added during the Crimean War. Cranes lifting bales of military stores of all incongruous kinds were rattling their chains from morning to night. If this indignity was to be perpetuated, hiding our noblest national monument from the river as if it had been indeed, as Gray called it, a thing of shame, we should in all truth deserve to be branded as a nation of shopkeepers. Happily this great Georgian monster had been condemned as unsafe, and it would cost more to restore it than to find elsewhere fitting shelter for blankets, boots, and outof-date muskets. The building was doomed, and with ample plans before us, together with the guidance of the old foundations, we were able to replace it by a correct presentment of the inner Ballium, with the Lanthorn Tower; thus showing to the Thames once more the great White Keep by the building of which eight centuries and more ago William made the good citizens of London quake with fear.

Once more I must repeat that all the credit for the execution of this work is due to Sir John Taylor. His judicious treatment, and his knowledge of the subject gained by careful study, were above praise. One discovery of his should be noteworthy. The White Tower had for centuries been pointed to as the one Norman Keep inside of which there was no well. Such an omission on Bishop Gundulf's part in a fortress which might have to stand a siege was incredible. Sir John Taylor in the course of certain investigations in the lower part of the Tower found the lost well, and saved the tearful Bishop's reputation.

The armoury at the Tower is such a pleasure to so many people that a note on its history with which I have been furnished by the kindness of Mr. Guy Laking, the Keeper of the King's armour, and one of the first authorities upon the subject, cannot fail to be of interest. All those who care for such things must join with him in congratulating themselves upon the knowledge that the collection is now under the loving care of that great antiquary and expert Lord Dillon.

The first important Royal armoury of which we have accurate record was brought together at the Palace of Greenwich, but the exact date of its formation is not known, but it was probably early in the reign of King Henry VIII. and perhaps at the time when he established the Almain armouries there in 1514.

It appears that an armoury house was attached to the Palace and built in the year 1517-it must, however, for twenty-five years have only partially fulfilled its purpose, inasmuch as in an inventory taken of Greenwich Palace in 1543 only arms are mentioned; though five years after that date a collection of arms, and much armour, is carefully described. This is in the inventory of the property of King Henry VIII. taken immediately after his death in 1547. The volume that records the armour and arms in the Palaces of Westminster and Greenwich, as also those at the Tower, is now preserved in the Society of Antiquaries of London: the remainder of the inventory, which deals with the household "stuffs" in the lesser palaces of King Henry VIII., is in the Harleian collection of MSS. 1419 A & B. It is this 1547 inventory that first records the contents of the armoury of the Tower of London. Despite the larger armoury at Greenwich, the Tower of London was apparently the show-place to which distinguished foreigners were taken, as there are numerous records of the visits of Ambassadors to the great store-house and fortress.

In 1515 Pasqualigo, the Venetian, writes that he had seen the Tower, where, besides the lions and leopards, were shown the King's bronze artillery mounted on four hundred carriages, also bows and arrows and pikes for 40,000 Infantry.

In 1535 Chapuis writes to Charles V., "The French Ambassador showed no pleasure at any attention that was shown him, even at the Tower of London and the Ordnance."

In 1554 Soranzo, the Venetian, reports: "His Majesty has a great

quantity of very fine artillery especially at the Tower of London, where the ammunition of every sort is preserved."

The combination of the Royal armoury of Greenwich with that of the Tower of London seems to have been between 1640 and 1644, as there are records of partial removals in the intervening years, the latest being dated 1644; although before that date, besides the artillery and weapons, particular suits of armour must have been exchanged, for in 1598 Hentzner mentions seeing certain suits at the Tower of London that in the 1547 inventory are recorded as being at Greenwich Palace. Much of the older armour in the Tower of London was, by command of Queen Elizabeth, in 1562 re-modelled, for we note the order " 9 curates of olde Almaigne rivets, 785 pairs of splynts, 482 sallets, 60 olde hedpec's, and 60 olde curats of dimilances" to be altered and transposed with plates for making 1500 jacks for use of the Navy.

In 1635, Charles I. issued a commission to Mountjoy Earl of Newport to select armour for 10,000 men from the Tower, and to sell the remainder to persons in the country who had none. This, however, was not done. The civil wars did much to abstract armour and arms from the contents of the Tower armoury, both sides drawing from it on several occasions.

