Chapter 14

‘Nothing is hidden under the sun’

Repo Man

One of Charles II’s first acts on negotiating the terms of his restoration to the throne, even before setting foot on English soil, was to set in motion the reassembly of the remnant of his father’s collection.¹ He must have feared the worst; at Breda, on the eve of his return, he reserved a group of seventy-two paintings from the dealer William Frizell, promising to pay later.² Events moved quickly. On 23 March 1660, Parliament proclaimed an act for the restitution of royal property sequestrated and sold by the Commonwealth. On 8 May Parliament proclaimed the restoration of the monarchy; a day later the House of Lords ordered the appointment of a committee of lords to oversee the return of the late king’s goods to the Crown.³ Robert Leslie, Master of his Majesty’s Cabinets, informed the House of Lords that he had been ‘offered by several persons pictures belonging to his office, which he cannot receive without an order from the Committee.’⁴ On 12 May it was ordered that ‘all persons that have any of the King’s Goods, Jewels, or Pictures, shall bring them in to the Committee for the King’s Goods, &c. within seven days after the date’.⁵ These orders would propel a flurry of inventories, lists, and memoranda concerning paintings and sculptures of royal provenance, which, some owners reported disingenuously, had been in their safe keeping against the hope of the restoration of the Crown.⁶ John Stone’s discovery return was by far the most extensive. Peter Lely submitted a list on 18 May consisting of ten paintings and four statues, keen to ingratiate himself with the new order and to secure the coveted post of ‘Limner and Picture Drawer to the King’, an office last occupied by Sir Anthony van Dyck before his death in 1641.⁷

Van Dyck’s former studio associate, George Geldorp, having dealt in the late king’s goods during the Interregnum, was also anxious to cultivate and appease the court. Turning whistle-blower, he provided intelligence about works of art in the hands of London merchants, officials, and aristocrats. Among their number were the artist-dealers Remigius van Leemput and Emmanuel de Critz.⁸ Geldorp also reported that an entire inventory of the Commonwealth Sale, annotated with the names of buyers and prices, was in the hands of Thomas Beauchamp of Parsons Green: ‘One Beedsome at Parssam Greene, divers pictures and status, and the bouck of the Holl catthalogue, and the price of every one, and the naemes of those that have bocht them.’ Beauchamp, formerly Clerk Registrar to the Trustees for the Sale of the late King’s goods,⁹ was ordered to submit the sale catalogue to John Webb, Charles II’s surveyor-elect; it would prove a vital tool for the identification, recovery, and subsequent administration of royal goods.¹⁰ Eager to be seen to comply, Beauchamp also made a disclosure of royal goods at his premises in Parsons Green.¹¹ The former Trustees of the Commonwealth Sale were ordered on 12 May to attend the committee with their books and accounts.¹² Beauchamp also submitted an inventory consisting of twenty-eight pages and listed the goods reserved for the use of the Protectorate; marginalia of the Restoration period specify works of art returned to the Crown.¹³

Charles II subsequently appointed a new committee to recover Crown property, later known as the Compounder’s Committee; among its members were Elias Ashmole, Col. William Hawley, William Rumbold, Francis Rogers, and Thomas Chiffinch, a former page to Charles I, Keeper of the King’s Jewels, shortly to be appointed Keeper of the Privy Closet. His brother William, who succeeded him in the post, may have been the author of the c. 1666 inventory of the Royal Collection, discussed below.¹⁴ Beauchamp’s unique knowledge of the Royal Collection during the sale, the identities of the buyers at the sale and during the Interregnum, together with his politic cooperation with the Lords committee, meant he was co-opted onto the committee tasked with the (re)sequestration of Crown works of art.

On 23 May, Col. William Hawley was appointed by the Lords committee to ‘seize all goods, pictures, jewels and moveables belonging to the Crown in the hands or custody of any person’;¹⁵ Col. Hercules Lowe assisted him in this task. On 26 May they applied for an order to deliver the seized goods to Clement Kynnersley, Keeper of the Wardrobe; on the same day Hawley applied to the Lords committee for his papers to be returned to him so that he could complete an inventory of the seized goods delivered into the Treasury House at Whitehall; he also asked that Beauchamp be appointed his assistant.¹⁶

