File talk:Coat of Arms of Robert Hale.svg
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Not associated with Nathan Hale
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No source states that this coat of arms was ever used by Nathan Hale. There is no cited evidence that Nathan Hale ever knew that it existed.
At best, any association of this coat of arms with Nathan Hale began as anecdotal evidence about his ancestor Robert Hale, from which the arms were connected to Nathan Hale by an inference that is based on no source at all.
The sole source that was cited for this coat of arms is Matthews' American Armoury and Blue Book (1907). Look at p. 37 of the Armorial Appendix, here. These arms are attributed to Ensign Robert Hale of Charlestown, Mass, with a date of 1630. The source states nothing more than that.
The connection to Nathan Hale – which was not even made by the cited source! – is that Robert Hale turns out to be the great-great-grandfather of Nathan Hale. Robert Hale emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Notably, the source makes no claim that this coat of arms was ever actually granted in England to Robert Hale, or to any of Nathan Hale's earlier English ancestors.
Recall that no college of arms has ever existed in America. There may be a small number of Americans with arms that are legitimately inherited (by patrilineal descent and primogeniture) from an ancestral European grant of arms. Except for those few, any American family's claim to have a "coat of arms" is generally nothing more than a harmless fantasy. (The connection, if not wholly imaginary, may be tenuously based on a common surname or a remote family connection, or the arms might have been arbitrarily adopted by an American ancestor.)
For at least that reason, Matthews (and a similar later work by Bolton) cannot be considered a reliable source for American heraldry. It appears that if a depiction of a coat of arms was found among the possessions of a colonial American (e.g., in a painting, or often a bookplate), that alone was sufficient for a charlatan to infer that an entitlement to use those arms had once existed, and that it could be transmitted to any descendant of that person. To his credit, in the preface to Matthews' 1903 edition, John Matthews did clearly state that he does not claim that his work has any legal basis, or carries any presumption of authority:
In the first place the Work does not affect to stamp with the seal of legal authority any claims to the Armorial Bearings which it registers. This legal indefeasibility or presumption of title (for whatever value the same may be held by the Antiquary or Genealogist searching after Truth) can only be secured by due application and payment of fees to Colleges of Arms having official cognizance of such matters.
Finally, even if we were to assume (for the sake of argument) that Robert Hale in 1630 had been granted a legitimate right to this coat of arms, it is simply not possible that Nathan Hale had ever inherited that right during his short life. It is impossible because Nathan Hale, who was his father's sixth son, did not live long enough to inherit anything from his father. He died before his father.
