Useful Notes / Knight Fever

Britain, being a monarchy, has a title/honours system to go with it—a clunky, sometimes counterintuitive system, with seemingly endless contradictions and absurdities. Getting titles and styles correct can be difficult for someone not "to the manner born"—which is, of course, the point: for centuries, the complexities of the honour system have served as a shibboleth to weed out posers, fraudsters, and plain old liars. Unlike what modern melodramas might presume, it was rarely used to weed out those who "went to the wrong school", just those who pretended they went to the right school but didn't. And of course, until the Victorian era most aristocrats didn't go to school anyway.

If you want to look up who has been awarded what title or honour, please refer to British Honours.

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Royalty

• The Sovereign: currently a King, Charles III of The House of Windsor. He is addressed as "Your Majesty" on first approach, "Sir" subsequently, and referred to as "His Majesty". A female sovereign (such as his predecessor, Elizabeth II) would be a Queen and be addressed/referred to as "Your/Her Majesty" (and "Ma'am"), of course.
  • It's often said that a King should be addressed as "Sire". This was once the case but the modern (since 1820) trend is to use "Sir".
  • The sovereign is not permitted to abdicate unilaterally. See Resignations Not Accepted for details.
• The Consort: A male sovereign's wife is by law a Queen consort, and thus far has always been known as such. (There was some speculation that Charles III's wife Camilla might use the style "The Princess Consort" or somesuch for a variety of reasons,^note The main ones being deference to the King's widely beloved first wife Diana, Princess of Wales, and something about both her and the King being divorced and her ex-husband still being alive and Church tradition about divorce, etc. but when it came down to it in 2022 she assumed the title of "The Queen Consort" with little fuss and simplified her style to that of "The Queen" following the Coronation.^note It helped here that a few months before her death, the widely beloved Elizabeth II had expressly stated approval of Camilla's assumption of the title.). A female sovereign's husband does not share in his wife's rank, but instead is usually given whatever style the sovereign (or, more accurately, the government of the day) thinks appropriate:
  • Peculiarly, both Mary I of England and Mary II of England and Scotland ruled jointly with their husbands, with Parliament making the consorts kings in their own right. In each case, the relevant husband was a foreign monarch (more or less):
    • Mary I of England — that is, Bloody Mary — was married to King Philip II of Spain.^note Technically, when she took the throne in 1553, he was Philip, Prince of Asturias, his father Charles I and V of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire still being in full control of his realms. However, Charles abdicated in 1556, so from then until Mary's death in 1558 England and Spain were technically in personal union in Philip. During her reign, all official documents refer to Philip as the King of England and he was generally treated as the proper king while his wife was alive. However, he is usually left off the official list because he never had any children with Mary, because he left England after her death, and because (30 years after he left) he ... tried and failed to invade England. That'll do it.
    • Mary II was married to William of Orange, who had a weird position in the Dutch political system of the day. Officially, the Netherlands was a federation of seven republics, but unofficially each republic always elected the Prince of Orange^note A rather strange principality that traced its name and ancestry to a line of minor but very rich nobles in the south of France—on the border between the old provinces of Provence and Dauphiné—whose junior line ended up based in the Netherlands and then inherited the old French title shortly before leading the rebellion that established the Dutch Republic. their Stadtholder (principal magistrate/military commander-in-chief) (usually anyway).^note Some republics liked to play coy and pick someone else; William himself was never elected Statdholder in Groningen or Friesland. Super-unofficially, but most importantly, Holland (the most populous and economically dynamic republic) controlled everything and so whoever was Stadholder of Holland ran the whole circus. Surprise, surprise, William was Stadholder of five of the seven republics, including Holland. This meant William knew what it meant to be a constitutional head of state, which is exactly what Parliament wanted after the Glorious Revolution. Plus he was Protestant! (Admittedly a Dutch Reformed one more like those weirdo Presbyterians up in Scotland than the sensible Episcopalian Anglicans who dominated Parliament, but after that cursed Papist James II they'd take any Protestant they could get.) As a result, Parliament not only made him king, they let him stay king after Mary died (something denied to Philip) and would have let his heirs by any second wife inherit if he remarried (he never did, though, so the throne went to Mary's aforementioned sister Anne).
  • Mary, Queen of Scots had three husbands, but each of them died or were deposed before their exact titles could be settled; at least one (Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, James VI and I's father) was declared king consort, but it's not clear how widely this was accepted.
  • Queen Anne's husband Prince George of Denmark was made Duke of Cumberland; he had been married to then-Princess Anne a few years earlier (during her uncle Charles II's reign), at a time when it wasn't clear if his wife would ever get anywhere near the throne. He was given the ducal title by his brother-in-law William III basically as a token of appreciation for supporting him during the Glorious Revolution. His title as "Prince" was the Danish one he was born with (as the fifth child and second son of King Frederick III of Denmark).
  • Meanwhile, Victoria's husband Albert was never made a peer.^note Albert retorted to this snub by declaring that it would be a step down for one of the dukes of Saxony (where dukes were reigning monarchs rather than "mere" nobility) to become, for example, Duke of York. Which is something of a stretch; Albert was certainly a Saxon duke, but as a second son he was never expected to become the reigning Duke Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Interestingly, had Albert lived to his old age instead of dying in 1861 at age 42, he actually would have inherited the sovereign ducal title, as his brother Ernst II died without (legitimate) issue in 1893. In the event, Albert's second son Alfred took the ducal throne on old Uncle Ernest's death (the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, having surrendered his Saxe-Coburg succession rights in favour of his younger brother for political reasons). As Alfred died without surviving sons he was succeeded as duke by his nephew Charles Edward (the posthumous son of Victoria and Albert's youngest son Leopold), even though by this point more senior descendants of Prince Albert were available (they all declined the ancestral ducal throne because they either didn't fancy moving to Germany or because the Kaiser thought their service in the British Armed Forces suspicious). Charles Edward's descendants hold the Saxe-Coburg titles in pretense to this day. Weirdly, this whole business, plus George VI having no sons, means that the agnatic head of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is actually Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, rather than being the British monarch (because of the aforementioned George VI had no sons thing) or the actual Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (because the title, again, went to a younger line for political reasons). He was not even given the style "Prince Consort" until he had been royal consort for seventeen years — and even that title was basically a Backhanded Compliment in the sense of "ok, you're a prince who happens to be married to the Queen, so we'll call you that".
  • Elizabeth II's husband Prince Philip was given the title Duke of Edinburgh a few hours before marrying the then-Princess Elizabeth on 20 November 1947. This was because Philip (who had been born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark) had renounced his Greek citizenship and his Greek and Danish royal titles as a condition of the marriage, and needed a title better than "Lieutenant Sir"^note "Sir" because he had been made a Knight of the Garter the previous day, "Lieutenant" because that was his earned rank in the Royal Navy to marry the heiress-presumptive to the throne. The conspicuous absence of "Prince" from his official style, despite being an HRH, led to about 10 years of confusion about whether he should or should not be called "Prince Philip", leading to all kinds of weird proposals (most notably one from Winston Churchill—ever the Victorian nostalgic—to revive Prince Albert's title of "Prince Consort" and one from John Diefenbaker^note At the time the heir-presumptive to the leadership of the Canadian Tories. (The Tories were in Opposition until 1957, but as Louis St. Laurent was seen as losing his edge Diefenbaker was viewed as a likely future PM even then.) that he should be styled "Prince of the Commonwealth") before his wife settled the matter by making him a "Prince of the United Kingdom" (the style automatically granted to sons of the sovereign and of the heir apparent) in 1957.
  • And finally, Elizabeth I avoided this whole mess through the expedient of never marrying.
• The Offspring: The children of a sovereign or heir apparent and the children of the sons of a sovereign or heir apparent automatically receive the style of "Royal Highness".^note This is because "Royal Highness" is supposed to designate members of the "official" Royal Family—that is, those part of the same family as the sovereign, which essentially means "if you used a surname, it would be the same as the sovereign's." Some male members of the Royal Family also hold noble titles, as mentioned below. Other family members (say, a female heir's husband) may be permitted the style by royal warrant.
  • A note on "prince" and "princess": Any person styled HRH from birth is also a prince or princess from birth. The wife of a prince is not technically a princess, but instead "shares" in his title (e.g. Princess Michael of Kent; see below). The title "prince" or "princess" may also be granted by the Sovereign, theoretically to anyone, but in practice only to certain people with direct ties to the Royal Family. This was the case with Prince William's children, who are not the children or grandchildren of the monarch (they were the Queen's great-grandchildren); before Prince George was born, it was decided that William's children would be granted the right to be princes and princesses as they would — as children of the eldest son of the eldest son — be in the direct line of succession.
  • There is also a special title of "Princess Royal"; this title is peculiar, as it (1) is only granted to the eldest daughter of a sovereign^note At least, it has only ever been granted to the eldest daughter of a sovereign. There is some question as to whether the title can be granted to the eldest daughter of an heir apparent, should the sovereign have no living daughters; every sovereign since Richard III has either had at least one legitimate daughter or died without legitimate issue, and the title "Princess Royal" did not arise in its modern form until the 17th century, so the issue has never come up. Charles III is the first sovereign since the title was first established who has full-grown sons but no full-grown daughters; thus, should his sister predecease him, it is entirely possible that the title will be granted to his eldest granddaughter Charlotte during his reign. (Charlotte will almost certainly be the next Princess Royal, as she will almost certainly outlive her great-aunt Princess Anne, but her receiving the title during her father William's reign would be completely unremarkable). (2) can only be held by one person at a time (so even though Elizabeth II was the eldest daughter of a sovereign, she never the received the title because she took the throne while her aunt Mary, Princess Royal, eldest daughter of George V, was still living), and (3) is completely discretionary (the current Princess Royal, Anne, became eligible to receive the title when the aforementioned Mary, Princess Royal, died in 1965, but did not actually get it until her mother deemed it proper—in 1987).
  • The definition of what is considered the appropriate usage of the "Royal Highness" title was tweaked somewhat in early 2020 when Prince Harry and his wife Meghan decided to permanently move away from Britain to Canada, to split time between there and Los Angeles, California. Their original intent was to continue serving as what has been termed 'working royals' in an area where they would not be constantly hounded by the British press ^note and instead be hounded by the international press simply by virtue of their international celebrity status. To make what has been a very drawn-out and involved story short, they had wanted to have it both ways, being able to use their royal status and celebrity to support their own private charities and causes while at the time same avoiding much of the responsibility that other royal family members, even those much further away from the main line of succession, are saddled with. After a long round of bridge burning, bridge building, and negotiation, the Queen allowed their move to live their own lives and pursue their own interests, but removed the couple's HRH titles and forbade them from using the terms 'royal', 'prince', 'princess', or any other title of royalty in affiliation with any of their projects. Harry would henceforth be simply titled as Harry, Duke of Sussex, and the term 'Royal Highness' would be only given to those members of the royal family who are minors and those in their majority who are, for lack of a better term, are authorised to represent the sovereign (in speeches, public appearances, endorsements, etc.).
• The Spouses: Wives of male Royal Highnesses use a female version of their husband's style for the duration of the marriage (and afterwards, if widowed). The wife of HRH the Earl of Wessex is HRH the Countess of Wessex^note The title "countess" is used as the female equivalent to both "count" and "earl", as a feminine form of the word "earl" in English never developed, while the wife of Prince Michael of Kent is referred to as Princess Michael of Kent. Her actual first name is Marie-Christine.
  • This was stretched almost to breaking-point after Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles. Even though she was widely referred to as "Princess Diana", she was in fact HRH the Princess of Wales. After their divorce, she was allowed to style herself as Diana, Princess of Wales. Camilla Parker-Bowles wisely opted not to style herself as "Princess of Wales" when she married Charles, opting to use one of his lesser titles and style herself as the Duchess of Cornwall (or the Duchess of Rothesay when she's in Scotland).
  • A notable exception to this rule was Princess Marina, the Queen's aunt. As the wife of the Duke of Kent, she was HRH the Duchess of Kent but after he died, she chose to style herself as "Princess Marina". She could do this because she was an actual princess in her own right — she was a member of the Greek royal family (as well as being the Queen's aunt by marriage, she was also Prince Philip's cousin).
  • Husbands of female Royal Highnesses simply keep their own names. Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi did not get any new titles when he married Princess Beatrice in 2020. In the past, men marrying princesses have been given titles; for instance, Anthony Armstrong-Jones was made the Earl of Snowden when he married Princess Margaret. This was even true when the princess's suitor himself had a title, the most prominent example being when Alexander Duff, 6th Earl Fife, was made Duke of Fife in advance of his 1889 wedding to Princess Louise (eldest daughter of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, i.e. the future Edward VII). But since Mark Phillips declined the offer of a peerage when he married Princess Anne, this has fallen into abeyance.
• Others: The widow of a King is a Queen Dowager; however, if she's the mother of the current sovereign she might choose to be called Queen Mother instead (as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon did, partly to avoid confusion with her daughter who has the same name as her; going back a generation, Queen Mary simply continued to be known as "Queen Mary" after her husband, George V, died). There's no precedent as to how to address the widower of a queen; the only male consort to have survived his wife^note William III doesn't count, as he reigned in his own right jointly with his Mary II — so when she died his title didn't change, as he was already King was the afore-mentioned Philip of Spain; although the English called him many fine things (especially after that incident in the Channel in 1588), none of them were related to his marriage. While Mary had had him declared King, few took this particularly seriously, and absolutely nobody did after Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession. In any case, he had his own title.
• A common mistake by writers is to use titles such as "Your Royal Majesty" or "Your Highness" in modern works. The first has never existed^note Although "Imperial and Royal Majesty" did exist...for the German Kaiser and Austro-Hungarian Emperor. The former was Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, while the latter was Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. While five British monarchs (Victoria through George VI) also held the title of Empress or Emperor of India (it was the only British colony to have had emperors in the past, and it simply wouldn't do to have Queen Victoria be "outranked" by her own daughter, the wife of Germany's second Kaiser), the style "Imperial and Royal Majesty" was never used for them. and is mainly popular with American historical novelists; the second was once used in the Royal Family,^note before 1917, it was given to distant descendants of the Sovereign but is now only held by the Aga Khan, leader of the world's Ismaili Muslims.
• It's worth noting that before Henry VIII, kings were usually addressed as "Your Grace"^note This medieval English usage is probably the basis for the style of the Westerosi monarch in A Song of Ice and Fire; nobody could accuse George R. R. Martin of not doing his research or even "my liege". Some earlier monarchs tried out the "Majesty" title on a limited basis (Richard II in particular seemed to like the style), but Henry was the first to insist on it.

Peerages

Hereditary Peerages

• Duke (Duchess): The highest title of the lot. The word comes from the Latin dux (from ducere, meaning "to lead"), a title in the late Roman Empire^note First taking significance during the reign of Diocletian for the chief of the military in a province. Address as "Your Grace" when you are talking to him, unless he is a "royal duke" like Prince Andrew, Duke of York.^note Though in the case of Prince Andrew, many would say you're best to avoid addressing him at all. A royal duke is a duke who is also styled Royal Highness, i.e. a duke who is also a prince. The overwhelming majority of Dukes (23 of 29) are non-royal.
  • Royal dukedoms become non-royal after the second generation; the definition of a Prince (or Princess) of the royal family is anyone whose parent or paternal grandparent is or was Sovereign or heir apparent to the throne (or, again, someone specifically given the title "Prince" by the monarch).
    • For example: among Elizabeth II's first cousins are HRH Prince Richard, 2d Duke of Gloucester, and HRH Prince Edward, 2d Duke of Kent, grandsons of George V. Their children are "Lord/Lady N. Windsor" like those of other dukes, and the future third dukes will be "His Grace" rather than "His Royal Highness". By coincidence (or something), the heirs to the dukedoms of Gloucester and Kent will be the first holders of ex-royal dukedoms since the Wars of the Roses; ever since Edward of York, 4th Duke of York took the throne as Edward IV, royal dukedoms always ended because the first or sometimes the second holder always either died with no legitimate male issue (a lot of them had mountains of illegitimate children and quite a few had only daughters) or inherited the throne themselves. Prince Albert, 1st Duke of York, managed to do both when he became King (as George VI) and left the throne to his daughter (the late Queen) because he had no sons.
    • Because nothing concerning titles can be simple, this has to be qualified. Two royal dukedoms — Cumberland & Teviotdale (a double Dukedom) and Albany — were affected by the Titles Deprivation Act of 1917 because the holders of these titles were German subjects — Germany being at war with Britain at the time. The holders were deprived of their titles, but the titles weren't themselves made extinct; should a successor wish to do so, he could petition the Privy Council to have them restored as an ex-royal dukedom. Because this remains a theoretical possibility, it is highly unlikely that any future royals will be created Duke of Cumberland or Duke of Albany in the future. Essentially, this could only happen if the families in question die out completely.
    • Royal dukedoms should be distinguished from dukedoms created for illegitimate sons of monarchs (like the Dukedom of Grafton, created for one of Charles II's bastards) or husbands of royal daughters (like the Dukedom of Fife, which as mentioned was created for the Scottish nobleman who married Edward VII's eldest daughter, Princess Louise). Even though they are associated with the royal family, these titles are not royal dukedoms because their holders were not necessarily royals.
    • Complicating matters, the second holder of the Dukedom of Fife actually was royal, being the grandchild of Edward VII; making things even more complicated, she actually held the title as a duchess, as Victoria re-created her grandson-in-law Duke of Fife in 1900 under new letters patent allowing for the duke's daughters to succeed their father to the title should their parents have no sons, which they didn't. (The 1900 creation was made because by 1900 it was reasonably clear that the Duke and Duchess would have no more children after 11 years of marriage.) Thus the 2d Duchess of Fife was a royal (and entitled to the style HRH) who held a dukedom but was not a royal duke (well, royal duchess). It gets even more complicated when you consider that this second duchess — Princess Alexandra — married Prince Arthur of Connaught, her first cousin once removed, who was also descended from Queen Victoria.
  • The high status of dukes and the distinction between royal and non-royal dukedoms was parodied by Mark Twain in the story of The Million Pound Banknote where the owner of the note becomes so famous that The Times reports his doings above those of "Any duke not royal".
• Marquess (Marchioness): Started out as a title given to lords who were granted lands on the borders with Wales and Scotland and so were considered more important because they were guarding the realm from dangerous foreigners; from "march", an obsolete word for "borderland". The connection with borderlands was eventually lost; probably the most notable marquessate is that of Salisbury (held by the Cecil family), but Salisbury is nowhere near any border. Anne Boleyn was ennobled as Lady Marquess of Pembroke before she married Henry VIII. Pronounced either "mark-us" or "mar-kwiss" depending on the time period, but never "mar-kee" (which is the version used on the Continent, spelled "marquis", feminine form "marquise"^note Although because nothing involving noble titles is ever simple, sometimes Continental titles that should be translated as "marquise" (e.g. the Italian marchesa) are translated are "marchioness" even though the equivalent masculine title (e.g., to continue our example, the Italian marchese) is translated as "marquis" (as any reader of English translations of early Italian literature, e.g. The Decameron, can confirm).).
• Earl (Countess): The title either comes from or is derived from the Old English equivalent (spelt "Eorl" in Old English) of the Norse "jarl", meaning "chieftain" or "ruler in stead of the King". The title of "eorl" as a standalone post^note The Anglo-Saxons generally used "eorl" in the compound "earldorman", roughly meaning "great lord," which could refer to the lord of anything from a few villages to all of Mercia. It survives in the modern word "alderman", like what Chicago calls the members of its City Council. was originally created by Canute the Great of England and Denmark for the four regional governors he established for the four historic major regions of England (Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex);^note He would later break Kent off Wessex to make it five, largely because of the persistent service/meddling of Earl Godwin of Wessex he needed to do this to make sure someone was minding the store in England while he was off running Denmark (and Norway, which he also ruled) but didn’t want to leave all of England to one lord (who might try and make himself king). The title was thus the rough equivalent of "duke" until the Conquest of 1066.^note Indeed, Old English texts like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle generally referred to Continental dukes as "earls" even after the Conquest, including Duke William "the Conqueror" of Normandy himself. The Normans made it the equivalent of the Continental count,^note Another ultimately Roman term; a comes ("friend" or "companion" of the Emperor) was a high-ranking official whose duties varied over the centuries; when first used as a title, they were military commanders with authority over an entire diocese—and therefore above a dux. However, the title's Roman usage kept changing, fell out of use, and then was revived by the Franks, who used it for rather more local officials/nobles. The word passed through (Norman) French into English as comte, from which "count". largely because whilst the ranking of titles was not especially fixed at the time, dukes were understood to have certain quasi-sovereign prerogatives (like, er, the Duke of Normandy, whose near-royal powers and status were how Billy the Conk could get away with building up an army big enough to conquer England), but counts were not. This was important because the new Norman dynasty's legal theory of landholding was that the Conquest had reset all land ownership such that after 1066, land and dignities all came from the King and could be taken away by the King at his pleasure, and the autonomy and inherent quasi-sovereignty implied by the title of "duke" in the 11th century conflicted with this "everything comes from the King" theory. The Normans probably chose the native Teutonic word over their own Romance one because of the aural similarity of "count" to a certain word for an undignified part of the body in the tongue of their new subjects,^note The similarity of the English word for the female pudenda to innocent French vocabulary has been the subject of frequent commentary. Even Shakespeare referenced it in Henry V. whence "countess" (which you have to admit is better than "earless") for the wife of an earl. There was previously one "royal earl", Elizabeth II's third son and youngest child Prince Edward, who was known as the Earl of Wessex from his marriage until early 2023. He was expected to be created Duke of Edinburgh with the queen’s death in 2022, and sure enough he was created Duke of Edinburgh for life in early 2023.^note This is because, technically, Prince Charles was the Duke of Edinburgh, having inherited the title from his father when he passed in April 2021. Of course, since Charles was already a duke — of Cornwall (outside Scotland) and of Rothesay (in Scotland) — he didn’t really use the title, but as a legal matter the title was not available to be re-created for Prince Edward until Charles inherited the throne, at which point the title of Duke of Edinburgh was "merged in the Crown" and became available to be created anew. )
• Viscount (Viscountess): The title means "vice-count"; was originally a secondary title given to earls for the use of their sons. The most famous viscounts are probably two 19th-century Prime Ministers, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne and Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston. While commonly held as a subsidiary title of an earldom, viscountcies are fairly rarley held as a peer's most senior title; Queen Victoria noticed this while reviewing the guest list before her coronation and recorded this response from the aforementioned Lord Melbourne (from her diaries):
  I spoke to Ld M. about the numbers of Peers present at the Coronation, & he said it was quite unprecedented. I observed that there were very few Viscounts, to which he replied "There are very few Viscounts," that they were an old sort of title & not really English; that they came from Vice-Comites; that Dukes & Barons were the only real English titles; — that Marquises were likewise not English, & that people were mere made Marquises, when it was not wished that they should be made Dukes.^note For the record, this is largely correct, with the glaring exception that the title of "Earl" is the most English of the lot, being derived from eorl, the main Anglo-Saxon title for a great lord.
• Baron (Baroness): The title comes from French, via an Old Frankish word meaning "warrior", which in turn was possibly derived from a West Germanic etymon meaning "bear" (as in, a warrior is a man who fights like a bear, or perhaps fights bears). A female baron is a baroness, but not The Baroness. Usually. Thankfully.
• Lord of Parliament (the equivalent of Baron in the Peerage of Scotland; "Baron" traditionally meant something else in Scotland and to some degree still does, but it's insanely complicated so just keep reading)

