Note 58 — Chapter XVIII · GOVERNMENT UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Of course the Queen cannot prevent a man from receiving a Foreign decoration, and he can wear it in Society without incurring prosecution, just as he might, if vulgar enough, wear a masonic star of the cheeseplate order of architecture on his breast. But he cannot wear it at Court, and the grievance of the British snob is that the Queen’s objection to his accepting a Foreign Order prevents Foreign Governments—except semi-barbarous ones—from bestowing it on him. Queen Elizabeth said that “she did not like her dogs to wear any collar but her own.” It is not so generally known that the Queen’s grandfather, George III., whose metaphors were usually of a more pastoral character than those of the great Tudor Princess, expressed the same feeling when he said that he “liked his sheep to wear his own mark.”