THE INVESTITURE

The Investiture is the evening on which the year’s new members are received, held once a year in late December in a private room in New York, taken for the night: each is presented by the member who proposed them, signs the book, and is seated at the table for the first time as one of the company.

It exists so that a new member’s first evening as one of the company is spent at its table.

Received into the Company

Investiture comes from the Latin in and vestire, “dress”, from vestis, a robe. It is “a formal installation ceremony” marking membership in a religious house, an order of chivalry or an office, and the new member “may receive (or be ’invested with’) an outward symbol or marker of their membership”: a habit, a decoration, a badge, a veil. In Britain about 2,600 people a year are invested with honours, in some twenty-five ceremonies, most of them in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace or the Grand Reception Room at Windsor.

The older form was the accolade, “the central act in the rite of passage ceremonies conferring knighthood in the Middle Ages.” The word, in English by 1591, comes through the French accolée, an embrace, from the Latin collum, the neck. A knight was first girded with a sword, or given golden spurs; the blow to the neck that went with it was later softened into “a light blow with the sword”.

The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348 under the motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense”, keeps the form in full. “Each June, on Garter Day, the members of the Order, wearing their habits and garter insignia, meet at Windsor Castle,” and new members are invested that morning in the Throne Room. Two senior knights or ladies assist the Sovereign, “placing the garter around the left leg of the new knight, or left arm of the new lady”, and fasten the riband, the mantle and the collar; an oath is sworn and the admonitions read. Each knight’s stall plate stays in St George’s Chapel for good.

Clubs came at it another way. Since the seventeenth century many gentlemen’s clubs have elected by ballot, a white ball for and a black ball against, to “preserve the current ethos of the club by ensuring that candidates are congenial to (almost) all the existing members”, and in secret, because “a public difference of opinions could be divisive.” Larger clubs often ask two black balls to exclude, or leave the vote to a committee.

The Court keeps none of the regalia. It has no habit, no garter and no sword. A new member is presented by a friend, writes a name in the book, and sits down to dinner.

The Evening

One evening in late December, in a private room in New York taken for the night. The Court keeps no house of its own.

The year’s new members are received.

Each is presented by the member who proposed them.

Each signs the book.

Each is seated at the table for the first time as one of the company.

What Is Asked

White tie. Nothing is published for a private room; Debrett’s calls white tie “the most formal event code, and the rarest”, and the Court keeps it for the evening its company grows.

Nobody is pitched at the table.

The Places

The number of places and the sum are stated in the invitation.

The Court’s Black Tie Dinner is held earlier in the month.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.