STARS: Douglas Arms in France (Updated May 30, 2018)

The Sibiville arms. The timing
makes sense only as influence
from Douglas to Sibiville. Vice 
versa would be of more interest. 

I have been searching for the origins of the stars in the Stars and Stripes. I have gotten as far as the Douglas and Moray coats of arms and Scottish ancestors of George Washington.

George Washington's ancestors got their name from the town of Washington in Durham County in the north of England. Washington is today a suburb of Newcastle in the metropolitan County of Tyne and Wear.

The gules (red) mullets and bars on the Washington arms are, I have asserted, a probable echo of and homage to the Douglas arms, with Scotland's St Andrew's azure (blue) switched by the English knight to England's St George's gules (red).

The first member of the Washington family to take the name Wessyngton/Washington was Sir William de Hertburn. One source says, with little backup, he was of French origin. Another says, with great detail, that he was of Scottish origin.

In late September 2016 I have been in France and have been hunting around among the étoiles in French coats of arms to see if the Douglas or Washington arms are connected with families in France. Heraldry was largely brought over from Normandy by William the Conqueror, and I thought that a search of French heraldry records might produce something useful. The only museum in France devoted exclusively to heraldry (science héraldique) is the Musée des Blasons in Saint Jean Devalériscle near Alès north of Montpelier. Rather than make this trip, I relied heavily on what is available in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and French heraldic websites.

Looking among the arms of the various communes in France, I find that 754 of them have étoiles in them. I have looked at each one of them and have picked out coats of arms that look like the Douglas or Washington arms. I am left with 30 coats of arms in my to-look-at list. I am mainly interested in the older arms of Douglas, i.e., a row of three argent (silver) stars in a row in chief (across the top), without the heart that was added after the death of the Good Sir James Douglas.

The connection could be interesting whichever way the influence goes, assuming there is a connection that is not just accidental:

1. What would be most interesting would be a French commune that had a knight living in it with stars in his coat of arms. This could be a clue to why the Douglas (and Moray) arms include stars. The five-pointed silver stars are of special interest because these are the stars in the Douglas arms.
2. Less interesting, the Douglas arms have been used by French communes as the basis for its arms because of some association of descendants of the Good Sir James Douglas. One such descendant – Archibald Douglas, the 4th Earl of Douglas – fought in France and in 1424 was given the title of Duc de Touraine (in the Tours region).
3. There may be a common thread influencing both the emergence of the Douglas family and the commune.

I end up with three interesting groupings of Douglas-related arms by canton (county):

• Ardennes (on the border with Belgium, east of Pas de Calais) – Amblimont, Doux and Lametz. 
• Corrèze (interior southwest France, the Dordogne) – Beaumont (gold stars), Margerides (1986), St Remy and St Fereole.
• Pas de Calais (northwest France near Belgium; Flanders territory) – Leulinghem (red stars and stripes) and Sibiville (post-Sir James Douglas heart included in the arms, so clearly the link is from Douglas to Sibiville). The Comtes de Douglas apparently had lived for generations as seigneurs of Sibiville in 1747.

Here are members of the Douglas family who have lived in France and whose existence might have been the reason for the Douglas stars in a commune coat of arms:

Archibald Douglas, 4th Earl of Douglas, Duke of Touraine, buried with his son, Sir James Douglas in Saint Gatien's Cathedral, Tours, following the Battle of Verneuil 1424. Archibald was named Duke of Touraine before his death in 1424, in gratitude for the assistance to the future Charles VII of France by the Scottish army led by Archibald, killed at the Battle of Verneuil in August 1424.

Archibald Douglas, Earl of Wigtown (d. 1438), was awarded the title of Comte de Longueville along with his son William Douglas, 6th Earl of Douglas (d. 1440).  Known by French chroniclers as Victon (after Wigton), he also received the honorary title of Seigneurie (Lord) of Dun-le-Roi, a Marshal of France.

