The earliest notice that we have of Venetian glass-workers in England carries us back to the year 1550, and it takes a form that is characteristic of the times. This is a petition to the Council of Ten, that has been found among the Venetian state papers. It is signed by no less than eight Muranese glass-workers, imprisoned in the Tower of London: they declare that they are threatened with the gibbet if they fail to work out their contract. These poor men were indeed between the devil and the deep sea; for did they delay their return to their homes they were liable, by a newly issued edict, to a long term in the Venetian galleys. It was only by the personal intervention of the young king that some arrangement was finally made that allowed of these Muranese glass-workers returning unmolested after working off part of their contract. One of these men indeed elected to remain behind, but he before long made his way to the Low Countries, and this first influx of Venetian workmen seems to have led to little as far as English glass was concerned. Cornelius de Lannoy, from whom Cecil hoped so much, was perhaps as much an alchemist and a universal schemer as a worker in glass. He was set to work at Somerset House in 1564, but with little result, it would seem. He attributed his failure to the clumsiness of the English workmen and to the want of a suitable clay for his glass-pots. It is to Jacopo Verzelini, a man evidently of some energy and resource, that we must give the credit of first successfully making the Venetian _cristallo_ in England. When in 1575 he obtained a patent ‘for the makinge of all manner of counterfayt Venyse drinkinge glasses’ (but not, it would appear, of glass for windows), he was already established in London. Stow, writing a little later, says: ‘The first making of Venise glasses in England began at the Crotchet Friars, about the beginning of the reign of Q. Elizabeth, by one Jacob Vessaline an Italian.’ The Friars Hall, he tells us, ‘was made a glasse-house, wherein was made glasse of divers sorts to drincken.’ It was in this same hall probably that the unhappy craftsmen of Edward VI.’s time had been set to work. Verzelini, like other glass-workers of the period, reached England, it appears, by way of Antwerp. At any rate he was married to a lady of that town, of good family, who bore him twelve children. This we know from the monumental brass to his memory that may still be seen in the little church of Down in Kent, where in the year 1606 he was buried.