# Armor Garniture, Probably of King Henry VIII of England > Royal Workshops at Greenwich (the Almain Armoury) - dated 1527 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/royal-almain-armoury-greenwich/greenwich-armour-of-henry-viii/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-31 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Royal Workshops at Greenwich (the Almain Armoury) - **Date:** dated 1527 - **Medium:** Steel, etched and gilt, with gold, leather and copper alloys - **Dimensions:** Overall H. 185.4 cm (73 in.); weight 28.45 kg (62 lb 12 oz). Reinforcing breastplate (19.131.1h) with lance rest (19.131.1t), combined weight 3,324 g. Reinforcing abdominal plate (19.131.1u), weight 1,206 g. - **Object type:** Arms and armour - **Period:** English, Tudor, sixteenth century - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view in Gallery 371 - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary The earliest dated armour from Henry VIII's royal workshop at Greenwich, and the earliest Greenwich garniture: not a suit but a wardrobe of steel, built with exchange and reinforcing pieces so that one harness could be reassembled for the battlefield, for the tilt and for the tournament on foot. It carries the date 1527 three times over, and it is etched and gilt across its whole surface, which places it among the most expensive objects the Tudor court ever commissioned from its own craftsmen.It has been catalogued under two different owners. It reached New York in 1919 as the armour of Galiot de Genouilhac, on a family tradition preserved by the ducs d'Uzes, and was published under that name for half a century. The Metropolitan now calls it probably Henry VIII's, made as a royal armour and given to a French ambassador. Both readings depend on the same undocumented century, and the museum's own title still says probably.Some of what stands in Gallery 371 is not from 1527. Ten elements of the horse harness are flagged modern in the museum's own data, and the mail brayette shown with it came from a different donor in 1927. A record of this object that does not say so is describing a display, not an armour. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1527** Royal Workshops at Greenwich, for Henry VIII `[documented]` (origin) Made at the Royal Almain Armoury at Greenwich and dated 1527 on the backplate, the fauld reinforce and the lower tace lame. The Greenwich workshop existed to arm the king and, occasionally, his allies; it did not take open commissions. That the object was made there in that year is the one part of its history that rests on the object itself rather than on testimony. - **1527-1532** Francois de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne `[disputed]` (gift) The Metropolitan's reading is that Henry VIII presented the garniture to the vicomte de Turenne, who led a French embassy to London in 1527, the year of the Anglo-French treaty negotiations. The museum states this as belief, not record: its own catalogue text says the armour is believed to have been made for Henry VIII and presented by him. No contemporary document naming this armour and this recipient is cited in the museum entry. - **1532-1546** Jacques Ricard de Genouillac, called Galiot de Genouilhac, Grand Master of the Artillery and Grand Ecuyer of France `[disputed]` (inheritance or gift) After Turenne's death in 1532 the armour presumably passed to his friend Galiot de Genouilhac. The museum's own word is presumably. This is the link on which the older attribution rests and it is the weakest in the chain: an inference drawn backwards from a nineteenth-century family tradition, not a transfer recorded at the time. - **1546-1878** Undocumented; by descent in the Crussol family, ducs d'Uzes, if the tradition is correct `[unknown]` (gap) Three hundred and thirty years are unaccounted for in the museum's published chain, which begins only in the nineteenth century. The Crussol d'Uzes descend from Galiot de Genouilhac, which is why the tradition is plausible, and the tradition is also the only reason anyone connected the armour to Genouilhac in the first place. That is a circle, and this record declines to close it. - **before 1878-1878** Louis-Emmanuel de Crussol, duc d'Uzes, Chateau de Bonnelles, Seine-et-Oise `[disputed]` (ownership) Given verbatim in the Metropolitan's provenance field as owner until his death in 1878, when the armour was bequeathed. The museum's text names the legatee with exactly the same name as the testator, which cannot be right as printed; either two men of the same name are being run together or a generation has dropped out of the record. Flagged here rather than silently