Armor Garniture of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland

A field-and-tournament garniture made in 1586 at the royal workshops at Greenwich for George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, a courtier who became Queen Elizabeth I's official Champion of the Accession Day tilts in 1590. It is decorated overall with Tudor roses, fleur-de-lis and the Queen's own cipher worked into love-knots, a program of loyalty rather than heraldry, and it survives more complete than almost any other product of the Greenwich armoury.

The garniture descended through Clifford's daughter, the diarist Lady Anne Clifford, into the Tufton family, Earls of Thanet and later Barons Hothfield, who held it at Appleby Castle in Westmorland into the twentieth century. It passed at an unrecorded date into the collection of the American financier Clarence Mackay, and the Metropolitan Museum bought it from the Munsey Fund in 1932. A companion piece, the terminal lame of the garniture's grand guard, followed in 1936 under a separate accession number.

This is a different object from the Museum's other Greenwich garniture, accession 19.131.1, probably made for Henry VIII around 1527: different owner, different reign, different decade of the Greenwich workshop's history, and a different, firmer chain of attribution.

What survives

The garniture as it stands today comprises a close helmet, gorget, cuirass with tassets, a full pair of arm defenses and gauntlets, and leg armor to the sabatons, together with the exchange and reinforcing pieces that turned a field harness into a tilting harness: a grand guard for the left shoulder and chest, a manifer for the left hand, and a locking gauntlet. It is, by the Museum's own account and by comparison with what has come down from the same workshop, the most complete and best preserved of the surviving Greenwich garnitures.

Every visible steel surface is worked to the same program: broad bands of blued, or russeted, ground cut with etched scrollwork and picked out in fire-gilding, so that the dark steel and the gold read against each other at a distance, which is what a tournament armor was for. It was made to be seen from a gallery, not examined in a case, and the decoration is scaled for that.

How a garniture worked

A garniture is not a single suit of armor but a matched kit of exchangeable parts built around one core harness, so that a single decorative scheme could be reconfigured for the tilt, the tourney (fighting on foot or on horseback with blunted weapons across a barrier), and the field. Greenwich under Halder specialized in exactly this kind of complex, expensive commission, and the Almain Armourer's Album records each patron's garniture as two facing pages: the base harness on one, the full spread of alternate and reinforcing pieces on the other.

This is why the Metropolitan's holding is split across two accession numbers. The bulk of the garniture entered the Museum in 1932; a further piece, the terminal lame of the grand guard, was acquired separately from a different source four years later and folded into the same object record. The two numbers describe one physical commission, not two different objects.

The decoration and what it declares

The scheme is not generic Tudor ornament. It combines the Tudor rose and the French fleur-de-lis, then still quartered into the English royal arms, with the Queen's own cipher: two capital E's placed back to back and bound inside a heart at the center of the breastplate, the whole repeated across the harness inside a chain of love-knots. Read together, the motifs are a wearable declaration of loyalty to Elizabeth personally, not a general statement of rank or wealth, and they were legible as such to everyone watching a tilt who could read a badge or an impresa, which was the entire point of Accession Day pageantry.

This kind of decoration belongs to a documented and quite literal courtly practice, not a private or hidden meaning: wearing the sovereign's cipher and colors into the tiltyard was a public, understood act of political theater, performed in front of the court and, from the 1580s onward, in front of a paying public audience as well.

George Clifford and the Accession Day tilts

George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, inherited large northern estates in Westmorland and Yorkshire and became, by his own account and his contemporaries', an outstanding jouster at court. The Accession Day tilts, held every 17 November to mark the anniversary of Elizabeth's accession, had grown by the 1580s from an informal courtly custom into the single largest fixed event of the court calendar, run by a Queen's Champion who organized the day and rode in it himself.

Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley held that office and effectively invented its modern form; he stood down at the 1590 tilt and Clifford succeeded him as the Queen's second Champion. The armor itself is dated 1586, four years before that formal succession, which means it was made for Clifford's existing career as a court jouster rather than commissioned for the ceremony of taking the office, and continued in use once he held it.

The evidence that he wore it

The clearest link between this specific armor and Clifford's own person is not documentary but visual: a large portrait miniature of Clifford by Nicholas Hilliard, now in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (inventory MNT0193), painted around 1590 at the point of his appointment as Champion. It shows him in full tilting armor, in blued steel with gilded decoration, with the Queen's glove pinned to his hat as her favor, a story recorded of Clifford specifically: he retrieved a glove she had dropped and wore it from then on as a badge.

Cataloguers of the miniature and of the armor both read the harness in the portrait as this garniture, on the basis of the matching decoration rather than a documentary caption naming the object. That is a reasonable identification for a portrait of this quality and specificity, but it is connoisseurship, not a receipt, and this record treats it as such rather than as settled documentary proof that Clifford is shown in this exact suit on this exact occasion.

The cost of tilting

Clifford's own later biographer, using family papers kept by his daughter, records that his passion for horse racing, tilting and wagering was a direct and named cause of the decline of his estate. A commission of this scale and quality, from the Crown's own armoury and finished in gold, sat inside a broader pattern of spending on tournament display, horses and stakes that his contemporaries and his own family explicitly blamed for his debts. He turned to privateering in part to cover the shortfall, with mixed results: a major prize taken in 1589 in partnership with the Queen was lost in a storm before it could be landed, and by 1591 he still owed the then very large sum of 6,800 pounds and was selling land to pay it.

