Esquire

‘I’m a learned doctor,’ cried my husband, pulling at the hems of his tweed coat and doing a little jig. He’d heard that Jacob Rees-Mogg had directed his office to use Esq of all non-titled males.

There’s something of the Charles Pooter about Esquire. Its last redoubt had been envelopes from the Inland Revenue. Since it became HM Revenue & Customs, honorifics have melted away.

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Americans use Esquire principally of attorneys, who do creep into British notions of those reckoned by courtesy gentlemen, and hence called Esquire.

Deploying Esquire is a question of U and non-U language; the higher snobbism currently favours its disuse. But when Shakespeare and his father were granted arms, they were recognised as gentlemen. I’ve read that in Stratford, out of a population of 2,200, 45 were accounted gentlemen between 1570 and 1630. By then, to be armigerous was to be an esquire.