Revocation
It is possible for membership in the Order to be revoked. Under the 1725 statutes the grounds for this were heresy, high treason, or fleeing from battle out of cowardice. Knights Companion could in such cases be degraded at the next Chapter meeting. It was then the duty of the Gentleman Usher to "pluck down the escocheon of such knight and spurn it out of the chapel" with "all the usual marks of infamy". Only two people were ever degraded — Lord Cochrane in 1813 and General Sir Eyre Coote in 1816, both for political reasons, rather than any of the grounds given in the statute. Lord Cochrane was subsequently reinstated, but Coote died a few years after his degradation.
Under Queen Victoria's 1847 statutes a member "convicted of treason, cowardice, felony, or any infamous crime derogatory to his honour as a knight or gentleman, or accused and does not submit to trial in a reasonable time, shall be degraded from the Order by a special ordinance signed by the sovereign". The Sovereign was to be the sole judge, and also had the power to restore such members.
The situation today is that membership may be cancelled or annulled, and the entry in the register erased, by an ordinance signed by the Sovereign and sealed with the seal of the Order, on the recommendation of the appropriate Minister. Such cancellations may be subsequently reversed.
William Pottinger, a senior civil servant, lost both his Companionship of the Order of the Bath and CVO in 1975 when he was gaoled for corruptly receiving gifts from the architect John Poulson.
Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu was stripped of his honorary GCB by Queen Elizabeth II on 24 December 1989, the day before his execution.
Dr. Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, was stripped of his honorary GCB by the Queen, on the advice of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, on 25 June 2008 "as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided."
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