A dignity in disarray: the baronets’ Roll of 1910

The baronetage was in a state of disarray. Titles were bought from the Crown, and other abuses followed, above all the title assumed by men with no right to it; a Crown rule against the practice was rescinded at the baronets’ own objection. A body was formed in 1898, which became the Standing Council of the Baronetage, and in 1910 an official Roll was approved by Royal Warrant, admitting a name only on proof. It restored the order’s credibility. This is the precedent for the Roll of Scottish Barons and the Pledge of the Baronage of Scotland Association.

A state of disarray: titles bought

The baronetage was instituted to raise money. J. H. Round’s article in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica opens with the purpose: “The object of its institution was to raise money for the crown, as was also done by the sale of peerage dignities under this sovereign.” Each grantee paid for thirty soldiers in Ulster at 8d. a day for three years: “This amounted to £1095, which was the sum paid for the honour.” James promised to hold the order to two hundred men of £1,000 a year and armigerous descent. “But these qualifications were before long abandoned.”¹

His son sold harder. “Creations became one of his devices for raising money; blank patents were hawked about, and in 1641 Nicholas wrote that baronetcies were to be had for £400 or even for £350; a patent was offered about this time to Mr Wrottesley of Wrottesley for £300.” At the Restoration the honour was “bestowed so lavishly” that a letter of 3 June 1660 called it “too common,” and offered to procure it for £300 or £400; Sir William Wiseman is said to have given £500.¹

The order would not own it. As late as 1900 Francis Pixley, Registrar of the baronets’ own society, wrote that there was “no foundation for the assertion” that the dignity went to “any who cared to purchase a title”, and that it does not appear “to have been sold”. His own book gives the price: “there was paid by each Baronet into the Exchequer the sum of one thousand and ninety-five pounds”.² A dignity whose own Registrar denied its history could not ask to be believed on its word. What made it credible in the end was a Roll that rested on proof.

And other abuses: the title assumed without right

Bought dignities bred assumed ones. In 1783, “in consequence of the wrongful assumption of baronetcies, an old and then increasing evil, a royal warrant was issued” requiring proof before any man was recognised as a baronet in official documents. The baronets objected, and the rule fell: “In consequence of the opposition of the baronets themselves, the first of these two regulations was rescinded and the evil remained unabated.”¹ George III’s three Warrants, of 1783, 1785 and 1789, were meant “for the prevention of abuses touching the status of Baronets.” None ended them.³

Assumption went on openly. In 1834 Richard Broun, whose father had assumed a Nova Scotia baronetcy, sought privileges for the order and was refused; a petition for a badge “met with the same fate in 1836.” Refused a knighthood as a baronet’s heir apparent, Broun “publicly assumed the honour in 1842, a foolish and futile act.”¹

The abuses went beyond the title. A Committee of the Baronetage for Privileges, with Broun as its secretary, claimed for baronets the style “the Honourable” and “a Collar of S. S., a Badge, Robes, a Coronet, and Supporters to their arms.” Every Minister consulted, The Spectator reported, gave “an absolute negative”. “Incredible as it may seem, the Committee solemnly resolved upon the latter course”: to take the honours anyway.⁴

Broun’s own Baronetage for 1843 sets out what was taken: a coronet, “adopted in 1841” and “distinguished from the coronets of the other degrees of dignity hereditary by four balls”; a badge “worn with a sanguine riband”; and “supporters, an open helmet, with two bars on either side, the collar of S.S., a mantle gules, doubled ermine”. Every baronet in the book is “The Honourable”. The Committee resolved that “the Arms of the applying Baronets should be registered in the books of the Order” with these ornaments, and its secretary was also its “Registrar”.⁵

The Spectator called it “illegal proceedings” by “one hundred and ten gentlemen of rank, property, and education” who had formed “an association for the purpose of establishing those pretensions”.⁴ The Committee won nothing and “was consequently dissolved”; the baronets’ own historian later regretted its “pugnacious attitude” and its “proposals for a fancy dress”.⁶ The case it pleaded rested on the barons of Scotland: see “A class of nobles”.

