Hi all,

I am attaching a jpeg of the arms of Sir Timothy Lowe of Bromley Kent. The portarit which the arms are on had been handed down through the family, unfortunately, during the passage of time, his identity had been forgotten, and therefore the College of Arms was asked to identify the arms. Luckily the portrait has the information that the subject was age 55 in 1603. The arms are on a portrait dated 1603 and the following information is from Richmond Herald:

"The quarterly shield and crest were recorded for a family named Fifield alias Lowe at the Visitations of Kent in 1619 and Gloucestershire in 1623.--------- ( The reason you weren't able to identify it quickly yourself is that the bend is meant to be engrailed, which is by no means clear from the portrait).

The first and second quarterings were confirmed to Timothy Lowe of Bromley, Kent by Robert Cooke, Clarenceux King of Arms, in 1592, the crest being granted at the same time. We have a full copy of the text of the document by which Cooke gave, granted, ratified and confirmed the arms and crest. This states that Timothy Lowe's great grandfather was for the most part known as Richard Fishyd alias Lowe but that at the end of his life he used the alternative name of Fifield rather than Fishyd and that his descendants subsequently used the name Fifield alias Lowe.

The prenominal coat in fact consists of the arms of the Fishyd family from whom Richard is supposed to have descended. There is evidence to suggest that Timothy and other members of the family were using different arms prior to 1592. The second quartering represents the family of Richard's wife. The third quartering evidently relates to the Lacy family to which Timothy's mother belonged, and the fourth and fifth must have been brought in via the Lacy's. More reseach could be done into the individual quarterings, but this would not affect the basic identification.

The presence of the Lacy quartering means that there are only two individuals of the right generation whose arms could be those on the portrait. Timothy Lowe and his younger brother Thomas, both of whom were knighted in 1603. Timothy on 23 July and Thomas on 26 July (being among the thousand or so knights James I created in the first year of his reign). On present evidence, I think the subject of the portrait is rather more likely to have been Timothy than Thomas, for the following two reasons:

1. Our records include a funeral certificate for Sir Thomas Lowe, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1604-5 and died in 1623. In the painting of his arms, both the Fishyd quartering and the falcon are charged with a crescent, the cadency mark of a second son. Cadency marks were more widely used at that period than they are today, so one might expect a portrait of Sir Thomas to include a crescent in his arms. But it remains possible that he used the arms without any such mark.

2. In your letter, you said that the inscription of the portrait read 'aetat 55 in 1603'. G. E. Cocayne, in his 'Lord Mayors and Sherrifs of the City of London' states that Sir Thomas Lowe was born in 1550 and was 73 when he died in 1623. If this is correct, then Thomas's age doesn't fit, whereas his older brother could presumably have been aet. 55 in 1603. However, Cocayne does not give his source for the supposed death age of 73 and rather confusingly goes on to quote the MI for Sir Thomas in St Peter le Poer, London (as recorded by Stow), which gives the death age as 78. (The printed registers of St Margaret Moses, Friday Street, indicate that Thomas Lowe married Ann Coulston in 1576.)

So far I have been unable to locate any evidence of Sir Timothy Lowe's likely birthdate. He died in 1617 and was buried at Bromley. His surname is recorded in most instances simply as Lowe, but both the PCC index and Cokayne suggest that he used Fishide as an alias."

I hope this is of interest to some of you.

Regards,

Ann Sadler