Other Douglases in France: 

Adam Douglas, governor of castle and town of Tours, 27 May 1424. He was a cousin of Archibald, 4th Earl of Douglas

Antoine Douglas, chevalier, seigneur de Richagnard en Bugey et de Ployart en Picardie, Governor of Montreal Chateau

Charles Archambault Douglas (Sir), Count of Suze, Captain King's Infantry Regiment

Charles Douglas, Lord of Arrancy–built Ferme du Maipas

Charles Guillaume Douglas (Captain), Drummond regiment

Charles Joseph Douglas was appointed Governor of Saint-Claude in 1751.

Charles Joseph Douglas, Lord of Mépillat, Chiloup and Hautepierre acquired Montreal for 60,000 pounds 13 Apr 1757

Charles, Comte de Douglas, syndic of the nobility of Bugey

d'Hortore Douglas (Captain) in the regiment de Languedoc

Francois-Prosper Douglas, Chevalier de Douglas, (21 Feb. 1725-26 April 1781)

Gabriel, Esquire, Lord of Saint-Jacques, c. 1668

Guillaume Douglas (c.1420),

James Charles Douglas-Whyte, died 3 Apr 1885, Finistère, Bretagne, France

Jean Douglas (c1450), son of Guillaume, and Alain Douglas, son of Jean, Seigneur de Prastulo/Pratulot and Châteauneuf

John Douglas, Esquire, Lord of Chateauneuf, c.1550

Joseph Hyacinthe Duglas Arrancy admitted knight justice to the priory of France, born Feb. 11, 1664, baptized May 26 1664 in the parish church of the diocese of Laon Arrancy.

Leonel, Esquire, Lord of Ployart, c. 1632.

Louis Douglas, Lord of Ployart, c. 1567.

Marc Douglas - Seigneur de Saint-Jacques, Seigneur de Longueuil, Seigneur d'Arrancy,  Seigneur de La Suze, Vicomte d'Amifontaine

Oliver Douglas, Esquire, Lord & Ployart Arrancy of Picardy (?Lord of Ployart) c.1550

Olivier Douglas, died 1558, son of Gilles.

Philippe Douglas, died 1763,

Valentine Douglas OSB, appointed Bishop of Laon, France, in 1580, in which position he served until his death on 5 Aug 1598; he built the Chateaux d'errancy.

William Douglas (Sir William) of Drumlanrig and William Douglas of Kinross helped Joan of Arc and were buried with a plaque in their memory in the nave of Orléans Cathedral Sainte-Crois.

Related Posts: Oxford Stars

BIRTHDAY: June 16–Adam Smith, Balliol, Oxford

Adam Smith

Adam Smith was born in 1723 this day - based on the newer (Gregorian) calendar - in Kircaldy, Fife, Scotland. His contribution to the American Revolution was to provide an economic rationale for the overthrow of foreign domination.

To the French Physiocrats' idea that some labor is productive and other labor unproductive, Smith added the idea that trade broadens the market, thereby allowing more division of labor, which makes labor more productive.

Smith entered the University of Glasgow in 1737, at the age of 14, and studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson, a professorial star of the time, who taught philosophy with the vigor of a preacher.

From Glasgow, Smith went to Balliol College, Oxford on an Exhibition/Scholarship endowed by his fellow Scot, John Snell. Of his Oxford career, we may note two basic facts:

• Smith was not impressed by Oxford. The teaching quality at Oxford, he later wrote (in Book V, Chapter II of The Wealth of Nations), was poor because the dons were given excessive and secure incomes - making it unnecessary for them to attract students. For Smith, orthodox Church-of-England Oxford was a comedown from the buzz of Glasgow, where the Scottish Enlightenment was shaking up the intellectual landscape. When Smith was caught reading fellow Scotsman David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1738)–an exposition of Hume's Utilitarian Philosophy–his copy of the book was confiscated and he was severely punished. Smith spent his happiest time on the other side of Trinity College, reading at the Bodleian Library. Smith left Oxford in 1746, before his scholarship ended.

