A visitor who has time should not leave the Wakefield Tower without seeing an interesting series of stars, collars, and badges of the different orders of knighthood. They are exhibited in the side cases, as are also the silver trumpets of the Guards and other objects of the kind.
THE ARMOURY
Although great stores of arms were accumulated in the Tower during the Tudor reigns, we do not know of any special collection of ornamental suits until much later. The armourers of Henry VIII.—men from Italy, and in particular from Milan and Mantua, whence such words as milliner, portmanteau, and others—dwelt and worked at Greenwich, where in the Green Chamber were twelve suits of tilting armour for men and horses, in the Great Chamber, nine, and in the Harness Chamber, seven, some of them still incomplete when the inventory was made in 1631. The tilting suits were removed to the Tower in 1660. Previously the arms stored there were chiefly for soldiers, and comprised, in the reign of Elizabeth, 2000 equipments for foot-soldiers, known as demi-lances, as many corslets, 1000 shirts of mail, 3000 morions or helmets, and as many steel caps, called “skulles” in the inventory. Towards the end of the reign the more ornamental horse and tilting armour began to be brought up from Greenwich, but the removal was not complete till the time of Charles II., when the old palace was pulled down to make way for the first buildings of what is now Greenwich Hospital.
Soon after, the picturesque building, now used as a military hospital, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren for the reception of the armour. About the same time, Wren’s friend, Grinling Gibbons, was employed to carve the horses on which the full knightly panoply could be exhibited. Some of these horses still remain and must be admired as real works of art. Previously, no doubt, the equestrian armour was placed upon horses such as are now called clothes-horses in a house, or saddle horses in a harness room, convenient enough for the purpose, but unsuitable for any scenic effect.
The armour was next removed to the Small Armoury. The name does not mean that the building was small, but that it was designed for the storage and exhibition of small arms, as distinguished from cannon and other great guns. It was situated where the Waterloo Barracks are now, and was entirely destroyed by fire in 1841, having become a store and being full of inflammable material. It must have resembled the central part of the great barrack at Winchester, built also by Wren. It was 245 feet long by 60 wide. Founded by James II., it was finished by William and Mary, who at the opening dined in the great room in state “having all the warrant workmen and labourers to attend them, dressed in white gloves and aprons, the usual badges of the orders of masonry,” as Dodsley tells us, writing in 1761. The “entablature and triangular pediment of the Doric order” of which he speaks, “and the king’s arms, with enrichments of trophy work,” were saved, and are now built into a wall on the south side of a storehouse near the new Lanthorn Tower. The great Small Armoury was undisturbed in 1821, but large quantities of weapons had overflowed into the White Tower, where an armourer named Harris, whose operations were much admired in their day, with his successors, arranged them in various fantastic designs, many of them very ingenious. It was Harris who made the trophies of arms at Hampton Court. “He was a common gunsmith, but after he had performed this work, which is the admiration of people of all nations, he was allowed a pension from the Crown for his ingenuity.” This Small Armoury contained, at the time of the fire in 1841, 280 stands of muskets and small arms, ready for use.
The horse armoury had fortunately been removed some ten or twelve years before the fire. A shed-like gallery, already mentioned, was built south of the White Tower, and was ready in 1826, when the collection was removed and arranged by Sir Samuel Meyrick. The visitor on entering saw a long line of equestrian figures, twenty-two in number, clothed in the armour supposed to belong to various reigns from Edward I. to James II. As a fact, very little of the armour dated before the time of Henry VIII., and the chain mail on a figure labelled Edward I. probably came from India. A rearrangement was made by Mr. Hewitt about 1859, and a catalogue. Ten years later a further arrangement was carried out by Mr. Planché. In 1883, the whole collection was removed to the upper stories of the White Tower, where it has been examined and put into something like order by Lord Dillon, whose views are considerably more scientific than those of Meyrick, Hewitt, or Planché. The change in the aspect of the collection is considerable, and the visitor may be certain of a great number of pieces of which few could be considered authentic before. Lord Dillon calls attention to the mounted figure in chain mail which used to do duty for Edward I. and before that, for William the Conqueror. There are several other suits of Oriental armour, but this one seems, in part at least, to be Persian. The only dated suit was sent to Charles II. by the Great Mogul about 1660. In the so-called Council Chamber is a suit worn by Lord Waterford at the Eglinton Tournament. It shows armour of the time of Richard III. Several suits made for Henry VIII. are beside it, and some also from Nuremberg of the same date. The finest “was sent over in 1514, having been made by Conrad Sensenhofer, whose mark is on the helmet. It was a present from the Emperor Maximilian to his ally and relative, Henry VIII. Another maker is well represented, Missaglia of Milan, by a suit for foot combats. Another bears the Burgundian “cross ragulé,” which must not be confused with the ragged staff of Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester. This last-named suit is very rich in extra pieces for the protection of the left side in tournaments. Another was worn by Dymoke of Scrivelsby at the coronation of George II. It would be tedious to go through all the armour, but a case in the first room contains an extensive collection of helmets, many of them modern imitations, made in Germany, of ancient forms. “The genuine tilting helmets,” says Lord Dillon, “will be distinguished from false ones by the arrangement of the ocularium or eye slit, which in the modern examples would allow of the easy insertion of the opponent’s lance point.”
It may be worth while here to observe that in the lists two knights passed each other on the left hand. In many modern pictures of mediæval fights we see the knights each with his lance in the right hand and pointing towards another knight on his right. This would have been impossible, the weight of the lance alone being sufficient to make it so. If the combatant struck his opponent, he must infallibly have put his shoulder out and probably would also have broken some of his ribs with his heavily mailed elbow. In old pictures, and particularly in those representing tilt yards, the knights will be seen keeping the “off side,” the lance being held diagonally across the horse’s neck, the elbow being free so that no fracture ensues when the point strikes anything hard. The extra pieces in the so-called Leicester’s suit were, therefore, as Lord Dillon points out, “for the tilt yard and protected the left side, that on which the riders passed each other.” Pictures in the National Gallery and illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum may be consulted on this subject.
Of the more miscellaneous objects in the collection it is not necessary to say much here. Everything is carefully labelled. There is some Greek bronze armour from Cumæ near Naples. The series of halberds is remarkably fine and varied, as are the swords, the maces, early fire-arms, and gauntlets. We may sum up, in the words of the Guide of 1888, and make up our minds “that of the early linen armour, supplemented with iron, of the Bayeux Tapestry, we have no examples extant; that of the Crusaders and their ‘panoply’ in the twelfth century we are almost equally ignorant; that monumental brasses and illuminated manuscripts enable us both to judge how the knight was armed in the thirteenth century, and also to identify a rare helmet here and there as of the same period; but that for authentic suits of cap a pie and even much less, and for horse armour, apart from mere saddlery or harness, we must depend on a period long after the invention and common use of guns and gunpowder, a period when the skill of the armourer was exercised to ornament tilting suits, defence against fire-arms proving impossible.”
For an account of the ancient foundation known as St. Katherine’s by the Tower see Mediæval London, vol. ii. p. 335.