New appointments to the Order of the Garter

King Charles III has appointed three new Companion Knights of the Garter. 

On the occasion of St. George’s Day, it was announced that King Charles III has been ‘graciously pleased’ to appoint three new Companions to the Most Noble Order of the Garter. The Order of the Garter is the oldest and most Senior Order of Chivalry in Britain. Each year, it is celebrated with a procession and service featuring the Knights and Ladies on the grounds of Windsor Castle.

Today’s announcement brings the number of Companions to 23 (out of a maximum of 24). The appointments of the Knights and Ladies of the Garter are in the King’s personal gift. Appointments to the Order of the Garter are therefore in the same category as the Order of the Thistle, the Order of Merit and the Royal Victorian Order.

The Garter Service this year will take place in the Summer at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.

The new Companions are listed below with light background information.

• The Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, to be a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.

©House of Lords / photography by Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0

Lord Hennessy is an academic and historian specialising in the history of government. He has served as Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London since 2000.

Lord Hennessy was born in North London & is of Catholic Irish heritage on his father’s side. He was educated at grammar school in Stroud after the family moved to Gloucestershire. He studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Lord Hennessy was previously awarded a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship to Harvard University for the 1971-72 academic year.

Lord Hennessy started his career in journalism with The Times Higher Education Supplement. He went on to write for The Times, for which he was also Whitehall correspondent. Lord Hennessy later worked for the Financial Times and the Economist before becoming a regular presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Analysis. He went on to present the Radio 4 programme Reflections, for which he interviewed Shirley Williams, Jack Straw, Norman Tebbit and Neil Kinnock, among others.

Lord Hennessy co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History in 1986. His analysis of post-war Britain in Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1992 and the NCR Book Award in 1993. His study of Britain in the 1950s won the 2007 Orwell Prize for political writing. Lord Hennessy was elevated as a crossbench life peer in 2010.

Lord Hennessy is married to Enid, with whom he has two daughters.

• The Lord O’Donnell, GCB, to be a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.

©House of Lords / photography by Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0

Lord O’Donnell served as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service between 2005 and 2011. He was born in South London and educated at Salesian College, Battersea, the University of Warwick, at which he read Economics, and Nuffield College, Oxford. He worked as a lecturer in economics at the University of Glasgow before joining HM Treasury in 1979.

In 1985, Lord O’Donnell joined the British Embassy in Washington, where he served as First Secretary of the Economics Division for four years. He later served as Press Secretary to both the Chancellor and Prime Minister. Lord O’Donnell returned to Washington in the late 1990s as the U.K. Director on the Boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Since leaving the Civil Service in 2011, Lord O’Donnell has served as Chair of Frontier Economics, Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics & Honorary Fellow of the British Academy. He is also a board member of the worldwide wellbeing movement & All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, President of the Institute of Fiscal Affairs & a Trustee of the Economist. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 2011 and created a crossbench Life Peer in 2012.

Lord O’Donnell is married to Melanie, with whom he has a daughter

• The Lord Burnett of Maldon, to be a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.

©House of Lords / photography by Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0,

Lord Burnett served as Lord Chief Justice between 2017 and 2023. He studied jurisprudence at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he became an Honorary Fellow in 2008. He was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1980 and appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1998.

Lord Burnett practised civil, public and administrative law, was appointed to the High Court in 2008 and to the Court of Appeal in 2014, with responsibility for extradition cases, and was supervising Lord Justice for immigration and public law appeals. In 2017, at the age of fifty-nine, he became the youngest Lord Chief Justice to be appointed since 1958. In 2017, Lord Burnett was created a Life Peer and serves as an active crossbencher.

Lord Burnett is married to Caroline, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He has served as a Deputy Lieutenant in Essex since 2024.