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The FEUDAL HERALD
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| CONTENTS
* A Welcome |
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| A WELCOME
The purpose of this newsletter is to link regular BARONAGE readers to those articles in the magazine that might interest them, so in it you should find mention of the art, symbolism and meaning of heraldry, and, from time to time, of the history, politics, warfare, chivalry, nobility, books, cinema and other entertainment to which heraldry has thematic links. |
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The pressure of events that squeezed our programme has continued and in order to free the resources necessary for our long overdue reorganisation we are now publishing just one issue of Baronage to cover the period September-December. This will be a little larger than the usual size, and will have extra articles added to it as we move through November and December.
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| A REVIEW OF THE PERIOD
Terrorism |
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A little more than a year ago the horror in Manhattan forced us to recognise that terrorist attacks, wherever located, are attacks against all of us, against all who share Western values no matter where we live. In our grief we were united. Now, in Bali, we again acknowledge the truth of what that means. The majority of the two hundred dead were young Australians, but the young of many nationalities were caught in the blast and flames, and one of the captured suspects has stated that the aim was to kill as many Americans as possible ~ young Americans.
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Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, Those words from a poet caught in an earlier horror encapsulate the bewildered anger of the bereaved, and especially among Australians for whom the trauma is as profound as it was a year ago for America. The size ratios are very similar. In the United States 3,000 died among a population of 285 million. For Australia the figures are 200 and 19 million. These rounded figures give an identical ratio ~ of 10.526315789 bodies per million population ~ an extraordinary coincidence. |
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| Our human minds find it difficult to comprehend the arithmetical consequences of evil. Are ten bodies ten times worse than one body? It is a quite meaningless question. But to grasp the degree of enormity we do need numbers to quantify, and then, to help us understand, we need mechanics. Numbers alone, advancing across the page at the speed of their logarithms (adding single digits to represent multitudes), in their use of space portray quantities inaccurately. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| When Solzhenitsyn tells us that with his purges, agricultural reforms, deliberate starvation, forced transportation and wars Stalin killed 120 million, we need some gadgets. If the corpses are thin and many are children, 5,000 can be laid out on a football field ~ and so to bear Stalin’s corpses we need 24,000 football pitches. That helps to concentrate the mind, doesn’t it? Hitler needed 1,200 for the Jews he killed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| So let us use the ratios to evaluate the impact of terrorist atrocities. For Bali and Manhattan the figure is 10.5 bodies per million. What then of Omagh, a small country village of 1,500 population which in one day four years ago lost 28 dead to republican terrorists? Measured against the population of Northern Ireland the ratio is 16.6 bodies per million, sixty per cent higher than the atrocities of which the world is at present more conscious. (Measured against the 1,500 population of the little village it is nearly two per cent, and that is how terrorism is measured in Northern Ireland.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Omagh, too, is a grief in which we must all be, and remain, united. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Queen and the Courts | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Readers resident outside the British Isles may have missed the cause célèbre that had Paul Burrell, butler to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, prosecuted for the theft of more than three hundred of her belongings. It appears that it is a case that should never have been brought, but any chance the Royal Family might have had to stop it and its embarrassing consequences ended when the Prince of Wales was formally informed that the police had evidence of Burrell selling her clothing and shoes to overseas buyers. This “evidence” did not exist. Burrell had sold nothing. All the missing material was stored in good condition at his house.