Peers are referred to and usually addressed as "Lord [title]" unless they're dukes, in which case (as mentioned) they're addressed as "Your Grace" and referred to as "The Duke of [title]". Women who are peers in their own right get "Lady" and "Duchess" instead of "Lord" and "Duke". Wives of male peers share their husbands' social rank and use the female version of their husband's title — but husbands of female peers (and wives of female peers and husbands of male peers, now that those are a thing) do not. This unfair-seeming custom arose primarily to save men's feelings; a man who took his wife's title might (shock! horror!) be mistaken for her subordinate instead of her lord and master, clearly something no red-blooded man would tolerate. This wasn't always the case; before the Tudor era, the husband of a peeress in her own right usually exercised her authority and thus assumed her title (known as holding a title jure uxoris, "by wife's right"). The most famous example of this is Richard Neville, a.k.a. "Warwick the Kingmaker", who inherited the earldom of Salisbury from his mother but was (and still is) usually known by his wife's earldom of Warwick.

A peer's eldest son uses his father's second title (if any) "by courtesy" during the father's lifetime. Thus, Prince Edward is the Duke of Edinburgh and his son James gets to be called Earl of Wessex as that is his father's second title. (Until 2023, Prince Edward was the Earl of Wessex and James was styled the Viscount Severn for the same reason.)^note This one is a little confusing, as Prince Edward was given the title Duke of Edinburgh after Charles III became king because, technically, Charles had been Duke of Edinburgh from the passing of their father Prince Phillip in 2021 until Charles's succession in September 2022. Even more confusing, when Prince Edward eventually dies and James succeeds to his titles, he will succeed as Earl of Wessex but not as Duke of Edinburgh, as Charles created Prince Edward's dukedom for life rather than to his heirs male—i.e. when Prince Edward dies, so will the ducal title. So should James eventually have a son, he would be styled "Viscount Severn" until he succeeds rather than until his father succeeds. All dukes, marquesses and earls have at least one second title. Sometimes, the most senior second title is not used when it refers to the place mentioned in the senior title, in order to avoid confusion. For example, although the Duke of Westminster's second title is Marquess of Westminster, the duke's eldest son uses the title Earl Grosvenor — or he would if he existed; the current duke, who inherited the title in 2016, is unmarried.

The Crown has occasionally used a writ of acceleration to transfer the subsidiary peerage to the heir apparent during the father's lifetime, in order to put him in the House of Lords. This was most commonly done in the 17th-19th centuries, when the Lords were still firmly part of the political process, and the acceleration was used so that an heir apparent with a promising political career could pursue it without having to worry about getting elected every so often. This device was last used in 1992 for Lord Cecil, known at the time by courtesy as Viscount Cranborne, a distinguished Tory MP;^note He succeeded to the substantive title, the aforementioned Marquessate of Salisbury, upon his father’s death in 2003 it is now obsolete, as hereditary peerages no longer entitle their holders to seats in the Lords. Instead, when the heir of a hereditary peerage merits elevation to the House of Lords, new non-hereditary baronies will be created as needed.

Younger sons/daughters of dukes and marquesses and daughters of earls, and eldest sons of earls who do not possess a subsidiary title to lend them,^note Not currently true of any British earldom, but has been the case in the past use "Lord/Lady [firstname] [lastname]". This distinction is important (and fiction writers get it wrong all the time): "Lord John Smith" and "Lord Smith" are NOT interchangeable and NOT the same person. Lord John is not a peer, but merely a son of the current (or late) Lord Smith (or, perhaps, of William Smith, Duke of Puddleby), using the style "Lord" by courtesy only. ^Example One example is Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's father), who served for many years in the House of Commons; legally, he was a commoner, styled "Lord" because he was a younger son of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. His older brother George, meanwhile, was by courtesy styled the Marquess of Blandford, or Lord Blandford, before succeeding to the dukedom in 1883. Lord Randolph was never, ever "Lord Churchill", always "Lord Randolph". Any other children of peers are addressed in writing as "The Honourable [first name] [last name]"; when speaking to or of them, however, you'd just use "Mr.", "Miss", etc.

Informally, all peers except dukes can be referred to as "Lord Title-name", as mentioned above. Formally, however, dukes, marquesses, almost all earls, and some Scottish viscounts are "the Title of Title-Name". Examples include the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Queensberry, and the Earl of Clarendon. It's done this way because the title-names in these cases aren't surnames: they're place names. Barons and English viscounts have no of because their styles usually derive from surnames, as do those of a few earls (e.g. Earl Russell). Writers should keep in mind that a title normally rendered as (for example) "the Earl of Matlock" cannot also be rendered as "Earl Matlock"; you have to pick one or the other and stick to it, keeping in mind that either can also be rendered as "Lord Matlock".

Succession rules for titles are set by the letters patent that create them. In most cases, the rule is that a title can only be inherited by a legitimate male blood relative from the male line of the latest title holder's family. Those born out of wedlock or adopted are usually excluded from lines of succession. If a title holder dies without any direct descendants, family trees are scoured until a suitable heir is found somewhere in the world. This is how the Dukedom of Atholl (and the hereditary chieftainship of Clan Murray) ended up being held by Bruce Murray, a South African businessman who's mostly bemused by the strange twist his life has taken^note It gets better, for as Duke of Atholl he is the only person in Europe who can legally raise a private army, a unique right that was granted to his ancestor by Queen Victoria.

A few titles can pass to a male heir through the female line (i.e. to a daughter's son or sororal nephew). In Scotland, many peerages are linked to clan chieftainships which can and do pass to a female if there are no suitable males. "Modern" hereditary titles that can pass through the female line or to an heiress are usually so because of the situation of the original grantee; e.g. a man with only daughters who was elevated to the peerage would ask that his title be inheritable by or through a daughter. A good example is the dukedom of Marlborough which was created for General John Churchill by Queen Anne in 1702. As Churchill had no sons, his eldest daughter Henrietta inherited the title, becoming the second Duchess of Marlborough. When she died, the title passed to her nephew Charles Spencer (the son of her sister, who had predeceased her) who became the third Duke. (Charles's grandson George would amend the surname to "Spencer-Churchill" in honour of the 1st Duke; most subsequent Churchills—including basically all the example Churchills on this page, including Sir Winston—descend from him and so are technically agnatic Spencers and not Churchills.) They did the same thing for Prince Philip's uncle Louis "Dickie" Mountbatten (who had 2 daughters before his wife stopped sleeping with him, and everyone in Society knew it, largely because she was sleeping with half of Society^note And possibly Jawaharlal Nehru, but that's another matter while he was sleeping with the other half) in establishing his earldom; this is why the "Earl Mountbatten of Burma" is named Knatchbull.

Should no suitable heir for a title can be found, then the line is considered to be ended even if the family continues to live and thrive. Dead titles go back into the grab bag and get dusted off after a few generations to be handed out as entirely new creations rather than as continuations of the original lines. The earldom of Warwick, for example, is currently in its fourth creation.

There is occasional discussion about whether succession rules should change to allow females to inherit titles even if it's not specified in their letters patent, especially after the monarchy adopted absolute primogeniture in the 21st century. However, this is not likely to change any time soon as limiting heirs to legitimate male blood relatives means some lines will eventually come to an end and ensure that the number of hereditary peers doesn't get too high^note for example, the hereditary title of Baron Haden-Guest will most likely end within a generation as Christopher Guest, the current holder doesn't have natural children, while his brother and heir to the title, Nicholas Guest, only has daughters and is unlikely to have more children.

Life Peerages:

A life peer is an appointed member of the peerage whose title cannot be inherited, in contrast to hereditary peers. The practise of creating peers only for the holder's life has existed off and on for most of the history of the English/British peerage, but it only became a regular thing after the passage of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, which specifically authorised the creation of life peers to fill the seats of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords (about which see more in the section on judges below). Appointment of life peers was expanded a little over 80 years later to the political arena by the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, allowing the Government to create life peers who were not specifically judges. Since 1958, the vast majority of new peerages that have been created have been these.

• All extant life peerages save one^note The one being the aforementioned fourth creation of the dukedom of Edinburgh, being granted to Prince Edward for life only. As it was a special creation for a member of the royal family and not under the Life Peerages Act, it does not grant the prince any right to sit in the Lords. are baronies. Life peers are known as "Lord/Lady Title-Name". Usually, the title name derives from their surname rather than a place, although the full title includes both. This is useful because you can have more than one lord with the same title name — for example, there are currently several life peers with the surname Smith who are all "Lord Smith" or "Lady Smith", with the place name being added (Lord Smith of Finsbury, etc) if one needs to specify which one they are referring to. As they get to choose their title name when they are ennobled, some choose not to use their surname. Sometimes a particular surname may not be appropriate — when a politician called Michael Lord was given a life peerage in 2011, he was told that he could not be "Lord Lord" so opted to be Lord Framlingham (after a town in the constituency he had formerly represented as an MP).
• A few holders of life peerages prefer to use "Baron" or "Baroness" as opposed to "Lord" or "Lady". Margaret Thatcher, for instance, preferred "Baroness Thatcher" — starting what seems to be a developing trend for life peeresses to use "Baroness" in order to stress that they hold a title in their own right and are not simply the wives of peers or knights.
• Several hereditary peers are also life peers, having been granted the latter honour after the House of Lords Act of 1999 which limited the number of hereditary peers who can sit in the House of Lords.

Baronets:

• A title specifically created just to look posh; the king used to sell them to get extra cash. None have been created since 1964 (except for Denis Thatcher, who got one for being Margaret Thatcher's husband), but there are still some out there. Like a knight, a baronet starts his name with "Sir" but puts "Bart." at the end instead of the initials of his order and degree of knighthood (see below). Baronetcies are hereditary; one was inherited by a U.S. Air Force officer.
  • In Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, the main character, "The Bad Baronet of Ruddigore," is called a "Bad Bart" by himself and others quite often.
  • Uniquely, there is a Baronetage of Nova Scotia — that is to say, a fairly large number of baronet titles were created with the land associated with them being in Nova Scotia. Most of the holders are British and not Canadian, however; these baronetcies were created by the kings of Scotland in the 17th century as a means of raising funds to support the new colony, with many of the holders never even going there.
  • Baronetships are almost always transmitted only to direct male heirs; if a baronet has no sons, the title extinguishes at his death. There are a very few that can pass to a male heir in the female line, and one that can pass to a female; these were crafted thus because of the unique situations of the original grantees.

A quick note on the terms "The Peerage", "The Peerage of England", "The Peerage of Scotland", "The Peerage of Ireland", "The Peerage of Great Britain", and "The Peerage of the United Kingdom'':

Because Britain is not simply one country but a "country of countries" with a rather complicated history of mergers, demergers, and reorganisations, the hereditary aristocracy of the kingdom is as well. It would, therefore, be a good idea to clarify the differences between a certain set of terms so we're clear on them as we go forward:

• A peerage is a single noble title of baronial rank or above (see above for more details).
• The Peerage is a catch-all term referring to all persons who hold peerages (hereditary or life).
• The Peerage of [Insert Country Here], on the other hand, refers to a legal classification of the various titles that Peers hold based on which Sovereign created their titles and when. To wit:
  • The Peerage of England and the Peerage of Scotland refer, respectively, to the peers whose titles were created by the English and Scottish monarchs (again respectively) before the 1707 Act of Union.
  • The Peerage of Ireland refers to the class of Peers whose titles were created by the Irish sovereign (who was always the same person as the English or later the British sovereign, but wearing a different hat) before the 1801 Acts of Union.
  • The Peerage of Great Britain refers to the class of Peers whose titles were created by the British sovereign between 1707 and 1800 (wearing their "monarch of Great Britain" hat).
  • The Peerage of the United Kingdom refers to the class of Peers whose titles were created by the British sovereign since 1801. Naturally, all life peers are in this Peerage.

History

These different Peerages historically (i.e. before the House of Lords Act 1999 revoked the inherent right of Peers to sit in the House) had different rights. Under the terms of the 1707 Act of Union, peers in the Peerage of Scotland did not have an automatic right to sit in the House of Lords of the new Kingdom of Great Britain — the English thought that the kingdom had too many peers already without adding all of the Scottish lords (there was frequent talk of doing something to trim the size of the English Lords, but nobody could be bothered to go beyond that and actually make a plan), and on top of that Scotland had a lot of peers relative to its size. So the Peerage of Scotland elected sixteen of their number — termed "Representative Peers" — each Parliamentary term to sit in the Lords to represent their interests. As a side-effect, the remaining Scottish Peers who were not so chosen could (and did) seek election to the House of Commons.

The Peerage of Ireland has an even funnier history. Because the English sovereign had claimed the title "King of Ireland" since the Tudor era, many English people received Irish titles; some of these actually lived in Ireland (being the Anglo-Irish), but many did not. After the Union of the Crowns, many Scots also received Irish peerages. As the Kingdom of Ireland was legally separate until 1800, Irish Peers did not sit in the English, Scottish, or British House of Lords until then, but rather the separate Irish House of Lords (which had an alarmingly high absentee rate thanks to all the lords who actually lived in England), and were therefore entitled to seek election to the House of Commons in Britain. Irish titles were therefore often offered when someone who was already a member of the Commons and wished to remain one or wanted to seek a seat in the Commons later was eligible for a peerage. When Ireland joined the Union pursuant to the 1801 Act of Union, this arrangement ended; for reasons similar to those that applied with the Union with Scotland in 1707, members of the Peerage of Ireland were to elect Representative Peers, but unlike their Scottish brethren, Irish lords got 28 seats and Irish Representative Peers held their seats for life. The remaining Irish lords continued to be allowed to seek seats in the Commons; Victorian PM The Viscount Palmerston is the most prominent example.

This did not, however, mean that there were only ever 16 Scottish and 28 Irish peers in the Lords. Peers in the new Peerages of Great Britain and (subsequently) the United Kingdom were entitled to sit in the House of Lords as well, and many holders of Scottish and Irish titles were given additional titles in the Peerages of Great Britain and (subsequently) the United Kingdom to allow them to sit at Westminster (and for various other reasons; the monarchs of The House of Hanover, in particular, loved creating new titles at the drop of a hat). It gets more complex after that, though, but we must note this: titles in the Peerages other than the Peerage of the United Kingdom are all over 200 years old, with the English and Scottish titles all being over 300 years old. Even a lowly baron in the Peerage of England or Lord of Parliament in the Peerage of Scotland is ridiculously aristocratic.

