Order of the Charter

The Order of the Charter is the principal order of the United Kingdom of America. It is conferred for service to the Realm in any field, in five grades from Companion to Knight or Dame Grand Cross, and about 1,500 people are appointed to it each year. The King is its Sovereign and the Governor-General its Chancellor. Its two senior grades carry the prefix Sir or Dame.

It is the only order in the Realm founded by statute. It was created by Part VI of the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859, the statute that abolished the rotten boroughs, by a backbench amendment that Abraham Lincoln’s ministry accepted to secure votes for a Bill it carried by a majority of five. The amendment’s mover, Hiram Pell, intended that public service should have a reward that no longer ran through a borough seat. The Act that created the Order is almost unknown to the public; the Order is the most widely held distinction in the Realm.

In 1924 the Order was entrenched in the Charter of Union by accident. The Eighth Amendment, which wrote the 1859 Act’s electoral machinery into the Charter, listed the Parts to be entrenched by exception, and Part VI, standing at the end of the Act after the general clauses, was not excepted. Since then the Order can be abolished only by a Charter amendment. Nobody intended this, and the error was not noticed for seven years.

The Order’s record is uneven. Women were eligible from the first list, under the Act’s word “Persons”. Black Americans were almost entirely absent from it for half a century after 1905, and members of the treaty nations were absent for longer, and most of those first appointed after 1923 refused. Its senior grades have gone overwhelmingly to officials and officers by rank and length of service. The trade in honours of the early 1920s sold knighthoods of the Order as well as peerages, and the first prosecution under the Peerages Act that ended it was over a knighthood of the Charter.

Name

The Order is named for the Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the constitution of 1783, and not for any person, saint or emblem. Pell’s amendment proposed the name in its first draft and it was never changed. Members and the press call it the Charter; to be “given the Charter” is to be appointed to any grade, and “a Charter knighthood” is an appointment as Knight or Dame.

The motto, Pro Rege et Lege, “for King and Law”, was chosen for the first ordinances in 1859 and is not in the Act. The two nouns are read in the Realm as a statement of the constitutional order the Charter set up: a Crown bound by law, served under it.

History

Pell’s amendment

The Bill that became the Parliamentary Reform Act was introduced in 1859 with five Parts and no provision for honours. Hiram Pell, member for St Mary’s City, who chaired the standing committee on the representation and drafted much of the Bill, moved the amendment that became Part VI at the committee stage.

His argument was short and is recorded. For two generations a seat in the Commons had been the Realm’s principal reward for public service: a proprietor gave a pocket borough to a man the ministry wished to honour, and the seat served as both reward and dignity. The Bill abolished the boroughs that made this possible. Pell proposed that the Crown should have a reward for service that did not depend on a seat, conferred by an order constituted by Parliament rather than by the patronage of a proprietor or a court.

The ministry had not wanted the amendment and accepted it because it needed votes. Several members whose boroughs stood in the First Schedule had public careers that the abolition would end without recognition, and the Order offered them, and the friends of men like them, something in place of the seats the Bill took. Historians agree that the amendment moved some votes in the decisive division, which the ministry carried by one hundred and twenty-one to one hundred and sixteen. They do not agree on how many.

The clause was placed in a Part of its own, after the general clauses and the commencement, because it had to escape the commencement clause. The rest of the Act took effect at the next dissolution; the Order was to exist from the day of assent. Part VI therefore carries its own commencement, and is the only part of the Act that came into force in 1859.

Ernest II and the first Chancellor

Ernest II welcomed the Order. The King had been at pains throughout his reign to keep honour from becoming an instrument of faction, as it had been suspected of being under his father, and he wrote to the Governor-General that an order constituted by the American Parliament allowed American service to be rewarded “without the American public having to look to London for it, or the American ministry to a borough”. He said nothing in public about the Act that created it, in keeping with his view that the composition of the Commons was the one subject on which the Crown should be invisible.

Royal Assent was given on 14 July 1859 by Governor-General Winfield Scott, who by the terms of Part VI became the Order’s first Chancellor and its first member, holding the Grand Cross ex officio from the moment of his own signature. He left office nineteen days later. The first investitures were held at Government House by his successor, Edward Everett.

The first lists

Until 1922 the lists were the Prime Minister’s own. Lincoln drew the first two, in the autumn of 1859 and at the New Year of 1860, and drew them mainly from public service: judges, officers of the Army and Navy, and the clerks and engineers of the federal departments. The proprietors of the abolished boroughs were mostly left out, which they noticed. The members whose seats the Act abolished were included in small numbers, as the amendment’s supporters had been led to expect.

