Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 3).djvu/255

 of King Henry VIII, taken immediately after his death, a collection of arms and armour is carefully described. The volume recording the armour and arms in the Palaces of Westminster and Greenwich, as also those at the Tower, is now preserved in the library of 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 and B. It is in this 1547 inventory that the first records of the more important suits now preserved in the Tower of London are to be found. Despite the fact that Greenwich Palace contained the larger armoury, the Tower of London seems to have been the show-place to which distinguished foreigners were taken. There are numerous records of the visits of ambassadors to the great store-*house and fortress. In 1515, for instance, Pasqualigo, the Venetian, writes that he had seen the Tower, where, besides the lions and leopards, he was shown the King's bronze artillery mounted on 400 carriages, and bows and arrows and pikes for 40,000 infantry. Again, 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." Yet again, Soranzo, the Venetian, reports in 1554: "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 amalgamation of the Royal Armoury of Greenwich with that of the Tower of London seems to have been effected between 1640 and 1644. There are records of partial removals in the intervening years, the latest being dated 1644. But prior to that date, in addition to artillery and weapons, particular suits of armour must have been exchanged; for in 1598 Paul Hentzner mentions seeing certain suits at the Tower of London which 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, remodelled in 1562, when the order was given for "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 into plates for making 1500 jacks for use of the Navy. In 1635 Charles I issued a commission to Mountjoy, Earl of Newport—which, however, was never carried out—to select armour for 10,000 men from the Tower, and to sell the remainder to persons in the country who had none. The civil wars contributed largely to the abstraction of armour and arms from the Tower Armoury, both sides drawing from it on several occasions. The following account of a visit to the Tower paid in 1672 by Mons. Jorevin de Rochefort, an account interesting as showing the