The original Millett coat of arms was granted
by William
Camden, Clarenceux King of Arms, to John Millet of Hayes Court, Hayes,
Middlesex in 1616.[1]
See fig. 1.
Blazon
Arms: Argent
a fess gules between three dragons’ heads erased vert.
Crest: Out
of a mural coronet an arm in pale, habited or, grasping in a glove argent a dragon’s
head erased vert.[2]
The mural coronet or crown was often used in
the arms of
distinguished soldiers, with the wall originally signifying the taking of a
walled city.
See figs. 2-4.
Milletts
of Perivale,
Middlesex [3]
The Milletts of Hayes were probably a branch
of the Perivale
Milletts, descended from one of the sons of Henry Millet or Myllet,
who died on 5 February 1500 at Perivale.
Henry Millet was several times constable of Perivale (Greenford Parva),
and his brass in Perivale Church shows that he left three sons and six
daughters by his first wife Alice,
and three sons and three daughters by his second wife Joanna. According to Brown’s
The chronicles of Greenford Parva,
the Perivale Millett arms were “a lion passant above a cross like that of St.
Andrew, which are the arms of Millet”.[4] The Milletts of Perivale, descended
from
Henry Millet, appear to have come to an end with Elizabeth Millett of Perivale,
who died on 20 April 1655 at Agmondesham, Buckinghamshire. She married twice: first Sir
Thomas Knightley, and secondly John
Lane of the Inner Temple and of Rosehall, Sarratt, Hertfordshire.
Milletts
of Hayes
Court, Middlesex
John
Millett of
Hayes Court, who died before 21 October 1571, married Alice Lyon of Twifford
(Twyford), Middlesex, whose will was dated
21 October 1571 and proved on 22 February 1572.
Alice was the daughter of Henry
Lyon of Ruislip, Middlesex (born 1495) and Dorothy ?, and sister of Richard
Lyon of West Twyford, who was first cousin and heir of Sir John Lyon, Lord
Mayor of London in 1554, who died on 8
September 1564; Richard Lyon’s second
wife was Isabel Millett, the sister
of his brother-in-law John Millett.
Richard Lyon died on 17 March 1579 at Twyford.
John Millett and Alice Lyon has four sons, the
eldest of
whom was Richard Millett of Hayes
Court, whose will was dated 30 December 1594 and proved on 3 February
1595. Richard Millett married Mary
Page, daughter of William Page of Sidbury in the Parish
of Harrow-on-the-Hill, Middlesex, who was buried on 29 November 1558 at Harrow,
and Isabell Shepherd, daughter of Thomas
Shepherd of Kingesbury Hill,
Middlesex.[5]
Richard Millett and Mary Page had four
sons and four
daughters. The eldest, John Millett
of Hayes Court, to whom
the coat of arms was granted in 1616, was the Lord of the Manor there in
1613. His will was dated 1628. He
married Thomasin Driwood of Essex, and had two children: John
Millett, who died without issue and whose will was dated 1651; and Elizabeth
Millett, who married George Page,
draper of Coleman Street, London who was living in 1634 and was a member of the
Worshipful Company of Drapers.
John Millett of Hayes Court was elder brother
of Richard Millett of Denham, Buckinghamshire
who died in 1638. Other siblings
included Randall Millett of Denham,
Buckinghamshire, a skinner of London whose will was dated 1631; Isabel
Millett, whose will was dated 1649; Anne
Millett, whose will was dated 1611
and who married Allan Hendre of
Egham, Surrey; and Mary Millett
who married Edward
Horde, an ironmonger of London.
See fig. 5.
Early
use of arms
Elizabeth
Millett
of Perivale, referred to above, died on 20 April 1655 at Agmondesham,
Buckinghamshire. Her monument at
Perivale shows the Millett arms, rather than those of her husbands: Argent,
a fess gules between three dragons’ heads erased vert.[6]
The Millett arms are also inscribed on a stone
obelisk in St
Hilary churchyard, marking the grave of Humphrey
Millett of Enys, Cornwall, who was born in 1744/45 and died on 16 November
1774.[7]
See fig. 6.
