Page:A Complete Guide to Heraldry.djvu/480

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A COMPLETE GUIDE TO HERALDRY

Licence in that year she and her husband assumed the additional surname of Chisholm, becoming Chisholm-Batten, and, contrary to the English practice in such cases, the arms of Chisholm alone were matriculated in 1860 to Mrs. Chisholm-Batten and her descendants. These once again were the undifferenced coat of Chisholm, viz.: "Gules, a boar's head couped or." Arms for Batten have since been granted in England, the domicile of the family being English, and the arms of the present Mr. Chisholm-Batten, though including the quartering for Chisholm, is usually marshalled as allowed in the College of Arms by English rules.

Though there does not appear to have been any subsequent rematriculation in favour of the heir male who succeeded as "The Chisholm," the undifferenced arms were also considered to have devolved upon him together with the supporters. On the death of the last known male heir of the family, Roderick Donald Matheson Chisholm, The Chisholm, in 1887, Mr. James Chisholm Gooden-Chisholm claimed the chieftainship as heir of line, and in that year the Gooden-Chisholm arms were again rematriculated. In this case supporters were added to the again undifferenced arms of Chisholm, but a slight alteration in the supporters was made, the clubs being reversed and placed to rest on the ground.

Amongst the many other untitled Scottish families who rightly bear supporters, may be mentioned Gibsone of Pentland, Barclay of Urie, Barclay of Towie, Drummond of Megginch, Maclachlan of that Ilk, "Cluny" Macpherson, Cunninghame, and Brisbane of that Ilk.

Armorial matters in the Channel Islands present a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. There never appears to have been any Visitation, and the arms of Channel Island families which officially pass muster must be confined to those of the very few families (for example, De Carteret, Dobrée, and Tupper) who have found it necessary or advisable on their own initiative to register their arms in the official English sources. In none of these instances have supporters been allowed, nor I believe did any of these families claim to use them, but some (Lemprière, De Saumerez, and other families) assert the possession of such a distinction by prescriptive right. If the right to supporters be a privilege of peerage, or if, as in Scotland, it anciently depended upon the right of free barony, the position of these Channel Island families in former days as seignorial lords was much akin. But it is highly improbable that the right to bear supporters in such cases will ever be officially recognised, and the case of De Saumerez, in which the supporters were bedevilled and regranted to descend with the peerage, will probably operate as a decisive precedent upon the point and against such a right. There are some number of families