Doubtless, the intelligence contained in Beauchamp’s copy of the sale inventory was critical to the dispatch of his duty to locate, identify, catalogue, and receive Crown goods. As Clerk to the Trustees, in 1649 he had worked alongside King Charles I’s former under-copier and keeper, Jan van Belcamp, as he catalogued and appraised works of art in his new capacity as Trustee to the Sale. The architect John Webb, petitioning at the Restoration, emphasized long service to Charles I as Deputy Surveyor under Inigo Jones; on 23 May 1660 he wrote to the Earl of Dorset requesting ‘his Lordship to order that such pictures as the writer may find fitting to set up in His Majesty’s lodgings at Whitehall may be delivered to him by the Committee.’¹⁷ Presumably Robert Leslie, as Keeper of the King’s Cabinet, was also involved in the task of re-hanging the galleries and closets of Whitehall. Via these civil servants, there existed a direct line of transmission of anecdotal and working knowledge of the paintings in the Royal Collection, together with their formal records in the inventories made before and during the Interregnum. The Caroline ‘genealogy’ of the connoisseurship evinced at the Restoration court can be traced along this bloodline, despite the interruption of the Civil War and Commonwealth periods, the deaths of key individuals, and the inconvenient exigency of shifting political allegiances.

Hawley has been demonized as the ultimate ‘Repo Man’ of the seventeenth century, and the rapaciousness of his methods certainly confirm this characterization,¹⁸ but despite the compelling backstory, the inventory of goods returned to the Crown in 1660 through his offices has received meagre attention. Preserved in the British Library, it is inscribed on folio 3: ‘A Booke conteining severall of his Maties goods brought into his Maties closset and wardrop by Coll. Wm. Hawley, by order of a Committee of Lords, in April 1660’, dated Whitehall, 1 June 1660. On the verso of folio 2, a certificate ratified by Lords Carbery, Vaughan, Dorset, and Campden is transcribed in a late seventeenth-century hand. It records Hawley’s delivery of several parcels of Crown goods ‘imbezzled in the late unhappy times’, for which service the committee recommends he should be awarded a fifth of their value.¹⁹

Folios 3 to 6v itemize parcels of goods delivered to Thomas Chiffinch between 29 June 1660 and August 16 1661. It is clear that these lists were drawn up some time afterwards, since one of the items, a large looking glass, was ‘now in His Majesty’s bedchamber’. Close examination of the entire document reveals puzzling ambiguities that contradict what we know of the restitution of goods in 1660. It is a record of goods returned via the enthusiastic offices of Hawley, but also an inventory of paintings at Whitehall c. 1660–2, probably compiled by Thomas Chiffinch, with some input from Thomas Beauchamp.

Folio 7 details three paintings delivered out of the Jewel House to the royal frame-maker Henry Norris (appointed Joiner of the Privy Chamber on 10 July 1660), and thereafter commences a long list of paintings delivered to Thomas Chiffinch.²⁰ Among the first eight items on this list (fol. 7) are two paintings recognisable from John Stone’s return: ‘A picture of y^e seige of Bullen’ and ‘One picture of y^e ships going to Bullen’ [?Siege of Boulogne-sur-mer by Henry VIII, 1544 and The departure of Henry VIII from Calais on 25 July 1544].²¹ Folios 7v–17 reiterate, almost verbatim, the items appearing in the Contractors’ Inventory, section ‘Severall pictures of St James’s’, where each item is marked ‘R’ (discussed above, Chapter 7).²² There are some omissions, but the majority—lots 1–209 of 281—are present, arranged in near-identical order, although the spelling of the artists’ names is eccentric, as if the compiler misunderstood, or misheard, an extant list.²³

This surely solves the mystery of the meaning of the suffixed ‘R’: here are the paintings of the Reserved Goods, that is, those goods set aside from the Commonwealth Sale for the use of Oliver Cromwell and the Council of State. William Hawley had subcontracted the discovery of Cromwell’s goods to Richard Yates, who seized them sometime between 21 May and 8 June 1660, according to a petition of November 1660.²⁴ Erin Griffey, discussing Thomas Beauchamp’s lists of reserved goods—‘the 1651 inventory of goods reserved for State Use and the 1659 inventory of Hampton Court’—notes that these comprised principally fine furnishings, textiles, and tapestries, chosen to confer the pomp of state on the Commonwealth government.²⁵ However, she observed that ‘a paltry 13 pictures and a single decorative ceiling cycle (at Greenwich) [was] reserved for State use’.²⁶ The present identification of the ‘Hawley’ list, ff.7v–17, as a list of Reserved Goodds considerably enlarges our view of the paintings choosen for the use of the state during the Commonwealth, but also raises new questions.

