Sir Gervase Lucas' Company

Among guides for Colour design was Markham’s Souldiers Accidence which listed the virtues of each colour: yellow “betokeneth honour, or height of spirit”; blue “faith, constancy, or truth in affection”; red “justice, or noble worthy anger, in defence of religion or the oppressed”; green “good hope, or the accomplishment of holy and honourable actions”; black “wisdome and sobriety”; purple “fortitude with discretion, or a most true discharge of any trust reposed”; orange “merit or desert, and a foe to ingratitude”; white “signfieth innocencie, or purity of conscience, truth and upright integrity”; ermine “religion or holiness”; From these colours and their mixtures are derived many bastard and dishonourable colours, as carnation, orange tawny, popengie, &c. which signifie craft, pride and wantonness”. By this reconing Lucas’ were probably supposed to be shown by their Colours to be both honourable and faithful although many historians ascribe to the “linen chest theory” whereby hasty colonels are reconed to have rummaged through whatever was available to them in the house to make a Colour from!

Flag devices might be common heraldic symbols, symbols based upon the colonel's coat of arms, such as the cinquefoil of Sir Edward Stradling, or even a pun upon his name, as for the hounds on the Colours of Talbot’s Regiment. Common devices with heraldic equivalent names are listed below:

There has been a theory put forward that the flag and coat colours of regiments were always the same. It is extremely rare for regimental coat and flag colours to be known for the same date but a few instances are recorded where flag and coat coat colours for a given unit are mentioned and these sources clearly show the same colour theory to be unfounded. For instance at the Aldburne Chase muster on 19th April 1644 Symonds noted among others that Lord Hopton’s regiment wore blue coats but carried Red Colours.

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