Page:A Complete Guide to Heraldry.djvu/634

 conjunction with those of Sheldon. The same practice was followed in the patent which was granted to Nelson's Lady Hamilton. This patent, which both heraldically and historically is excessively interesting, was printed in full on p. 168, vol. i. of the Genealogical Magazine. The arms which in the grant are specifically said to be the arms of Lyons (not of Hamilton) are painted upon a lozenge, with no reference to the arms of Hamilton. In each of these cases, however, the grantee of arms has been an heiress, so that the clause by which the arms are limited to the descendants does not help. An instance of a grant to a man and his wife, where the wife was not an heiress, is printed in "The Right to Bear Arms"; and in this case the painting shows the arms impaled with those of the husband. The grant to the wife has no hereditary limitations, and presumably her descendants would never be able to quarter the arms of the wife, no matter even if by the extinction of the other issue she eventually became a coheir. The fact that the arms of man and wife are herein granted together prevents any one making any deduction as to what is the position of the wife alone.

There was a patent issued in the year 1784 to a Mrs. Sarah Lax, widow of John Lax, to take the name and arms of Maynard, such name and arms to be borne by herself and her issue. The painting in this case is of the arms of Maynard alone upon a lozenge, and the crest which was to be borne by her male descendants is quite a separate painting in the body of the grant, and not in conjunction with the lozenge. Now, Mrs. Maynard was a widow, and it is manifestly wrong that she should bear the arms as if she were unmarried, yet how was she to bear them? She was bearing the name of Lax because that had been her husband's name, and she took the name of Maynard, which presumably her husband would have taken had he been alive; she herself was a Miss Jefferson, so would she have been entitled to have placed the arms of Jefferson upon an escutcheon of pretence, in the centre of the arms of Maynard? Presumably she would, because suppose the husband had assumed the name and arms of Maynard in his lifetime, he certainly would have been entitled to place his wife's arms of Jefferson on an escutcheon of pretence.

On March 9, 1878, Francis Culling Carr, and his second wife, Emily Blanche, daughter of Andrew Morton Carr, and niece of the late Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, G.C.B., both assumed by Royal Licence the additional surname and arms of Gomm. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Carr-Gomm appear to have had any blood descent from the Gomm family; consequently the Gomm arms were granted to both husband and wife, and the curious part is that they were not identical, the marks (showing that there was no blood relationship) being a