The first lists also included southern members of long parliamentary standing, appointed as a gesture of balance in a year when the Bill had been accused of being a sectional measure. Jefferson Davis and Howell Cobb were among them.

Dorothea Dix, the reformer of the asylums, was made a Companion in the first list. The Act used the word “Persons” throughout Part VI, and the Law Officers advised in 1859 that the word included women, so that no amendment was needed then or since. The Order admitted women from its first list. It did not appoint a woman to either knightly grade for thirty years.

The removals of 1861

The Order’s first removals were made in 1861, after the rebellion began. A single instrument, signed by Everett on the advice of Lincoln’s ministry, struck off by name Davis, Cobb and about a dozen others who had joined the rebel government or taken arms against the Crown. It is the only removal in the Order’s history made by list rather than case by case. The instrument is kept by the College of Heralds and is shown in its exhibitions more often than any other document in the Order’s register.

The war lists of 1862 to 1865 were dominated by the Army. Robert E. Lee was appointed Knight Grand Cross in 1863, on his promotion to General at the end of the war, and the Grand Cross went to the commanders of the field armies and the principal officers of the War Office in the same years.

Ely S. Parker

Ely S. Parker, the Seneca sachem who served on Grant’s staff through the war and drafted the surrender terms for the field formations in 1863, was made a Companion in 1865 for war service. He was the first member of a treaty nation appointed to the Order.

In 1871, when he resigned as Commissioner of Indian Affairs over the ministry’s bill to end treaty-making with the nations, he returned the badge to Government House with a letter of two sentences. The register records his membership as ended by his own act, which is the Order’s form for a resignation. No member of a treaty nation was appointed again until after the Treaty Renewal Act 1923, which declared the nations’ members citizens of the Realm, and most of those appointed in the following years refused.

Governors-General and the colour line

Every Governor-General is a Grand Cross ex officio under Part VI, and by the ordinances remains one for life. Frederick Douglass, Governor-General from 1873 to 1881, was therefore the first Black member of the Order’s senior grade, and Booker T. Washington, from 1897 to 1905, the second. Frances Willard was the first woman to hold the Grand Cross, as Dame Grand Cross on her installation in 1889, and the style “Dame Grand Cross” was first used in the instrument that recorded it.

The lists themselves were another matter. Under Washington, who examined the lists that came to him and asked ministers whether they reproduced exclusion, a handful of Black Americans were appointed: teachers, ministers of religion, physicians and the officers of the Black regiments. After his tenure the practice lapsed. For half a century the lists contained almost no Black names, and the ministries and later the committees that compiled them offered reasons that were recorded at the time: that nominations had not been received, that the candidates’ service was local rather than national, and that the polities had not put them forward. The appointment of Black members in numbers began only in the 1960s.

The trade in honours

In the years after the First Great War places in the lists were sold. Orrin Breckett, a fundraiser for the Conservative and Crown Union in New York, took payments from people who wished to be honoured and arranged for their names to be included in the submissions that the party’s managers made to the Prime Minister’s office. He sold peerages, knighthoods of the Charter and the lower grades of the Order, at prices that the subsequent inquiry set out in a published table.

The trade was exposed by a New York newspaper in 1921. The ministry of Charles Evans Hughes, whose own Cabinet was not implicated, appointed an inquiry and carried the Peerages Act in 1922. The Act made trafficking in any dignity of the Crown a criminal offence, and created the Honours Committee, so that the general lists have since been compiled by independent committees and the Prime Minister transmits them without choosing the names.

Breckett continued to trade after the Act came into force. In 1923 he was convicted under it for the sale of a knighthood of the Charter to a Pennsylvania manufacturer, and was imprisoned. It was the Act’s first prosecution. The manufacturer gave evidence against him and was struck off the Order. Hughes declined to comment on the case while it was before the courts, as he declined to comment on every prosecution of his party’s supporters in those years, and his ministry survived the affair without a resignation.

Entrenchment by error

The Eighth Amendment to the Charter of Union, carried in 1924 under Hughes, was intended to entrench the electoral machinery of the 1859 Act: the quota, the commissioners, the criteria and the unamendable resolution, all of which stand in Parts I and II. Its schedule did not name those Parts. It entrenched the Act “save Parts III, IV and V”, excepting the spent Parts on the boroughs abolished and the seats distributed in 1859 and the general Part. The drafters worked down the Act’s table of Parts and stopped at the commencement clause. Part VI, which follows it, was not excepted, and was entrenched with the machinery.

