Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/585

 S. III. JUNE 24, 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

481

LONDON, SATURDAY, JUNE t!t, 1905. CONTENTS. -No. 78.

NOTES : Grandees of Spain, 481 Danteiana, 482 The ' Faithful Admonition ' of May, 1554, 484 " Boast " James Glen, 485 St. Piran's Oratory, Cornwall "Bloody Warriors " " His Majesty's Opposition " Bvangelica Zoology at Vitoria, 486.

QUERIES -.Sir Balthasar Gerbier : Zoffany's Portrait of Mozart Bishops' Signatures Carnegie: its Pronuncia- tion Lyttou Quotation De Teixeira Sampayo Major Monro 'Pictures of the Old and New Testaments,' 487

Alliterative Greek Verses, 488 Guidot -Simon and Simon Smyth Mountfort Jules Verne : Star and Crescent Moon St. Gilbert of Sempringbam Sonnet on N. M. Con- stance Qiienington, Gloucestershire Mint at Leeds Conyers Messianic Medal Besant on Dr. Watts, 489 Lulach, King of Scotland, 490.

REPLIES : Parsloe's Hall, 490 " Pop goes the weasel." 491 "England," "English" W. Shelley, 492 Audience Meadow 53, Fleet Street, 493 English Crown Jewel Quotation William Tyndale's Ordination Fanshawe Family, 494 Shakespeare's Grave Children at Execu- tions "Jockteleg," 495 Coliseums Old and New, 496 House of Lords, 1625-60 St. Patrick Indian Kings The Lass of Richmond Hill 'La Scala, 497 Lines on Mug Ghost-Words Southwold Church" I sit with my feet in a brook" Local 'Notes and Queries' Dryden's Sisters Human Sacrifices: Ghosts, 498 Sir K. Fan- shawe, 499.
 * Coryate's Crudities ' Chester Plea Rolls Parliamentary

Index to Shakespeare's Characters.' Notices to Correspondents.

OUR GRANDEES OF SPAIN.

A SPANISH monarch's visit to the British Court has reminded the public that certain Englishmen enjoy the highest hereditary honour it has been in the power of Spain's sovereigns to -confer for wellnigh four centuries.

Little is accurately known, outside the Peninsula, of a Spanish Grandeeship and of its prerogatives ; less still in a country where contempt to call a spade a spade for foreign titles is, at least, indiscriminate. The truth is that the regularity, and especially the solidity, as Saint-Simon would have said, of our national honours, rather unfit us for unprejudiced views of the nobiliary systems of states in which the hereditary senatorial dignity has never been synonymous, as here, with a title.

As in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century neither nobles of title, nor, indeed, all dukes, were peers, so in Spain since the establishment of the Grandeeship by Charles I., better known as the Emperor Charles V., the iitulados, or titled nobility,

have not all been, by any means, Grandees. Nor, similarly, have all dukes enjoyed the distinction, though occasionally one finds the contrary opinion maintained (as in Burkes 'Peerage': Foreign Titles-Losada). The dignity of Granule de E S1 nua, confers, therefore, a hall -mark of supreme distinction whether the recipient of the honour be* already titled, or whether he receive a title upon his elevation thereto.

It is impossible to consider or explain the Grandeeship apart from the historical circum- stances which produced it and have made it what it is. The distinction of Gmndeza conferred, in 1520, by Charles V. upon certain Of the ncos honibres, or "rich men," ie in lands, strong places and the like-conceded to these tenants-in-chief the right to wear their hats in the royal presence, a right which they claimed as successors of the sturdy territorial baronage of mediaeval Castile and Aragon ; and also of being addressed by the sovereign as "Cousin." It is interesting to note how this sense of equality also implied of course, in the word " peerage "survived the parliamentary or consultative function ot the ncos hombres in the Cortes. The weakening and temporary extinction of the latter under Spain's Hapsburg kings left the Grandees, so far as concerned their function in the possession of mere honours, exercised principa ly at the reception of recruits to their body. Phi hp Ill's creation of Grandees ay patent was the final step in the transition between a recognition, which the primitive Grandees must have regarded as a right and the exercise of royal grace it has since become.

This distinction between the recognition of a status in those whose forefathers were ricos hombres and the elevation to it of created Grandees lies at the root of the division of the order into classes. From it has resulted too, the strangest and, to the foreigner, most incomprehensible point about the corps of Grandees, viz., the lack of precedence be- tween its members, a count being in this respect as good as a duke, and the latter no better than a marquis : to which the diversity of titles of the first Grandees-twenty-five dukes, marquises, and counts recognized by Unarles at his coronation, also contributed It has been helped, also, by the polite fiction which officially dubs all Grandees "of the farst class (de pnmera clase), so that, while continually encountering the highest grade of the honour, the unsophisticated inquirer is unable to trace a single example of the lower ones.

But whatever sanction legality may give