The baronets’ Roll of 1910

On 8 February 1910 King Edward VII signed a Royal Warrant creating an official Roll of Baronets, to be kept at the Home Office. Its preamble gives the reason: “persons have assumed the title of Baronet without any just right.” From then on no one left off the Roll was to be received as a baronet, or named as one in any official document. The Roll of 1910 is a lesson in method: not argument, but a public record that admits on proof.

A dignity in disorder

The baronetage is a hereditary dignity instituted by James VI and I in May 1611, ranking below the peerage.¹ By the end of the nineteenth century its difficulty was men using the title without proof. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in John Horace Round’s article “Baronet”, records efforts “to purge the order of wrongful assumptions, an evil to which the baronetage of Nova Scotia is peculiarly exposed, owing to the dignity being descendible to collateral heirs male of the grantee as well as to those of his body.”¹

The Crown had tried before. The 1910 Warrant recalls that “by Warrants under the hand of Our Royal Predecessor King George the Third further Rules were established for the prevention of abuses touching the status of Baronets.”² Those Warrants, of 3 December 1783, 24 February 1785 and 30 September 1789, had not ended the abuses. Clause XII of the 1910 Warrant declared them “cancelled and made void and of no effect.”³

The baronets organise

The baronets’ own campaign began over precedence, not proof. “A fresh agitation was aroused in 1897 by an order giving the sons of life peers precedence over baronets, some of whom formed themselves, in 1898, into ‘the Honourable Society of the Baronetage’ for the maintenance of its privileges … a royal warrant was issued on the 15th of August 1898, confirming the precedence complained of as an infringement of their rights.”⁴ The Crown ruled against them on the point that had brought them together. The Society carried on as the Standing Council of the Baronetage, and “succeeded in obtaining invitations for some representatives of the order to the coronation of King Edward VII.”⁵

Its ambitions ran further. Reviewing Francis Pixley’s A History of the Baronetage in October 1900, The Spectator reported that Pixley “would have every jot and tittle of right recognised”: he wanted baronets “designated as ‘Very Honourable’”, and “he would like to see the collar, badge, mantle, and coronet in use.” The reviewer was unmoved: “we think the less hereditary millinery the better”, since such decorations tended, as the College of Arms had maintained, to “reduce in value personal distinctions awarded for public services, naval, military, or civil.”⁶

The style, the mantle and the coronet were never granted, and the badge came only in 1929. What Pixley did help to shape was the Roll. When it was prepared, The Times reported in 1914, the Registrar had “received much valuable assistance from Dr. Horace Round in connexion with difficult genealogical points”, and from Pixley, “who made suggestions as to the form and contents of the Roll.”⁷

Status taken without warrant was nothing new. A Mr Broun, refused a knighthood as a baronet’s heir apparent, “publicly assumed the honour in 1842, a foolish and futile act.”⁸

The Home Office inquiry

On 3 November 1905 a committee was appointed “to consider and report what steps should be taken to safeguard the status of holders of Baronetcies, and to prevent the assumption of the title of Baronet by persons who have no right thereto.” It reported to the Home Secretary on 12 December 1906. Both dates are given in the preamble of the 1910 Warrant.⁹

On 27 March 1907 Sir F. Banbury asked in the Commons whether the Departmental Committee “appointed to inquire into matters affecting the degree of baronet” had reported. Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, answered: “Yes, Sir; this Committee have presented their Report, and it will shortly be laid before Parliament.”¹⁰ According to The Times, the committee found “that a certain number of persons had assumed the title of baronet, either wrongfully, or on a very doubtful basis”, and recommended “the preparation by the Home Office of a Roll of Baronets.”¹¹

The warrant of 8 February 1910

The Warrant was given “at Our Court at Saint James’s, the eighth day of February, one thousand nine hundred and ten”, and published in the London Gazette, No. 28339, 15 February 1910, pages 1123–1124.¹² Its preamble states the case: “that divers abuses have crept into the said Order, and that persons have assumed the title of Baronet without any just right: Know ye therefore that We have thought fit to signify Our Royal Will and Pleasure that for the correction of such abuses and for preventing the like in future, the following regulations and Ordinances be established.”¹³

Clause I created the Roll: “That from and after the date of these Presents an official Roll of Baronets shall be prepared and kept in the Office of Our Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.”¹⁴

Clause II made the Roll the test: “That no person whose name is not entered on the official Roll of Baronets shall be received as a Baronet, or shall be addressed or mentioned by that title in any civil or military Commission, Letters Patent or other official document.”¹⁵

Clause III required the Roll to be prepared “in consultation with one or other of the Kings of Arms (Garter, Lyon or Ulster) according to their respective heraldic jurisdiction”, revised from time to time, and “published annually in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Gazettes, and be placed on sale.” A successor claiming a place “shall exhibit his claim to such succession, with the proofs thereof, to one of Our Kings of Arms”, who reported to the Secretary of State.¹⁶

Clause IV provided for doubt. Where the Secretary of State found “difficulty in advising Us as to the validity of the claims of any person to be placed or to be retained on the Roll”, he was to refer the matter to the Attorney-General for England, the Lord Advocate for Scotland or the Attorney-General for Ireland, and if need be to the Privy Council.¹⁷

Clauses VII and VIII created an office to keep it: “an Officer of the Home Department to be Registrar of the Baronetage”, charged with “keeping the Roll and of making all necessary entries and deletions in it and of publishing the Roll annually”, and “responsible for its contents.”¹⁸ Clause XII cancelled the three Warrants of George III.³ The Warrant closes: “By His Majesty’s Command. H. J. Gladstone.”¹⁹

After 1910

A further Royal Warrant, given at St James’s on 13 April 1929 and published in the Edinburgh Gazette of 14 May 1929, granted “unto all Baronets other than Baronets of Scotland Our Royal Licence and Authority that they may henceforth upon all appropriate occasions wear round their necks a Badge”: “a shield of the arms of Ulster, viz. on a silver field a left hand gules, surmounted by an Imperial Crown”.²⁰ The Standing Council records that the baronets of England and Ireland had first “applied to Charles I for permission to wear a badge but, in spite of many petitions, it was not until 1929 that a badge was granted by a Royal Warrant of George V.”²¹

The Roll itself has changed hands. By the Transfer of Functions (Miscellaneous) Order 2001, the Home Secretary’s functions “under the Royal Warrant concerning the preparation and maintenance of the Official Roll of the Baronetage” passed to the Lord Chancellor.²² The Roll is today “maintained by the Lord Chancellor in accordance with the Royal Warrant of the 8th February 1910 and a Transfer of Functions Order of 2001”, and the Standing Council publishes a version of it online.²³

What a roll is for

The Warrant of 1910 did not itself decide who was entitled to be a baronet. It decided how the question would be tested. A claim was entered on proof, exhibited to a King of Arms and, if doubted, referred to a Law Officer and the Privy Council. A name not entered carried no recognition, whatever a family believed. The lesson is one of method: a dignity troubled by wrongful or doubtful claims is set in order by a public roll that admits on proof and leaves the unproven off.

The Association’s Roll of Scottish Barons, at roll.baronage.com, works on the same principle. It is an open, verified and impartial public register; each entry publishes the credentials on which it rests, and the non-recognition of unverified titles is fundamental to its work. Nothing on it is asked to be taken on trust.²⁴