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Plate made by King James II and VII for the Chapel Royal of Holyroodhouse in 1686
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2011
Extract
On the 6th February 1685 King James II of England and VII of Scotland succeeded to the throne of Great Britain on the death of his elder brother, King Charles II. His reign, which was to last for less than four years, was beset by many difficulties. A number of these problems stemmed from the fact that James, before his accession, has gone over to the Church of Rome and made no effort to conceal that fact. One of the results of this spiritual allegiance of King James was the provision of Chapels Royal at Whitehall, Windsor, Dublin, and Edinburgh, where James could worship according to the ritual of his Church, and these chapels were duly furnished with suitable altar plate. The altar plate provided for the English and Irish chapels seems to have disappeared but, by a stroke of good fortune, several of the altar vessels made for the Chapel Royal in the Palace of Holyroodhouse have survived. These vessels, which are of superb quality, have up till now escaped the notice of the experts who have dealt with the history of the silversmith's craft in Great Britain. They are now discussed in the following pages: the historical circumstances of their survival will first be described and this will be followed by a technical description of the various surviving pieces.
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- Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1968
References
page 285 note 1 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Third Series), iii, 593.
page 286 note 1 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Third Series), xiii, xxix, and 435.
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page 288 note 5 The equipment of some of the craftsmen was stolen or damaged in the riot and, on 7th January 1689, there was paid out compensation, amounting to £64 sterling, to workmen at Holyroodhouse for the loss of ‘tooles and workloomes when the chapell wes dimolished on 10th December last’. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Third Series), xiii, lv.
page 288 note 6 Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh: the manuscript ‘Memoirs of Scotch Missionary Priests’, compiled by Canon William Clapperton, where no. 17 in the series is a lengthy biography of David Burnet.
page 289 note 1 Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh: Letter of David Burnet, Dublin, 27th May 1690.
page 289 note 2 Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh: ‘Extracts from Mr. James Gordon's Mss. when he was procurator at Rome from 1702–1706’, in Clapperton's Note Book III.
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page 294 note 3 This would seem to have been the practice of Wolfgang Hauser, a Swiss, until the Goldsmiths were compelled to accept his work as a result of a letter from Charles II (Court Minute Book of the Goldsmiths' Company, Friday 6th May, and Monday, 9th May 1664).
page 295 note 1 John Shelley of Bignor was fined for recusancy in 1668 (Catholic Record Society, Miscellanea, v, 1909, 321).
page 295 note 2 The Times, 26th October 1933.
page 295 note 3 Liége fashions in church plate are copiously illustrated by Pierre Colman in L'orfèvrerie religieuse liégeoise, 2 vols., 1966.