The general characteristics of Gothic armour have been described in _Armour in England_, illustrated in Fig. 19, by the fine and accurately modelled suit of the Beauchamp effigy at Warwick. Though many fine suits have been brought to this country from abroad, none are in any way connected with English wearers, and none could therefore be illustrated in the former monograph. It seems incredible that nothing should have been preserved either of the weapons or armour with which the long struggle for supremacy in France was maintained during the minority and rule of a king, too studious and placable for days when his turbulent subjects cared only for war. Of the armour and weapons of the thousands of men-at-arms who fell victims to the Wars of the Roses, the direct outcome of the disappointing issue of the French Wars, and so annihilating to English art, perhaps but a helmet and a few weapons remain. The extermination of the old nobility; the completeness of the change in habit and thought introduced into this country by the Renaissance, affecting alike art, literature, and costume; the change in religion, the revolution in the science of warfare, and the absolute centralisation of the ambitious and luxurious nobility in the court or camp of Henry VIII., together with that vainglorious and wealthy despot's passion for extravagant dress, novelty and pomp, combined to break most effectually with the past and to render all Gothic armour mere obsolete lumber. Contemporary pictures of Henry VIII.'s proceedings, especially of his meeting with Maximilian, in which the English retinue is equipped in the new closed armet while Germans wear the old visored sallad, as well as the accounts of his forces and his purchases of arms, convince us that out-of-date armour and weapons, even if still serviceable, were no longer, as heretofore, passed on to the lower ranks of retainers. Hall relates of the muster of the city bands in the thirty-first year of Henry VIII. that "all were put aside who had Jackes, coates of plate, coates of mail, and bryganders, and appointed none but such as had whyte harness, except such as should bear the morish pykes, which had no harness but skulles." The destruction of obsolete armour in this reign must have been very complete, for no suits of the Gothic armour worn down to this date by the fathers and grandfathers of the courtiers of Henry have been preserved. [Illustration: PLATE III.--Half Suit, engraved and parcel-gilt. Collection of the Duke of Westminster.]