The Stacpoole info came from a poor Google-translation of a biography in French on the web.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=...

I did find an article explaining the papal orders and titles rather well. I'm not sure I completely understand it, but it seems as though you could buy a title from the Pope, at least until 1964.

http://www.maineworldnewsservice.com/caltrap/still.htm

"...Fortunately, there was the Holy Father, the head of Christianity. As temporal sovereign of the Vatican State and spiritual sovereign of the world’s Catholics, this sovereignty enabled him to reward, by means of various distinctions, the faithful who had served the Holy Church well.
There were three types of such distinctions:
- the admission to an order of chivalry,
- medals,
- nobiliary titles."

"The Holy Father, as a sovereign, conceded nobiliary titles to whomever he pleased and drew up the patent how he saw fit. The Pontiff conferred the titles of prince, duke, marquis, count, (the most frequent) viscount (only one known), baron and noble. The titles were mostly ad personam but could be hereditary by order of primogeniture either for all male descendants or for the descendants of either sex. The Pope also granted arms to families and issued briefs recognizing and confirming ancient titles."

I found this info on Wikipedia:
"If a bishop is a diocesan bishop, it is customary for him to combine his arms with the arms of the diocese following normal heraldic rules.[16] This combining is termed marshalling, and is normally accomplished by impalement, placing the arms of the diocese to the viewer's left (dexter in heraldry) and the personal arms to the viewer's right."

If that is the case, could this be the "purchased" arms of the Bishop Stacpoole? (His family arms on the sinister, some sort of Papal association on the dexter?) He did indeed have issue, having become a priest later in life. I didn't know that was legal, but I'm Episcopalian, so what do I know?

-Julie K