Of the chapeaux upon which crests are represented in the early Garter plates the following facts may be observed. They are twenty in number of the eighty-six plates reproduced in Mr. St. John Hope's book. It should be noticed that until the end of the reign of Henry VIII. the Royal crest of the sovereign was always depicted upon a chapeau gules, lined with ermine. Of the twenty instances in which the chapeau appears, no less than twelve are representations of the Royal crest, borne by closely allied relatives of the sovereign, so that we have only eight examples from which to draw deductions. But of the twenty it should be pointed out that nineteen are peers, and the only remaining instance (Sir John Grey, K.G.) is that of the eldest son and heir apparent of a peer, both shield and crest being in this case boldly marked with the "label" of an eldest son. Consequently it is a safe deduction that whatever may have been the regulations and customs concerning the use of coronets, there can be no doubt that down to the end of the fifteenth century the use of a chapeau marked a crest as that of a peer. Of the eight non-Royal examples one has been repainted, and is valueless as a contemporary record. Of the remaining seven, four are of the conventional gules and ermine. One only has not the ermine lining, that being the crest of Lord Fanhope. It is plainly the Royal crest "differenced" (he being of Royal but illegitimate descent), and probably the argent in lieu of ermine lining is one of the intentional marks of distinction. The chapeau of Lord Beaumont is azure, semé-de-lis, lined ermine, and that of the Earl of Douglas is azure lined ermine, this being in each case in conformity with the mantling. Whilst the Beaumont family still use this curiously coloured chapeau with their crest, the Douglas crest is now borne (by {381} the Duke of Hamilton) upon one of ordinary tinctures. Chapeaux, other than of gules lined ermine, are but rarely met with, and unless specifically blazoned to the contrary a cap of maintenance is always presumed to be gules and ermine. About the Stuart period the granting of crests upon chapeaux to others than peers became far from unusual, and the practice appears to have been frequently adopted prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of these crest chapeaux, however, were not of gules. An instance of this kind will be found in the grant in 1667 to Sir Thomas Davies, then one of the sheriffs of the City of London, but afterwards (in 1677) Lord Mayor. The crest granted was: "On a chapeau sable, turned up or, a demi-lion rampant of the last." The reason for the grant at that date of such a simple crest and the even more astonishingly simple coat of arms ["Or, a chevron between three mullets pierced sable"] has always been a mystery to me.