Henry VIII suit in the Tower, states that it is precisely similar in shape to a suit preserved in the little Belvidere palace at Vienna which belonged to Maximilian himself. The present writer, however, is at a loss to know to what suit Mr. Planché can have referred, as he is unacquainted with any suit now at Vienna that resembles it either in decoration or in form.
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Fig. 1017a. Tonnlets
Riggs Collection, Metropolitan Museum New York
Looking at the suit as one sees it to-day, one can only marvel that it has survived the ruthless treatment of the centuries that have passed since its production. Fortunately a drastic restoration of it suggested in 1841 by the late Mr. John Hewitt never took place. It was his intention "to restore the suit by regilding"; he remarks in his catalogue: "that so desirable a work has so long been delayed is only to be regretted." Fashioned for a youth of twenty and made by a German armourer, this harness is yet by reason of its very elegant proportions a suit decidedly and strangely Italian in construction. Look at the armet head-*piece (Vol. ii, Fig. 447), the shape of the breastplate, and form of the elbow cops, and it takes but a very small stretch of the imagination to describe them as a late production of one of the Missaglia; yet this is perhaps the only suit now extant that bears the mark which we now know was employed by Conrad Seusenhofer. Nothing in this harness is exaggerated in form, save possibly the bases, tonnlets, or skirt, which, after all, were but a conventional rendering in metal of the civil skirt of the time. This curiosity in the way of plate armour is, however, no rarity. In Mr. W. H. Riggs' Collection, given to the Metropolitan Museum of New York, are a pair of tonnlets (Fig. 1017A) of almost precisely similar construction, slashed and etched, and curiously enough there is a tradition attaching to them that they were originally obtained from the Tower of London early in the XIXth century. Mr. Riggs acquired them from Prince Soltikoff, who purchased them at a sale of old iron at the Tower, having been informed by Sir Walter Scott, when he met him at a friend's house at dinner, that there was to be a sale at the Tower of old