He was also a founding name on the Crown's own charter: the royal charter of 31 December 1600 that incorporated the East India Company names George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, first among the company's 215 founding members, and he sold the company his own ship, the Malice Scourge, which sailed as the Red Dragon on the Company's first voyage to the East Indies in 1601.

The design survives too

Halder kept, or had kept, a record of the armoury's major commissions in what is now called the Almain Armourer's Album, a set of pen, ink and watercolor designs compiled between about 1557 and 1587 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (museum number D.605&A-1894 for the Clifford design specifically). Clifford's page shows the full base harness on one leaf and the exchange pieces on the facing leaf, painted in the same decorative scheme of roses, fleur-de-lis and love-knots that appears on the surviving steel.

This is the strongest form of evidence Greenwich armor scholarship has: not a stylistic argument from decoration alone, but a workshop record naming the patron and showing the design, which can then be checked directly against a surviving object. Very few Elizabethan armors can be tied to their own commission drawing this closely, and this garniture is one of them.

A documented later substitution

The Museum's own account of the garniture notes that not every piece now displayed with it is original to the 1586 commission: the left gauntlet is not a match. It comes from a different, closely similar Greenwich suit made a couple of decades later than the rest of the harness, and was at some point substituted for whatever the original left gauntlet had been, which is now lost or unidentified.

What is not established in the sources available to this record is when that substitution happened, who made it, or whether it happened before or after the garniture left the Clifford-Tufton family's hands. It is a genuine, acknowledged departure from the 1586 original, not a rumor, and it is recorded here as exactly that: a documented mismatch with an undocumented history.

From Clifford to Appleby Castle

Clifford died in October 1605, reconciled to his estranged wife Margaret Russell only shortly before the end, and was buried at Skipton. His only surviving child, Anne Clifford, later Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery, spent much of her long life establishing her right to the Clifford inheritance against her father's will, which had left the northern estates to his brother; she eventually secured them. Her own family's account of the armor states plainly that it passed to her and that she in turn bequeathed it to her two daughters.

From there the documented record thins. Anne Clifford's daughter Margaret married John Tufton, later second Earl of Thanet, and their descendants, who inherited the Clifford barony itself through Anne, held Appleby Castle in Westmorland into the twentieth century, latterly as Barons Hothfield. By 1885 the armor is recorded in print as being at Appleby Castle in the possession of Lord Hothfield. Exactly how it moved within the family, and whether it stayed at Appleby continuously across roughly three centuries or left and returned, is not established in the sources consulted for this record.

Into the American market

At an unrecorded date the armor left the Hothfield family's hands and entered the collection of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, the American telecommunications magnate, who assembled what was, in its day, the most valuable privately held collection of Renaissance arms and armor in North America at Harbor Hill, his estate at Roslyn on Long Island. No source consulted for this record gives a date, a dealer, an agent or a price for the transfer from Hothfield to Mackay; it is recorded here as a documented change of ownership with an undocumented mechanism, not bridged by a guess.

Mackay's fortunes declined sharply after 1929, and he sold works from his collections through the early 1930s. The Metropolitan Museum acquired the Cumberland garniture from him in 1932, using the Munsey Fund, a purchase fund created from the 1925 bequest of the newspaper and magazine publisher Frank A. Munsey, one of the largest single gifts the Museum had received to that date. The purchase price is not published in the sources consulted for this record.

A second accession, four years later

In 1936 the Museum acquired, through the Rogers Fund, a single further element: the terminal lame of the garniture's grand guard, the lowest articulated plate of the large reinforcing shoulder-and-chest defense used for tilting. It carries its own accession number, 36.98.1, distinct from the 1932 purchase, which means the garniture as it is now shown was assembled by the Museum from two separate acquisitions made across two different funds and four years apart, not received complete in a single transaction.

This is worth stating plainly because it is exactly the kind of detail that a caption naming a single accession number obscures. The object on view is the sum of two purchases; the object record correctly carries both numbers, and this record does the same.

Rarity: what else survives from the same workshop

The Almain Armourer's Album records twenty-nine separate Greenwich commissions from Halder's years as master; most of the armors it depicts have not survived complete, and several are known only from the drawing. Among the small number of complete or substantially complete Greenwich garnitures that do survive, the Metropolitan holds this one along with the armors of Sir James Scudamore and of Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke; the Royal Armouries holds armors associated with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, William Somerset, third Earl of Worcester, and William Herbert, at the Tower of London and at Leeds, the latter also holding Sir Christopher Hatton's armor; and the Wallace Collection in London holds an armor associated with Thomas Sackville.

Set against that list, a Greenwich garniture surviving as complete as Clifford's, with its own workshop drawing also surviving and identifiable, is unusual rather than typical. Most Elizabethan tournament armor of this rank has come down either broken up, incomplete, or known only through the album's record of a commission that no longer exists as an object.

Not the Henry VIII garniture

The Metropolitan Museum holds a second Greenwich garniture, accession 19.131.1, dated 1527 and catalogued as probably made for Henry VIII, decades before Halder's mastership and for an entirely different royal owner. The two objects share a workshop and a city, and nothing else: different reign, different decade of the armoury's output, different decorative program, and a different, weaker chain of attribution, since the Henry VIII garniture's ownership was disputed in print for most of the twentieth century, having been catalogued for years as the armor of the French Grand Master of Artillery Galiot de Genouilhac before the Museum revised the attribution. Clifford's garniture carries no comparable dispute: the patron, the maker, and the date are agreed, and the surviving Halder drawing names the sitter directly.