It will be noticed that Pyne, as in the case of the Black Prince coat of mail, gives the supposed history of these two suits; his somewhat bald description suffices, however, to identify them with the full suits, Nos. 6 and 7. Why he should describe one suit as being decorated with thistles, and the other with fleurs-de-lis, it is a little difficult to understand. This difficulty we propose to get over by assuming that the different parts of the thistle and fleur-de-lis suit of Henry, Prince of Wales, and of the engraved and gilded suit, supposed to have belonged to Charles, Prince of Wales, became intermixed. Indeed, within our own recollection, certain plates of the former suit were riveted to the suit of Charles, Prince of Wales, a circumstance that goes to prove that at one period the plates of the two suits were intermixed. We must suppose that Pyne omitted to notice that both the thistle and the fleur-de-lis appear on the same suit, and not, as he states, the thistle on one suit and the fleur-de-lis on the other.
In James Stephanoff's illustrations to Pyne's "History of the Royal Residences," aquatint views are given of both the old Guard Room in the Round Tower, and of the King's Guard Chamber in the Castle itself. In these illustrations are shown suits of armour, but so vaguely drawn as to be useless for purposes of identification.
These then are our reasons for now thinking that the seven suits of armour existing at Windsor Castle in 1742 are the same seven suits that were still there in 1901; reasons which serve to prove, even without reference to the Tower of London Issue Book, that nothing was added to the Windsor Armoury after the Wyatville restorations. Indeed, the converse must have been the case; for we are unable to account for the whereabouts of the large number of back- and breastplates, triple bar helmets, lances, pikes, bandoleers, etc., which are mentioned as being at the Castle as late as the year 1819, but which certainly were not at Windsor in 1901.
Whether or not these seven suits, first recorded in 1742, were part of the collection of arms formed by Prince Rupert when he was Constable of the Castle, we shall never know. Prince Rupert's Armoury was in the old Guard Chamber in the Round Tower, which has now been turned into rooms numbered 643, 644, 658, and 659. But, be that as it may, there was a store of armour and arms in this same Guard Chamber long before Prince Rupert's time.
We ought, perhaps, to quote the first recorded statement of the actual existence of armour in Windsor to be found in a MS. presented to the Society of Antiquaries by Gustavus Branden in 1775, setting out the inventory of the contents of royal palaces (part of the MS. is Harl. MSS., 1419 A and B. It mentions an order sent by the Lords of the Council to John Lindsay, "The
