After the
Restoration, says Mr. Planche, in Knight's "London," the Duke of
Norfolk, hereditary Earl Marshal, hoping to re-establish the court,
employed Dr. Plott, the learned but credulous historian of
Staffordshire, to collect the materials for a history of the court,
which, however, was never completed. The court, which had outlived its
age, fell into desuetude, and the last cause heard concerning the right
of bearing arms (Blount _versus_ Blunt) was tried in the year 1720
(George I.). In the old arbitrary times the Earl Marshal's men have been
known to stop the carriage of a _parvenu_, and by force deface his
illegally assumed arms.

Heralds' fees in the Middle Ages were very high. At the coronation of
Richard II. they received L100, and 100 marks at that of the queen. On
royal birthdays and on great festivals they also required largess. The
natural result of this was that, in the reign of Henry V., William
Burgess, Garter King of Arms, was able to entertain the Emperor
Sigismund in sumptuous state at his house at Kentish Town.

The escutcheons on the south wall of the college--one bearing the legs
of Man, and the other the eagle's claw of the House of Stanley--are not
ancient, and were merely put up to heraldically mark the site of old
Derby House.

In the Rev. Mark Noble's elaborate "History of the College of Arms" we
find some curious stories of worthy and unworthy heralds. Among the evil
spirits was Sir William Dethick, Garter King at Arms, who provoked
Elizabeth by drawing out treasonable emblazonments for the Duke of
Norfolk, and James I. by hinting doubts, as it is supposed, against the
right of the Stuarts to the crown. He was at length displaced. He seems
to have been an arrogant, stormy, proud man, who used at public
ceremonials to buffet the heralds and pursuivants who blundered or
offended him. He was buried at St. Paul's, in 1612, near the grave of
Edward III.'s herald, Sir Pain Roet, Guienne King at Arms, and Chaucer's
father-in-law. Another black sheep was Cook, Clarencieux King at Arms in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who was accused of granting arms to any
one for a large fee, and of stealing forty or fifty heraldic books from
the college library. There was also Ralph Brooke, York Herald in the
same reign, a malicious and ignorant man, who attempted to confute some
of Camden's genealogies in the "Britannia." He broke open and stole some
muniments from the office, and finally, for two felonies, wa