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| The prosecution’s case did not go well, and eventually it was left with the charge that Burrell had taken the belongings, principally letters and photographs, with no authority and without informing anyone. This materially altered the nature of the case, and when the Queen heard of the change, and learned that Burrell was no longer accused of selling the items he had taken, she informed the Prince of Wales that Burrell had himself told her that he had taken some of Diana’s papers into safe keeping (to prevent them, Burrell explained later, being destroyed by her mother and sister, who were “shredding history”). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Prince’s private secretary immediately informed the police and the trial collapsed, giving every malevolent republican with access to pen or microphone the opportunity to howl accusations of a conspiracy intended to prevent Burrell giving evidence under oath that might harm the Royal Family. The fact that, if there had been such an intent, the Royal Family could easily have stopped the trial before it started was too inconvenient to be accepted, and then the argument was extended to include the rôle of the Monarch as the Supreme Justice within the United Kingdom, a rôle the republicans yearn to see ended (as one more step along the long road to the abolition of the monarchy). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It is at moments such as these that the quality of the People’s representatives in our parliamentary democracy can perhaps best be measured. The cost of the case (perhaps one and a half million pounds) should be paid by the Queen, claimed some, because she could have stopped it earlier (when the statement she made was irrelevant to the alleged theft and sale of clothing, etc,!!!). As the case had cost £1.5 million of public money, there should be a formal public enquiry (although the recent foot-and-mouth catastrophe which, owing to government incompetence, cost nearly eight billion pounds ~ 5,000 times as much ~ was ruled by the government not to need a public enquiry!). The prosecution of criminal cases, always made in the Monarch’s name (Regina v. Burrell being one example), should now be in the name of the People (whose representative is, of course, currently the Queen)! Burrell had to be kept out of the witnessbox lest he recite tales of homosexual rape and orgies among the staff of the royal palaces!!!!!!! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Meanwhile, Burrell had sold his story to a tabloid newspaper and started a frenzy among competing editors determined to grab their share of attention. Nothing of this is likely to interest our readers except perhaps one item. Burrell does not like the Spencers, Diana’s family, and appears to have taken every opportunity to attack her mother and siblings. However, in criticising her brother, Earl Spencer, for removing the flag that covered her coffin in London and on its journey to Althorp, and replacing it with his own banner, he errs. First, the London flag was not, as Burrell describes it, “the Royal Standard”. It was the Royal Banner with an ermine border, available for use at the Sovereign’s discretion for any member of the family (present or past) who does not possess an appropriate flag. Second, being buried beneath her father’s banner (now her brother’s) was entirely correct for a Spencer who was a divorcee. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Witchburning in the 21st Century
Historians, conscious of a past many prefer hidden, readily see within modern man the base creature from which he so recently developed. The current trial of an actress for shoplifting has lifted the veils, revealing a hideously ugly crowd psychology lurking among our racial memories. Were the vile sentiments aroused by the poor, naked wretches at the tail of the oxcart, lashed at every tenth step towards their funeral pyres, so very different from those to be found now on the bulletin boards of the Internet? Hatred ... envy ... lust? |
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A rational mind, learning that a very rich young woman, beautiful and successful, had been found stealing garments she did not need, would conclude first that it was a case for a doctor to examine. Yet this sad event produced a mindless mob ~ “Put her behind bars and throw away the key!” ~ “I’d just love to see her in handcuffs!” ~ “What a dumb pregnant dog she is!” ~ “What a joke.........hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”
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| One British newspaper reported an aspect that might have been missed by some readers. According to Los Angeles County records, all of the other 5,000 Los Angeles residents prosecuted for shoplifting in the past two years were charged with misdemeanour. Winona Ryder was charged with felony. We wonder why. Are the witchprickers still alive and well in California? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| CLASSICAL HERALDRY
This new page continues Graham Johnston’s collection of the arms of famous knights from the 13th and 14th centuries. |
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| TWENTIETH CENTURY CHIVALRY
November brings Remembrance Day and poppies worn on lapels. According to our age we think back to friends and relations lost in Viet Nam, Korea, the Pacific, Europe, North Africa . . . . . . . Older ones among us have distant memories of dear ones lost in the first of the World Wars, The Great War. Ann Lyon has reminded us that The Great War was for the British Empire the war of the volunteers, and in a short memoir she describes the war of two volunteers, her two grandfathers. |
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| BOOKPOST
Unfortunately, Blood Royal, just published by Smith’s Peerage Ltd, reached us too late for our review to appear with this issue of Baronage, but it will appear as a late additional article in December. Meanwhile, Ann Lyon reports that Blood Royal, subtitled From the time of Alexander the Great to Queen Elizabeth II, is produced to mark the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty The Queen and covers the dynasties which have ruled in what is now Great Britain from the landing of Julius Caesar in 55BC to the present, along with what must inevitably be only a selection of their non-royal descendants. The book is comprehensively illustrated with reproductions of original portraits, along with maps and genealogical tables, and clearly has much to offer everyone interested in British history. The Editor also has been too busy to review it, but has noted that the book is not only packed full of the kind of historical information one likes to have close to hand, it is written in a highly entertaining manner. It is a natural Christmas gift. Blood Royal by Charles Moseley may be ordered from Amazon in the British Isles, but not yet in North America. |
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| NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HERALDRY | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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At the XXV International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in September, David Appleton presented a paper giving an outline of his views on some of the more interesting lines along which he believes modern heraldry might develop. These included the introduction of new partition lines, of which some are already in use in the newer heraldic jurisdictions, and even new tinctures, of which rainbow is illustrated here on the right. His paper is published by Baronage as a PDF file.
