War II. In 1953 Maclagan was made an Officer Brother of the Venerable Order of Saint John, and served as a Gold Staff Officer at the Coronation and as a Green Staff Officer at the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. In 1970, he was appointed Portcullis Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary at the College of Arms. He held this post for 10 years until his promotion to the office of Richmond Herald on 14 July 1980. Maclagan held this last office until his retirement in 1989, at the age of 75. Scholarship Maclagan was characterised by his obituary-writer in The Times as an antiquary, rather than an historian. Patric Dickinson, in the Independent, called him "the quintessential Oxford don – a scholar of the old school, erudite, antiquarian and stylish", who "seemed to have strayed from an earlier age". He had an eclectic range of historical interests spanning all periods (particularly, but far from exclusively, in the fields of genealogy, heraldry and bibliography); he was more concerned with arcane detail, for which he had a remarkable memory, than with grand narrative; and he tended to pursue topics and projects which appealed to him, rather than those which might advance his career. All this meant that he published less than he might have done. He was a proficient linguist, fluent in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Serbo-Croat, and with some knowledge of Arabic. His first book, in 1949, was a translation of part of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Many of his core interests were genealogical. He had a longstanding expertise in the history of the medieval Anglo-Norman family of de Clare, although little of this came to print. His principal foray into modern history was a well-received biography of a kinsman (through his mother), the first Earl Canning, who was Governor-General of India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and first Viceroy of India. He is best known to students of royal and noble genealogies and royal families as co-author (with Jiří Louda, who compiled and drew the tables, while Maclagan wrote the text) of the best-selling Lines of Succession, first published in 1981, and subsequently reprinted and revised on several occasions. He was also interested in Byzantine history, and in 1968 published a history of Constantinople. For many years he spent part of his summer vacation as a popular lecturer on