WRONG TO BEAR ARMS?
RITTERSHAUSEN, Nicolaus; William RADCLYFFE, annotator.
Genealogiae imperatorum, regum, ducum, comitum, praecipuorumque aliorum procerum orbis Christiani; deductae ab anno Christi MCCC · continuatae ad annum MDCLXIV. … Editio tertia, auctior & emendatior.
Tübingen, Johann Heinrich Reis for Johann Georg Cotta, 1664.
Two parts in one vol., folio, ff. [8], [240, i.e. 120 folding two-leaf tables], [2], [184, i.e. 92 folding two-leaf tables]; printer’s device to title-pages, woodcut initial; a little foxed with a few stains, text slightly trimmed on a few leaves, head of first front flyleaf excised; bound c. 1800 in diced russia; front board detached and rear joint starting at head, somewhat rubbed and worn, particularly at spine, covers sunned at head, wormhole to front cover, headband lost, tailband partly detached; armorial bookplate of William Noel-Hill, 3rd Baron Berwick to front pastedown, shelfmark and purchase inscription of Edward Smith Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby to front free endpaper and front flyleaf, armorial bookplate of William Radclyffe to front flyleaf and his annotations and heraldic drawings to c. 320 pp. (see below), with five leaves of manuscript genealogies in his hand tipped in along with an unsigned bifolium letter (230 x 185 mm; see below) and an armorial bookplate, unidentified price codes to rear pastedown.
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Genealogiae imperatorum, regum, ducum, comitum, praecipuorumque aliorum procerum orbis Christiani; deductae ab anno Christi MCCC · continuatae ad annum MDCLXIV. … Editio tertia, auctior & emendatior.
Third, expanded edition (first published 1658) of this rare and extensive work on the genealogies of the ruling and noble houses of Christendom, this copy owned and painstakingly augmented c. 1800 by the herald and alleged imposter William Radclyffe, whose controversial pedigree – which he was accused of forging to advance his social standing, with criminal consequences – is laid out at length here in his hand.
Compiled by the Altdorf jurist Nicolaus Rittershausen (1597–1670) and dedicated to Charles XI of Sweden, the Genealogiae consist of some 200 folding tables showing the lineages of the great families of Europe from 1400 to the mid-seventeenth century. Though his work was well regarded in his day, Rittershausen may on occasion have made ‘corrections to one or another of his family trees’ on ‘unscientific grounds’ (ADB, trans.) – thus anticipating a more daring fraud alleged to have been committed 150 years later in our copy.
More than 300 of its pages bear the annotations, manuscript genealogies, and heraldic drawings of William Radclyffe (1770–1828), Rouge Croix Pursuivant of the College of Arms from 1803 to his resignation in disgrace in 1823. The cause of his resignation, which followed a criminal conviction and imprisonment, was a noble lineage claimed by him at about the time he began annotating this copy. This contentious claim – found to be fraudulent by a jury and accepted as such by subsequent scholars, but claimed in a recent study to be sincere and wrongly doubted – is extensively documented in the manuscript additions to our copy.
In the standard account of his life, in Sir Anthony Wagner’s Heralds of England, Radclyffe was ‘bred up to the trade of a pastrycook and confectioner’ before his sister’s marriage to ‘an old gentleman of considerable fortune’ enabled him to retire to his heraldic and genealogical interests (pp. 450–1). From this time he made almost daily visits to the College of Arms to consult its records, and in 1803 – having established his descent from the Radclyffe family, earls of Newburgh and formerly of Derwentwater – was through the influence of his newfound noble kinsmen appointed Rouge Croix. In the late 1810s, however, the College found that a marriage of 1640 recorded in a parish register, on which most of Radclyffe’s claimed heritage hung (and which features in an intriguing family tree in our copy; see below), had been invented by the Rouge Croix himself. Prosecution followed, Radclyffe was convicted, and a sentence of three months’ imprisonment and a £50 fine passed.
St John Parker’s recent study disputes this account, accusing Radclyffe’s contemporary foes and later Wagner of malicious snobbery and maintaining that the Rouge Croix genuinely believed his claimed descent. Wagner ‘swallowed whole’ the ‘slurs’ uttered against Radclyffe at his trial, repeating ‘the sneer of a bullying lawyer’ in asserting that Radclyffe was ‘bred up to the trade of a pastrycook’. Radclyffe was in fact ‘a scion of a once-landed family, now in relatively obscure, though still respectable, circumstances, and … was exercising hard-won professional skills to regain status among the propertied classes’. He had ‘an unwavering belief’ in his distinguished ancestry, and his criminal conviction, brought on by his impetuous reformism within the corrupt and hidebound College of Arms, was ‘a grave miscarriage of justice’ (St John Parker, pp. 4, 10, 33, 37, 155).
The voluminous manuscript additions to our copy bear heavily on Radclyffe’s heraldic career and, in particular, on his claimed pedigree. These annotations and drawings include hundreds of family trees, coats of arms, genealogical notes, and copies of indentures, deeds, and tombstones, ranging from the ‘Ancient Kings of Brittain’ to the ‘Bastards of Charlemain’, the ‘Kings of the Franks’, and many noble British families. With its many citations of manuscript sources, much of this work appears to be original. Tipped in is an unsigned letter to Radclyffe from Bath dated 31 March 1824 expressing the hope that ‘you will think well of the proposal to publish some of your … genealogies’, suggesting that even after his disgrace (and perhaps to mend his reputation) Radclyffe was working to bring his researches to press, possibly including the very genealogies added to this volume.
But the heart of these annotations is found in two sections on the Radclyffe family. The first, with the help of hand-drawn and -coloured coats of arms, shows the Radclyffes’ derivation from the medieval barons of Kendal. The second, over the course of some forty-five pages, gives a comprehensive genealogy of the Radclyffes in their various branches. Here we reach the crux: among the Radclyffes in these family trees is Rosamund, ‘born after 1612’, whose supposed marriage in 1640 was at the centre of William’s trial and expulsion from the College. Tantalisingly her entry is cut short, with the ensuing text thoroughly erased. Is this Radclyffe covering his tracks or simply deleting an honest mistake? Was Radclyffe a social climber employing fraud to his advantage, or a self-taught, upwardly mobile scholar who fell victim to snobbery?
Further study of this remarkable volume will help to solve this puzzle and shine light on a deeply class-conscious age.
Later provenance:
1. William Noel-Hill, 3rd Baron Berwick (1773–1842), FSA, MP, and diplomat. It is unclear how he acquired the volume since it does not appear in the catalogue of Radclyffe’s library sold at Sotheby’s in 1828. Berwick’s sale, Sotheby’s, 1 May 1843, lot 954, £2 2s to T. & W. Boone on behalf of Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby.
2. Edward Smith Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby (1775–1851), MP and naturalist.
BM STC German R765; USTC 2582663; VD17 23:231484E. See St John Parker, ‘William Radclyffe (1770–1828): Genealogist and Antiquarian in Yorkshire and London’, unpublished DPhil thesis (2018); Wagner, Heralds of England (1967).