The evil outlasted the Committee. Joseph Foster’s Baronetage of the 1880s set apart, under the heading “Chaos”, the families “of persons claiming the dignity of Baronet, but regarding whose claims there does not appear to be accessible the primâ facie evidence which would justify their inclusion among those whose title is unquestioned”; G. E. Cokayne counted “no less than sixty-five Baronets (then living)” there. “No check, however, exists to anyone assuming a Baronetcy”, Cokayne wrote in 1900. In the same year Francis Pixley, Registrar of the baronets’ new society, named the cause: “there is not in existence a single tribunal which even claims for itself the right to deal with doubts and questions relating to the sixth hereditary degree”.⁷

A body is formed, 1898

Their body was born of a grievance about 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. But a royal warrant was issued on the 15th of August 1898, confirming the precedence complained of as an infringement of their rights.”¹ The Crown ruled against them on the very point that had brought them together, and the body did not dissolve.

It was “reconstituted in July 1903 as the Standing Council of the Baronetage as a permanent organisation to deal with all affairs of the Degree.”⁸ It won invitations for representatives of the order to the coronation of Edward VII, and it turned to the graver matter: it sought “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.”⁹

An official Roll is approved, 1910

The Home Office took the question up. A committee appointed on 3 November 1905 was “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 on 12 December 1906.¹⁰ The Commons was told in March 1907 that the committee “have presented their Report, and it will shortly be laid before Parliament.”¹¹ The committee had found, The Times later reported, “that a certain number of persons had assumed the title of baronet, either wrongfully, or on a very doubtful basis”, and had recommended “the preparation by the Home Office of a Roll of Baronets to include all persons who should for the future be officially recognized and entitled to the dignity.”¹²

On 8 February 1910 King Edward VII signed the Royal Warrant. 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.”¹³ Clause I created “an official Roll of Baronets”, to 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 A claimant had to “exhibit his claim to such succession, with the proofs thereof, to one of Our Kings of Arms”, who reported to the Secretary of State; a doubtful case went to a Law Officer and, if need be, the Privy Council.¹⁶ A Registrar of the Baronetage was made “responsible for its contents.”¹⁷ Clause XII declared the three Warrants of George III “cancelled and made void and of no effect.”¹⁸

The baronets’ body had a hand in the instrument. When the Roll was prepared, the Registrar “has received much valuable assistance from Dr. Horace Round in connexion with difficult genealogical points, and from Mr. P. W. Pixley, Registrar of the Standing Committee of the Baronetage, who made suggestions as to the form and contents of the Roll.”¹²

Credibility restored

The Roll settled the question by proof, not argument. The first Roll carried “the names of 1,309 baronets”. Rules for petitioners were drawn up by the Privy Council, and between December 1911 and 1913 “formal hearings of four disputed cases have been held”: two claimants were placed on the Roll, and “in the other two cases the advice of the Committee was that the names of the claimants should not be placed on the Roll.” Entry proved nothing for ever: each name “can and will be cancelled at any time on the production of evidence, or on an adjudication by a competent legal tribunal, against the validity of the claim.”¹² Government guidance on the Warrant still states its purpose as being “to safeguard the status of holders of baronetcies and to prevent abuse.”¹⁹

The rule still holds. The Standing Council’s Roll for 2026 says that “only those named below are entitled to be addressed officially as Baronets”. Of 1,226 baronetcies, “Approximately 230 currently have no holder entered on the Official Roll”: where no one has proved the succession, no one is named.²⁰

That is the measure of what the Roll did. In 1883 a genealogist set sixty-five living baronets apart under “Chaos”, and in 1900 the order’s own Registrar could name no tribunal to test a claim. After 1910 a name meant nothing on its own, only proof put it on the Roll, and only the Roll was recognised. The Roll restored the credibility of the order.

The precedent

The sequence is the precedent. A dignity in disarray, its titles bought and other abuses tolerated; a body formed in 1898 that became the Standing Council; an official Roll approved in 1910 that restored the order’s credibility. The Scottish baronage stands where the baronetage stood: baronies are bought and sold, titles are assumed without right, and no public authority keeps a register of them.²¹ The Association’s Roll of Scottish Barons, at roll.baronage.com, is the baronets’ answer applied to it: a public register that admits on proof, leaves the unverified off, and asks no payment for a place on it. The Pledge goes one step further than 1910: those who sign it undertake, in honour and not in law, to preserve their barony within the family for future generations and to uphold the Baronial Code of Honour.²²

There is a lesson in what failed, too. Broun’s Committee took honours the Crown had refused, registered them for any baronet who applied, and was ridiculed and dissolved. The body of 1898 chose the other course: it pressed for proof, and the Crown gave the order a Roll. The Association follows the second. It claims nothing new for barons, and its Roll asks only for proof.