Nobody noticed for seven years. In 1931 a backbench member introduced a private member’s bill to abolish the Order, and the Speaker, on the Clerk’s advice, ruled that the bill could not proceed because it proposed to amend by statute a provision that stood in the Charter. Since then the Order can be abolished, or its constitution in Part VI altered, only by the amending procedure: both Houses, a national majority and a majority of the polities. Hughes himself was appointed Knight Grand Cross in 1925, the year after the amendment, to an Order his own amendment had entrenched without his knowing it.

The modern Order

The Order’s present form was largely settled in the middle of the twentieth century. The two lists, the Birthday Honours on King’s Day, which is the larger, and the New Year Honours, were fixed by custom in the nineteenth century; the cap on the senior grades was set by the Order’s ordinances in 1938; and the share of each list nominated by the polities was regularised after the Second Great War.

The film industry has declined the Crown’s honours as a convention since Louis B. Mayer refused a knighthood of the Charter in the Coronation Honours of 1937, while the stage accepts them in numbers. The best-known knights of recent decades come from music and the stage rather than from film: Buddy Holly accepted a knighthood in the 1998 Birthday Honours and used the title, and Tom Hanks, knighted in the 2010s while he was leading his guild’s dispute with the streaming companies, has never used it.

Constitution

Part VI

The whole of the Order’s statutory constitution is one clause.

Clause 26. There shall be an Order, to be called the Order of the Charter, for the Reward of such Persons as shall have rendered Service to the Realm; of which Order the Sovereign for the Time being shall be Sovereign, and the Governor General for the Time being shall be Chancellor and a Member of the first Class; and the said Order shall consist of five Classes, the first of Grand Cross, the second of Knights, the third of Commanders, the fourth of Officers, and the fifth of Companions: and notwithstanding any thing in this Act, this Part shall take effect from the passing thereof.

Everything else, from the insignia and the limits on numbers to the procedure for removal and the right of honorary membership, is in the ordinances of the Order, made by the Sovereign by letters patent on the advice of ministers and amended from time to time. The first ordinances were made in 1859. The present consolidated ordinances date from 1938 and have been amended about twenty times since.

The division matters because Part VI is entrenched and the ordinances are not. The name, the five grades, the Sovereign, the Chancellor and the Governor-General’s ex officio membership cannot be changed without a Charter amendment. The prefix, the limits, the insignia and the rules of appointment can be changed by letters patent on ministerial advice.

Sovereign and Chancellor

The King is Sovereign of the Order, and appointments are made in his name. The Governor-General is Chancellor, signs the instruments of appointment and removal, and holds the investitures. As Chancellor the Governor-General advises the Sovereign on removals and on the ordinances, in each case on the advice of ministers.

The Chancellor wears the Order’s insignia only at the Order’s own occasions. The Governor-General’s Full Dress, introduced by Douglass in 1873, carries no Charter or eagle emblem, and Douglass ruled that the Grand Cross should not be worn with it, on the ground that the office’s dress should show nothing its holder had been given. Every Governor-General since has kept the rule.

The register

The College of Heralds of America keeps the Order’s register, issues the instruments, and maintains the record of every appointment, resignation and removal since 1859. Its Secretary of the Order is the officer to whom a refusal is addressed. The register is public, and the full roll of living members is published each year.

Grades

The Companions are much the largest grade, and about two-thirds of each list is appointed to it. The limits on the senior grades apply to living substantive members; honorary members are outside the count.

The prefix is a matter of the ordinances, not the Act, and is used far less than the British equivalents. Many Knights and Grand Crosses decline to use it while accepting the appointment: Hughes signed himself as he always had and corrected people who tried the alternative, and Hanks has never used it. A member who declines the prefix is still entitled to it and is described with it in the register.

Honorary members

Foreign nationals, and subjects of the King’s other realms, may be appointed only as honorary members. They do not use the prefix, are outside the limits, and are not invested at the general investitures. The honorary list is advised separately by the Foreign Office. Honorary Grand Crosses were conferred on Allied commanders and heads of government after the Second Great War.

The honours of the King’s other realms confer no precedence in the Realm, and the Order confers none in them. A subject of two realms is appointed in the realm whose service is being recognised.

Appointment

The lists

Appointments are published in two lists a year: the Birthday Honours, on King’s Day, 9 February, which is the larger, and the New Year Honours. Special lists accompany a coronation, and an outgoing Prime Minister may submit a resignation list, which the committees scrutinise like any other. Together the lists make about 1,500 appointments a year. Investitures follow through the spring and the autumn.

