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Milan [Italy]

Foot-combat armour of Prince Charles about 1615

RCIN 67275

Queen's Guard Chamber, Windsor Castle

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  • Foot-combat armour of Prince Charles consisting of a close helmet of the type that turns on its gorget, a ‘Spanish’ morion, a gorget, a breastplate, a backplate, a pair of one-piece tassets, a pair of symmetrical pauldrons and vambraces permanently linked to one another, and a pair of gauntlets.

    The decoration, which covers the entire surface of the armour, consists of silver encrustation, counterfeit-damascening in gold and some incising, all on a blued ground. On the main surfaces there are narrow diagonal bands of guilloché punched and hatched with silver and having gilded dots at their centres, alternating with wider bands of cartouches outlined in silver-encrusted dots, alternately oval and longitudinally elongated and octagonal with concave sides. The grounds of alternate bands are plain blued and counterfeit-damascened in gold with very fine scrollwork.  All the bands are separated from one another by fine rows of tiny overlapping punched circles on a gold ground. The turned edges of the plates are sparingly roped with hatched-on gold leaf

    Each cartouche is pierced by four tiny holes for the rivets that originally secured a gold decorative plaque. The design of the missing plaques can be conjectured from a few places on the armour where it would have been inconvenient to fit them. In such places, the surface was incised with a representation of the plaque and the area more thickly hatched with gold than elsewhere. The oval plaques frame a quatrefoil, while the hexafoils frame sprays of trifoliate leaves, in each case within a pearled border.

    The construction of this armour, and particularly of its close helmet, can be compared with that of an armour with similar incised decoration, probably made for the future Emperor Ferdinand II (1578–637). This is signed 'IO' with a castle and has been attributed to an unidentified armourer known only as the ‘Maestro IO dal castello’ who worked in Milan about 1600.

    Measurements: Close Helmet: height 25.1 cm, width 20.7 cm, depth 27.8 cm; Morion: height 19.1 cm, width 22.6 cm, depth 26.7 cm; Gorget: height 19.1 cm, internal diameter front to back 12.7 cm; Breastplate: height from shoulders to the lower edge of waist-flange 35.7 cm, height from centre of neck to point of waist 29.4 cm, height from centre of neck to lower edge of waist-flange 31.3 cm, width beneath arm-openings 27.3 cm; Right Tasset: height 14.8 cm, width 22.4 cm; Left Tasset: height 14.8 cm; width 21 cm; Backplate: height 33.7 cm; Right Pauldron and Vambrace: length 57.2 cm, width of pauldron 14.0 cm; Left Pauldron and Vambrace: length 57.2 cm, width of pauldron 14.0 cm; Right Gauntlet: length 19.2 cm; Left Gauntlet: length 18.3 cm

    Weights: Close Helmet: 2.438 kg; Morion: 1.134 kg; Gorget: 0.836 kg; Breastplate with Tassets: 1.488 kg; Backplate: 0.952 kg; Right Pauldron and Vambrace: 1.708 kg; Left Pauldron and Vambrace: 1.730 kg; Right Gauntlet: 0.288 kg; Left Gauntlet: 0.311 kg.

    Tests undertaken by Dr Alan R. Williams on the skull of the close helmet and the brim of the morion of the Prince’s armour show them to have microhardnesses in the ranges 212–34 VPH and 187–28 VPH respectively. Both are formed of a mixture of pure iron and carburised iron (pearlite) with a carbon content of about 0.5%. The fragmented nature of the carburised iron indicates that the steel of which it forms a component has undergone a good deal of hot working. The steel is air-cooled and thus typical of that seen in much sixteenth-century Italian armour.

    Text adapted from Arms and Armour in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: European Armour, London, 2016
    Provenance

    This armour is mentioned in a letter dated 1 July 1613 from Sir Dudley Carlton, the English Ambassador in Venice. He noted that the Prince of Savoy intended to present an armour, said to be from Milan but not yet complete, to Prince Charles (later Charles I).

    John Pickering, son of the armourer William Pickering, later mentioned the armour in a petition of May 1625 concerning the Master Workman at Greenwich, Thomas Stevens Jnr. Pickering claimed that Stevens' wife 'hath broken up your Majesty’s trunck of rich armour and stolen away nearly 200 studs of gold from the armour presented by the Duke of Savoy …’.

    The earliest Remain to mention Prince Charles’s armour is that of 1629, which records ‘In the Greene Gallerie’ at Greenwich: ‘One guilte graven and Damasked Armor of the Kinges for the ffeild Compleate the whole Armor laid with bosses of gold viii bosses onely remayning on the Collar and all the rest euther lost or taken from the Coller and Armor …'. By 1639 it was recorded in a chest in ‘the Great Chamber, late Mr Pickering’s’ at Greenwich, by which time it had lost two more of its bosses.

    In 1660 the armour was in a trunk in the Office of the Armoury at the Tower, having been brought up from Greenwich by Annesley about 1644. It was listed as ‘Small Armour for Horse and ffoote richly gilt with Bosses of Gold and corded with silver consisting of backe breast, Taces, Murrion, close Headpeice Pouldrons and Vambraces with Gorgetts and Gantletts’. This entry is repeated almost word for word in both the Inventory of 1675–9 and the State of 1677, but does not occur in the 1682 Survey, possibly because the armour had been sent to another palace.

    The armour seems to have been returned to the Tower by 1688 when it was valued at £208. It is last recorded there in the General State report of 1 January 1693, when it was valued at £250. Its gauntlets, which had become separated, are listed separately and valued at 40s a piece. The armour is subsequently clearly identifiable in the 1721–2 Remain of Windsor Castle. It is included as no. 9 in the eighteenth group recorded in the manuscript ‘An Account of the Armour and Arms in the Guard Chamber at Windsor Castle’ prepared by the Board of Ordnance at the Tower of London, and dated 29 July 1831 (Appendix IV).


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