Knighthoods and Other Given Honours

Most knighthoods are created in one of several knightly orders; you can tell the knights apart by the letters after their names (shown here in brackets). These are the best known:

• Order of the Garter (KG or LG). Oldest of the batch, usually dated to 1348. Top level of honour for England and Wales. Has the motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense" ("shame upon him who thinks evil of it" in Old French). Apparently came about after some woman's garter fell down at a party, and everybody thought it happened because Edward III had his hand up her skirt.^note It was his daughter-in-law, if you're wondering. Limited in number to 24 (other than ex officio members and "supernumeraries", generally members of the Royal Family and occasionally foreign monarchs). The King is an ex officio member (as is his consort) and the motto appears on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom as used outside Scotland.
• Order of the Thistle (KT or LT). A Scottish one; it's the top honour for Scotland, at the same level as the Order of the Garter. Limited in number to sixteen (plus a few "extra" knights, generally members of the Royal Family and occasionally foreign monarchs). Motto: Nemo me impune lacessit, or "No one provokes me with impunity" in Latin (also the motto of the Black Watch, a famed Scottish regiment), and appears on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom as used inside Scotland.
• Order of the Bath (GCB for Grand Cross members; KCB/DCB for Knight/Dame Commanders; CB for Companions, who are not knights). This is divided into two divisions, one for civil servants and the other for military types. The Order of the Bath is also sometimes awarded to the Sovereign's personal physician. James Reid, Queen Victoria's primary physician, campaigned for a KCB for years, seeing it as "above" the usual KCVO. (He was also raised to the baronetcy by Victoria). Honorary KCBs have been given to several American Presidents and Secretaries of Defense.
• Order of St. Michael and St. George (GCMG for knights or dames Grand Cross; KCMG/DCMG for knights or dames commanders). This is for diplomats and civil servants in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the occasional comedian who have rendered overseas service to the Kingdom. ("CMG" is for "Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George", which is not a knighthood.)
  • Thanks to Yes, Minister, the amusing alternative explanations are fairly well known: CMG means "Call Me God", KCMG means "Kindly Call Me God", and GCMG means "God calls me god.". More seriously, it's a cynical but not necessarily inaccurate interpretation to say that a CMG has a pretty good idea where an embarrassing body is buried, a KCMG/DCMG knows exactly where it is, and a GCMG still has the shovel used to inter it.
• Royal Victorian Order (GCVO, Knight Grand Cross; KCVO/DCVO, Knight/Dame Commander; see below for other levels). For personal services to the Royal Family.
• Order of the British Empire. The "catch-all" order, more or less. Two knight ranks (Knight/Dame Grand Cross and Knight/Dame Commander, abbreviated as GBE and KBE/DBE). See below for the others.
• Knight Bachelor is for men—and only men, there being no feminine equivalent—who deserve to be knighted, but don't fit in the categories of who belongs in the orders. You can get a lesser Order of the British Empire honour, but still not qualify for a KBE, in which case you keep the lesser honour as well as your knighthood, as in Sir Alex Ferguson CBE and Sir Terry Pratchett OBE. If you don't have any such letters, you can follow your name with "Kt". This is the oldest kind of knighthood in Britain; if you're thinking of the classic knight of The High Middle Ages with the armour and sword and horse and lance "running around and killing things," his title was, essentially, Knight Bachelor.^note It's a bit more complex than that, but—for once—not by much.
  • High Court Judges were historically made Knights Bachelor but are now always made a KBE; since there is no such thing as a "Dame Bachelor" (Dame Spinster?), women appointed to the High Court Bench were always made DBEs, and now that so many women are being appointed to the Bench, it didn't seem fair to put the male judges on a lower footing.
• Knighthoods are for life. That said, it is possible (albeit rare) for someone to be stripped of a knighthood; this has happened to Anthony Blunt, Fred Goodwin and Robert Mugabe, among others. What's not quite so well known is that upon death, knighthoods automatically cease to apply in all cases, regardless of the individual's behaviour in life, because knighthoods are created in living orders, of which the individual ceases to be a member when they die. For example, the revelation that the late Sir Jimmy Savile was a serial paedophile and rapist fuelled calls for his knighthood to be stripped posthumously — but the question arose, given that the knighthood had expired with him, as to whether this is legally possible. So far, the question remains unanswered — the government let the furore blow over without seriously attempting it. This was probably a wise move, as historians or political activists might have seen this case as a precedent to have other historic individuals removed from the ranks due to Values Dissonance.

Other Honour Titles:

• CB — Companion of the Order of the Bath
• OM — Order of Merit (Can. Fr. Ordre du Mérite): For outstanding lifetime achievement. Only 24 are allowed in at any time, and entirely in the Sovereign's personal gift—i.e. he can give it to whoever he likes withhout asking the Government. Florence Nightingale was made a member at the age of 87. All citizens of Commonwealth Realms are eligible. Despite not having a knightly title, membership in the Order of Merit is considered to be an extremely, ridiculously high honour on account of the fact that there can only be 24 members and that to even be considered you basically have to be the best in your field not only in the Commonwealth but the world. Practically everyone in the Order is either someone you've probably heard of at least once in your life, at least if you’re British (e.g. Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Sir David Attenborough, Sir Tom Stoppard, Norman Foster, Lord Foster of Thames Bank^note The architect who did the Gherkin in Canary Wharf, among other things Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Basil Cardinal Hume^note The Archbishop of Westminster—the highest ranking Roman Catholic prelate in England—from 1976 through 1999, and the most prominent and popular religious leader in Britain for most of that time, even among non-Catholics and even more so than the Archbishop of Canterbury (the spiritual leader of the Church of England). This was in part compensation for not being created a Life Peer; he was offered a peerage by the Government on multiple occasions practically from the moment he was installed as archbishop, but never got one. This was because in the mid-to-late 1970s, the Vatican was coming to the decision that Catholic prelates and diocesan priests should not hold public office (triggered in large part by the successful election of two Catholic priests to the U.S. House of Representatives and wider participation of Catholic clergy in left-wing politics in Latin America as part of the "Liberation Theology" movement around that time; in 1980, all diocesan priests and bishops holding public office were ordered to resign or be defrocked, and in 1983, the rule was made general canon law). Hume therefore felt duty bound to decline a peerage, as the seat in the Lords was just enough of a public office to run afoul of the Vatican's new rules. The Government—under both Tory and Labour leadership, mind—and Her Majesty still wanted to honour him, and so he was given the OM. Margaret Thatcher,^note With whom the Queen had had something of a testy relationship at times, but whom the Queen deeply respected both for her fierce personal qualities and her unquestionably transformational tenure as Prime Minister. Oh, and she won The Falklands War. Good way to keep a monarch happy is to preserve the territorial integrity of her empire against foreign aggression. Jean Chrétien, John Howard)^note Please note that like Thatcher, Chrétien and Howard literally preserved the territorial integrity of the Crown's realms. Chrétien was instrumental in the defeat of the 1995 Quebec secession referendum, and Howard worked tirelessly to advance the ultimately-successful monarchist side in the 1999 Australian republic referendum. That'll get you serious brownie points with Her Majesty. or someone who did really amazing things in an obscure but important or interesting field (e.g. two recently deceased members, Sir Michael Atiyah, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician, and Sir Aaron Klug, a Nobel-winning biophysicist).
• CMG — Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George
• CVO, LVO, MVO — Commander/Lieutenant/Member of the Royal Victorian Order
• DSO — Distinguished Service Order. For exceptionally good military personnel. Previously an officers-only bravery award — second only to the Victoria Cross — but since military honours were revised in 1993 it has become an award for awarded specifically for highly successful leadership during active operations, with all ranks being eligible.
• CBE, OBE, MBE — Commander/Officer/Member of the Order of the British Empire. These are the most commonly-granted honours, and there's a lot of confusion about the meanings of the abbreviations for the Order of the British Empire. Even major media outlets and commentators who should know better sometimes mistakenly assume that OBE simply means "Order of the British Empire". Not to mention the people who expand MBE to "Member of the British Empire". Countries in The Commonwealth have their own versions, but their Commander is renamed as "Companion".
• CH — Companion of Honour (Can. Fr. Compagnon d'honneur): For outstanding achievements in certain things; this ranges from politics and industry to the sciences to literature and the arts, with most being either artistic types or retired politicians. Seen as being a bit like the junior grade of the Order of Merit. Maximum membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour is 65 at any one time, including the monarch. Open to all citizens of the Commonwealth Realms, subject to certain limits: no more than 47 for the UK, 7 for Australia, 4 for New Zealand, and 9 for all other Commonwealth Realms.^note Why Canada, the ur-Commonwealth Realm (besides the UK) and by far the largest (again besides the UK) is left out is too complex to address here., Additional "honourary" members may be added for non-Commonwealth Realm citizens; these are fairly rare.^note As of November 2020, there are only three: Indian economist Amartya Sen, Dutch orchestra conductor Bernard Haitink, and South African social activist and clergyman Desmond Tutu. Again, on account of the small membership and selection criteria, considered to be an extremely high honour despite the lack of a knighthood. Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) and Dame Judi Dench (M in seven James Bond films, plus a cameo in an eighth) are members.
• The Order of St. John — formally, The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. A royally-chartered charitable order claiming descent from The Knights Hospitallers (by a convoluted route, the original Knights having been abolished in England with the Reformation), best known for its ambulance service (the logo of which is currently on the TARDIS). Members are selected from the Commonwealth, the US, Hong Kong, and Ireland, by invitation only. Only Christians may become knights, but other religions can become honorary members. Its Grand Prior is HRH the Duke of Gloucester. Its knights are not allowed to use the titles "Sir" or "Dame", and the post-nominal letters are for internal use only; but its symbols may be used in a knight's coat of arms. The order has 6 grades: Bailiff/Dame Grand Cross (GStJ), Knight/Dame (KStJ/DStJ), Commander (CStJ), Officer (OStJ), Member (MStJ), and Esquire (EsqStJ).
• ADC — Aide-de-Camp, a personal helper to a senior military officer. Certain members of the Royal Family with military commissions, including the Prince of Wales, hold the title of Personal Aide-de-Camp to the monarch.

Extinct Orders:

• Royal Guelphic Order (GCH, KCH, KH) — Created by George IV when Hanover became a kingdom in 1815, the order had separate civil and military Divisions. It ceased being awarded in Britain on the death of William IV in 1837, when Queen Victoria's uncle became King Ernest I of Hanover. It was the national order of merit in the Kingdom of Hanover until it was annexed by Prussia in 1866, and still exists today as an award for personal services to the Royal Family of Hanover. The Duke of Wellington was a recipient.
• Order of St. Patrick (KP) — Was to Ireland what the KG is to England and the KT to Scotland. The monarch's jewelled badge and star of the order, which were known as the Crown Jewels of Ireland, were famously stolen in 1907 and never recovered. Stopped being awarded in 1919; the last living member, George VI's brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, died in 1974.
• Order of the Star of India (GCSI, KCSI, CSI) — Created in 1861 and awarded to important Indian princes, viceroys, and colonial officials. Went dormant in 1947. Last living member was an Indian prince who died in 2009.
• Order of the Indian Empire (GCIE, KCIE, CIE) — a more inclusive order for lesser Indian nobles, accomplished soldiers and colonial administrators in the Indian Empire. Created in 1878, shortly after Queen Victoria was proclaimed the Empress of India. Went dormant in 1947; the last living member was a maharaja who died in 2010.
• Order of the Crown of India (CI) — for wives of important Indian princes, viceroys, and colonial officials. Elizabeth II was made a CI in 1947, the year it went dormant; she was the last living member.
• Indian Order of Merit (IOM) — a non-knighthood award to Indian soldiers for gallantry. Originally 3 classes, the 1st class was abolished in 1911 when Indian soldiers became eligible for the Victoria Cross. A civilian division was created (two classes, reduced to one in 1939) but rarely awarded. Retired in 1947.
• Order of British India (OBI) — For "long, faithful and honourable service", originally to the British East India Company, then to the Indian Army. Awarded in two classes; recipients of the first class were also given the honorific Sarhar Bahadur (Hindi for "heroic leader") while 2nd class were titled Bahadur ("hero"). Retired 1947.
• Order of Burma (OB) — Instituted in 1940 for long or distinguished service or acts of heroism in the Burmese armed forces, a local equalivent to the IOM. Only awarded to 33 people before being discontinued in 1948.
• Imperial Service Order (ISO) — a non-knighthood award for long service and good conduct in the civil service throughout the British Empire. It also had an accompanying Imperial Service Medal (ISM) for 25 years good service in non-management civil service, 16 years for jobs in unpleasant conditions. After WWII it was given mostly to British workers until honours reform in 1993 retired the awarding of the ISO, while keeping the ISM. Peculiarly, the government of the Australasian Commonwealth nation of Papua New Guinea continues to send ISO and ISM recommendations from its civil service to London to this day.

Royal Family Orders:

• These are orders created by certain monarchs to reward female members of the Royal Family for personal service, mostly as a token of esteem. The orders (which are uniformly named "The Royal Family Order of (monarch name)") consist almost entirely of a medal; it carries no title, post-nominal letters, formal sash, star, collar or mantle, nor any public announcement of the appointment or place in the order of precedence. George IV created the first Royal Family Order, with later ones created by Victoria (as "The Royal Order of Victoria and Albert" and separated into four classes, the lower two reserved for female courtiers), Edward VII, George V, George VI, and Elizabeth II.
• Similar to this is the Royal Victorian Chain, a token of the monarch's personal esteem first given in 1902 by Edward VII. Like a Royal Family Order, it consists entirely of a chain, but it is awarded to fewer people, mostly outside the Royal Family, and is given by multiple monarchs.

Judges

Judges of superior courts in the UK sometimes get titles depending on the court. Members of the High Court of Justice in England, the Appeal Court of England and Wales and the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom have such titles, as do Senators of the College of Justice in Scotland. Their titles are not actually peerages (although many of these also get additional knighthoods), and sitting as a judge does not entitle you to sit in the House of Lords. Some judges, however, can and do hold peerages, and previously the highest court of appeal in Britain was the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, whose members—the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, usually called the Law Lords—were by definition Peers, and indeed it was because of the Law Lords that the modern system of life peerages was established in the first place.^note When the Appellate Committee was formally established in the 1870s, everybody was concerned that this would create problems, as the idea was that experienced judges would be appointed to the Lords to allow them to hear cases under the Lords' judicial powers, and many were afraid that this would result in the size of the Lords skyrocketing (since if the Law Lords' peerages were hereditary, when a Law Lord died his son would become an ordinary Lord—and a new judge would be appointed to replace him as a Law Lord). After much wrangling, it was decided that the old but extremely disused practice of appointing peers for life would be revived for the Law Lords; the concept worked well enough that it didn't even take a whole century before the practice was adopted more generally (in 1958). Since a European Court of Human Rights judgement, the right of Law Lords to sit as members of the legislature was abolished (separation of powers, and all that), and the separate Supreme Court of the United Kingdom established in 2009. Those judges who were appointed and who sat as Law Lords before that date retain their membership, if not their right of attendance, of the Lords. Those judges appointed after that date are given the courtesy title of Lord or Lady. It is reasonably likely that Supreme Court Justices without peerages will be given life peerages upon retirement and expected to provide advice to the Lords and to the Government on judicial matters.

In the High Court of Justice, a High Court judge is referred to as My Lord or Your Lordship if male, or as My Lady or Your Ladyship if female. High Court judges use the title in office of Mr Justice for men or Mrs Justice for women, even if unmarried. The style of The Honourable (or The Hon) is also used during office. For example, Sir Joseph Bloggs would be referred to as The Hon Mr Justice Bloggs and Dame Jane Bloggs DBE as The Hon Mrs Justice Bloggs DBE, for as long as they continue to hold office. Additionally, any judge presiding in a trial at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales—better known as the Old Bailey—is called "My Lord"/"My Lady"/"Your Lordship" for the duration of the trial even if he/she is a Circuit Judge or even a Recorder (i.e. not even a full-time judge) usually only entitled to the style "Your Honour".

Note that this was even more confusing before the Judicature Acts 1873 and 1875, as one of the three major types of court—the Court of Exchequer—styled its judges "barons" even though they weren't necessarily Peers. You can still find old Exchequer opinions in modern law books (in Britain, yes, but also in the Commonwealth and America), as quite a few major legal concepts were settled in the Exchequer Court (e.g. the rule in Hadley v Baxendale, which is still applied in contract law today), and headings like "Baron Alderson delivered the opinion of the court" can be sort of confusing.

In Scotland, Senators of the College of Justice, in addition to that already awesome title, are styled "The (Rt) Hon Lord/Lady X". They may choose whether "X" is a surname or a territorial name — for instance, Alastair P. Campbell Q.C, upon becoming a Senator, took the title "The Hon Lord Bracadale", as Bracadale is the name of the village of his birth. However, Ann Paton chose not to use a territorial name and is simply "The Rt Hon Lady Paton." Depending on whether they sit in a criminal or civil court then they also be either a Justiciar or a Lord of Session.

It is considered treason to murder a high-ranking judge.^note Curiously, it's also treason to forge the Great Seal of Scotland — but not the Great Seal of the United Kingdom.

The Privy Council

The Privy Council of the United Kingdom is a formal body of advisers to the sovereign. It formally advises the sovereign on the exercise of the royal prerogative, and as a body corporate (Queen-in-Council) it issues executive instruments known as Orders in Council, which among other powers enact Acts of Parliament. It also advises the sovereign on the issuing of Royal Charters, which are used to grant special status to incorporated bodies, and city or borough status to local authorities. Otherwise, the Privy Council's powers have now been largely replaced by the Cabinet, which — in strictly legal terms — is actually the Privy Council's executive committee. This is why most Privy Councillors tend to be politicians. Fun fact: On those occasions that the Privy Council does actually meet as such—usually only with a handful of Cabinet members, besides the monarch—they traditionally do so standing up. This is apparently because after the death of her husband Prince Albert, Queen Victoria wanted to keep her official duties to a minimum; she realized that if she remained standing, her ministers would be obligated to do the same, and because standing up is annoying, they'd be more likely to just do what they needed to do and leave.

After taking the oath, an individual Privy Councillor is referred to as "The Right Honourable" ("Rt. Hon." for short). In the House of Commons, they are referred to as "Right Honourable Members" rather than "Honourable Members" (the latter being the usual way of addressing MPs during debates in the Commons). Since nothing is simple, there are some lords have higher styles; non-royal dukes are automatically styled "The Most Noble" and marquesses are "The Most Honourable" regardless of Privy Council membership, and if they are members they can keep those titles rather than 'downgrading' to "The Right Honourable". To avoid confusion, peers who are Privy Councillors have the letters "PC" after their names. For commoners, "The Right Honourable" is sufficient identification of their status as a Privy Counsellor, meaning they have no need to have the letters "PC" after their names.

Each Privy Counsellor has the right of personal access to the sovereign. In practice, personal access may only be used to tender advice on public affairs.

Membership is conferred for life. Formerly, the death of a monarch brought an immediate dissolution of the Council, as all Crown appointments automatically lapsed — meaning that one of the first tasks of any new monarch was to reappoint all Privy Councillors. In 1901, the law was changed to ensure that the Privy Council (and other Crown appointments) are wholly unaffected by any change of monarch.

It is possible for Privy Councillors to be removed; this happened in 2011 when Elliott Morley (a former MP) was expelled from the Privy Council after being convicted of false accounting (before him, the last person to be thrown out had been a baronet who had colluded with the Germans during World War I). Usually, individuals faced with the prospect of expulsion choose to resign in order to avoid the humiliation of being forcibly removed; examples include the disgraced MPs John Profumo (of "Profumo Scandal" fame ^note  this is what Billy Joel was referring to with the line "British politician sex" in "We Didn't Start The Fire"), Jonathan Aitken (convicted perjurer) and Chris Huhne (convicted perverter of the course of justice).

Canada has had its own Privy Council -— the King's Privy Council for Canada -— since 1867. The equivalent organs of state in other Commonwealth realms, such as Australia and New Zealand, are called Executive Councils.

What about people outside of Britain and the Commonwealth Realms?

