The Lieutenancy badges

What the badge is

A Deputy Lieutenant is an honorary Crown appointment. Deputy Lieutenants assist the Lord-Lieutenant in representing the Monarch within their county, and are appointed by the Lord-Lieutenant for distinguished service to that community.

The badge of office is what identifies them. It carries a national floral emblem, and the emblem changes with the nation: the Tudor Rose for England, the Thistle for Scotland, the Prince of Wales Feathers for Wales and the Shamrock for Northern Ireland. The Vice Lord-Lieutenant’s badge is distinguished from the Deputy Lieutenant’s by its ribbon, and a badge made for a lady hangs from a bow rather than from the neck.

How we make them

The Lieutenancy has military origins reaching back to the reign of Henry VIII, and the badge has been re-drawn rather than replaced across that history, which is why a re-design is a delicate job. We are working inside a form that has to stay recognisable to people who already wear the previous version.

Four national emblems mean four sets of tooling and four sets of enamel colours, all of which have to agree in weight and finish so that two Deputy Lieutenants from different nations, standing together, are wearing the same badge in two forms rather than two different badges.

The plates below are from the earlier design and from the related badges of the Lieutenancy — the Vice Lord-Lieutenant’s and the Lady Lord-Lieutenant’s. The first three are the design drawings in gouache rather than photographs of finished badges. In the plates that follow, the badges made for a lady carry a crown above the emblem and hang from a bow; those on a gentleman’s neck ribbon do not. The Deputy Lieutenant’s badge as it stands after 2023 is not pictured here.