Puzzlingly, most of these goods had been marked as ‘sold’ in the Contractors’ Inventory, with the prices and buyers’ names annotated. Because the paintings reappear in a consecutive inventory in the Hawley document, and again in the c. 1666 royal inventory, it seems that they were not after all disbursed to purchasers or dividend leaders during the Interregnum, to be returned pell-mell in 1660, but were retained in situ for the use of the state. Some of the items can be identified from Van der Doort’s 1639 inventory of Charles I’s new cabinet room at Whitehall, furnished with paintings and statues from the old cabinet room at St James’s Palace. Did Cromwell order the preservation of the hang in the Whitehall cabinet, revoking the sale of most of the paintings? Even more intriguing is the spectral presence, fol. 15v, of Leonardo’s St John the Baptist, traditionally presumed to have left Britain during the 1650s, passing through the collections of Everard Jabach and Cardinal Mazarin before entering the French royal collection in 1661.²⁷ If the hypothesis outlined above is correct, it overturns our construction of the Commonwealth Sale, and the provenance history of important Renaissance paintings.²⁸

Erin Griffey has highlighted Thomas Beauchamp’s role in the recovery of goods belonging to the dowager queen (Henrietta Maria) in 1660, and constructed a lost list of goods at Somerset House, 1665, which were packed by her under-housekeeper, Henry Browne, on the occasion of her return to Paris from London.²⁹ This is based on references to ‘Browne numbers’ in the 1669 post-mortem inventory of her goods at Colombe. While neither of these lists betray a sign of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, they do remind us that royal goods were taken from London to France during the first decade of the Restoration. Further comparison and research into the early Restoration inventories may reveal more of the context of the transmission of goods between London and Paris, elucidating the questions raised by the identification, here, of the c. 1660–2 and c. 1662–6 royal inventories.

From internal evidence, it is clear that the ‘Hawley manuscript’ records a very early hang of pictures at Whitehall immediately following the Restoration. Folio 17v marks the start of a new list and describes a little painting of the history of Daphne by Isaac Oliver, placed ‘Upon y^e doore in y^e King’s Clossett’.³⁰ There follows a list of miniatures and cabinet paintings; evidently, this is an inventory of Charles II’s cabinet at Whitehall. Folio 20 itemizes a drawing of mice by Raphael, also recorded in the preceding list (fols. 7v–17). This suggests that the Restoration collection was rehung shortly after 1661. Perhaps we can discern the ghost of Charles I’s Whitehall cabinet in the first list, c. 1660–2, and Thomas Chiffinch’s more comprehensive re-hang of the apartments of Whitehall after 1662 in the list that commences on folio 17v. By that date, the recuperated Royal Collection had been augmented by the paintings bought by the king from William Frizell, a gift of paintings and sculpture from the Dutch States,³¹ gifts from courtiers such as John Browne,³² and paintings purchased in November 1660 via a lottery from the artist-dealer John Michael Wright, whose sumptuous portrait of Charles II defines the aspirations of the Restoration court.³³

The ‘second’ list (c. 1662–6) reflects the enlarged collection. Folio 22 may record the earliest indication of Holbein’s Noli me Tangere, a painting belonging to Henrietta Maria at Colombes in 1669, and later in the collection of Charles II.³⁴ Folio 33 describes a painting acquired from Wright’s lottery (‘in the island of St George’).³⁵ Paintings acquired by Charles II from William Frizell in 1660—for which Thomas Chiffinch recompensed in June 1662 Sir John Shaw’s payment on behalf of the king—appear in the inventory (fols. 50v; 57).³⁶ This list is surely identifiable with Thomas Chiffinch, Keeper of the Privy Closet and the King’s Jewels.³⁷ In June 1662, the King designated him the recipient of restituted money and goods, a role commemorated in the portrait by Jacob Huysmans in the National Portrait Gallery, in which Chiffinch makes a conspicuous display of precious coins, miniatures, cameos, and classical statuary.³⁸

Although the inventorist does not identify locations, we can discern a thematic hang: cabinet pictures and miniatures; a gallery of ancestral portraits; a set of artists’ self-portraits, a group of Titians. It is apparent that this document records the first iteration of the display of the Restoration collection at Whitehall under the charge of Chiffinch, dating from 1662. Indeed, the c. 1662 list mirrors almost exactly the hang of the individual rooms in the c. 1666 royal inventory, which misunderstands some of the attributions and spellings of the earlier document.³⁹ The ‘Hawley’ manuscript has long been overlooked; it is evidently the earliest inventory of Charles II’s collection and merits more scrutiny than the present study can devote.⁴⁰

The historic confusion over the authorship of the manuscript is understandable. The inscription on the frontispiece incontrovertibly identifies Hawley with the recovery of the items in the register, and an entry on folio 119 itemizes a rope of pearls ‘given by the Prince of Orange to Princess Henrietta, His Majesty’s sister. One Deuwant bought it and I arrested him to bring in his Rope of Pearls’.⁴¹ Naturally scholars have surmised that Hawley composed the entire register, but Chiffinch is a likelier candidate to whom, the document records, the goods were delivered.

