been carried into effect; at least I am not aware of even a solitary instance of the Scottish arms without the tressure either at or after this period.
There are other two representations of the Scottish arms in foreign armorials, to which I may briefly allude. One is in the Armorial de Gelre, a beautiful MS. in the Royal Library at Brussels, the Scottish shields in which have been figured by Mr. Stodart in his book on Scottish arms, and, more accurately, by Sir Archibald Dunbar in a paper read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1890. The armorial is believed to be the work of Claes Heynen, Gelre Herald to the Duke of Gueldres between 1334 and 1372, with later additions by another hand. The coat assigned in it to the King of Scotland is the lion and double tressure; the lion is uncrowned, and is armed and langued azure; above the shield is a helmet argent adorned behind with a short capelin or plain mantling, on which is emblazoned the saltire and chief of the Bruces, from which we may gather that the arms of David II. are here represented; the lining is blue, which is unusual, as mantlings are usually lined or doubled with a metal, if not with ermine. The helmet is surmounted by an Imperial crown, with a dark green bonnet spotted with red.[1] On the crown there is the crest of a lion sejant guardant gules, imperially crowned or, holding in his paw a sword upright; the tail is coué or placed between the hind-legs of the lion, but it then rises up and flourishes high above his back in a sufficiently defiant fashion. This shows that the Scottish arms were well known on the Continent of Europe nearly a hundred years before the date of the Grunenberg MS., while Virgil de Solis (c. 1555) gives a sufficiently accurate representation of the Royal shield, though the fleur-de-lis all project outwards as in the case of Grunenberg; he gives the crest as a lion rampant holding a sword in bend over his shoulder. Another ancient representation of the Scottish arms occurs in a MS. treatise on heraldry of the sixteenth century, containing the coats of some foreign sovereigns and other personages, bound up with a Scottish armorial, probably by David Lindsay, Lyon in 1568.
The tressure, like the bordure, in the case of an impalement stops at the line of impalement, as will be seen by a reference to the arms of Queen Anne after the union of the crowns of England and Scotland.
It is now held, both in England and Scotland, that the tressure flory and counterflory is, as a part of the Royal Arms, protected, and cannot be granted to any person without the express licence of the
- ↑ In M. Victor Bouton's edition of the Armorial de Gelre (Paris 1881) the bonnet is described as a mount.
