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The tapering ivory grip mounted
with silver ferrule, pommel and quillons and inlaid in silver wire with
tulip-and-leaf iconography between three bands of silver piqué work, the
bulbous, spherical reinforce to the grip inset with piqué work in floral
motifs; the pommel cap and quillon tips in the form of grotesque helmeted
heads; the tapering double-edged blade - with a narrow and a wide edge - inset
thrice in copper with the “comet” mark of John Hathaway (registered
1689).
Overall length 18 ¾”,
blade length 13”.
The decoration of the hilt of this
ceremonial plug bayonet places it firmly in the early 1690s. Piqué work
on ivory of the type demonstrated here was common in Britain at the time and is
now most usually found decorating the ivory tops of gentlemen’s walking
canes of the period; it became noticeably less detailed and intricate later in
the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century.
Although the tulip motif that is used
so boldly here on the tapering grip of the bayonet was in decorative use in
Britain prior to 1688, the advent of a Dutch king (William III) in that year
made all manner of things Dutch, including tulips, suddenly both fashionable
and expedient. Thus, the use of the tulip as a decorative motif is significant
of the politico-cultural awareness of the period, in which tulips represented
the new, Whig, Protestant dynasty, rather than the old, Tory, Catholic one that
would henceforth be termed “Jacobite”: its adherents rendered
émigrés, traitors and rebels.
The period 1689-92 was one of upheaval
for the British army and one in which employment as an officer depended upon
demonstrable loyalty to the new regime: to own, and wear, a plug bayonet with a
tulip-decorated pommel would have been just one of the ways in which one’s
allegiance could be demonstrated. Bayonets of this quality are known to have
been owned by Army officers, sufficient named examples surviving to illustrate
the practise of officers purchasing exquisite examples of those issued to their
men. Officers of grenadiers wore plug bayonets from the mid-1680s, they being
equipped with light muskets, rather than with swords. The most well-known image
of an officer of grenadiers of the time, that of Captain Francis Hawley, 1st
Foot Guards 1685, shows the sitter wearing a plug bayonet that, although
encased in a richly-laced velvet scabbard, has a plain wooden hilt mounted in
what is probably gilded brass.
While such bayonets were popular in
continental Europe as part of hunting dress and equipment, the practice of
carrying a plug bayonet for the Chase in Britain is unrecorded. In his Hunting
Weapons (London, 1971), Howard Blackmore described exactly this type of hilt as
being that most often found on ceremonial sporting plug bayonets and, although
the decorative style of the hilt is British, the ceremony of the Chase was one
whose codes, dress and language were international: thus, while this is
quintessentially a British plug bayonet, it would not be out of place in a
continental setting.
The particular form of its pommel cap
and quillon tips is one identified by Harold Peterson in his Daggers and
Fighting Knives of the Western World (London, 1968) as,
“…[an]
English pattern that seems to have been very popular during the very late 17th
century, and possibly the opening years of the next century, boasted pommels
and quillon terminals in the form of helmeted heads…”.
In his recent and magisterial survey
of plug bayonets, The Plug Bayonet: an identification Guide for Collectors
(Shipley, 2002), R.D.C. Evans devoted an entire section to the English plug
bayonet with helmeted heads forming the pommel cap and quillon tips,
illustrating several bayonets with similar hilts.
A similar bayonet of 1693, with a
partly blued flamboyant blade and a silver-mounted rayskin scabbard, was
offered in Peter Finer’s catalogue of 1997 (item 41) and other examples
are known in a number of public and private collections, a similarly-decorated
grip being present on an example in the Victoria and Albert Museum
(797-1904).
John Hathaway, whose mark appears
three times on the blade of this bayonet, was granted the use of this symbol by
the Worshipful Company of Cutlers of London on 26th September 1689. He is well
known as a maker of blades for plug bayonets, several examples of his work
having been recorded. Evans records only two other known examples of a Hathaway
blade bearing his mark thrice: this may have been an indication of a high
quality blade, such as one would expect to find in such a high quality
hilt.
Image reproduced by courtesy of Peter
Finer |
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