corrected. - **1878-1917** Louis-Emmanuel de Crussol, duc d'Uzes, Chateau de Bonnelles, Seine-et-Oise `[documented]` (inheritance) The Metropolitan records this owner from 1878 until 1917, when the armour was sold to the museum. Bonnelles, in what was then Seine-et-Oise, was the Uzes seat where the armour was kept. - **1919-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Accessioned in 1919, Purchase, William H. Riggs Gift and Rogers Fund. Bashford Dean, the museum's founding curator of arms and armour, published the acquisition in the Museum Bulletin in October 1919 under the title Gilded and Engraved Armor for Man and Horse. The museum's provenance field dates the sale to 1917 while the credit line and accession number date the acquisition to 1919; the two-year discrepancy is unexplained in the published record and falls across the last year of the First World War. The price has not been published in the sources consulted. Dean is the reason the museum has an arms and armour department at all: a Columbia zoologist who worked on fossil fishes and armoured Devonian placoderms, the only person ever to hold simultaneous curatorial appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan, guest curator for the Duc de Dino collection, honorary curator from 1906 and founding curator of the department on 28 October 1912. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This garniture has never been offered at public auction. It moved from the Crussol d'Uzes family to the Metropolitan Museum by private sale, and neither party published a figure. There is therefore no hammer price and no premium to separate, and this record does not derive one. ## Exhibitions - Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1889: Les Anciennes Armees Francaises, Exposition Retrospective Militaire du Ministere de la Guerre (not cited in the catalogue), Palais de la Guerre, Les Invalides, Paris, 1889 - Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900, Palais des Armees de Terre et de Mer, Paris, 1900 - Exhibition of Armour Made in the Royal Workshops at Greenwich, no. 3, H. M. Tower of London, 1951 - Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, no. 247, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970 - Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from Holbein to Warhol, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2018 - The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England (New York, then Cleveland Museum of Art and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, to September 2023), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2022 ## Literature - 1919, Bashford Dean, 'Gilded and Engraved Armor for Man and Horse', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, October 1919, pp. 209-15. - 1937, Stephen V. Grancsay, 'The Armor of Galiot de Genouilhac', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Papers 4, pp. 1-37, plates I-IV, VI-XXVII. - 1941, Charles R. Beard and Francis Henry Cripps-Day, 'Claim and Counter-Claim', in Fragmenta Armamentaria vol. 5, printed privately, Frome, pp. 153-86. - 1951, Tower of London Armouries, Exhibition of Armour Made in the Royal Workshops at Greenwich, HMSO, no. 3, plates III and XXXIIIb. - 1952, Francis Henry Cripps-Day, An Introduction to the Study of Greenwich Armour, Fragmenta Armamentaria I.5, pp. 100-103. - 1972, Helmut Nickel, 'A Harnes All Gilte: A Study of the Armor of Galiot de Genouilhac and the Iconography of Its Decoration', Metropolitan Museum Journal 5, pp. 75-124, figs. 1-69. - 1995, Alan Williams and Anthony de Reuck, The Royal Armoury at Greenwich 1515-1649: A History of Its Technology, Royal Armouries Monograph 4, Leeds, pp. 70-71. - 2002, Alan Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, Brill, pp. 750-51. - 2009, Pierre Terjanian, 'The King and the Armourers of Flanders', in Henry VIII: Arms and the Man 1509-2009, ed. Rimer, Richardson and Cooper, Royal Armouries, Leeds, pp. 151, 155-59, 214. - 2022, Thom Richardson, 'Pieces of Advantage: Tournament Armour in Tudor England', in Tournaments: A Thousand Years of Chivalry, ed. Stefan Krause, Thomas Del Mar Ltd, London, pp. 120-23, 128. - 2025, Leslie Southwick, 'Henry VIII's Almain Armoury at Greenwich and the Master Workmen to the Tudor Court, 1515-1603', Arms and Armour: Journal of the Royal Armouries 22, no. 1, pp. 67-130 (this armour at pp. 86, 89, fig. 10). ## Open questions - Who was the first owner? No document naming this armour and either Henry VIII, the vicomte de Turenne or Galiot de Genouilhac is cited in the museum record. The attribution has moved on technical argument alone. - Was the garniture made for the king to wear and only later given away, or