The following account of a visit to the Tower in 1672 by Mons. Teravin de Rocheford was published in 1672 in Paris, and is printed in Grove's "Antiquarian Repertory," IV. 569. It is interesting as showing the state, not only of the Tower, but also of antiquarian knowledge in those days:

"The great Arsenal consists of several great halls and magazines filled with arms of all sorts, sufficient to equip an army of a hundred thousand men. Our conductor showed us a great hall, hung with casques and cuirasses for arming both infantry and cavalry; among others were some which had been worn by different Kings of England in their wars; they were all gilded and engraved in the utmost perfection.

"We saw the armour of William the Conqueror, with his great sword; and the armour of his Jester, to whose casque was fixed horns; he had, it is said, a handsome wife. Moreover, they showed us a cuirass made with cloves, another of mother-of-pearl; these two were locked up in a separate closet.

"We passed into another hall, where there were nothing but muskets, pistols, musketoons, bandoliers, swords, pikes, and halberds, arranged in a very handsome order, so as to represent figures of many sorts. We saw William the Conqueror's musket, † which is of such a length and thickness that it is as much as a man can do to carry it on his shoulders. We descended from this room to another place

* Curates cuirasses. Sallet = a sort of helmet.
+ (!)

where there are the magazines of cannons, bullets, powder and match, and other machines of war, each in its particular place.

"But after all, this is nothing when compared to that of Venice. It is true that I saw, in a cabinet in the King's Palace, many arms, which, for their beauty and exquisite workmanship, surpassed the rarest in the Arsenal of Venice. This was by the permission of Monsieur De la Mare, Keeper of the King's Armoury."

In the eighteenth century, the Tower of London was considered to be the most important of London's show-places. After the Restoration, the armaments were furbished up, Grinling Gibbons himself handling, with dramatic effect, the then much depleted armoury; indeed, even to-day his handiwork is manifest in some of the wooden horses on which certain of the figures are placed. Mistakes as absurd as those narrated by Mons, Teravin de Rocheford were made in the description of the armour and weapons. A coloured aquatint after Rowlandson published in 1781 shows a view of the so-called horse or Royal armoury of the Tower with a row of mounted figures, each suit accredited to some King, starting the series with that of William the Conqueror.'

In the year 1825, Dr. Samuel Rush Meyrick received the Royal commands to re-arrange the horse and Spanish Armouries, as they were then called; but instead of that learned antiquary being permitted to exercise his taste and knowledge to the extent he desired, he was hampered by the instructions of the War Office. He was allowed to arrange the armour upon principal equestrian figures in certain chronological order and to do away with the gross absurdity of exhibiting a suit of the reign of Elizabeth as one that belonged to William the Conqueror, but he was not permitted to entirely destroy the absurd "line of Kings," or when he did, was ordered to appropriate the mounted figure to some great personage. Dr. Meyrick was knighted for his gratuitous services. His work was conscientious, he gainsaying nearly all the eighteenth-century absurdities of attribution. After the lapse of a quarter of a century, Mr. J. R. Planché, known to the world by his famous works on costume,t started a crusade against the War Office Authorities for permitting the gross irregularities that permeated the management of the Tower armouries. It was at this period, from the end of the thirties to the sixties of the nineteenth century, that purchases were made by the authorities in charge. These, for the most part, were puerile forgeries, nearly all the work of one Grimshaw, a clever artificer, who supplied each of his products with a so-called accurate account of its discovery. The building which then

* Compare the portraits of the Kings of Scotland at Holyrood Palace.

† Also as a herald, and author of the beautiful extravaganzas produced at the Lyceum, under the management of Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris.

contained the armoury was simply an annexe,* through the roof and skylights of which Mr. Planché records that the rain penetrated, forming pools of water in the gangways and dripping upon the armour and weapons. Although Mr. Planché started his agitation for the improvement of the Tower armoury in 1855, it was not until 1869 that he was allowed to do all that was possible, hemmed in as he was with "red tape " of the time. In the seventies the wooden annexe was done away with, and the armoury was reinstated in the White Tower. Little was done for its more studious arrangement; indeed, it may be said the care of it, if possible, relaxed. Only twenty years ago the visitor was shown a suit of Eastern chain mail set upon an equestrian figure as that of a Norman Crusader, also other anachronisms almost as glaring. The late Mr. Barber, who had charge of the Armouries for many years, was conscientious, but unobserving. The armour under his care was vigorously scoured at given intervals by the troops of the garrison, by no means to its advantage. The advent of the Viscount Dillon to the Armouries as Curator has saved the National armoury from being what it was at one time, the laughing-stock of the Continental cognoscenti.

*Swept away as told above.