The committees

Since the Peerages Act of 1922 the names have been chosen by the Honours Committee and its sub-committees, which sit by field: public service, the armed forces, the law, science and medicine, the arts, commerce and labour, sport, and voluntary and community service. Nominations come from the federal departments, from the polities and from the public, and any person may nominate any other. The committees’ recommendations go to the Prime Minister, who transmits them to the Governor-General. The Prime Minister transmits and does not choose.

The Prime Minister may in law decline to transmit a name. No Prime Minister is known to have done so since the 1930s, and the committees’ practice has been to treat a returned name as a question to be answered rather than as a refusal.

The polities

Forty-three of the Realm’s forty-nine polities confer no honours of their own. Their Governors and Lieutenant-Governors nominate to the Order through a standing procedure, each with an allocation agreed with the Honours Committee, and about a third of each list comes from the polity nominations. The six polities that confer their own honours, Hawaiʻi, Alaska and the four grand duchies, make no nominations through the procedure, but their people are eligible through the federal departments and the public route and are appointed in numbers.

Refusal

A person offered an appointment is asked in confidence beforehand and may refuse. Refusals are recorded by the College and not published, but a refusal made public by the person refusing is noted in the register.

Three traditions of refusal are established. The citizen-premier tradition, from Theodore Roosevelt through Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt, refuses all of the Crown’s honours on retirement from the premiership, and some of its heirs, Harry S. Truman and Jimmy Carter among them, have accepted the Order of Merit while refusing the Charter. Prime Ministers of the Conservative and Crown Union have usually accepted the Grand Cross on retirement and often declined the prefix. The film industry has declined since Mayer’s letter of 1937. And refusal has been more common among the treaty nations than in any other community in the Realm, since the first appointments after 1923.

Investiture

The Governor-General invests the members at Government House, New Westminster, in about thirty investitures a year. When the King is in the Realm he invests the Grand Crosses himself. Companions and Officers may choose instead to be invested by the Governor or Lieutenant-Governor of their own polity, at the polity’s Government House, and most of those outside the capital region do.

The ceremony is short and has not changed in form since Everett’s first investitures in 1859. The member’s name and citation are read, the insignia are conferred, and the member signs the roll. A Knight or Dame is not dubbed with a sword. The omission was Everett’s, and was deliberate: he held that the Realm’s knights were made by Parliament and the Crown together and not by a blade.

Insignia

The badge of the Order is a white-enamelled cross, its arms joined by a wreath of oak in green enamel, bearing at the centre a heraldic crowned eagle in gold on a crimson field, encircled by the motto Pro Rege et Lege. The reverse carries the date 1859. The badge is worn from a crimson ribbon.

Grand Crosses wear the badge from a crimson sash over the right shoulder, with a silver eight-pointed star on the left breast. Knights and Dames wear the badge at the neck, with a smaller star. Commanders wear the neck badge alone. Officers and Companions wear a smaller badge on the left breast, in gilt for Officers and in silver for Companions.

The insignia are the property of the Order and are returned to the College of Heralds on the death or removal of a member, except for the Companion’s badge, which the family keeps. The returned stars and badges are reissued.

The chapel

The Order’s chapel is in Columbia Cathedral, New Westminster, the national seat of the Church of America, at the east end behind the high altar, where it has been since the choir opened in 1874. The banners of the living Grand Crosses hang in it, and a Grand Cross’s banner is taken down at death and returned to the family or to a place of the family’s choosing.

A service of the Order is held in the chapel each year on 14 July, the anniversary of the Act’s assent. It is the only observance in the Realm held on that anniversary, and it commemorates the founding of the Order without mentioning the redistribution that the Act carried.

Removal

Members are removed by the Sovereign on the Chancellor’s advice, after a conviction for a serious offence or a grave public disgrace. The Honours Committee’s forfeiture sub-committee considers each case and reports to ministers, and the member is told and may make representations. Removals are rare, about a dozen in a decade, and are published in the official gazette without reasons.

The register distinguishes three ways in which membership ends besides death: removal by the Sovereign; resignation, by the return of the insignia, as Parker resigned in 1871; and the striking off of 1861, which the College records as a removal of its own kind because it was made by list.

The Order of Merit of America

The Order of Merit of America is a separate order, founded by Ernest III by letters patent in 1902. It has one grade and at most twenty-four living members, carries no prefix, and is conferred for exceptional distinction in public service, the armed forces, science, scholarship, letters and the arts. Appointments are made by the Sovereign on the Governor-General’s advice, after a committee of the Prime Minister’s proposes names.

