Misled Heralds

Read by School Archivist, Mark Wilkerson, HERE.

". . . the shield, which was part of the original coat of arms of the Diocese of Washington, was heraldically misleading." St. Albans News, Alfred Friendly Jr., February 5, 1954

"I think they got around to changing the school crest officially about my senior year. The excuse given us, which did not appear in Mark’s article, was that heraldically the old crest stated that George Washington climbed the walls of Jerusalem, and the new one corrected that heraldic error." Email from Brigadier General Jim Dickey, USA (Ret.), STA 1959

In my most recent Bulletin article, Remember, You Wear the Shield, I traced the history of the several School shields. I had read Alfred Friendly's full article from 1954, and the quoted sentence above stuck with me. However, I found no evidence to support the "heraldically misleading" comment. Jim Dickey's email made this sentence reverberate, so I started to dig into the history of the Diocesan shield a bit more.

A key article in this search was by Dr. Chad M. Krouse ( https://walsinghamwanderings.blogspot.com/2023/10/arms-of-episcopal-church-design.html ), and although links in the article led me to a far deeper understanding of the ancient practice of heraldry than I would have had otherwise, I am far, far from being an expert. Thanks as well to The Internet Archive website (https://archive.org/) that hosts digital copies of Christian Art and the Hathi Trust website (https://www.hathitrust.org/) that hosts digital copies of The Churchman.

In his June 29, 1901, article in The Churchman, Ralph Adams Cram, explains the virtues and downfalls of ALL of the diocesan arms "at present in use, and we will take them on alphabetically." He continued, endorsing some, picking apart others, eventually arriving at the Washington arms and heaped praises on it.

"Washington (Figure 32). A very beautiful, heraldic, and noble achievement. The sinister half [or left side if you were behind the shield] displaying the arms of the house of Washington with a mural crown on the first bar, is ideal in every way; the dexter half [or right side if you were behind the shield] shows the arms of Jerusalem . . . These arms are quite adequate to their high purpose, and it would be hard to give greater praise . . . it shows what can be achieved when the problem [of developing a seal] is approached in proper fashion and solved in accordance with established laws."

Not everyone agreed with Mr. Cram's assessment of the seals specifically or his pronouncements on correct vs incorrect heraldry in general. Two of these critics replied pointedly and extensively in the August 10, 1901 edition of The Churchman.

"Mr. Cram has, I fear, unduly limited the question. For English heraldry is of two quite distinct classes -- the private and the public. The first, as everyone knows, is used by families and is therefore associated with heraldry. The last is subject to entirely different conditions and stands for the permanent organic life of cities, colleges, corporations, and public bodies generally. Public heraldry, while in many ways similar in detail to private, often uses devices never employed by the other. And it cannot be too clearly kept in mind that ecclesiastical heraldry belongs to public and not to private heraldry." C. Ellis Stevens, Lake George [NY]

"Against Mr. Cram's article in The Churchman of June 29, we must protest. We do not wish to be unkind to the living, but we do mean to be just to those who are gone. Heraldry is not 'at once a science and an art,' neither is it 'a language of symbols'; it is a body of fixed rules of description -- historic rules, by the way, which Mr. Cram himself seems not entirely to understand." Frederick W. Story, Baltimore, MD

There were also discussions about the proper divisions of seals and shields and what these divisions (quartering, impalement) meant in the interaction of the symbols used. There were also disagreements on tricking and retricking (coloring and tinctures) that took up columns of editorializing. Not one to sit on his hands, Mr. Cram replied in The Churchman, August 31, 1901.

"Let me say in conclusion that I believe heraldry to be a living, not a dead art. If this be true, then it must adapt itself to new conditions. I do not mean for a moment that we have any right to deliberately violate the old established laws, we should hold by them faithfully but . . . we must discriminate between public and private heraldry . . . we must recognize the fact that an American diocese is a thing that was not thought of in the Middle Ages."

Interestingly, the next take on the Washington Diocese seal came in the publication Christian Art, edited by the very same Ralph Cram. ?Mr. Cram had clearly ceeded the discussion to Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, a heraldic expert who would play a large role in the development of many seals for many US Episcopal diocese and organizations. ?Writing in Christian Art, November 1907, Mr. la Rose continued the attack on Washington's seal.

"And now I should like first to dispose of the arms of four American sees which, because of the ignorance displayed in them of heraldic grammar, I consider the very worst examples of ecclesiastical heraldry known to me. ?They are the arms of New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Vermont . . . Washington . . . Perhaps the worst of all, as, even though unconsciously, the most impudent and misleading of American coats . . . the arms in the dexter impalement are not accurately the arms assumed by Geoffrey of Bouillon, and from him ascribed to the Kingdom of Jerusalem . . . in using these arms the diocese and bishop are guilty of a bit of heraldic assumption which even the Patriarch of Jerusalem of the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem would never dream of . . . the present diocesan shield, as has on several occasions been pointed out by other critics, means either that a king of Jerusalem has married a Miss Washington (whose father was granted an honourable augmentation to his arms), or that a gentleman of the Washington family has become a king of Jerusalem, or that the Washington estates have become an appanage of the kingdom of Jerusalem . . . the shield means nothing at all, except dense ignorance of the fundamental principles and grammar of heraldry. ?I offer a possible revision."? ?

In short, Pierre de Chaignon la Rose's advice, given in 1907, would eventually be adopted by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in 1946, coincidentally right around the dioceses's 50th anniversary, and since the diocesan shield got an upgrade in heraldic clarity, I'm betting with the upcoming 40th (1949) and then 50th (1959) anniversaries of St. Albans, the process began in 1952 to bring us up-to-date as well.

So Jim Dickey's remembrance was somewhat on target -- if Washington "climbed the walls of Jerusalem", that's certainly in line with becoming "a king of Jerusalem" or receiving Jerusalem as an appanage. According to Wikipedia that "is the grant of an estate, title, office or other thing of value to a younger child of a monarch, who would otherwise have no inheritance under the system of primogeniture (where only the eldest inherits)."

All this to say that we certainly owe another thanks to Mr. Ferdinand Ruge and Mr. Alanson Sturgis who perfected our School shield, and even if none of us would claim to be expert in the field of heraldry, at least we are no longer heraldically misled.