• Balliol College, on the other hand, was impressed by Smith. The College still glories in the fact that the founder of the economics profession once resided there, however unhappily. Smith is described as the college's most famous alumnus. Balliol was selected to receive the Snell Scholarship not because of any special distinction at the time in the college's scholarship, but rather because of its Scottish connections. The college was founded (in principle) by a Scotsman, John I de Balliol, at the urging of the Bishop of Durham. However, the establishment of the college did not occur until after his death - when his widow, Dervorguilla of Galloway, confirmed a significant transfer of funds. Their son John became King of Scotland but was challenged and left Britain to seek the protection of the Pope. Every November, Balliol has a Snell Dinner that includes representatives from the University of Glasgow and Balliol's sister college at Cambridge, St. John's.

After leaving Oxford, Smith delivered a successful series of public lectures at the University of Edinburgh, where two years later he befriended Hume. For the next 13 years, he taught at the University of Glasgow, becoming first a professor of logic in 1751 and then a year later, when the position opened up because of the death of the incumbent, of moral philosophy. Besides Hume in Edinburgh, who named Smith his executor, Smith's friends included a variety of Glasgow academics and merchants. Smith's literary executors were chemist-physicist Joseph Black and noted geologist James Hutton.

Smith's first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was a well-received analysis of the essence of human morality. It depends on sympathy between the person who is acting and a spectator, i.e., sympathy between the individual and other members of society. Smith argued that the basis of "moral sentiments" is "mutual sympathy", which we would today be more likely to call "empathy".

His second book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) had greater influence because it had clearer policy implications. Smith shows that the marketplace is not moral itself, but produces a moral outcome because the pursuit of individual self-interest leads, as if by an "invisible hand," to the Holy Grail of the Utilitarians - the greatest good of the greatest number.

Based on Utilitarian principles, Smith opposed monopolies and government efforts to create or preserve them, preferring competition to maximize consumer welfare. His opposition to monopoly was hugely influential in providing theoretical support to public grievances against the British Crown (and later in France against the French Crown).

Smith was against most government regulation of business but he was not anti-tax. He favored progressive taxes - not just taxation "in proportion to their respective abilities," but something more:

The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

However, his anti-mercantilist ideas - built on those of the Physiocrats - were easily be spun into anti-imperial and therefore anti-imperial-tax rhetoric.

Although The Wealth of Nations did not appear until the American Revolution was under way, Smith's ideas were already percolating among the Founding Fathers. Starting in 1763, Smith travelled as a tutor to Toulouse, France, where he stayed for a year and a half. He then moved on to Geneva, where he met with the philosopher Voltaire, and Paris, where Smith came to know Benjamin Franklin, as well as economists like François Quesnay, leader of the Physiocrats, and his followers, including Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune. Franklin could not have better tutelage for making an economic case against new British laws directed at the colonies.

Quesnay and the Physiocrats provided the anti-mercantilist motif of the Wealth of Nations. Their motto favoring marketplace freedom was "Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" (Let it be and let it pass, the world goes on by itself!). Smith, following the Physiocrats, argued that the cause of increase in national wealth is labor, rather than the nation's quantity of gold or silver, which was the mercantilist focus. This argument was used by the American Revolutionaries to argue against oversight and taxation from London. It was also later used by French Revolutionaries, with specific additions from Jean-Baptiste Say, to argue against the necessity of the French aristocracy, with unfortunate consequences for the aristocracy and, in due course, France.

The aristocracy and the church - and even the standing army - were viewed by Adam Smith as unproductive. The distinction between productive and unproductive labour (the "class steril" of the Physiocrats) was a rallying cry of both the American and the French Revolution. To the Physiocrat idea that unproductive labour should be pushed back, Smith added the idea that productive labor is made more productive by deeper division of labor, which is "limited by the extent of the market." Every country should try to broaden its market to deepen the division of labor.

Smith never married. On his death bed, he said he was disappointed he had not achieved more.