Usage of "Your Excellency"

In historical fiction I sometimes encounter “Your Excellency” or “His Excellency” as a form of address or referral to the president, prime minister, or other nonroyal chief executive of a nation-state, or the governor of a province. It was applied to President Lincoln a couple of times in the TV adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln. And, of course, to Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup! :slight_smile: (In C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the slovenly governor of the Lone Islands uses the humbler title of “His Sufficiency.”)

  1. When was the first recorded usage of “Your Excellency”?

  2. How did the form originate?

  3. When did it pass out of usage?

  4. Is it still in use anywhere?

I’m not sure of the answers to questions 1-3, but *His/Her Excellency * is still the formal title accorded to the various vice-regal representatives in Australia, namely the Governor-General of the Commonwealth and the Governors of the states.

I imagine that the same applies for the Canadian Governor-General. I’m not sure about the provincial vice-regal repesentatives.

Our GovGen is Her Excellency.

LtGovs are His/Her Honour.

HE is also accorded to the Governor-General of New Zealand.

When in doubt, use ‘Your Excellency.’ It is rarely wrong when addressing senior officials and always welcomed.

He is a bishop, she is an ambassador, they are earls. Just call them all ‘Your Excellency.’ The earls will smile, but nobody will be offended.

New England governors have to style of Excellency, but they rarely use it. The President of the United States isn’t styled Excellency domestically. In foreign countries and at the UN he (hopefully she soon) is styled Excellency. Letters of credence use it too. In the past Excellency may have been used as a gesture of respect, but it never had official status. In 1789 when the 1st Congress was debating the President’s style (they came up things like Elective Majesty & Patriotic Higness) Washington decided that he wanted to be addressed simply as Mr President and ended the debate.

It goes back to the medieval period. Just about all nobility was “your Excellency”. (Dukes are “Your Grace’, but Dukes started out as bothers to the King, and are thus 'royalty”).

Here’s a style guide:

If you join Amnesty International, you get to write to all sorts of people who like to be adressed as “Your Excellency”. Colonel Gaddafi is one of them.

Forgot to mention - the reason for the difference in Canada is that the Gov Gen is appointed directly by the Queen and is her direct representative at the federal level. The LtGovs are appointed by the GovGen, and are not Her Majesty’s direct represenatives, hence “Honour” not “Excellency”.

My understanding is that in Australia the state governors are appointed directly by the Queen and are her direct reps, so I assume that’s why they get “Excellency.”

That’s basically it. The state governors are the Queen’s representatives in each state. They’re appointed directly by the Queen, on the advice of the state Premier.

The state governors perform all of the same functions within their own state that the Governor-General does at the federal level: give the royal assent to bills; commission the leader of the majority party to form a government after each state election etc. By convention the longest serving state governor fulfils the role of Administrator of the Commonwealth when the office of Governor-General is vacant (as it was in 2003 after the resignation of then GG, Peter Hollingworth).

In 1999, at the time of the referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, there was quite a bit of interesting constitutional discussion about the role of the state governors - and especially what would happen to them if the Commonwealth chose to become a republic while individual states decided to remain as “monarchies”.