Quartered
arms
On 1 September 1798 at St Anne’s, Limehouse,
London, Richard Millett (1770-1826), eldest son
of John Millett of Bosavern
(1724-1793) and Dorcas Trevorian
(1724-1799), married Sarah Towers
(1774-1810), the only daughter and sole heiress of John Towers (1738-1797) and
Ann
Turner (1746-1830). As a consequence
of this marriage the original Millett arms of 1616 were quartered with those of
Towers.
See fig. 7.
Blazon
Arms: Quarterly,
1st and 4th
quarters Argent a fess gules between three
dragons’ heads erased vert, for Millett;
2nd and 3rd
quarters Sable on a chevron argent
between three towers of the second as many pellets of the first.[8]
Crest: Out
of a mural coronet an arm in pale, habited or, grasping in a glove argent a dragon’s
head erased vert.
Motto:
Manus haec inimica tyrannis = This hand is hostile to tyrants or
(more poetically) This hand brooks no tyranny
It is not known when
this motto was added to the Millett arms.
Burke’s General armory [9]
and Fairbairn’s Book of crests [10] attribute the motto to Leigh
of Standishgate near Wigan, Lancastershire.
According to Boutell’s
Heraldry, “the inheritance of arms is restricted to heirs who are lineally
descended from the first lawful possessor of those arms”.[11]
Since Richard Millett was not lineally
descended from John Millet of Hayes, it is not clear under what authority Richard
inherited the 1616 Millett of Hayes Court arms.
However, from the date of his marriage in 1798 the quartered Millett
arms were passed on to succeeding descendants of the Millett of Bosavern line.
The well-known Penzance genealogist and antiquarian
George Bown Millett (1842-1896) used
the quartered arms in his book-plate.
See fig. 8.
[1] Foster,
Joseph. Grantees of arms named in docquets
and patents between the years 1687 and 1898,
preserved in various manuscripts, collected and alphabetically arranged by the
late Joseph Foster and contained in the Additional ms. no. 37,149, in the
British Museum. Edited by W. Harry
Rylands. London, Harleian Society,
1915. (Publications of the Harleian
Society, vol. 66) p. 172.
[2] Burke, Sir Bernard. The general armory of England,
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; comprising a registry of armorial bearings from
the earliest to the present time.
London, Heraldry Today, 1984, p. 687.
Burke attributes these arms to Millett of Denham, Buckinghamshire and of
Middlesex, not to Millett of Hayes Court, whose arms are given as Azure a fess dancettée
(another, a lion passant guardant) between
three birds or.
[3] Main sources for this and the following
section are: Evans, Charles. Millett,
of Hayes, Middlesex. Notes
and Queries n.s. v. 10 no. 11,
November 1963, p. 403-405; Stinchfield,
John Clark. History of the town of Leeds,
Androscoggin County, Maine, from its
settlement, June 10, 1780. Lewiston,
Me, Press of Lewiston Journal, 1901, p. 41-43;
Brown, John Allen. The chronicles
of Greenford Parva; or,
Perivale, past and present. London,
J. S. Virtue, 1890, p. 78; Mundy, Richard.
Middlesex pedigrees, as collected by Richard Mundy in Harleian ms. no.
1551; edited by Sir George John
Armytage. London, Harleian Society,
1914. (Publications of the Harleian
Society, vol. 65) p. 138.
[4] Brown, op.
cit. p. 73.
[5] St George, Sir Henry. The
visitation of London, anno domini 1633, 1634, and 1635. Edited by Joseph
Jackson Howard. Volume 2.
London, Harleian Society, 1883.
(Publications of the Harleian Society, vol. 17) p. 138.
[6] Evans, op. cit. p. 403.
[7] Polsue, Joseph.
A
complete parochial history of the County of Cornwall. Truro, William Lake,
1867-1872. 4 v.
Vol. 2, p. 189.
[8] Burke, op.
cit. p. 1022.
[9] Burke, op.
cit. p. 598.
[10] Fairbairn, James.
Fairbairn’s
book of crests of the families of Great Britain and Ireland. 4th
edition. London, T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1905.
2 v.
Vol. 1 part 2, p. 34.
[11] Boutell, Charles.
Boutell’s
heraldry. Revised by J. P.
Brooke-Little. Rev. ed. London,
F, Warne, 1978, p. 131.
January 2015
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