This piece belongs to the Charles II period, and is typical of the characteristic style of applied decoration, undoubtedly of French origin. This cup has the maker’s mark[3] T G or J G interlaced, and he evidently was an English craftsman working during the latter half of the Charles II period and during the short reign of James II. The vogue then disappeared.
English silver plate at the end of the seventeenth century is worthy of note, on account of its technique. A noticeable feature in this period of free chased work, in pieces with large leaves and fruit or figure subjects, is the bold manner in which the leaf springs from the collet of the foot. Among some of the most treasured objects of this late seventeenth-century outburst of fine craftsmanship are sconces and mirror frames, and especially large beakers and oviform vases and covers with floriated ornament richly chased. It was at that time that Grinling Gibbons the woodcarver revelled in his intricate flower and fruit pieces carved in the soft lime and chestnut woods. There is little doubt that the same artistic impulses were in the air. Side by side with the silversmith’s art were other fashions in furniture, in silk hangings, in costume, in the building and architecture of houses and the habits of the people who dwelt in them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with so many civil disturbances it was inevitable that easily movable possessions such as plate were the first to be realized. It is not difficult to imagine from the remnants still remaining what the plate must have been like which graced the splendid banqueting halls of the days of Elizabeth. The massive flagons, such as that illustrated [page 105], and the gleaming dishes and lordly plates rightly belong to an age when courtiers wore doublets richly sewn with pearls, when dreams of conquests in the New World set men’s minds aflame, when new trade routes were opened and great companies formed, when the sturdy spirit of independence established itself in these realms to take root and develop into world supremacy on the seas, and establish an abiding place in the council chambers of Europe, and when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and Kit Marlowe, and Edmund Spenser with inspired vision penetrated into the domain of romance and won enduring fame.
But gold and silver plate hold a somewhat insecure place as historic records. The thief with vandal hands put many a cunningly fashioned vessel into the melting-pot to escape detection. The Civil War with its burnings and plunderings on the one hand, and the loyal devotion of cavaliers who gladly saw their plate go to equip Charles’s army, on the other, accounts for many more specimens of craftsmanship which can never come again. Other treasures left the country; the retinue of Queen Henrietta Maria, her French retainers and her scullions and priests, journeyed in forty coaches to Dover with much plate. Charles I, writing to Buckingham, calls upon Steenie to help him and says: “I command you to send away to-morrow all the French out of the towne, if you can by fair means, but strike not long in disputing, otherways force them away, dryving them like so many wilde beasts, until you have shipped them, and the devil goe with them.” How they plundered the Queen of jewels and plate, and of the money they owed in Drury Lane, and of the scuffle they had with the King’s Guards who turned them out of Somerset House, is a piquant story. To this day in the vaults, beside dusty documents, three stones record the last resting-place of all that is mortal of three of the Queen’s faithful French servants,—a scullion, a chaplain, and a waiting-woman.
ELIZABETHAN FLAGON.
With London date letter for 1599. Decorated in formal strap work and foliated design incised in outline.
(By courtesy of Messrs. Crichton Brothers.)
ELIZABETHAN FLAGON.