Written in an elegant copperplate hand, the inventory deploys a percipience reminiscent of Van der Doort’s Register. Given the circumstances under which it was drawn up, it is a remarkable document displaying cultivated connoisseurship. Many of the pictures have attributions to artists, some evincing a sophisticated knowledge of artists’ names, for example, ‘Jacobus Palma’ and ‘Antonio Corregio’. It distinguishes between different types of copies, and in some cases, identifies their authors. The receipts for returned goods and the inventories bound together in the manuscript provide fuller information than earlier inventories of royal goods in some cases. For instance, the ‘unicorn’ horn, listed in 1649 among the contents of the Lower Jewel House at the Tower of London by Carew Mildmay, weighing 40lbs 8oz, and, at £600, the single most valuable item, with the exception of the late king’s crown. It was later seen by Lodewick Huygens at Somerset House, who noted that it was ‘as thick as an arm, with a large crystal knob.’ The horn was sold to Edward Bass in December 1651, but delivered out of the Jewel House on 21 June 1660 to Charles II.⁴² Chiffinch’s inventory gives a fascinating description of this object: ‘Thomas E Beccits staffe made of unicorns horn y^e head of it inlaid w:^th precious stons’.⁴³ Considering that it was believed to be a holy relic—the staff of St Thomas Becket—it is intriguing that it was not broken up, as were the crown jewels, but instead was reserved by the state during the Commonwealth.

One can imagine the complex undertaking of this inventory at Whitehall in the winter of 1660–1: discussions between Beauchamp, Webb, and Chiffinch concerning attributions and the status of restituted paintings, scrutiny of sale inventories, and perhaps also catalogues deriving from before the Civil War. No mere administrative exercise, the inventory is a central synapse in the development of connoisseurship in seventeenth-century England, bridging the 1630s and the 1660s across the divide of the Interregnum.

Thomas Chiffinch died in April 1666 and his position was inherited by his brother William. Around this time a new inventory was drawn up of the collection of King Charles II at Whitehall and Hampton Court: ‘An Inventory of all his Ma^ties Pictures in White-Hall’ and ‘An Inventory of all his Ma^ties Pictures in Hampton Court’.⁴⁴ This patently relied in part on the earlier inventory, many items are detectable from inclusion in the earlier list, and the hang follows a similar order. Paintings recorded in John Stone’s ‘discovery inventory’ are also recognizable, and receive prominent billing in the king’s apartments at Whitehall Palace.⁴⁵ Since the handwriting in the c. 1666 royal inventory differs from the highly characteristic hand of the list here attributed to Thomas Chiffinch c. 1662, it seems probable that the c. 1666 inventory was compiled by William Chiffinch on taking up office.

Paintings by Leonardo, Luini, and the School in Chiffinch c. 1660–2 and Chiffinch c. 1662–6.

Can we identify a painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo in Thomas Chiffinch’s lists of c. 1660–2 and c. 1662–6? The ‘lords figure’ disbursed to Edward Bass in 1651 was catalogued, lot 123, in the list of paintings at St James’s (here identified as the list of the Reserved Goods). Therefore, it ought to appear in the c. 1660–2 inventory, which lists lots 1–209 of the St James’s paintings. It should be identifiable not only from its description, but also from its placement between a landscape with the portrait of Queen Anne of Denmark and a painting of the Prophet Elias by Guercino. These items are indeed recorded on folio 11v, but the item sandwiched between them is: ‘A fflower halfe figure done by Leonardo Danotio’ and not ‘A lords figure in halfe’ by Leonardo da Vinci. The ‘flower figure’ is strongly suggestive of the (?)School of Leonardo Flora/Columbine, catalogued by Van der Doort in 1639, absent from the Contractors’ inventory, but reappearing in the c. 1666 royal inventory. Why, when, and how this item was substituted for the ‘lords figure’ is a mystery.

