But gold and silver plate hold a somewhat insecure place as historic records. The thief with vandal hands put many a cunningly fashioned vessel into the melting-pot to escape detection. The Civil War with its burnings and plunderings on the one hand, and the loyal devotion of cavaliers who gladly saw their plate go to equip Charles’s army, on the other, accounts for many more specimens of craftsmanship which can never come again. Other treasures left the country; the retinue of Queen Henrietta Maria, her French retainers and her scullions and priests, journeyed in forty coaches to Dover with much plate. Charles I, writing to Buckingham, calls upon Steenie to help him and says: “I command you to send away to-morrow all the French out of the towne, if you can by fair means, but strike not long in disputing, otherways force them away, dryving them like so many wilde beasts, until you have shipped them, and the devil goe with them.” How they plundered the Queen of jewels and plate, and of the money they owed in Drury Lane, and of the scuffle they had with the King’s Guards who turned them out of Somerset House, is a piquant story. To this day in the vaults, beside dusty documents, three stones record the last resting-place of all that is mortal of three of the Queen’s faithful French servants,--a scullion, a chaplain, and a waiting-woman. [Illustration: ELIZABETHAN FLAGON. With London date letter for 1599. Decorated in formal strap work and foliated design incised in outline. (_By courtesy of Messrs. Crichton Brothers._)] [Illustration: ELIZABETHAN FLAGON. Marked with leopard’s head, lion rampant, and London date letter for 1572. Decorated in chased floriated design. (_By courtesy of Messrs. Crichton Brothers._)] In these troublous Stuart times many pieces of silver were buried by the owners who never came back, and they may still lie buried to this day. Others were disinterred and proudly grace some of our fine collections. One thinks of John Rivett, the blacksmith, who delivered up broken pieces of copper to the Puritan iconoclasts who had directed him to break up the equestrian statue of Charles I. But the statue itself he buried in his garden at Holborn Fields by night, and at the Restoration it was re-erected in its old place at Charing Cross, where it now stands. Without doubt, some of our most treasured plate has had as eventful a history as the “Man on the Black Horse.” Elizabethan Flagons