made from the outset as a diplomatic present? The museum's own curator states both possibilities and does not choose between them. - Why does the Metropolitan's provenance field name Louis-Emmanuel de Crussol, duc d'Uzes, as both the testator who died in 1878 and the legatee who received the bequest? The chain as published cannot be read literally. - Why does the provenance field date the sale to the museum to 1917 while the credit line and accession number date the acquisition to 1919? The gap spans the last year of the First World War and is unexplained in print. - What did the Metropolitan pay, and to whom? No figure has been published in the sources consulted, and the split between the Riggs Gift and the Rogers Fund is not broken out. - Where was the garniture between 1546 and the nineteenth century? The published chain begins at the Chateau de Bonnelles. Three hundred and thirty years are blank. - When and why did the Metropolitan withdraw the Holbein attribution? Its own 2017 collection export gives Design of the decoration attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger; the live catalogue gives the workshop alone, with no published explanation. - What did Charles R. Beard and Francis Henry Cripps-Day argue in Claim and Counter-Claim in 1941, and against whom? The piece sits in the museum's own bibliography for this object, in a volume about armour at Chartres, and has not been consulted for this record. - Does the mail brayette given by Prince Albrecht Radziwill in 1927 still hang with the armour, and on what basis was it associated with it in the first place? - What did Alan Williams's metallurgical sampling find? The Knight and the Blast Furnace treats this armour at pages 750-51 and would give hardness, slag inclusion and carbon data that no online source reproduces. ## Sources - [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue entry for Armor Garniture, Probably of King Henry VIII of England (reigned 1509-47), object 22741: curatorial text, inscription note, provenance field, exhibition history, the full reference bibliography, and the audio guide transcript for stop 4405 (Stuart W. Pyhrr and Donald J. La Rocca). Read in a browser on 4 August 2026; the page bot-blocks automated fetching with an HTTP 429 challenge. - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object 22741: accession number, credit line, accession year, medium, dimensions and weights, gallery, open-access status, primary image file, and the element-by-element measurement list that flags which components are modern. - [3] Victoria and Albert Museum, catalogue entry for The Almain Armourer's Album (the Jacobe Album), museum number D.586A/B-1894: Jacob Halder, Greenwich, 1557-1587, 29 designs on 56 sheets plus one sheet of additional components, acquired by the museum in 1894 from M. C. Stein of Paris for 5,000 francs. - [4] Leslie Southwick, 'Henry VIII's Almain Armoury at Greenwich and the Master Workmen to the Tudor Court, 1515-1603', Arms and Armour 22, no. 1 (2025), pp. 67-130, DOI 10.1080/17416124.2024.2434783. Abstract, keywords and the full endnote apparatus read on the publisher's page; the body text is paywalled and is cited here only for what the open matter carries. - [5] Wikimedia Commons file page and wikitext for the Metropolitan's principal photograph of the garniture. Carries the CC0 release, the Met donation project, and, in the preserved metadata block, the museum's own raw collection export dated 27 March 2017: the accession string including the 1927 mail brayette given by Prince Albrecht Radziwill, and the two-maker attribution with the roles Armorer and Designer naming Hans Holbein the Younger for the design of the decoration. Primary for the licence and for the museum's 2017 catalogue state. Read from the Commons API on 4 August 2026. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Greenwich armour', for the Southwark interlude of 1516-1520, the survey of surviving Greenwich armours by collection, and the count of twenty-nine designs in the Halder album. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with Cripps-Day 1952 and the Royal Armouries monograph. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Bashford Dean', for the biography of the Metropolitan's founding curator of arms and armour, the dual appointment with the American Museum of Natural History, the Duc de Dino purchase, the First World War helmet work and the division of his own collection after 1928. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with the 1933 Bashford Dean memorial catalogue and Donald J. La Rocca's 1996 Metropolitan Museum Journal article. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.