‘Three aulter Candlestickes of glasse.’
‘Oone Holly-water stocke of glasse with a bayle.’
‘Twelve bottles of glasse with oone cover to them all wrought with diaper work white.’ By this last expression are we to understand some kind of vetro di trina?
Finally, ‘One rounde Loking Glass sett in a frame of wood, vj cornered, painted under glass with the armes of Ingland, Spayne, and Castile’ carries us back to the days when Catherine of Aragon was queen. Of this method of decorating the frames of mirrors with inlay of glass painted on the inner surface I have already spoken. I would again refer the reader to the mirror in the Arnolfini Van Eyck at the National Gallery.[[235]]
The earliest notice that we have of Venetian glass-workers in England carries us back to the year 1550, and it takes a form that is characteristic of the times. This is a petition to the Council of Ten, that has been found among the Venetian state papers. It is signed by no less than eight Muranese glass-workers, imprisoned in the Tower of London: they declare that they are threatened with the gibbet if they fail to work out their contract. These poor men were indeed between the devil and the deep sea; for did they delay their return to their homes they were liable, by a newly issued edict, to a long term in the Venetian galleys. It was only by the personal intervention of the young king that some arrangement was finally made that allowed of these Muranese glass-workers returning unmolested after working off part of their contract. One of these men indeed elected to remain behind, but he before long made his way to the Low Countries, and this first influx of Venetian workmen seems to have led to little as far as English glass was concerned.
Cornelius de Lannoy, from whom Cecil hoped so much, was perhaps as much an alchemist and a universal schemer as a worker in glass. He was set to work at Somerset House in 1564, but with little result, it would seem. He attributed his failure to the clumsiness of the English workmen and to the want of a suitable clay for his glass-pots.
It is to Jacopo Verzelini, a man evidently of some energy and resource, that we must give the credit of first successfully making the Venetian cristallo in England. When in 1575 he obtained a patent ‘for the makinge of all manner of counterfayt Venyse drinkinge glasses’ (but not, it would appear, of glass for windows), he was already established in London. Stow, writing a little later, says: ‘The first making of Venise glasses in England began at the Crotchet Friars, about the beginning of the reign of Q. Elizabeth, by one Jacob Vessaline an Italian.’ The Friars Hall, he tells us, ‘was made a glasse-house, wherein was made glasse of divers sorts to drincken.’ It was in this same hall probably that the unhappy craftsmen of Edward VI.’s time had been set to work. Verzelini, like other glass-workers of the period, reached England, it appears, by way of Antwerp. At any rate he was married to a lady of that town, of good family, who bore him twelve children. This we know from the monumental brass to his memory that may still be seen in the little church of Down in Kent, where in the year 1606 he was buried.
We see, then, that before the death of Elizabeth the making of both hollow ware and window-glass by the new methods was firmly established in London and in the provinces. Great complaints had already arisen of ‘the making of glass by strangers and outlandish men,’ and we hear of ‘the timber and woods spoiled by the glass-houses.’[[236]] The same difficulty arose as in France. It was argued that the foreigner should be required to take native apprentices. But there is evidence that as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the making of the better kinds of glass, the ‘Christalline Morana Glass,’ was still in the hands of Italians. This we have seen was for long the case in France as well. But we in England were in a measure dependent upon the foreigner for our window-glass also, this time upon the Lorrainer.
Of glass made in England during Elizabeth’s reign I can point to a goblet now in the British Museum. It is dated 1586, and bears an inscription in capitals of somewhat Gothic character—IN : GOD : IS : AL : MI : TRUST. The glass is engraved with the diamond, and is decorated with stringings of white enamel.[[237]] The plain cylindrical glass tankard in the Gold Room is remarkable only for the silver-gilt mounting and for the arms of Cecil on the cover.[[238]]
We have seen that early in the seventeenth century the French gentilshommes de verre were firmly established at Stourbridge and at Newcastle. Now by this time the outcry against the destruction of our English forests, the source of the timber for the navy, was becoming general. It was directed against the iron-smelters in the first place, and then against the makers of glass, above all against foreigners. ‘It were the less evil,’ says a proclamation of 1615, ‘to reduce the times into the ancient manner of drinking in stone and of lattice windows than to suffer the loss of such a treasure.’ It was in the Stourbridge district that Bub Dudley[[239]] and others were occupied at this very time with the problem of smelting iron by means of pit-coal. With them was probably associated Thomas Percivall, to whom more than to any one else is to be given the credit of the first successful employment of coal in the glass-furnace.