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Segar, Sir William
(bur Richmond, Surrey, 11 Dec 1633). English herald and painter. He is said to have been trained as a scrivener and may have been a son of Francis Nycholson, alias Seager, who became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company in 1557. A Jacob Seager, stationer, was living in the London parish of St Andrew, Holborn, early in the 17th century, and William was in another Holborn parish, St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (the registers do not survive from before the Fire of London in 1666), at about the same time. William Segar entered the College of Arms under the patronage of Sir Thomas Heneage in 1585; he was appointed to the principal office, Garter King of Arms, in 1607 and was knighted in 1616. His career as a herald is well documented and some fine examples of his heraldic painting survive (especially London, BL). In 1586 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, persuaded him to act as master of ceremonies at the Earl’s observance of St George’s Day in Utrecht, and in 1596 he accompanied Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, to Rouen for the investiture of Henry IV of France with the Order of the Garter. In 1590 he published anonymously a heraldic treatise, the Booke of Honor and Armes, and in 1602 he brought out an expanded and illustrated version, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I and entitled Honor, Military and Civill, in which the engravings by William Rogers (i) are probably after his own drawings. A portrait of Segar engraved by Francis Delaram forms the frontispiece in some copies.
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