Foreigners can get these titles also, but, cruelly, they generally can't call themselves "Sir" or "Dame". Bono of U2 is an example, as is Kevin Spacey ^note  who has not been stripped of his KBE because he has, as of January 2024, not yet been convicted of any criminal offences relating to the sexual misconduct allegations — see below under forfeiture for more on this , while some countries specifically prohibit their citizens from accepting foreign titles of nobility.

• Regardless, there appears to be an exception for some, depending on their ancestry of their parents or their citizenship. For example, British-American Elizabeth Taylor managed to be called Dame because she held both British and American citizenship due to her being born in London to American parents, and Terry Wogan (although Irish) could be called Sir because he had British citizenship along with his Irish one. Sidney Poitier was both an American and Bahamian citizen ^note His parents were from the Bahamas; his American citizenship came about because he was born when they were visiting Miami , so he could style himself as Sir Sydney but he only did so for his charitable and ambassadorial work.
  • However, Austin Powers does insist on calling Steven Spielberg "Sir Stevie".
• For the rules for U.S. citizens see this. The basic rule is that you can accept any award or title from a foreign country as long as 1) you're not a public employee or official at the time of the award (if you are, Congress has to consent) and 2) the title does not come with land, money, or power.
  • Despite the use of such as a trope in fiction, there have never been any created "native" titles of nobility given to British subjects in the American colonies before their independence. There have certainly been holders of various peerages with land holdings in the colonies,^note Most famously Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who actually moved to his vast Northern Virginia estate in 1748 and never left even after the Revolution despite his Loyalist politics. He was a personal friend of George Washington—again, despite the political differences—and is the namesake of Fairfax County, Virginia (one of the major suburban counties in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area). Interestingly, he also had a connection to a major republican military leader of the English Civil War through his namesake and predecessor in the title, his grandfather's cousin Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who had been the first commanding general of the New Model Army and a mentor to Oliver Cromwell. Also, lawsuits over the disposition of that vast Northern Virginia estate after his death led to one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court rulings in its history (read to this day by every American law student in one of their introductory courses—generally Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, or Federal Courts, depending on the school). Really, Fairfax is one of the most secretly important people in early American history, for reasons very much to do with his title. but that is far different than an American-born person being given a title. A similar situation arose in Spanish Florida where royalty would give out royal land grants to settlers, and these grants were recognized by the U.S. when Florida became an American territory, but these did not come with a hereditary title. The closest true American peerage form to exist was a Patroon, a quasi-title given to land holders in the Netherlands colonies of modern day New York. The title came with a heridetary land grant and some jurisdictional authority but was more of a mayor-by-ownership than a true peerage. The last Patroons had their authority stripped by British governors after their takeover of the Dutch colonial holdings and later American authorities maintained that position. After law changes causing land reform strengthened the positions of tenant farmers, the last major Patroon holdings were sold or broken apart by the 1840s.
• Canda occupies a unique position amonst the Commonwealth Realms when it comes to titles and peerages.
  • The country has long eschewed knightly titles. Because of this, the highest grade within the domestic Canadian honours system is that of Companion of the Order of Canada (CC). (The Order—more or less explicitly modeled on the Order of the British Empire—also has lower grades of Officer (OC) and Member (MC)). There are occasional discussions of adding two higher grades that would be equal to Knight Commander and Knight Grand Cross without using the actual terminology, but no real attempt has been made to do so.
  • Because Canada was colonised by royal powers, there are extant hereditary peerages created by the British and the French for Canadians. But, because of family lines going extinct and titles jumping to the next-best candidate, these are now all held by British subjects living in England and Scotland, plus one based in Los Angeles. The creation of new Canadian titles has been complicated by the Nickle Resolution of 1917, which implies that Canadians are not allowed to accept a foreign honour that has not been approved by the Prime Minister (with the exception of the Order of Merit), no Canadian citizen has ever been prevented from inheriting a Commonwealth peerage granted to an ancestor. This is why Winnipeg Jets owner David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet^note also chairman of wire service Reuters, and — important for American lawyers — of the West publishing group, kept his Canadian citizenship with no issue when he inherited his title. Conrad Black, on the other hand, had to renounce his Canadian citizenship when he became Baron Black of Crossharbour. Adding an additional wrinkle to the Nickle Resolution is that Gordon Wasserman, a Canadian politician who spent his career in British government, became a Life Peer in 2011 without needing to renounce his Canadian citizenship while Baron Black was able to regain his own Canadian citizenship in 2023.
• While no Commonwealth Realm has peerages, realms other than Canada have historically been variable in their acceptance of knightly titles (both British and their own). Australia and New Zealand, for example, have gone back and forth on granting knighthoods through their honours systems.
  • The Order of Australia has a knightly grade. This was removed in 1986 at the recommendation of then-PM Bob Hawke (a republican), reinstated in 2014 at the recommendation of then-PM Tony Abbott (a monarchist), only to be removed again in 2015 at the recommendation of then-PM Malcolm Turnbull (a republican). Those who were made knights and dames while the grade was extant kept their titles.
  • New Zealanders who receive a KBE/DBE can use "Sir/Dame." The New Zealand royal honours system also includes knightly grades. These stopped being handed out in 2000 and were restored in 2009. When knighthoods were brought back, Principal Companions and Distinguished Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit were given the option of converting their titles to knighthoods. Most chose to become knights and dames while a small number opted to remain Distinguished Companions (including Sam Neill^note he said he thought being called "Sir" was a bit much, although he changed his mind in 2022).
  • A few other Commonwealth Realms also grant knighthoods. Antigua and Barbuda, for example, has the Order of the National Hero which has Knight and Dame divisions (respectively, KNH and DNH). This is how legendary cricketer Viv Richards (who is Antiguan) got to be a knight — he's Sir Viv Richards KHN, and his wife Miriam can style herself as Lady Richards if she so wishes.
• Commonwealth republics generally don't have knighthoods, and the non-Commonwealth Realm Commonwealth monarchies (Brunei, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Malaysia) don't use knighthoods either.

How to Refer to an Honouree, and Honour Inheritance

A very common error among non-British (and even some British) people involves how knights and baronets are addressed or referred to. A baronet or male knight is called "Sir [firstname surname]", or "Sir [firstname]" if you want to take up less time/space, even if you wouldn't usually be on first name terms with them. Female knights are addressed as "Dame [firstname surname]" or "Dame [firstname]". "Sir [surname]" and "Dame [surname]" are always wrong. (Although up until the mid-19th century "Dame [surname]" was frequently used as an honorific for an older working-class woman, which could be either sincerely respectful or mocking depending on tone.) For a really glaring and consistent example of how not to do it, see the Dark Horse English translations of Hellsing, where Sir Integra is consistently called "Sir Hellsing" (you can handwave the gender issues).

Making this more confusing is the fact that the wife of a baronet or male knight is addressed and referred to as "Lady [surname]" — the same form as the wife of a peer. For example, Harold Wilson was knighted in 1976, making him Sir Harold Wilson, and then made a lord — Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, or Lord Wilson for short — in 1983. His wife Mary was therefore Mrs Wilson until 1976, following which she was Lady Wilson — the title by which she continued to be known after her husband's ennoblement. This does not work the other way. Sticking with ex-Prime Ministers as examples, when John Major's wife Norma was made a DBE in 1999, she became Dame Norma Major but her husband remained plain John Major — until he was knighted in 2005, following which he became Sir John Major, while Norma could now style herself as Lady Major.

Dame Judi Dench has mentioned the confusion her title causes in the USA: she is known formally as "Dame Judi", but rather than being called "Dame Dench", which would simply be the wrong application of her actual title, she experiences a very specific form of mislabelling possibly due to her first name's similarity to a different title, which does roll off the tongue — she gets called "Lady Dench" ... which would only be correct if she were a peer of the realm, or the wife of a lord or knight ^note Although funnily enough, her late husband Michael Williams was awarded a knighthood by the Pope — although as this wasn't a British knighthood, he couldn't call himself "Sir Michael". Presumably, if she is ever actually elevated to the peerage then she'll get further misnamed "Lady Judi", and so on.

"Brave Sir Surname" runs rampant through historical fiction, and not just among self-published writers either: in one Jeffery Deaver short story, knightly titles are so badly mangled that suspension of disbelief goes flying out yon diamond-panèd window long before the climax of the story.

A similar error happens with the "Lord" and "Lady" prefixes. Peers (other than dukes) are, as mentioned above, usually referred to as "Lord/Lady Title-name". The wives of male peers, knights, and baronets are always "Lady Title-name", not and never "Lady Firstname Title-Name". (So the Countess of Grantham is "Lady Grantham", but not "Lady Cora" or "Lady Cora Crawley" as she is the wife of an earl, not the daughter of an earl, marquess, or duke.

The construction "Lord/Lady Firstname" is considered a style, not a title, and is only given to the daughters and younger sons of senior peers — well-known examples include Lady Diana Spencer (the daughter of an earl) and the fictional Lord Peter Wimsey (the son of a duke). Put simply, a person can be styled as "Lord/Lady Firstname" if he is the younger son of a duke or marquess ^note The oldest son will have a courtesy title or if she is the daughter of a duke, marquess or earl. Sons of earls, viscounts and barons style themselves "The Honourable" ("The Hon." for short), as do daughters of viscounts and barons. Sons and daughters of life peers are also entitled to style themselves as "The Honourable" (although quite a few of them seem to choose not to) but obviously they can't inherit the peerage. Until 2004, children who had been adopted by peers had no right to any courtesy title. Since then, these children are now automatically entitled to the same styles and courtesy titles as their siblings — although unlike biological children, they cannot inherit peerages.

The daughter of a duke, marquess or earl who marries an untitled man keeps the "Lady Firstname" style. For example, Lady Dorothy Cavendish was a duke's daughter who married Harold Macmillan, following which she was Lady Dorothy Macmillan (although her husband was elevated to the peerage in later life, she died before this happened). Similarly, the daughter of a viscount or baron who marries a commoner keeps "The Honourable"

A woman who marries a man who uses the "Lord Firstname" style is entitled to be styled "Lady" but this must be followed by her husband's first name as she is not entitled to use the style on her own right (unless, of course, she happens to be the daughter of a duke, marquess or earl). For example, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's dad) was the son of a duke, hence the title. He married Jennie Jerome, who was subsequently known as Lady Randolph Churchill (the same principle by which Prince Michael of Kent's wife is known as Princess Michael of Kent).

If a son of a senior peer gets made a lord in his own right, the "Lord Firstname" bit gets dropped. For example, Lord Louis Mountbatten (Prince Philip's uncle) was called that because he was the younger son of the Marquess of Milford Haven, but when he was created an earl (specifically Earl Mountbatten of Burma) in 1946, he became Lord Mountbatten.

Naturally, the media gets this wrong constantly, calling the wife of a knight "Lady Sonia" or, even more strangely, the infant daughter of a duke "Lady Wellington". Even better is when a wife or ex-wife of one of these worthies deliberately makes the "mistake" in order to make herself seem posher than she really is. The most notorious example of this comes from The '30s, when the young, um, shall we say "glamour model" ex-wife of a doddering old knight advertised herself as "Lady Elizabeth" — which was even more scandalous at the time because people assumed she'd named herself after the six-year-old Princess Elizabeth (i.e. the future Elizabeth II).

There is one caveat to the above: if you're entitled to use more than one title or style, you normally use the highest ranked one. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, is addressed in Pride and Prejudice by her first name because she's the daughter of an earl, which outranks her status as the widow of a knight; had she been a commoner before her marriage, she would have been called Lady de Bourgh.

Some Britons (those of the smug, sneering, sarcastic, snide stereotype) seem to think that deliberately getting titles and styles wrong makes them come across as cool and edgy, because it shows that they don't care about these things. In reality, it just makes them look ignorant, and arrogantly ignorant at that. Factual inaccuracy generally isn't considered a sign of intellectual superiority.

Another mistake is to confuse the peerage and the knighthood. A noble title historically gave the holder a voice in the government, and today still does, albeit a much weaker one than before. Before 1999, all peers sat in the House of Lords. Today, while all life peers continue to sit in the Lords, only 92 hereditary peers sit under their hereditary titles;^note Hereditary peers who have been granted additional life peerages do not count against the total of 92. however, as all hereditary peers have a right to vote in the elections for these 92, a modern hereditary peer does get an extra vote in the composition of Parliament (however attenuated). Either way, peers have a real (if somewhat weak) voice in how the country is governed. A knight, on the other hand, gets a nice medal and the right to be called "Sir" or "Dame". This is especially glaring in shows set in the Victorian Era; at that point in time you needed to have or marry Blue Blood in order to get into the House of Lords, but anyone — fishmonger, toilet manufacturer, tea baron — could be knighted. This is part of the reason that, in that era, wealthy knighted businessmen would seek out the daughters of nobles for marriage: they would then have the credentials necessary to be elevated to the Peerage. (Prominent fictional example: this is newspaper baron Sir Richard Carlisle's failed plan in Series 2 of Downton Abbey: by marrying Lady Mary — the daughter of an Earl — it would be much easier for him to enter the Lords under the next Conservative government;^note He was on the Liberal shit list for breaking a scandal in the Liberal government, and he never cared for the Liberals anyway. although marrying into a noble family wasn't strictly necessary by the 1910s, it would have helped.)

As for inheritance...oy. It's easy for life peerages and knighthoods: these are never inherited.^note With one tiny exception: there are three hereditary Irish knighthoods created for junior lines of the House of FitzGerald in the 13th century—the Green Knight of Kerry and the Black Knight of Glin for younger legitimate sons of the Earl of Desmond, and the White Knight Fitzgibbon for an illegitimate scion of the dynasty. The White and Black Knighthoods are dormant, but the title of Green Knight remains active. Baronetcies are generally equally simple — they're nearly^note A few small exceptions were made in the early days of the system when granted to a prospective baronet with no surviving sons. always passed down to the senior male descendant of the senior male line; the oldest son, the oldest son's oldest son, and so on. Run out of direct male-line male descendants and the baronetage goes extinct.^note That is, direct male-line male descendants of the original baronet. If someone is the original baronet's youngest son's youngest son's youngest son, but all his various uncles, brothers, and cousins died leaving only daughters, the baronetcy goes to him rather than go extinct. It's the Salic Law, basically.

The real confusion is with hereditary peerages, since how they are handed down varies depending on the royal warrant made at the time of the creation of the peerage and even on the country they were created in (Scotland was an independent country prior to 1707 with its own peerage rules, and yes, there are peerages dating back that long). Most English and UK peerages work like baronetcies with only male-line male descendants being able to succeed, but Scots peerages and some English/UK peerages can be inherited by daughters if they have no brothers. Lord Mountbatten's peerage is a good example; as he had no sons, it was stipulated when he was made a lord that his title could pass through the female line, which happened after he was murdered in 1979 (his eldest daughter subsequently became the Countess Mountbatten).

Many old English earldoms and baronies were historically subject to a rule whereby daughters inherited partial claims on a title if they had no brothers, meaning that a title could fall into "abeyance" (i.e. nobody gets it) because no daughter had a full claim to the title, and it would only be "resolved" (i.e. somebody gets it again) if only one of the daughters survived or if the daughters' descendants' titles were reunited (e.g.: earl dies, leaving two daughters; one daughter has only one child, a son, and the other has one child, a daughter; son and daughter get married and have a son; son has thus reunited the claim and will get the title).

And if that isn't bizarre enough for you, some peerages are even stranger. The Earldom of Selkirk, originally created for a younger son of a chief of the powerful Scottish Clan Hamilton (whose chieftain is always the Duke of Hamilton) and explicitly intended to ensure that a junior member of the House of Hamilton always has a title if there is such a junior member available, has, to that end, succession rules so confusing that the courts have been forced to interpret them ... repeatedly. One of the more complicated Scottish folk dances has even been named "Hamilton House" after it.

Suffice to say that any writer who intends to tackle the succession of an hereditary peerage would be well-advised to get the advice of an actual expert instead of making things up as he goes along.

Another interesting wrinkle is that until the Peerage Act 1963 it was impossible for somebody hereditarily entitled to a peerage to turn it down (although for much of history it was probably hard to imagine why somebody would want to). The Act was passed specifically to help the Labour politician Tony Benn, who wanted to give up his hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate (which he had inherited on the death of his father^note  A Labour elder statesman who had been given a peerage in 1942 to satisfy Labour's demand for adequate representation in the Upper House as part of the wheeler-dealings needed to maintain the all-party National Government during World War II. in 1960) so that he could go back to the House of Commons. Nearly everyone in British politics—even Tories—sympathised, as (1) his left-wing political orientation made it a bit embarrassing to be a peer, and (2) (more importantly) he was fairly high-ranking in the Labour Party and considered a potential future senior Cabinet minister—perhaps even future Prime Minister^note It didn't happen that way, but it was definitely considered possible throughout the 1960s and 70s, and indeed he stood for the Labour leadership after Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976. He lost (he took 4th place out of 6 candidates), but the fact that he could stand at all showed that his worry wasn't just bigheadedness; he had a real constituency both in the Labour base and among his fellow MPs.—which by that point was an option closed to peers. Almost immediately afterwards, Alec Douglas-Home disclaimed his title of Earl of Home a few days after he was appointed Prime Minister ^note  Outgoing PM Harold Macmillan had told the Queen that Douglas-Home was his preferred successor; as the Conservative Party did not at the time have a regular method for choosing a leader and were deadlocked, Macmillan's recommendation was the best they could do in the circumstances , as it was generally considered by that point that peers could not be PM. If a title is disclaimed, it doesn't cease to exist, but remains "dormant" until the death of the person who disclaimed it, at which point their heir can assume the title. The most famous disclaimed title, the aforementioned Stansgate Viscountcy, was accepted by Benn's (much less radical) son Stephen upon Benn's death in 2014.

Coats of Arms

Unlike in some countries, UK/Commonwealth coats of arms are not familial but individual (if inheritable), and are issued by the College of Arms (in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) or the Lord Lyon King of Arms (in Scotland); they are an early form of intellectual property,^note Wikipedia even categorises suits in the High Court of Chivalry—the court with jurisdiction over heraldic disputes—as "United Kingdom intellectual property case law", with the somewhat amusing result that 14th-century judgments between English knights about who gets to use a gold diagonal stripe on a blue background for their arms (and in which Geoffrey Chaucer was a witness at trial) shares a category with 21st-century judgments between American pharmaceutical companies about recombinant biologics. being a design which is the personal property of one person. There is no such thing as a "family coat of arms": Each coat of arms is held by one person. It's also important to note that the protection extends to the design, as formally described in terms of blazons (the official technical language used to describe arms), and any particular artist's rendering of the arms is as valid as any other and must be authorised by the individual armiger if intended for official use.^note In this sense, it's rather like the copyright a composer has in the sheet music of his/her compositions. The design can be passed on, but only to the senior heir (i.e. heir by primogeniture). Younger sons of armigers (armiger=person who owns arms) were expected to "difference" their arms—if, that is, they were entitled to arms—in some way, and even the eldest son was traditionally required to do so while his father lived.

That's right—"entitled to arms". Not every Blue Blood in Britain actually has a legal right to use a coat of arms. In Scotland, only the heir to a title is entitled to inherit his/her ancestor's arms, and although in England the rules are different, generally allowing all sons of an armiger to inherit the right to own arms, this changed from time to time and in general people entitled to register arms under English law will not do so unless they hold a title or other honour or are in the seniormost line (i.e., essentially the Scottish rules).