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| ANCESTRAL GATEWAYS
Ancestor hunters chasing their surname up the male line from father to father to father, and paying only nominal attention to the female lines that enter at every generation, often miss their connections to hoards of heraldic treasure. Gateway ancestors are easily overlooked when researchers concentrate almost exclusively on their male descent. |
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| We have illustrated this by taking as an example an actress, the late Ann Todd, born of an unarmigerous Aberdeen family whose only heraldry appeared to be the right to use the clan badge of their clan, the Gordons. However, the paternal grandmother of Ann Todd was a gateway ancestor whose lines led back into all the great families of northeastern Scotland and produced a wealth of arms for the decoration of her family tree. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| CURIOSITY CORNER
The subject for Curiosity Corner in this issue is the Phoenix, an enigma that has fascinated many writers down the ages, not least of whom was Shakespeare who created a poem to celebrate the bird’s love affair with the Turtledove. In heraldry the Phoenix is usually taken to be a white demi-eagle displayed arising from a small fire, but, as the article explains, some experts differ on this. |
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| PRINCE HARRY’S NEW ARMS
New arms bearing a label of five points, three bearing the escallop Gules memorialising his mother, have been granted to Prince Harry. |
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| THE CROSS OF ST ANDREW
The notes on the history of St George published in the last issue prompted some requests for a similar article on St Andrew. Here it is. |
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| BOGUS TITLES
As Baronage has often explained, the most profitable of all the bogus title merchants has been for a long time Antonio Adolfo Boada Cartaya (on the right), alias Baron Chafford, Marquis d’Alessio, Prince of Galilee, Prince de Lusignan, Lord Edward, et al, but for him the times are now a-changing. Several of his American victims are chasing him for refunds and both state and federal agencies are in the process of investigating his frauds. (His claim of not trading in Florida has been torpedoed by the incontestable proof that he has signed contracts there and fraudulently received money there.) |
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| Boada Cartaya’s website has now been down for several weeks (beware ~ he still sells his fictitious titles on e-Bay) as he reorganises his operation from an offshore tax haven base. His lawyer in London, Roger Pitts-Tucker, is doubtless similarly occupied with some unexpected work, for one of Boada Cartaya’s victims has given details of Pitts-Tucker’s involvement in the scams to the Law Society. More newspaper publicity for his client will not be assisting him in this. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Another of the “title” merchants in trouble with the law is Gary Martin Beaver, alias Baron Richecourt, Lord Newport, et al, the owner of an anonymous website that has libelled, among others, Alan Blacker, a lawyer in an arbitration practice whose obviously immediate access to all relevant forensic expertise would have warned off anyone less intellectually challenged than Beaver. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Despite having great difficulty in locating Beaver’s residential address (for he moves around regularly to evade his creditors), Mr Blacker last year launched an action for defamation in the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division. Since that date every offence committed by Beaver on his website has been recorded as part of the proceedings, and the writ and injunction are sealed and ready for service by the Sheriff’s officers as soon as his current whereabouts are determined. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Breach of the injunction carries a custodial sentence of up to seven years, and the damages, on which no limit is currently set, mount with each new offence. It is, Mr Blacker explains, an elegant solution to the problem of Beaver’s evasion. He will have to break cover eventually, for if he refuses to accept service and enter a defence he will be found by the police and imprisoned for contempt. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| As readers will have guessed, Beaver reads this newsletter and doubtless, because he is a silly man, will comfort himself with the thought that Mr Blacker is bluffing. To call Mr Blacker’s “bluff” all he has to do is to write to Mr Blacker giving him his address for service. (He should at the same time seek counsel’s advice.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A NEW E-BOOK WITH THE TITLE ~ ARE YOU BEING CONNED?
We have in the past asked readers to circulate the Baronage URL to their friends and colleagues, so that the truth about the bogus title scams can be spread around the Internet. We have now taken this a stage further and produced an e-book that we hope all our readers will pass on to their address book with a request that the recipients do the same. This e-book explains the way the scams work and how to recognise the users of bogus titles. If it reaches the size of circulation possible on the Internet, it will do this vile trade some significant damage. All our readers can help in this. |
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