It differs from the Order of the Charter in three ways. It is a prerogative order and not a statutory one, so that its constitution can be changed by letters patent alone. It is very small. And it is the one honour of the American Crown that several premiers of the citizen-premier tradition have accepted, on the reasoning that it is recognition from peers of a body of work rather than a dignity.

Its members have included:

What is argued about

The prefix. A proposal to abolish the styles Sir and Dame, leaving the grades and the letters, has been made about once a decade since the 1930s. It needs no Charter amendment, since the prefix is in the ordinances, and has failed every time on the same mixture of indifference and attachment. Its supporters point out that most of those entitled to the prefix do not use it; its opponents answer that the ones who do would mind.

The entrenchment. Republican writers argue that the Eighth Amendment’s error should be corrected by a Charter amendment returning Part VI to ordinary law, and complain that a decoration is now as hard to abolish as the House of Lords and harder to reform than the Lords’ composition, which statute has changed repeatedly. No government has proposed the correction, because an amendment to undo the error would have to be campaigned for, and a campaign would be about the honours.

Statute or prerogative. Whether the Sovereign may add a grade to the Order, or a medal attached to it, by letters patent is unsettled. One school holds that the prerogative to constitute honours survives Part VI; the other that the clause occupies the field, and since 1924 that a grade can be added only by Charter amendment. A proposal of 1968 for a medal of the Order for long service was dropped when the Law Officers could not agree, and the question has never been tested.

Donors. The Peerages Act forbids the sale of a place in the lists and does not forbid the appointment of a party’s donors. Donors continue to appear in the lists, usually for charitable or commercial service, and a proposal to bar anyone who has given above a stated sum to a party in the preceding five years has been made in each of the last several Parliaments and has never been carried.

Failings

The colour line. The Order’s senior grade included two Black Governors-General ex officio before 1905, and its lists contained almost no Black names for half a century after Washington’s tenure. The ministries that compiled the lists before 1922 and the committees that compiled them afterwards both attributed the absence to a lack of nominations. The lack was real, and the committees did nothing to remedy it. The practice of appointing Black members in numbers began only in the 1960s.

Donors. The Peerages Act ended the sale of places and did not end the reward of party money. Every party has nominated its donors through the committees for service of some other kind, and the committees have accepted most of them.

Who gets the top. The Grand Cross and the knightly grades have gone overwhelmingly to senior officials, judges and officers by rank and length of service, and the Companion’s grade to everyone else. A permanent secretary of a federal department can expect a knighthood on retirement; a nurse, a teacher or a union organiser of comparable distinction can expect to be made a Companion. The committees have published figures on this since the 1970s, and the figures have changed less than the committees’ statements about them.

The treaty nations. The nations were outside the Order from Parker’s resignation in 1871 until after 1923, and when appointments resumed most were refused, on the ground that an honour from the Crown that had broken the treaties was not a thing to accept from it. Appointments from the nations remain fewer, and refusals more common, than from any other community in the Realm.

Assessment

The Order is the most widely held distinction in the Realm and among the least examined of its institutions. It is valued by the great majority of those who receive it, and particularly by the Companions, who are the Order in all but its ceremonies. It is mocked more for its prefix than for anything else, and the prefix is the part of it that most members do not use.

Its statutory origin has shaped it more than its members realise. Because it was created by Parliament for the reward of service, it never became a court order, and its lists have never been the Sovereign’s personal gift. Because its constitution is one clause and its rules are in ordinances, it has been amended easily in everything except its existence. And because the clause was entrenched by an error, its existence is now protected more securely than that of most of the institutions it rewards people for serving.

Its failings are those of the people who compiled its lists. The colour line, the donors and the hierarchy of grades are all failures of nomination and selection, and the committees created in 1922 to take selection out of party hands have reproduced them in a different form. The Order has reflected the Realm’s idea of service more faithfully than it has corrected it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Parliamentary Reform Act 1859: the statute whose Part VI created the Order
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies: the constitution the Order is named for, and whose Eighth Amendment entrenched it
• The American Peerage: the Realm’s titled estate, the College of Heralds, the Honours Committee and the Peerages Act
• Governor-General of the United Kingdom of America: the Order’s Chancellor
• The Crown in Right: the separate founts of honour of the fourteen Crowns
• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America: the office that transmits the lists and does not choose them
• King’s Day: the day of the larger list
• Treaty nations: the relationship Parker resigned over
• Charles Evans Hughes: the Prime Minister of the Peerages Act and the Eighth Amendment, and a Grand Cross

Categories

Institutions · The Crown · Honours · Orders of Merit · Constitutional Law · The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 · Nineteenth Century