Whether in Scotland or out, the way people who really wanted the prerequisites to get arms would go about this changed over time: the Middle Ages, this was usually done by doing the whole knight thing (riding horses and killing people); in the Early Modern period this was done by taking up a career in politics, government, the military, the Bar/the judiciary, sometimes the arts^note E.g. the 18th-century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds or sciences,^note E.g. Sir William Herschel, the 18th-century astronomer. Note that Sir Isaac Newton wasn't an example of a knighthood for scientific services; he got his knighthood for his governmental service as Master of the Mint, in which role he made major contributions to English monetary policy and prosecuted a whole bunch of counterfeiters and other currency miscreants. or just schmoozing the King; and today, you earn it in the ways you see on this page. In any case, if you, younger son of armiger, actually earned a title (even a knighthood), then you could have/would be fairly safe in getting your own arms. What's interesting about this is that no matter the source of your right to own arms (whether it be earning a title or for an English junior son just claiming it, social convention be damned), your arms would have to be unique: you cannot just use whatever arms your father used, because those are his personal property, and they will be passed on to your older brother when he dies. On the other hand, just choosing any random design you liked seemed disrespectful, and made genealogy (important in those days!) much harder.

To solve this problem, they came up with the idea that you would use the "differenced" arms of your father—that is, your father's arms plus an extra symbol or a minor change to make them legally "different" and therefore a unique design that a person could own in a meaningful way.^note This could get even more complicated, since there is both a hard-and-fast rule that arms must be distinct and a more flexible "rule" that "differences" would follow particular rules of "cadency"—i.e., certain symbols represented being a 2nd son, 3rd son, 4th, 5th, etc. So, if you were, say, a third son and English, you were expected to put a star on your father's shield, and that would be the "difference"—but not completely expected, because you could use a different design, so long as they weren't exactly the same as your father's (e.g.: if your mother was from a more prominent family than your father, you might use the quartered or impaled arms of their marriage to signal to everyone "Yes, my name is X, but more importantly I'm a Y on my mum's side"). (On the other hand, the rules were more closely followed in Scotland; if you were a third son and Scottish, you put a chequered blue border on the edge of your father's arms and that was that.) But what if, say, your uncle, your father's youngest brother and himself a third son, had already earned a title and also had the arms of the senior line differenced with a star (remember, the arms stay unchanged in the senior line)? Actually, that's simple: Just use stars of different colours (or, if all the colours are taken, in a different place). Incidentally, this story is taken, more or less, from the way things worked out between the Barons Ampthill and Earls Russell (yes, as in John and Bertrand), junior lines of the Dukes of Bedford. That said, these rules were flexible; generally speaking the arms of the seniormost line were often informally regarded as a symbol of the "dynasty" as a whole.

An individual who inherits or is awarded any of the above honours may apply to the Garter King of Arms for a coat of arms. Traditionally these were a pictorial representation of the owner's ancestry, titles, and offices,^note and in fact the search for female-line relatives of Richard III's sister was aided by her descendant's coats of arms but more recent arms tend to be more creative and, dare we say, progressive. As of 2014 a married recipient may choose to have his or her spouse's coat of arms added to his or her own (this is called "impalement"); this holds for both same-sex and opposite-sex married couples. The rules have changed frequently over the centuries; previously, a woman granted a coat of arms had to impale her arms with her husband's if he had one.

Needless to say, those websites that purport to list English family crests (another totally ridiculous thing in itself: the "crest" is the part of the coat of arms above the helm—i.e. the helmet or other hat that sits atop the shield—and being part of a coat of arms is no more a family symbol than any other part of the arms^note There are badges that are associated with families, many of which are associated with the crest of the arms held by the family's senior line, but these are not official, most English families don't have them, and they're not really important. The idea that a family has a badge may be influenced by the Scottish clan system, where all the clans do have badges or crests—there being little difference, as the crest of the clan chief's arms is inevitably the badge of the clan, and in Scotland the terms are interchangeable. Moreover, any member of a Scottish clan may use the clan badge—which, again, is also the crest (top bit) of the individual arms of the clan chieftain—as a sign of affiliation (clan badge tattoos are particularly common today, both in Scotland and among the diaspora).) and hereditary coats of arms^note The idea that such a thing as a hereditary coat of arms usable by all members of a family may be influenced by both Continental traditions and also by the peculiar example of Scotland, where clans without a clan chief (because the line of chiefs has died out) are sometimes said to be "armigerous clans." Popular belief in Scotland is that every member of an armigerous clan is entitled to use the clan arms, and although this is untrue (the Scottish law of arms is much stricter than the English, especially as respects the requirement of distinctive arms), it is a very old misconception and one with some logic to it (if the clan has no chief, who gets the arms? Surely it can't be no-one—but it is.) are mostly run by scammers.

A short note on "Lord of the Manor"

Back in Merrie England when knighthood was in flower, peers were primarily military commanders who were expected to raise armies to defend king and country when necessary. But armies (and especially knights) cost a lot of money to train and equip, so when the king ennobled one of his drinking buddies he made sure to provide the man with enough land to support such an army. The king did this by granting his noblemen large numbers of "manors" scattered throughout the countryside — plots of farmland that in theory would each produce enough in rent, fees, and agricultural products to support a knight. Whoever owned one of these plots of land could (if he didn't have another title) have been called the "lord of the manor", keeping in mind that the word "lord" at the time was more akin to "master" or "owner" (think "landlord") than "titled nobleman" and the word "manor" meant "plot of farmland", not "Big Fancy House".

Unfortunately, scammers in the 20th century took advantage of the change in the meaning of the words "lord" and "manor" and sold many of these plots of land — often otherwise unmarketable due to soil problems or a crumbling manor house that would cost more to fix than it was worth — to snobs, often Americans, who wanted the right to call themselves a Lord of the Manor. Suffice to say that a faux title that boils down to "I own a farm!!!" isn't the same thing as holding an actual peerage, and definitely does not give you the right to call yourself Lord [XXXX] (people who know will laugh at you).

These scams persist to this day. A lot of the time, it's a low-level con where gullible people pay a small sum to supposedly buy a small plot of land in exchange for a certificate that claims that they can now call themselves "lord" or "lady". These also make popular gifts (hello, "Lord" Greg Davies). The classic scam also survives, which provides opportunities for pretentious rubes to open themselves to ridicule.

Similarly in Scotland, the title of "Baron" (along with the purely-Scottish title "Laird"—yes, like the MacDonalds of Glenbogle of Monarch of the Glen) actually refers to a position most equivalent to "lord of the manor" and is not a Peerage (the Peerage of Scotland had the title of Lord of Parliament instead). Purchasing a Scottish feudal barony does entitle you to call yourself "Baron So-and-so of Such-and-Such", but if you go around using it people will still laugh at you, although not as hard. Also, most Scots holding the title of Baron are in fact Peers; the Peerage of Scotland closed and the creation of Lords of Parliament ceased in 1707 with the Acts of Union and thus Scots ennobled afterward were created Peers of Great Britain or of the United Kingdom; many of these Scots were made barons in those peerages, and so if you run across someone with the title of "baron" who is Scottish, he's probably an actual peer. (A byproduct of this is if you find someone whose highest title is "Lord of Parliament", their blood is probably bluer than that of many of higher rank; their titles go back to at least the 17th century, and are usually junior lines of ancient and powerful Scottish houses.)

Crown Stewards and Bailiffs

It is legally impossible to resign one's seat in the House of Commons. The only way one can lose it, in fact, is to be appointed to "an office of Profit under the Crown." Thus, an MP wishing to effect his or her resignation will write to the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer asking to be appointed to such an office. There are two: Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead and Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. Historically, the job of the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds was to police the forested Chiltern Hills, which in those days (around the 13th century) were full of outlaws instead of well-to-do commuters. These offices are only nominally paid (usually their holders are given a token amount of money, which can be between 1p^note  2 cents and £5^note  ~$10), and are sometimes held only for a few minutes (such as when a large number of MPs resign on the same day). This legal fiction is so entrenched that when Sinn Féin MP Gerry Adams resigned his seat but did not apply for an office under the British Crown (politically unacceptable for the Irish nationalists of SF), he was simply given the office (and small paycheque) anyway. (He apparently refused to cash the cheque, instead having it framed and hung on the wall in his office.)

How to Join the Club

So how do you get one of these juicy little titles? Here are some tips:

First of all, you need to be alive. Honours, unlike gallantry medals, cannot be given posthumously these days, and any such nominations will be rejected. If you accept an honour but die before the formal announcement, the award will be backdated to (just) before your death.

• The most recent example of the latter Sir Martin Amis had accepted a knighthood but died of cancer before it was announced in June 2023, the award being backdated to the day before his death. His family will collect his medal at a later date.
• Three genuinely posthumous knighthoods were awarded during the First World War for officers who were killed in action - a general and two admirals.
• Dame Deborah James, a journalist who became known as "Bowel Babe" for her chronicling her terminal bowel cancer and campaigning to raise awareness, announced in May 2022 she was receiving hospice care at her parent's home. With the distinct probability she might not live until the next honours list, let alone be able to collect any award from the Palace, an out-of-cycle damehood was announced and Prince William personally visited her to give her the DBE. She died a month later.

Second of all, you need to decide whether you want a peerage or a knighthood so you know who you need to suck up to. If you want a life peerage your man (or woman) is the Prime Minister, who has the actual final say on non-royal peerages (in theory the PM merely "advises" the monarch, but he/she is expected to take his or her advice).^note Given the continuing small but real political role of life peers, as well as peers' eligibility for many of the political-technical offices in Government, the reason for this is clear. Knighthoods are a different matter; the PM provides a list, but the monarch is permitted to add and remove names. As long as you don't do something stupid, like cancel Doctor Who,^note Seriously; BBC controller Michael Grade, who is widely assumed to have been behind its cancellation in 1989 (even though he hadn't been the BBC controller for a bit), casually happens to be the only BBC controller to not have been knighted. you should be fine. If someone nominates you for something first, that is! Deeds that will get you nominated for honours include:

• Save Western Civilization from falling into the abyss of a new dark age that would've been made even more sinister and protracted by the lights of perverted science. Doing this will definitely get you a title, although the man who did this accepted a knighthood (KG) but turned down the offer of a peerage (Duke of London, no less) because it would ruin his son's political career. By the modern unwritten rules, you can't be Prime Minister if you are a peer, and when Churchill was offered this title the law allowing lords to disclaim their titles — the Peerage Act of 1963 — had not been passed. Why nobody offered it to him after 1963 (Churchill was alive at the time and sitting as a backbencher, and by that point, it was fairly clear that his son was a political dud) is unclear.
• Be a high-ranking judge.
• Win a Nobel Prize or equivalent.
• Prove something really difficult like Fermat's Last Theorem.
• Go into space. Helen Sharman was made an OBE in 1992 (the year after she became the first Briton in space), while Tim Peake was appointed a CMG in the Queen's 2016 Birthday Honours while he was at the International Space Station. Those two are the only astronauts who have worn the Union Jack on their space-suits; there have also been five British-born American citizens who've been in space, two of whom were made honorary OBEs.
• Be Director-General of The BBC. Not a hard-and-fast rule admittedly; no D-G has been knighted since John Birt (1992-2000), although quite a few subsequent encumbants have been embroiled in enough controversy to make a knighthood a non-starter, like Greg Dyke (who resigned following heavy criticism of the Beeb's news reporting processes from the Hutton Enquiry) and George Entwhistle (who resigned after just 54 days in the job following controversy over a Newsnight report which falsely implicated a former politician in a child abuse scandal).
• There are various was you can get an honour in the world of sport...
  • Win a couple of Olympic medals. This seems to have crystallised over the last few years into a fixed Sliding Scale of Gold Medal-Holding Ennoblement:
    • Every member of a British Olympic squad who wins one gold can expect to receive an MBE –- the lowest rank within the Order of the British Empire –- in the next Honours List.
    • Two gold medals will get you an OBE and three a CBE (e.g. Bradley Wiggins after Beijing in 2008).
    • The hallowed realm of four golds or more lands you a KBE (Sir Steve Redgrave ^note although he wasn't knighted until his fifth consecutive gold in Sydney 2000, Sir Matthew Pinsent after Athens '04, Sir Chris Hoy after Beijing '08, Sir Bradley Wiggins ^note his Tour de France victory in the same year — the first ever by Brit — might have helped as well, Sir Ben Ainslie after London 2012, and Sir Mo Farah^note After winning four golds in two Olympics. He's actually a knight bachelor, meaning his proper title is Sir Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah, CBE.).
    • It's not a hard and fast rule though — Laura Kenny (née Trott), the cyclist who got her fourth gold in Rio 2016 (the first British woman to get that number), was "only" CBE, as was her husband Jason Kenny who has six golds to his name; they had to wait until the 2022 New Year's Honours list, when both got a dame/knighthood^note which means that Laura is both Dame Laura Kenny and Lady Kenny. Then there's the case of gymnast Beth Tweddle, who "only" won a bronze medal but got an MBE anyway as this was the first ever Olympic medal in women's gymnastics for Britain. Quite what equivalent quantity of World Championship athletics gold is required to achieve these ranks remains, as yet, unclear.
  • The scale is not yet clear for Paralympic athletes — Dame Tanni-Grey Thompson and Dame Sarah Storey have both won eleven gold medals, but so did David Roberts who is still only a CBE.
  • Become England's football manager and win The World Cup. OK, that might be a hard one, but it worked for Sir Alf Ramsay in 1966. In a similar vein, Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was knighted after achieving the unique "treble" of winning the Premier League, the Champions League and the FA Cup in 1999.
  • On the pitch itself, being a footballer in an England team that wins a big international tournament will get you an honour of some sort, although in the case of several members of the 1966 World Cup winning team there was a wait of a few decades; George Cohen, Ray Wilson, Alan Ball, Nobby Stiles and Roger Hunt had to wait until 2000 before they got MBEs.
    • This rule isn't set in stone: of the England team that won the Women's Euro 2022, only four were given honours (Chloe Kelly, the scorer of the winning goal in the Final, was not amongst them), as was Sarina Wiegman^note her's was an Honorary award, as she's a Dutchwoman.
  • Failing that, scoring the most goals in an international tournament helps, as Gary Lineker OBE and Harry Kane MBE (respectively, the Golden Boot winners at the 1986 and 2018 World Cups) would testify.
  • In fact, being a prominent footballer will generally land you an MBE or an OBE for services to the game at some point. Longevity definitely helps, as representing your country many times is a sure way to honours — examples include Pat Jennings OBE (119 caps for Northern Ireland), David Beckham OBE (115 England caps), etc. This, however, is also not a hard and fast rule: Wayne Rooney has made the most appearances for an England outfield player (125 caps, only behind Peter Shilton) and had scored the most goals until that record was surpassed by Harry Kane) but he has no honour to his name.
  • Another route to honours for professional footballers is through philanthropy — and given that the median wage is around £60,000 per week (not including bonuses), they often have a lot of money to spend. While this usually happens later in a career, such as with 31 year old Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson, a Premier League and European Champion made MBE for his pandemic era charity work in support of the NHS, this is not always the case. 22 year old Marcus Rashford's MBE was rushed through after he had comprehensively embarrassed the government with a very effective and well-organised campaign against food poverty following the government's attempt to stop support for free school meals during the pandemic. Since Rashford had grown up in food poverty, was utterly devoid of scandal, very careful to keep it above party politics, and far better read on the subject than the government, he was essentially impossible to smear or dismiss as out of touch (especially since he was young, black, and working class, all things that the Conservative party is very much not). It was apparently hoped that this would both draw attention away from the humiliating U-turns the government were forced to undertake and shut Rashford up. Neither worked.
  • Being a Rugby Union player in an England team that wins the Rugby World Cup works too. Everyone from the 2003 team has an MBE at least — and their coach, Clive Woodward, got knighted. Other prominent international rugby players from the Home Nations have also been honoured over the years, examples including Will Carling OBE (England), J.P.R. Williams MBE (Wales) and Gavin Hastings OBE (Scotland).
  • Do something spectacular on the cricket pitch. Winning The Ashes, for example — the England team who beat Australia in the 2005 series (England's first Ashes win in 18 years) all got MBEs (except for the captain, Michael Vaughan, who got an OBE). Several English cricketers over the years have been knighted, with two — Colin Cowdrey and Ian "Beefy" Botham — going one step further and being elevated to the House of Lords (which, in 2021, led to the baffling announcement that the monumentally unqualified Botham, who had stated on his elevation that he only intended to speak on things he knew about, like sport and the countryside, was the UK's new trade envoy to Australia). Several cricketers from Commonwealth countries have also been knighted, among them Don Bradman and Garry Sobers ^note  Knights Bachelor in both cases; Viv Richards is also a knight but he's a Knight Commander of the Order of the Nation, an honour of his native Antigua & Barbuda (one of 15 Commonwealth Realms of which the British monarch is Head of State).
  • Success in other sports works too.
    • Being the Formula One world champion will get you an honour. Most but not all Britons to win this have been honoured with an MBE at the very least; two multiple winners, Jackie Stewart and Lewis Hamilton, have also been knighted ^note  the only two British champions not to be honoured were Mike Hawthorn, who died in a car crash mere months after winning it, and James Hunt, quite possibly on account of his very colourful personal life. Stirling Moss, the most famous F1 driver never to be world champion, was also knighted.
    • British boxers who win one or more of the various world championships in their weight division could reasonably expect an honour of some sort — among them Lennox Lewis CBE (heavyweight), Joe Calzaghe CBE (super-middleweight, light-heavyweight) and Ricky Hatton MBE (light-welterweight, welterweight). It's not a hard and fast rule, though, as Amir Khan (light-welterweight) might testify.
    • Success in Horse Racing is another route to honours.^note Perhaps no surprise given the Royal Family's longstanding interest in all things equestrian and the royal stables' longstanding competitiveness on the track. Elizabeth II was known to have been particularly passionate about it, reading the Racing Post at breakfast every morning. Of course, horse racing is the "Sport of Kings". Just don't tell polo we said that. Or hunting. Or real tennis. Or, since Mike Tindall is Princess Anne's son-in-law, rugby. Long-standing Champion Jockey Tony McCoy was awarded an MBE in 2003 which was upgraded to an OBE in 2010 before he was knighted in 2016 (although as he was made a Knight Bachelor rather than a KBE, he's "Sir Tony McCoy OBE"). Similarly, Frankie Dettori has an honorary MBE (he being an Italian citizen), while trainer Jenny Pitman (the first woman to train a Grand National winner) has an OBE.
    • Show-jumping prowess also works. Zara Tindall (née Phillips) MBE is a world-class equestrian who had racked up 5 Championship medals (3 gold, 2 silver) and a British Sports Personality of the Year award by the time she was honoured in 2006. However, this may not be an entirely fair example, given that she also happens to be a granddaughter of Elizabeth II (hilarity ensued at the 2012 Olympic Games when she was given her silver medal by her mother, Princess Anne). Funnily enough, her husband, Mike Tindall, also has an MBE on account of him having been part of England's 2003 Rugby World Cup winning team.
    • Winning a Grand Slam tennis title will do it too, especially since this is a somewhat rare achievement for a Brit. Andy Murray is now Sir Andy Murray OBE due to his having won Wimbledon twice (and the US Open once, plus two Olympic gold medals), while Emma Raducanu got an MBE after winning the US Open in 2021, the first British woman to win a Grand Slam title since Virginia Wade OBE in the 1970s.
    • Cyclist Chris Froome was awarded the OBE in the 2016 New Years Honours, following his second victory in the Tour de France; he went on to win it twice more. He wasn't the first British cyclist to win le Tour; that was Bradley Wiggins, who was knighted after his 2012 triumph, at which point he already had a CBE thanks to his multiple Olympic successes (Froome, by contrast, merely has two Olympic bronze medals to his name).
    • Rounding off the sports part, it's worth nothing that winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award is not in and of itself a guarantee of honours, although whoever wins this has usually already done one of the things listed above in order to get this award in addition to an MBE or OBE. There are a few lower-profile SPOTY winners (e.g. Greg Rusedski) whose achievements in their sport generally haven't been considered honour-worthy.
• Be a high-ranking member of the Civil Service. Hence Sir Humphrey Appleby.
  • Naturally, Yes, Minister also satirised this; one episode where the Minister threatens not to approve his department's honours list unless they actually do something to deserve them sends shockwaves of horror throughout the entire Civil Service. It's pointed out that unlike the rest of the population, who actually have to do something of great significance or of great public benefit to earn an honour (and then usually only a minor one), civil servants seem to get showered with all sorts of high-level honours merely for existing, with the clear implication that they are manipulating the system for their own benefit.
  • The counter-argument, which civil servants and their defenders can't trot out fast enough, is that the prospect of honours is a form of compensation for the substantial pay cut most civil servants take compared to their likely pay in the private sector; to what extent this holds water is up for debate^note For instance, American civil servants seem to be satisfied with the relative job security and work-life balance that comes with being in government, but then perhaps not—the private/public revolving door is a really big thing in the US, while in Britain it's less pronounced; British officials are often shocked at the young age of many of their American counterparts, which some suspect is due to the habit of senior American officials departing for private jobs while British ones are more likely to be in it for the long haul and only take private consultancies and directorships after they've already hit the top of the civil service and don't want to spend their late middle age doing nothing.. Naturally, Yes, Minister also satirises this by pointing out that while this may be the case in general terms, civil servants (or at least the high-ranking ones) aren't exactly being paid a pittance for their work either, and are clearly manipulating the system from both ends, ensuring that they both get showered with honours and get extremely well-paid for the privilege.
• Be a high-ranking military officer or just be very good at your job in the Armed Forces. This has been going on for centuries—indeed, both peerages and knighthoods were originally supposed to be military offices—and is how Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley (among others) ended up as peers of the realm. It continues to this day. For those who are lords or knights, the military rank goes first. Thus, when the World War II general Bernard Montgomery was promoted and knighted after the battle of El Alamein, he went from being Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery to General Sir Bernard Montgomery.
  • Kelly Holmes got an MBE for her military service before acquiring the Damehood for her athletics achievements.
    • Which explains the previously-baffling discrepancy between her 'only' winning two Olympic titles yet receiving a DBE, contrary to the established Scale of Gold Medal-Holding Ennoblement — she evidently only needed a pair to upgrade her MBE...
• Be head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) or the Security Service (MI5).
• Be in charge of a police service. Cressida Dick, the current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (in other words, head of the Metropolitan Police) ^note  As well as being the first woman to hold this position, she's also the highest-ranking gay copper in British police history, having come out as a lesbian in 2017, was made a DBE in 2019.
• Be a senior politician. Ex-Prime Ministers customarily get the Order of the Garter or, if they're Scottish, the Order of the Thistle ^note  a Welsh ex-PM would get the Garter, which is fine in legal terms because the Order of the Garter is from the former Kingdom of England, which included Wales; what a Northern Irish ex-PM would receive is unclear, although as the chances of a Northern Irish MP becoming Prime Minister are remote, it's not terribly important . This is a remnant of the practice whereby the ex-PM would get an earldom (before 1961) or a life peerage as well as a knighthood.
  • In addition to being knighted, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher were all made life peers after stepping down as MPs ^note  In Douglas-Home's case, he had actually been made a KT before he became Prime Minister, at which point he renounced his peerage; after stepping down as an MP he was made a life peer — thus, he went from being the 14th Earl of Home to Sir Alec Douglas-Home to Baron Home of the Hirsel. Edward Heath, who stayed on as an MP for 27 years after losing the Premiership, declined a peerage.
  • As of November 2023, only one of the seven living former Prime Ministers have been given a life peerage and just two have been knighted—and the peerage was under unusual circumstances.
    • That peerage was given to David Cameron, and it was decidedly not an honour: rather, it was to allow Rishi Sunak to appoint Cameron (who had left Parliament after resigning as PM) as Foreign Secretary. (See further details in "Convince the government that you'd make a really, really good minister but nobody would ever vote for you" below.)
    • John Major and Tony Blair were made KGs. It's unclear if the offer of a life peerage still stands generally (Cameron's elevation being so unusual), since no formal decision has been taken to stop offering peerages to retired ex-PMs. The last one to be offered one was Major after he stepped down as an MP in 2001; he declined. Of the others, three (Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss) are still MPs. Tony Blair stepped down as MP upon leaving office, while Gordon Brown remained in the Commons as a backbencher before stepping down in 2015. Blair was knighted in 2022, some 17 years after Major; for several years, the lack of honours for Blair and his successor Gordon Brown were attributed to the fact that both the Orders of the Garter and the Thistle have limited numbers (24 for the former, 16 for the latter), although in actual fact there were (and still are) vacant spaces in both of those orders. Should Brown get knighted, he — being Scottish — would get a KT rather than a KG.
• Risk your own life to save a nationally significant monument from almost certain destruction. Admittedly this is rare, but between 1906 and 1911, deep sea diver William Walker worked in water up to 6 metres (20 feet) deep for six hours a day in order to shore up the foundations of Winchester Cathedral, which had been in danger of collapse owing to a combination of shoddy medieval workmanship and a high water table. For this, he was made an MVO by George V. In addition to this, the pub closest to the cathedral was later renamed after him.
• Be a renowned highbrow actor, author, musician, filmmaker or TV production person (like Sir Derek Jacobi, or more obviously Sir Laurence Olivier, later Baron Olivier). If you're an actor who gets a knighthood or above, you don't use your new title when you're being credited in movies, at least not anymore — although Judith Anderson was credited as "Dame Judith Anderson" in Star Trek III, in more recent years Ben Kingsley has been roundly mocked for being credited as "Sir Ben Kingsley".
  • John Mortimer, creator of the popular legal drama Rumpole of the Bailey, was awarded a CBE in the 1980s and a knighthood in the 1990s, in addition to the QC title he achieved through his real-life legal career in the 1960s. So his proper tile was Sir John Mortimer CBE QC.
  • Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, got a life peerage, although in his case it helped that (1) he came from an old, eminently traceable background, (2) his work was was often centred around peers, and (3) he was a committed Tory and was in the spotlight at a time (2011) when a Tory government needed a few more life peers to provide support in the Lords.
• If you're a writer whose work is not exactly highbrow, you will still be considered for honours if said work is consistently popular, although your chances of a knighthood or damehood are slim. Hence why Russell T Davies merely has an OBE, as does Bernard Cornwell, while Frederick Forsyth has a CBE, as did Dick Francis. That said, if you've been going for a really long time, you could get something more ... Agatha Christie was made a dame towards the end of her life ^note  she got a DBE in 1971, five years before she died, having previously been awarded a CBE in 1956, while P. G. Wodehouse was knighted shortly before he died.
• Be a hugely popular and very long-lasting pop music phenomenon: Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Vera Lynn, Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Dame Shirley Bassey, etc. You won't find any of them using their title on an album cover except the latter, who is apparently subject to "Ben Kingsley Syndrome" — she must at all times be referred to as "Dame Shirley" or more puzzlingly "The Dame" (which seems to be approximately a case of confusing a damehood with a peerage: a man calling himself "the Knight" would sound very weird, wouldn't it?) — most egregiously her website not only uses "DSB" as her initials now, but has listed The Dame appearing alongside "Elton John" shorn of his equivalent "Sir".
• Save the lives of many people who would otherwise be killed by a genocidal regime. Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker who worked to get 669 (mostly Jewish) children out of Czechoslovakia in the run-up to World War II (thus saving them from the Holocaust), was later knighted for this. That said, he kept quiet about what he had done for many years; his work only came to public attention in 1988 when he was reunited with many of the (by then grown-up) children he had rescued on the TV show That's Life!. Having been hailed as Britain 's answer to Oskar Schindler, he was knighted in 2003. The movie One Life tells his story.
• Selfless, tireless charity work over a period of many years. Again, Nicholas Winton is a good example, as he was awarded an MBE in 1983 for his work in establishing the Abbeyfield homes for the elderly.
• Give the government or governing party a lot of money. Baronetcies were originally always purchased. Even without direct payment, rich people were always more likely to receive any honour, partly because some honours required the holder to live in a certain way (knights, for instance, were originally military officers who had to afford a horse, armour, grooms, servants, etc.) and because poor people wouldn't be able to do any of the things that would bring them to the sovereign's attention. Officially the grant of titles or honours in exchange for donations to the government, political parties or individuals has been illegal since the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, which was introduced after a major scandal involving the near-open sale of titles by David Lloyd George's Liberal administration ^note As noted above and below, there were political as well as pecuniary reasons for this; the Liberals were chronically in the minority in the Lords—the holders of older peerages were Tories almost to a man (to be expected, since the Tories were basically explicitly the party of the old aristocracy), and even new peerages created for Liberals had an annoying habit of turning Tory after the second or third generation. Thus Liberal governments had a habit of using any possible excuse to create new Liberal peers to avoid trouble in the Upper House. The first Parliament Act (in 1911) allowing the elected government to bypass the Lords was basically the Liberals' "nuclear option" after it both became unseemly to keep giving peerages to party donors just to get bills passed and popular to officially give the Commons final say in everything. However, there have been strong public and media suspicions about the number of party donors who have been granted honours by both Labour and Conservative governments in the last thirty years or so.
• Convince the government that you'd make a really, really good minister but nobody would ever vote for you. The rule is that a Cabinet minister must sit in Parliament but need not necessarily sit in the Commons. Nowadays it’s extraordinarily rare for any of the really powerful ministries to be headed by a lord (though it can happen), but it's still quite common for a successful businessman to be ennobled as a life peer so he or she can serve as Minister for Trade or some similar position.
  • Peter Mandelson did this after his return from the European Commission. Having left his seat in Parliament to serve in Brussels, he took a life peerage rather than seek a seat in the Commons (there's hardly a constituency in Britain where he'd have had an easy time, even if it were a Labour safe seat) to be appointed Minister for "Business, Innovation, and Skills", which was really little more than a way for him to cement control over Gordon Brown. This led to a hilarious response from an astonished Frankie Boyle: "Who made him a Lord, the Sith?!"
  • The same happened with Charles Falconer, a prominent commercial barrister (and, perhaps more importantly, Tony Blair's old flatmate), who had had some trouble finding a Labour committee that would nominate him to run. Blair made him Lord Falconer in 1997 so he could be appointed Solicitor-General. He eventually became Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.
  • Most recently, Rishi Sunak had David Cameron created a Life Peer to serve as Foreign Secretary after being forced to kick Suella Braverman from her post as Home Secretary and slide James Cleverly from the Foreign to the Home Office. This raised some eyebrows, but mostly because it was so weird for Sunak to be turning to a former Prime Minister to staff his Cabinet and that he would specifically ask Cameron (who while seen as well qualified to do foreign policy generally was seen as having made a dog’s breakfast of Brexit and was associated with an embarrassing lobbying scandal).
  • As an aside, the office of Lord Chancellor — in charge of the administration of the courts ^note  appointing judges, handling the support structure for the judiciary, keeping the courthouses maintained, etc; he/she had/has no power over judicial decisions — was historically always held by a peer, as the Lord Chancellor was also the Speaker of the House of Lords; in the second half of the 20th century, it became common to confer a life peerage upon a high-powered barrister loyal to the government so that he could this post. Now that the two hats have been separated, most Chancellors have been Commons members, but it wouldn't cause a huge outcry if this post or any of the other high-level government legal positions (Attorney-General or Solicitor-General) were to be held by peers, unlike (say) if the Chancellor of the Exchequer ^note  this one has historically been held by an MP; until the mid-to-late 19th century, if the Prime Minister was an MP he usually held the office of Chancellor as well, while if the PM was a peer the Chancellor was the government's de facto leader in the Commons or Foreign Secretary were drawn from the Lords, as these posts (1) are often overlooked and (2) occupy a strange position where the officeholder's political loyalties are important but not as much as his/her skill as a lawyer and reputation as an honest broker in the legal community.
• All sorts of services to the Prime Minister may count, given the various reasons for people being included in the Resignation Honours^note honours granted at the behest of an outgoing PM following their resignation, which usually include peerages in addition to lesser honours, to be conferred on any number of people of the outgoing PM's choosing over the years. Denouncing honours thus awarded as examples of cronyism is nothing new; expect the likes of David Lloyd George and Harold Wilson to be mentioned. Or consider David Cameron, whose barber, Raffaele Claudio Carbosiero, who received an MBE in 2014 for "services to hairdressing", or Liz Truss, who put forward a Resignation Honours list after serving a grand total of 50 days (as is her right) and had several people on said list decline out of embarrassment.
• Or just be friends with the Prime Minister. It worked for Jeffrey Archer, who was made a lord by John Major in 1992! ^note  At the time, Archer was angling for a front-line political role but it never happened; he did get to be the Tory candidate for Mayor of London but he had to resign his candidature prior to the election after it emerged that he had committed perjury.
• A rare one, but being a namesake of an intended recipient is not unknown. Back in the 1970s, Harold Wilson wanted Harry H. Corbett (of Steptoe and Son fame) to have an OBE, quite possibly on account of the fact that he was a prominent Labour Party supporter to the point of him having appeared (as Harold Steptoe) in a Labour Party political broadcast ^note  funnily enough, the Steptoe episode "Tea for Two" has Harold as the secretary of his local Labour Party branch, in contrast to his Tory-supporting father . Unfortunately, the middle "H" in his name was somehow lost in the process, and it was instead announced that Harry Corbett (of Sooty fame) was getting the OBE instead ^note  this gets even funnier when you take into account that Harry H. Corbett had only added the initial "H", which he claimed stood for "hennyfink" (a Cockney pronunciation of "anything") when he was starting out as a stage actor in order to avoid confusion with Harry Corbett . In the event, though, both men were included in the 1976 New Year's Honours list.
• Win an election for the sitting government, apparently. The 2015-2016 New Year's Honours List drew a lot of controversy for, among other examples of suspected cronyism, awarding a knighthood to political strategist Lynton Crosby, who had masterminded the Conservative victory in the 2015 elections. Labour were quick to pounce on this as a case of seemingly being awarded more for services to the Conservative Party than services to the country and bringing the whole system into disrepute. Of course, anyone who remembers the "Cash for Honours" scandal might be inclined to point out that the Labour Party doesn't exactly have a lot of moral high ground to protest the honours system being brought into disrepute.
• Do something to preserve and embody the nation's culture. This category is getting bigger, with some titles being awarded for people that can be best described as stalwarts of British entertainment (like Ant and Dec, who are both OBEs) or charitableness (like Lenny Henry, who is a knight ^note  it should be noted, though, that he is not "Sir Lenny of Henry" — that's a nickname and a CBE for his long-standing association with Comic Relief).
  • Captain Tom Moore fits into this vein — he was the World War II veteran who, in the run-up to his 100th birthday and in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, walked a hundred laps of his garden to raise money for NHS-related charities. By the time he was done, he'd vastly exceeded his modest goal of raising £1,000 (by the time the fundraising campaign officially closed on the day of his 100th birthday, he'd raised over £30million), raised the nation's spirits and become a household name. This, naturally, led to him getting knighted by the Queen — following which, since he was widely known by his old Army rank, he became Captain Sir Tom Moore. Not "Sir Captain Tom", although even The BBC got that one wrong.
• These days, "be really nice and famous" seems to cut it, as evidenced by the national petition to give Ariana Grande an honorary damehood in 2017. ^note She was nominated for her efforts to restore hope to Manchester after the bombing at her concert in the city, particularly pulling every string she knew to arrange the One Love Manchester benefit gig. She was reportedly offered a DBE but turned it down.

For a list of individuals who have been honoured, see British Honours.

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The rules were somewhat different in earlier eras, changing slowly over time (like virtually everything British). Plausible ways in which your historical character can get one of these:

• By being a useful and prominent public servant, such as a member of the Cabinet, head of the military, or Prime Minister. Examples include William Cecil, advisor to Elizabeth I, who became Lord Burghley; John Churchill, advisor (and later general) under five of the Stuarts, who became the Duke of Marlborough; Edward Hyde, the guy who brought Charles II back to England, who became the Earl of Clarendon; and Arthur Wellesley, who conquered most of India, saved Europe from Napoleon, and became the Duke of Wellington with a stack of other titles, both British and foreign.
  • It became something of a tradition by the mid-19th century to give retired Prime Ministers who were not already peers earldoms once they retired from the House of Commons. The custom developed slowly; the very first PM, Robert Walpole, was made Earl of Orford in exchange for his resignation; a few already-Peer PMs (and one, Henry Pelham, who died on office) later, William Pitt The Elder was made the Earl of Chatham upon "formally" becoming PM in 1766. A while later, Henry Addington was made Viscount Sidmouth upon leaving office. For the next half-century or so, virtually every PM who wasn't a peer became one, except those who died in office (Pitt the Younger, Spencer Perceval, George Canning, Lord Palmerston ^note Although he was the third Viscount Palmerston, that was an Irish title so he was an MP for the entirety of his very long political career) and one who died while still in the Commons (Sir Robert Peel). Between 1861 (when Lord John Russell became Earl Russell) and 1961 (by which point a peerage was more trouble than help), every former Prime Minister was given an earldom upon leaving the Commons except for those who were already peers, those who died before retiring from the Commons ^note Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Bonar Law died in office, while Ramsay Mac Donald and Neville Chamberlain died after leaving the premiership but while they were still still MPs, those who declined elevation (the aforementioned Winston Churchill) or those who were William Gladstone (because Queen Victoria personally loathed him) ^note Gladstone also had the misfortune of dying in 1898 — three years before the Queen did. Had Gladstone lived to 1901, Edward VII — who had liked him almost as much as his mother had loathed him — would almost certainly have given the Grand Old Man an earldom had the Government requested it (which almost certainly would have happened after the Liberals took office under Campbell-Bannerman in 1905). Long after he'd left office, Harold Macmillan was made the Earl of Stockton by Margaret Thatcher. (It has been speculated that she hoped to revive the precedent so that she would receive an earldom—becoming the 1st Countess Thatcher, which whatever you think of her you must admit has a ring to it—in due course.)
  • And somewhat related to the above: by being a potentially useful public servant, in the sense that you will vote the right way when you do end up in the House of Lords. Several monarchs became notorious for creating a load of new peerages every time their policies were blocked in the Lords; after monarchs stopped being seriously involved in policy, they started to create peerages at the behest of the Government, if the issue was important enough (again, the Liberals in the 19th and very beginning of the 20th centuries were the biggest users of this trick, since their policies were inevitably unpopular with the kinds of fusty old aristocrats who historically inhabited the Lords). The need for this was removed by the Parliament Act 1911^note  Short version: the Lords can't veto a bill, only delay it for up to two years (provided the Commons keep passing it), and can't touch 'Money Bills' (ie the Budget) at all. although it did take George V threatening to do it one last time to get the act passed.
    • A variant of this occurred with some who held titles in the Peerage of Scotland and the Peerage of Ireland after the Acts of Union. As we mentioned earlier, members of these peerages were not generally entitled to sit in the Lords at Westminster, and instead elected a small number (16 for Scotland, 28 for Ireland) of "Representative Peers". The Scottish ones had to be reelected at each dissolution of Parliament; the Irish ones did not. Since you never knew when or whether a promising young member of these Peerages (that is, one who would make a good minister) would win a seat as a Representative Peer, but it felt unseemly to make an actual honest-to-God Peer stand for the House of Commons, it was relatively common to give them an additional hereditary barony in the Peerage of Great Britain (1707-1801) or the United Kingdom (after 1801) which would entitle them to sit as Peers. The Earl of Rosebery—whose original title was in the Peerage of Scotland—was created Baron Rosebery in the Peerage of the United Kingdom for this purpose; he quickly became a junior minister. (He later became a fairly disappointing PM, but we won't get into that.) Note that this didn't always happen; some Scottish and Irish Peers in politics simply continued to stand for seats in the Commons, the most prominent example being Lord Palmerston.
• By marrying into the royal family.
  • A female commoner marrying a male royal simply takes the female form of her husband's title. She may well end up getting honours of her own after this. A good example is Sohpie Rhys-Jones, who became HRH the Countess of Wessex as a result of marrying Prince Edward (who was himself made the Earl of Wessex shortly before their wedding) and has since been made a GCVO in her own right.
  • Peers who married female royals could well find themselves getting a title upgrade or extra honours, such as the Earl of Fife who was upgraded to a Duke when he married Princess Louise (Edward VII's daughter; he was already a KT and was later made a KG) and Viscount Lascelles who became a KG after marrying Princess Mary (George V 's daughter; he later became the Earl of Harewood but this title was inherited after the death of his father).
  • Historically, it was very rare for male commoners to marry female royals but those who did were given titles, such as Anthony Armstrong-Jones who became the Earl of Snowdon when he married Princess Margaret. This has since fallen into abeyance; Mark Philips was offered a title when he married Princess Anne but declined (although he was made a CVO the following year). There's no record of Timothy Laurence being offered a title when he became Princess Anne's second husband, although he was knighted (as a KCVO) in 2011, some nineteen years after the wedding. More recently, Jack Brooksbank and Eduardo Mapelli Mozzi were not offered titles when they (respectively) married Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice ^note  Mapelli Mozzi's father is an Italian nobleman, albeit one who holds both British and Italian citizenship and whose noble title of Count is no longer recognised in Italy, although he still uses it. Brooksbank, meanwhile, is the son of a younger son of a baronet; press speculation that he was going to be made an earl when he married Princess Eugenie turned out to be no more than, err, press speculation, and as of 2023 neither of those two gentlemen has been inducted into the Royal Victorian Order.
• By being a royal bastard, at least before the accession of George III in 1761. The present dukes of Richmond, Grafton, St Albans and Buccleuch owe their titles to descent from Charles II's bastards. After 1761, the only monarch with surviving acknowledged bastards was William IV, who had ten children by his long-term mistress/de facto common-law wife Dorothea Jordan; he created his eldest son George FitzClarence the Earl of Munster about a year after taking the throne, but none of his other children received titles (except his three daughters who married peers).^note The reason for this: George III was famously Happily Married to his queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a Perfectly Arranged Marriage for the history books. (Tales of a youthful dalliance with or secret marriage to a Catholic are not credited.) His sons were more libertine, but only two inherited the throne: the aforementioned William IV and his older brother George IV, who either never had any bastards from his numerous dalliances or never acknowledged them. After William IV's death, the throne was inherited by Queen Victoria, and the only monarchs since her who ever had mistresses were Edward VII (a great womanizer who like his great-uncle George IV either never had any bastards or never recognized them—though we should take pains to note here that this, the love of food, and a familial physical resemblance are the only similarities between the essentially decent Edward VII and his arsehole great-uncle), Edward VIII (known to never have had children) and Charles III (who never had any children by his one and only mistress, whom he would eventually marry and make his queen anyway).
• By sleeping with the sovereign, making the sovereign want to sleep with you, or letting the sovereign sleep with your spouse. The first worked for both George Villiers (under James I) and his distant relative Barbara Villiers Palmer (under Charles II); the second worked for Lord Robert Dudley, who became the Earl of Leicester under (or not under) Elizabeth I.
• By being the King's drinking buddy. Charles II handed titles out like candy. The Hanoverian Georges weren't much better, except that with George III they were more like tea-drinking buddies.

Declining and returning honours

Just because you're offered an honour doesn't mean you're obliged to accept it. There are numerous reasons for people to say "no" when they receive the brown envelope marked "OHMS".

People can and do refuse on matters of principle. For instance, republicans tend to refuse all honours because they don't believe in the continuation of the monarchy and its institutions. People have also refused entry into orders that they believe to have troubled, discriminatory histories (the very fact that the Order of the British Empire is still called that is reason enough, for some). And there are those who refuse to accept an honour because they feel that the one on offer is beneath them and are holding out in the hopes of receiving something more substantial in the future.

In the latter category we have Evelyn Waugh and Roald Dahl, who were respectively offered a CBE and an OBE but declined because they wanted knighthoods (which neither of them got). In a similar vein, the journalist and politician Bill Deedes declined a mere knight bachelorhood when offered it in the 1970s but was later happy to accept a life peerage and a KBE.

Some decline honours due to modesty or a dislike of awards and titles; examples include Rudyard Kipling (who turned down a knighthood — twice — and an OM), Kenneth Williams (who in addition to refusing an OBE also refused to accept the Radio Personality of the Year Award in 1968) and scientists like Michael Faraday and Stephen Hawking (the latter was happy to accept a CBE but drew the line at a knighthood). The record for the most honours declined by one person is reckoned to be held by the artist L.S. Lowry, who turned down an OBE, a CBE, a knighthood and a CH (twice in the case of the latter).

Some decline for political reasons. T. E. Lawrence was offered a knighthood by George V for his role in the Arab Revolt but refused due to his anger over the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Other examples include Ramsay Mac Donald and the historian A.J.P. Taylor, both of whom saw knighthoods as being incompatible with their left-leaning political views; the latter remarked that: "The Establishment draws its recruits from outside as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment – and nothing so corrupting."

Then there are people who accept honours but later decide to return them afterward as a form of protest against the Crown and/or the British government. John Lennon, for example, returned his MBE in 1969 in protest against "Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, our support of America in Vietnam and "Cold Turkey" slipping down the charts" ^note  that last was his second solo single, which peaked at number 14 in the British charts; funnily enough, at least five people are on record as having returned their honours (mostly given for military service) in protest against The Beatles being awarded MBEs in 1965. Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Prize winner for Literature and composer of the poems on which the national anthems of India and Bangladesh are based, returned his knighthood in protest of The Raj perpetrating the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre. More recently, Michael Sheen was made an OBE in 2009 but returned it in 2020 prior to calling for the title Prince of Wales to be scrapped (reasoning that it would be hypocritical of him to keep said honour while advocating said viewpoint).

In 2024, the Post Office scandal, which had been rumbling on for years, became a major news story following the broadcast of the TV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. After this was broadcast, an online petition was set up to try and get former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells stripped of the CBE she was awarded in 2019. It quickly got a million signatures and she bowed to public pressure, announcing that she would be returning the honour.

However, it's actually not enough for someone to say that they're returning an honour because only the sitting monarch can decide if an honour or title is forfeit (see below). Unless a formal petitions is filed to get the review process started, holders remain on the rolls and legally connected to their honours even if they return medals and cease using associated post-nominals.

Forfeiture

Once you have been given an honour, it (as stated above) is possible for it to be forfeited (i.e. withdrawn). Reasons for this (according to the Cabinet Office's website) include "being found guilty of a criminal offence, behaviour which results in censure by a regulatory or a professional body, or any other behaviour that is deemed to bring the honours system into disrepute." There is in fact a Forfeiture Committee which considers such matters on a case-by-case basis — it reports to the King via the Prime Minister, and if the former gives his approval, a notice of forfeiture will appear in the London Gazette (one of the British government's official journals of record).

A lord who has been stripped of his title is said to have been attainted. Historically, this happened after said individual was convicted of treason and entailed him not only being stripped of his title but also his property, in addition to losing the right to pass his title to his heirs. And then he'd be executed. This happened quite a few times during the Wars of the Roses, the reign of Henry VIII, the Civil War and the Jacobite Rebellions. Technically, a peer can still be stripped of his or her title only by an Act of Parliament, but this has not been done since 1820 — the closest thing since has been the Titles Deprivation Act of 1917 which deprived various German princes and noblemen of their British titles during World War I. It's reckoned that the only reason why Jeffrey Archer was not stripped of his peerage after his conviction for perjury in 2001 was because the government of the day did not want to go through the rigmarole of passing an Act of Parliament for that sole purpose. The same goes for Conrad Black following his conviction for fraud in the USA in 2007. In 2014, the House of Lords Reform Act was passed, which allows peers to retire or resign (something that had previously been constitutionally impossible for life peers); additionally, it allows for peers to be excluded if they are convicted of a serious criminal offence (defined as one that comes with a prison sentence of at least a year) or if they fail to attend the House for an entire legislative session. Since this came into force, 174 peers have resigned or retired, and 10 have been excluded for non-attendance. The criminal conviction bit is not retrospective.

The formal term for the removal of a knighthood is degradation, and this does not require an Act of Parliament. Prominent twentieth-century examples of individuals who had their knighthoods removed are Roger Casement (for treason during World War I) and Anthony Blunt (when it was publicly revealed that he was a Russian spy), while three foreign leaders who were given honorary knighthoods (Benito Mussolini of Italy, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe) were later stripped of them. More recently, two senior bankers, Fred Godwin and James Crosby, lost their knighthoods in the wake of the banking crisis of the late 2000s.

As far as lesser honours are concerned, there are many examples of people losing them for what could politely be called "conduct unbecoming", usually criminal convictions. Jockey Lester Piggott was stripped of his OBE when he was sent to prison for tax evasion, while boxer Naseem Hamed lost his MBE after being jailed for dangerous driving. Darts champion Phil Taylor was nominated for an MBE but had it annulled before he could be awarded it as a result of his being found guilty of indecent assault (for which he was fined rather than imprisoned) in the time between the honour being announced and the (planned) awarding of said honour. Film producer Harvey Weinstein was stripped of his honorary CBE in 2020 following his sexual assault and rape convictions, although there had been calls for the honour to be removed prior to his trial. As can be evidenced by these cases, honours tend to only get forfeited after a criminal conviction, which probably explains why Kevin Spacey still has his honorary knighthood.

It is not legally possible for someone to be stripped of their honours after they have died, as technically honours automatically expire with the life of the individual who received them. This is why Jimmy Savile, whose many crimes only came to light after his death, has not been posthumously relieved of his OBE and knighthood. While there were calls for this to happen, the government of the day ignored them, presumably on the grounds that doing so would have set a precedent by which honours could theoretically be removed from any deceased person who might fall foul of Values Dissonance.

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Examples in media

Ancient fictional titled people (before the Battle of Bosworth Field):

• Any number of the Knights of the Round Table.
• Sir Roger de Coverley, a character in The Spectator, named after a popular country dance.
• Sir John Falstaff, who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare — he was based in part on an actual 15th-century knight and English commander in The Hundred Years War, Sir John Fastolf, who was kicked out of the Order of the Garter for cowardice but later reinstated.

Modern fictional titled people :

