Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 2.djvu/206

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. n. SEPT. 2,


called " Sir Edward Grey," who furnished a man of doubtful nationality with a passport.

Mr. Law is particularly good on the preparations for the campaign which, indeed, form his main subject ; and also on the part played by the Xavy, and especially on the daring action by Admiral Howard at Brest. He is, perhaps, a little rash and wanting in insight in his estimate of characters and motives, though his accounts of such matters are amusing. What we mean may be seen in his account of Maximilian's appearance in Henry's camp " wearing the cross of St. George and a Tudor rose as the King's soldier " where he does not seem to see that this " pose " was a rather clever solution of a somewhat difficult problem in etiquette.

We may well wish that we had a Wolsey at the head of our affairs in the organization of the present war ; but we may at least congratulate ourselves that with all our shortcomings we have not managed less brilliantly than he did the two great businesses in which his administrative capacity showed at its best the commissariat and the transport of troops.

The book is illustrated by three portraits of Wolsey, of which two have not before been published ; and Mr. Law also gives us facsimiles of the beginning of Wolsey's memorandum on requisites for the war, and of the end of Edward Howard's last letter to Wolsey, and we heartily agree with him as to their peculiar value to the reader.

Armorial Bearings of Kingston-upon-Hull. By J. H. Hirst. (Hull, A. Brown & Sons, 3s. Qd. net.)

THE reader of a paper to a well-known society had made, to his own satisfaction, seven points with regard to the puzzles concerning the arms of Hull. With the first of these that the design of the earliest known representation of any arms is the one to be followed the writer of the book before us has, of course, no quarrel ; the rest he sets himself to overturn, and successfully accom- plishes his intention. Indeed, the contentions about the shape of the shield to be used, and the correct method of drawing the three crowns, to which the first unnamed writer had committed himself., cannot well be made to square with the principles and practice of heraldry as we know these directly from examples. It appears that in 1873 Windsor Herald, following the Heralds' Visitation of Yorkshire anno 1665-6, stated, in answer to a request from Hull for information, that the arms of Hull were not Royal Crowns, but ducal coronets. Mr. Hirst has no difficulty in showing that the town used these arms many years before dukes and their coronets were in- vented ; and thus disposes also of their supposed derivation from the arms of De la Pole. His own suggestion as to the origin of the arms which seems as good as any other is that the three crowns were adopted from those of King Edwin, differenced by being blazoned in pale instead of two and one.

The book is lavishly illustrated, having four coloured plates and a great number of cuts in the text. All the early representations of the three crowns of Hull are figured, and there is a good dea of elementary but useful explanation of different developments, and devices in heraldry. The long chapter on the use of " three " is, however largely unnecessary, and it does not bring out


what had certainly as much as anything to do vith the use of that number its giving the maximum of decorative beauty with the minimum of material an economy which is of supreme aesthetic force and also of importance in the matter of catching the eye effectively from a listance.

There are a few misprints : and we confess wo hink " leopard " a convenient heraldic term, and would rather speak of the " leopards " than of the " lions " of England.

'Old Mother Hubbard": ihe Authoress buried at Lorighton. By Z. Moon. (Reprinted from The Essex Review, July, 1916.) THIS little brochure of six pages tells pleasantly the chief facts of the life of " Sarah Catherine Martin, daughter of Sir Henry and Lady Martin, who departed this life on the 17th Day of Decem- ber, 1826," as the inscription on the family tomb at Lough ton tells us, and is known or rather not known chiefly as the author of ' Old Mother Hubbard.' Besides that, when a girl of 17, Sarah Martin became well acquainted with the royal sailor who was afterwards William IV., who fell violently in love with her, and showed a persistence in the wish to make her his wife, which was defeated only by the most strenuous resolution on the part of Sarah and her relations. All this, with a few bibliographical details about ' Mother Hubbard,' is set forth here by Mr. Moon, who tells us that the Leyton Public Library has a typewritten copy of a continuation of ' Mother Hubbard ' which has never been published.


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MR. NORMAN PENNEY. MR. A. H. W.FYNMORE writes to say that Thomas Shiffner (ante, pp. 29, 94) was of Westergate, Sussex, not Westergate, Essex.