Camden and the Life of Arms

There could hardly be a more appropriate penultimate phase to Camden's career than that of herald and King of Arms. That the man who had Edmund Spenser as one of his first encomiasts should be sworn into the College of Arms by the Fox himself, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in the year that Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, became Earl Marshal, suggests some larger pattern at work in the shaping of his life. Before looking at the details of Camden's appointment and duties, we must stop to explore this appropriateness and the wider implications of Camden's involvement in the world of arms.

The literature of the period provides a useful lens for viewing Camden's work as a herald. The theme of chivalry that informs Spenser's Elizabethan epic, The Faerie Queene, was the subject of Camden's life and work for a quarter of a century. Camden's office as herald is a reminder (if we need one) that “arms” and “honour” were vital elements in the life of the privileged classes in the Renaissance. They were also essential components in the romantic epic, and were not just “literary” ornaments. Their reach went beyond literature and the armigerous. In complex ways, they were integral to the age and its ideologies; they provided the semiotics by which men and women negotiated personal and social identities and by which court society managed the processes of change.