• Sir Walter Scott created many peerages for his novels, including Viscount Beauchamp in Rob Roy, Lord Castle-Cuddy in The Bride of Lammermoor and Lord Etherington in St Ronan's Well
• Lady Catherine de Bourgh, aunt of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.
• There are plenty of examples in Anthony Trollope's novels.
  • Is He Popinjoy? revolves around the question of whether or not a small child is the legitimate son and heir of the Marquess of Brotherton — the courtesy title of this particular marquessate being Lord Popinjoy. The titular question is actually not resolved, as the small child in question dies, rendering the whole thing moot; a nephew of the Marquess inherits the courtesy title (and, when the Marquess dies, the marquessate itself) instead.
  • In the Palliser novels, the aristocratic heiress Lady Glencora M'Cluskie marries Plantagenet Palliser and so becomes Lady Glencora Palliser. He later becomes the Duke of Omnium after the death of his uncle (the Old Duke). Their children, Plantagenet, Gerald and Mary, subsequently become Lord Silverbridge (the courtesy title), Lord Gerald and Lady Mary.
• Jack Ryan from the Tom Clancy books, for his saving the Prince of Wales from a kidnapping attempt by Irish terrorists in Patriot Games. Specifically, a Knight Commander (honorary) of the Victorian Order.
• Sir Harry Pearce from Spooks.
• Brigadier-General Sir Harry Flashman VC KCB KCIE. His wife Elspeth gets to call herself "The Honourable" because her father was a lord, although she doesn't like to be reminded of that fact that he only became one because he bribed Lord John Russell into giving him a peerage.
• Richard Hannay of The Thirty-Nine Steps is, to use his full title, Major-General Sir Richard Hannay KCB OBE DSO. His friend Sandy Arbuthnot is the 16th Baron Clanroyden. Elsewhere in the stories of John Buchan (himself ennobled as the first Baron Tweedsmuir), Edward Leithen is a knight ^note  who gets knighted at some point before World War I, given that he's plain Edward Leithen in The Power-House, which was first published in 1913, but he's addressed as Sir Edward Leithen in a flashback scene in The Dancing Floor which is specifically dated as taking place in 1913, Archie Roylance is a baronet and Charles Lamancha is Lord Lamancha, eldest son of the Marquis of Liddesdale (which explains why he's able to serve as a Member of Parliament).
• Tarzan is actually John Clayton, seventh Earl of Greystoke.
• Horatio Hornblower becomes Sir Horatio Hornblower KB ^note  prior to 1815, the Order of the Bath only had a single class of knighthood at the end of Flying Colours. In Lord Hornblower, he is ennobled as Baron Hornblower of Smallbridge. His second wife, Lady Barbara Wellesley, is the (fictional) younger sister of The Duke of Wellington and is "Lady Barbara" on account of her being an earl's daughter.
• Hornblower's former shipmate Nicholas Ramage ^note  Dudley Pope, Ramage's creator, included this detail as a nod to his friend C.S. Forester is Lord Ramage, this being a courtesy title (he being the eldest son of the Earl of Blazey, whose court-martial did not lead to him being attainted).
• Sir Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, in the English translation.
• Yes, Minister gives us Sir Humphrey Appleby who, as stated above, is very quick to defend the concept of senior civil servants receiving honours just for doing their jobs.
• Sir James Manson of The Dogs of War.
• The Brigadier from Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures was knighted over the course of the Big Finish audios. This was canonised in New Doctor Who's fourth TV series, so he became Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.
  • The Doctor and Rose get accoladed by Victoria as "Sir Doctor of TARDIS" and "Dame Rose of the Powell Estate" in "Tooth and Claw". Then they are 'invited' to leave the country. The late owner of Torchwood House in that episode was Sir Robert MacLeish, whose father had conspired with Prince Albert to fight the werewolf. Whether he had himself been knighted at some point or merely inherited a baronetcy is unclear..
    • The style "Sir Doctor of TARDIS" is anomalous; a knighthood doesn't come with a change of name or a territorial title. A mediæval knight might be known as Sir Godfrey of Bouillon, but "of Bouillon" was his surname irrespective of his knighthood. Now, a knight who is also a Scottish laird (see above) might be Sir Fullname of Estate, so perhaps the queen meant to recognize the TARDIS as a qualifying estate, or she may have thought of him as having the full name "Doctor of TARDIS" and was only adding the "Sir" to it. (The same would apply to Dame Rose, except that in 1879 the title "Dame" was only used by baronetesses; it was adopted for female knights when the DBE was introduced in 1917. It's entirely possible the Queen misunderstood the nature of Rose's "estate".)
  • Ian Chesterton is knighted Sir Ian of Jaffa in The Crusade.
• Sir Joseph Porter KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.
• Carry On Up the Khyber had Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, KBE KCB OBE ACDC BBC ITV.
• Lara Croft, of Tomb Raider fame, is Lady Lara Croft — an hereditary title. There was a letters column discussion in Private Eye over whether she is the Countess of Abingdon.
• The Hon. Phryne Fisher is the daughter of either a baron or viscount who inherited after all the other heirs died during World War I.^note Word of God is that Miss Fisher's father inherited the title of "Lord of the Manor", but as mentioned above that would be impossible.
  • The tv series clarifies this, revealing that Phryne's father is Baron Fisher.
• James Bond is a CMG. He's offered a knighthood at the end of The Man with the Golden Gun (the novel, not the film) but declines.
  • It is established in that same book that M is Vice Admiral Sir Miles Messervy KCMG. In Moonraker (again, the novel rather than the film) it is remarked that one of the Double-O Section's secretaries will probably end up getting an OBE in about twenty years time.
  • In Skyfall, Judi Dench's M is told that if she retires quietly, she'll get a GCMG with full honours.
  • In the original Casino Royale movie, David Niven plays an older, retired "Sir James Bond". Additionally, two 007 parodies — Austin Powers and Johnny English — get knighted (respectively, for capturing Dr Evil and for foiling Pascal Sauvage's attempt to seize the British crown).
• Sherlock Holmes declined a knighthood after a Noodle Incident, mentioned in "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs".
  • In the BBC television adaption, Sherlock remarks that the government "threatened me with a knighthood. Again." after he solves a serial murder case.
• A few lords feature as supporting characters in the works of Dick Francis (himself a CBE), perhaps unsurprisingly given the aristocracy's links with Horse Racing. Examples include Lord Gowrey in Enquiry and Lord Snow in Reflex, both of whom are authority figures whose integrity gets somewhat compromised. The two Kit Fielding novels, Break In and Bolt, provide Maynard Allardeck, whose attempts to get himself a knighthood are inadvertently derailed by Kit via evidence of some of Maynard's less savoury activities. In Guilty Not Guilty by Dick's son Felix, narrator Bill Russell is in fact The Honourable William Russell, younger son of the Earl of Wrexham (whose eighteenth-century ancestor secured that title, and the family's ancestral home for that matter, by way of bribery).
• Lord Snooty from The Beano.
• In Dad's Army, Sergeant Wilson becomes "The Honourable Arthur Wilson" following the death of an uncle who was a lord (presumably his father inherited the title). He quickly comes to dislike his new style due to the unwelcome attention it brings him and refuses to use it. This serves to infuriate an already-jealous Captain Mainwaring even more, as he believes that one should revel in noble titles rather than be ashamed of them.
• Clive in Hi-de-Hi! is the son of a lord; as he's also a former RAF officer who was decorated for bravery in World War II, his full title is Squadron Leader The Honourable Clive Dempster DFC. It's revealed that he was given a job by Joe Maplin, the always-unseen owner of Maplin's holiday camp, because he wanted a knighthood and thought that Clive's aristocratic connections would help him achieve this. It's also revealed that Clive is the only son of Lord Dempster, meaning that he will likely inherit the title after the death of his father, although his eventual marriage to Gladys is very much against the wishes of his family.
• The Babylon 5 episode "A Late Delivery from Avalon" gives us Sir G'Kar of a new Round Table, though the King Arthur who knighted him was not entirely kosher.
• Wing Commander features Admiral Sir Geoffrey Tolwyn, though the specific details of his knighthood aren't given.
• Lord Peter Wimsey is the second son of the 15th Duke of Denver ^note  the village in Norfolk, not the city in Colorado. His brother is the 16th Duke of Denver, his brother's wife is the Duchess of Denver, their son is Viscount St George (a courtesy title), and his mother is the Dowager Duchess. Although he is addressed by his valet Bunter as "My Lord", Lord Peter is not a lord — he has the courtesy title "Lord" because he is a younger son of a duke. His wife Harriet is Lady Peter Wimsey — not "Lady Harriet" — and their son Bredon is simply Bredon Wimsey. Word of God and the 2010 sequel The Atterbury Emeralds state that Lord St George joins the RAF in World War II and is killed on active service, and Lord Peter becomes the 17th Duke in 1951 after his brother dies in the aftermath of a fire at Duke's Denver; Harriet becomes the Duchess of Denver and Bredon becomes Lord St George — and will, assuming he outlives his father, become the 18th Duke.
• Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Lord Asherton (he's the eighth Earl of Asherton).
  • His wife Helen was Helen Lynley, Lady Asherton (and can also be referred to as the Countess of Asherton but not 'Lady Helen', as she is a commoner).
• Peaky Blinders has Tommy Shelby, as one of two conditions for destroying some embarrassing royal correspondence, asks for — and gets — an OBE. The other condition is that his family are released from prison.
• Aunt Dimity:
  • Anthony Evelyn Armstrong Seton, Viscount Hailesham, is the real name of Derek Harris. Emma is upset to learn after a decade of marriage that she is Viscountess Hailesham. His father is the ninth Earl Elstyn, and his children Peter and Nell are Honorables.
  • His Grace Grayson Alexander the fourteenth Duke of Penford is the titular peer in Aunt Dimity and the Duke.
• From Halo, there's Fleet Admiral Lord Terrence Hood. No specifics provided but we can assume he's following the family tradition. (If he's "Lord Terrence Hood" rather than "Lord Hood", then he's not the current Viscount Hood; evidently some ancestor was promoted to marquess or duke of somewhere, and perhaps Lord Terrence's brother has the courtesy title of Viscount.)
• In Village Tales, His Grace the Duke of Taunton KG GCB GCVO KBE MiD TD PC JP DL. Indeed, there are a fair number of titled characters in the series, from Cross and Poppy on, ranging from (most notably) the Duke of Taunton (and his rather vaguer, Nice-But-Dim cousin the Duke of Trowbridge) through Brigadier the Earl of Maynooth to Sir Bennett Salmon RA to a clutch of OBEs and CBEs (and the courtesy Lady Crispin Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet, the Duke of Taunton’s sister-in-law, married to His Grace's wastrel brother Lord Crispin, and Professor Millicent Lacy, who has a life peerage as The Baroness Lacy). It’s fair to say, in fact, that every rank and grade of the hereditary peerage and their kin appears in the series, from dukes and marquesses to Scots Lords of Parliament (the Scots peerage's version of English barons) to Honourables (some rebellious), knights and dames, baronets, Scots feudal barons, and those appointed to lesser Orders. As well as, as noted, the life peerage.
• The Honourable Sir Schliemannian Chair Professor Doctor Doctor Jones, CBE, DCM, JP, FRS from Irregular Webcomic!
• Sir Miles Axelrod from Cars 2. Tow Mater also receives an honorary knighthood at the end, though the film made the mistake of calling him "Sir" (honorary knighthoods do not entitle you to pre-nominal styles).
• Most Britannians in Code Geass.
  • Mostly because a substantial chunk of the Britannians in the series are Royalty. Otherwise, there's only the Knights Of The Round, who serve the Emperor as his greatest servants, Earl Lloyd Asplund, Earl Kanon Maldini, and Baroness Villetta Nu, presumably to cover up that the Empire's greatest enemy is one of the Emperor's own sons.
• Downton Abbey is about Lord Grantham –- formally The Right Honourable Robert (Crawley), 7th Earl of Grantham –- and his family. His wife Cora is the Countess of Grantham (Lady Grantham), his mother is the Dowager Countess (also known as Lady Grantham), and his daughters are Lady Mary, Lady Edith and Lady Sybil Crawley. The first son, if he existed, would have the courtesy title Viscount Downton (Lord Downton). Several other titles also feature, at every level:
  • Dukes/Duchesses: The highest-ranking nobles to appear^note Besides the royals; George V, Queen Mary, and the Prince of Wales show up for one of the Christmas specials are his Grace the Duke of Crowborough (who would never be referred to as 'Lord Crowborough') and her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Yeovil (whom the Dowager Countess has to tell Branson is called "Duchess" rather than Your Grace in a social setting like a dinner party)
  • Marquess/Marchioness: Lord Grantham's cousin is The Most Honourable Hugh (MacClare), Marquess of Flintshire (Lord Flintshire) and his wife the Marchioness (Lady Flintshire, Lord Grantham's cousin). There are a number of others besides, of which the most significant is The Most Honourable Herbert "Bertie" (Pelham), 7th Marquess of Hexham (who turns Lady Edith Crawley into the Marchioness of Hexham, also called Lady Hexham).
    The Dowager Countess: Well, how many Marquesses of Flintshire are there?
  • Earl/Countess: Lord Grantham, of course. Also of note, Lady Mary's second husband, Henry Talbot, while not himself a Peer, is nominally in (distant) remainder^note Per Lady Shackleton, "forty strong men" would have to die for him to take the title to the real-life oldest surviving earldom in England, the Earldom of Shrewsbury (whose holders do actually carry the surname "Talbot"), created in 1442 by Henry VI.
  • Viscount/Viscountess: A few, of whom Lady Mary's suitor Anthony "Tony" Foyle, Viscount Gillingham, gets the most screen time.
  • Baron/Baroness: Two of significance, one an "old" baron (the Crawleys' neighbour Richard Grey, Baron Merton, who makes Isobel Lady Merton) and one a "new" one (Rose MacClare's father-in-law, Daniel Aldridge, 1st Baron Sinderby, from a Jewish banking family).
  • Baronets: A few, including Sir Anthony Strallan, Bt (his deceased wife was Lady Strallan). Charles Blake is in line to a particularly old and rich Irish baronetcy.
  • Knights: A few. The one with the most screen time is Sir Richard Carlisle, a newspaperman. If Lady Mary had married him, she would have been 'Lady Mary Carlisle' rather than just 'Lady Carlisle' because her title as an earl's daughter would outrank her title as a knight's wife.
    • As noted above, Sir Richard probably intended to get a Peerage the next time the Tories took power, as marrying Lady Mary made him much more suitable for the grant of title.
  • There is also one "Esquire" of significance, Matthew Crawley, Esquire; as heir-presumptive to the Earldom of Grantham, he holds no formal title, but as a male-line descendant of a peer (the 3rd Earl) he is entitled to "Esquire." (It has nothing to do with him being a lawyer, unlike in America.)
• There's plenty of this in the world of P.G. Wodehouse (or, as he became shortly before his death, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE).
  • At Blandings Castle, Clarence Threepwood is the ninth Earl of Emsworth (Lord Emsworth for short).
    • His brother is the Hon. Galahad Threepwood. His sister is Lady Constance Keeble, who is "Lady Constance" on account of being the daughter of the eighth Earl; her husband is plain Joseph Keeble.
    • Lord Emsworth's eldest son George is Lord Bosham as this is the family's courtesy title; his wife Cecily is Lady Bosham. Emsworth's younger son is the Hon. Freddie Threepwood. Emsworth's daughter is Lady Mildred Mant; her husband is Colonel Mant because he's an army officer of that rank.
    • Galahad's friend Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton is the fifth Earl of Ickenham (Lord Ickenham for short, although most readers know him as "Uncle Fred"). Emsworth's neighbour and rival Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe is a baronet who inherited the title from a cousin.
    • The Empress of Blandings is the pig.
  • While he's clearly an aristocrat, Bertie Wooster doesn't have a title.
    • His terrifying Aunt Agatha is Mrs. Gregson as a result of her first marriage but becomes Lady Worplesdon after her second marriage which is to the Earl of Worplesdon, who thus becomes Bertie's Uncle Percy. Uncle Percy's daughter by his first marriage is Lady Florence Craye, who gets to be "Lady Florence" because she's an earl's daughter (were she to marry "Stilton" Cheesewright, she would become Lady Florence Cheesewright). Florence's brother Edwin is presumably heir to the earldom of Worplesdon as he's referred to as Lord Weeting (which must be the courtesy title) in an early story.
    • Bertie's Uncle George is Lord Yaxley; as Uncle George is a Wooster, the implication is that he, not Bertie's father, was the eldest son. When Uncle George marries an ex-barmaid, Maud Wilberforce, she becomes Lady Yaxley. It is unclear whether Bertie or whichever is the elder of his twin cousins Claude and Eustace is next in line to the title.
    • Bertie's friend "Chuffy" in Thank You, Jeeves is Lord Chuffnell; should he marry Pauline Stoker (as seems likely at the end of the book), she would become Lady Chuffnell. Chuffy's Aunt Myrtle is the Dowager Lady Chuffnell, she being the widow of Chuffy's uncle who was the previous Lord Chuffnell (her son, Seabury, has not inherited the title as he is the product of an earlier marriage). When she marries the "nerve specialist" Sir Roderick Glossop, she becomes Lady Glossop; it's unclear whether Sir Roderick is a baronet or a knight, but in terms of how he and his wife are referred to there is no difference.
    • Sir Watkin Bassett CBE has evidently been made a Knight Bachelor rather than having his CBE upgraded to a KBE; his (unmentioned) wife would be Lady Bassett while his daughter is simply Madeleine Bassett.
    • Roderick Spode, the lingerie-designer and would-be dictator, becomes the seventh Earl of Sidcup (Lord Sidcup for short, although Bertie mistakenly addresses him as "Lord Spodecup") after the death of his uncle. In Much Obliged, Jeeves, he considers renouncing his title in order to run for Parliament — despite the Wodehouse novels' Genteel Interbellum Setting, that book was written after the Peerage Act of 1963 which made this possible — but decides not to do so. This is seemingly crucial with regards to whether or not he will get to marry Madeleine Bassett, who wants to be Lady Sidcup but has little desire to be Mrs Spode.
    • Newspaper owner Mr. Trotter wishes to avoid a knighthood because it would make people aware of his Embarrassing First Name, Lemuel.
• The protagonist of three of Julian Rathbone's novels — Joseph, A Very English Agent and Birth of a Nation is Joseph Edward Bosham, alias Charlie Boylan, who occasionally styles himself as the third Viscount Bosham which (he claims) was a peerage created by Bonnie Prince Charlie for his grandfather, who had supported the Jacobite cause.
• Not really a "person", but, the Decepticon Cybertronian Soundwave was knighted for unspecified heroic deeds in Transformers: Shattered Glass.
  • And in Transformers Generation 2 Redux, the Autobot Pyro was knighted for saving the Queen from a Deception attack. Bonus points for him actually being "born" in Great Britain, unlike Soundwave.
• The Honor Harrington series has titles based on this system — a lot of them are given out, including to the title character and assorted secondary characters. Queen Elizabeth III rather likes creating peerages to reward people who have served her exceptionally well.
• Sophie Devereaux from Leverage, a world-class grifter, had conned her way into a Duchess title in her past. "The King George Job" reveals a few details and involves using her old identity to con the royalty-obsessed Mark Of The Week by luring him with a Barony.
• As of Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], we get Keyblade Masters Xehanort, Mickey, Eraqus, Aqua and Riku. And also, at least in the Sleeping Worlds, there's Royal Musketeer Sora.
• In Knowledge is Power Harry Potter is now Lord Potter.
• In Enola Holmes the is the Viscount Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwether, who is called that way so much by the main character that one could think "Viscount" is his actual name
  • Although one could explain the confusion as being due to Enola not being well versed in nobility titles due to her sheltered upbringing
  • The movie also confuses his mother's title by refering to her as "Lady Tewkesbury", instead of "Lady Basilwether" seeing as she was married to the previous Marquess
• In Call the Midwife, Chummy's dad was knighted for services to the Crown, which is how she knows Princess Margaret well enough to ask for her to formally open the Poplar Community Centre. As Chummy was born in India and her father seems to have been a Colonial official, it's likely that her father was made a KCMG (it wouldn't have been a KCSI or KCIE unless he was knighted before 1948—making Princess Margaret's involvement somewhat unlikely, as she was only 18).
• Warhammer 40,000: The Dark Eldar of all people, such as Duke Traevelliath Sliscus, Lady Aurelia Malys and Baron Sathonyx. The Imperium, strangely enough, doesn't go much for titles, using "Lord" to indicate a King Mook (i.e. Lord General/Inquisitor/Commissar).^note Perhaps more accurately, individual worlds of the Imperium use lots and lots of titles, which may or may not follow the UK style, but rarely do these have much significance to the greater Imperium as a whole.
• Many in Blackadder's 700-year history:
  • Edmund is Prince Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh in The Black Adder, and Lord Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder II and Blackadder Back and Forth.
  • Lord Percy Percy, heir to the Duchy of Northumberland ^note  which was indeed held by the Percy family, as fans of Henry VI Part 1 will know, but was an Earldom in The Black Adder and Blackadder II.
  • Lord Melchett in II and General Sir Anthony Hogmanay Melchett in Goes Forth.
  • Lord Flashheart in II and Goes Forth.
  • George is The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh MC in Goes Forth and Viscount George Bufton-Tufton in Back and Forth.
  • Lady Elizabeth in Back and Forth.
  • Baldrick becomes Lord Baldrick at the end of the first episode of Blackadder the Third, (although this is never mentioned again).
• Dame Edna Everage, who was given her damehood by the then Australian Prime Minister at the end of the second Barry McKenzie movie.
• Discworld:
  • The Ankh-Morpork honours system is based on the UK one, although complicated by the lack of a monarch. Most of the hereditary titles seem to date back to before the Civil War, but the Patricians have been quite prepared to grant life peerages. The most prominent noble title bestowed by the current Patrician is His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh, although Vimes himself — while absolutely hating all of them except Commander — has questioned whether the Duke isn't supposed to override the Sir, like an Ace beating a King in poker (it's explained by a diplomat that it does, but since they're going to Uberwald, a society which deeply values titles, it's best to play with a full deck). It's also revealed the Vimes family was nobility long ago up until Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes went and decapitated the last King — though it's implied that Suffer-Not-Injustice earned his title the same way his descendant did, given that Dragon King of Arms (a vampire) observes that he had input on the creation of his own coat of arms. He also uses Blackboard Monitor (he wiped the chalkboard clean after class) when dealing with dwarf protocol, who take learning rather seriously. Originally, he threw it in as a joke, and was taken aback when it was taken very, very seriously.
  • Nanny Ogg's Cookbook states that Lancre also has an honours system, but currently the highest honour is the Order of the Lancastrian Empire. Shawn Ogg was given an OLE for services to stopping the draughts in the castle. There used to be knights and dames, but a kingdom 40 miles wide tends not to have much of a landed gentry.
  • A title of some sort is always bestowed on those who become Guild heads. Mr Boggis, on becoming Head Thief, became Sir Josiah Boggis; and Doctor Downey, on acceding to the position of Chief Assassin, was honoured as Lord Downey.
  • Fan fiction set in the Discworld develops this theme. A.A. Pessimal introduced the idea of the Patrician's Hogswatch Honours List (following British practice, this comes around again on his birthday). Rimwards Howondalandian Assassin Doctor Johanna Smith-Rhodes is not amused to discover, reading the newspaper just before Hogswatch, that Vetinari has made her a Dame Of The Ankh-Morporkian Empire twice over. Once for services to zoology; and a second time because of the vexed issue of the heridetary Smith-Rhodes Baronetcy which has been hanging in abeyance since an ancestor of hers renounced it to fight on the rebel side in a colonial rebellion ''against'' Ankh-Morpork. Just to make sure, her husband Ponder Stibbons has been knighted. Making Johanna, an Ankh-Morporkian citizen by marriage, into a Ladyship. As her daughter points out, Vetinari really wanted to make sure at least one stuck. ^note giving this reluctant, republic-minded, recipient so many honours at once also sets up a very shaggy pun
  • Meanwhile, Grand Duke Nikolas Romanoff is stuck for what to do concerning the common-born son-in-law his daughter Olga has brought into the Family. Nikolas also notes his grandson Vassily is going to be, at some point, definitely Grand Duke and (potentially) a Tsar. At the prompting of Lady Sybil Ramkin,^note Who also advises him that Assassination is not an option Nikolas invokes protocol and makes Eddie into a Baron, just to regularise things.
• On Legends of Tomorrow, Ray Palmer helps save Camelot from Time Traveling bad guys, for which Queen Guinevere knights him "Sir Raymond of the Palms".
• The West Wing gives us Lord John Marbury. Or John, Lord Marbury. Or Lord Croy. The first two are used to refer to him in the series, and denote different ranks^note Lord John Marbury would be the younger son of a duke or Marquess; Lord Marbury would be the Duke, Marquess, Viscount, Earl or Baron of Marbury; the third would actually be the correct form of address if he is Earl Of Croy (as he says in the episode Dead Irish Writers). His various titles and forms of address are so hopelessly confused that you might as well call him Lord Fauntleroy, as Leo does.
• The Third Imperium in Traveller features noble titles based on the UK ones, albeit with an Emperor on top and no Kings or Queens (in the Imperial system, though individual planets are free to use their own titles — recognized as lesser than Imperial titles). It is possible for a Player Character to start as a Knight or Baron (possibly higher, with very good dice luck), though anyone below Duke is middle management at most. The justification for recreating nobility in the far future is to have people who are invested enough in the system that they will have learned how to manage Imperial interests, on the scene in case of emergency (while there is Faster Than Light travel, the Third Imperium can take over a year to cross, and messages travel at the speed of ship), so the primary way to gain a title is to do some noteworthy service to the Imperium.
• Roger Mellie (the foul-mouthed TV presenter in Viz) had an OBE ... but it was taken away after he was found to have stolen whisky and cigarettes from a supermarket. Roger was outraged, since it had cost him £5,000 to bribe the Labour Party in order to get it, and was even more outraged when he found that the Conservative Party, which had since taken power, was asking for a £7,000 bribe to reinstate the honour. Keen to retain his place in the celebrity hierarchy, he paid up.
• Bridgerton focuses around Regency high society:
  • Anthony Bridgerton is the Viscount Bridgerton. His widowed mother Violet is the Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton, and his younger siblings are all Misters and Misses Bridgerton, referred to as "The Honourable" when necessary. His sister Daphne is at one point referred to by a member of the royal court as a "commoner". It is acknowledged that what makes him such an eligible bachelor is not just the fact that he is a viscount, but that the Bridgertons are a very old, rich, and well-connected family (he's the 9th in Regency England).
  • The first season's bachelor du jour is Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. While he outranks Anthony, he also points out that his dukedom is very recent (his father was elevated to the title). Nevertheless, his very high social status (outranked only by the arrival of the foreign prince Friedrich) makes him a hot prospect in the marriage market, and Daphne is rightly considered to have married up when they get hitched.
  • Lord Featherington is a baron who is (a) running out of money and (b) has no direct male heir, putting his three daughters in danger.
  • Lady Mary Sharma is the daughter of an earl, so she is referred to as "Lady Mary" even after marrying a foreign commoner and leaving the ton in scandal.
• The Bones episode “The Yanks in the U.K.” has Lord Harry Bonham, Duke of Inmesford.

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