The only items attributed to Leonardo in the Chiffinch lists of c. 1660–2 are a St John, and a ‘flower figure’ (Flora).⁴⁶ An Infant Christ and St John, attributed to ‘Parmenthyus’ (Parmigianino), appears in the first list (i.e. the recovered Reserved Goods) so cannot be identified with the painting of the same subject attributed to Leonardo, purchased by Charles II from William Frizzell at Breda, 3 April 1660. The Salutation [Annunciation] attributed to Luini in the Contractors’ inventory of pictures at St James’s Palace (the Reserved Goods) reappears, attributed to ‘Lowena’.⁴⁷ This may be identifiable with the Annunciation attributed by Van der Doort in 1639 to ‘Barnardino Bennino’.⁴⁸ Another item, ‘A Madonna almost as big as the life’, is attributed to ‘Lawin’ [?Luini], this item is not identified.⁴⁹ There are numerous paintings of Herodias in the c. 1662 inventory, but none with an attribution to Leonardo or Luini.

Therefore, it seems clear that although the majority of the ‘Reserved Goods’ were recovered at the Restoration, probably because they never left St James’s Palace; Edward Bass had removed the ‘lords picture/Christ in bust’ and did not return it. Nor can we discern in either the c. 1660–2 or the c. 1662–6 Chiffinch lists the ‘peece of Christ’ certified as returned by Stone in 1660. Two Sixth Dividend paintings are recorded in the c. 1660–2 list, and many of the dividend’s goods appear in the subsequent list, c. 1662–6. In all likelihood, therefore, the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo in the c. 1666 Whitehall inventory is the Greenwich ‘peece of Christ’ returned by Stone in 1660, although its whereabouts between 1660 and 1666 are—again—opaque.

The papertrail generated by the sequestration and dispersal of the Royal Collection in 1649, and its partial restitution, or re-sequestration, in 1660, reveals only one painting explicitly corresponding to the description of a Salvator Mundi by Leonardo: the painting disbursed to Stone in 1651 and returned by him in 1660. No other document records a painting meeting that description. The iconography of the ‘lords figure/Christ in bust’ attributed to Leonardo and disbursed to Edward Bass in 1651 is ambiguous; the painting was not returned at the Restoration. This suggests the identification of the Greenwich (Stone’s) painting with the one recorded by Thomas or William Chiffinch in the c. 1666 inventory of Charles II’s art collection at Whitehall and Hampton Court.

Restoration Man

The manuscript inventory of the collection of Charles II is kept in the office of the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in York House, St James Palace; its inaccessible location means the document is rarely consulted or cited, and it has never been published.⁵⁰ There are three typewritten transcripts of this document (1922); these are also obscure and hardly ever consulted.⁵¹ Either Thomas or William Chiffinch is the presumed author of the manuscript, on account of their official custodial roles. The manuscript is not dated; the date of compilation is deduced from the year 1666 marked against one of the paintings, a portrait. As noted above, 1666 was the date of William Chiffinch’s accession to his late brother’s offices. He would become the closest confidant of the king and the beneficiary of a highly lucrative position, continuing in post after the death of Charles II, until the hurried exile of James II on the eve of the 1688 revolution.⁵²

The inventory is written in an elegant secretarial hand. It is well organized and tabulated into columns—much in the manner of the 1639 register—recording the specific location of a given work in either Whitehall or at Hampton Court, its inventory number and a pencilled modern collection number where applicable, the attribution to an artist, and the height and breadth of the piece. Provenance is noted in many cases, with paintings acquired from ‘M^r Wright’s Lottery’, ‘Lanier’, ‘Frizzells collection’, and as part of the ‘Dutch Present’. Questions over attribution are indicated: ‘thought/said to be of’. Subtle distinctions are drawn between direct copies and pastiches: ‘After Raphael’s way’, ‘After Titian’ and ‘Coppied in Spaine after Titian’. The obscurity of this inventory, and a natural circumspection towards attributions in seventeenth-century English inventories, explains scholars’ neglect of a most significant painting in the collection of Charles II, which Chiffinch attributed to Leonardo: ‘In the Kings Closet. 311. Leonard de Vince. O^r Savio^r w^th a gloabe in one hand & holding up y^e other’.⁵³

While scholars have emphasized the loss of Charles I’s Titians, and speculated whether the Dutch States General made a conscious attempt to donate paintings comparable to the works sold off under the Commonwealth,⁵⁴ little notice has been paid to Charles II’s interest in Leonardo. As discussed above, the Caroline art collection possessed eleven works attributed to Leonardo or his school; it seems that Charles II inherited from his parents an interest in the artist. The c. 1666 inventory records four items attributed to Leonardo: a Salvator Mundi,⁵⁵ the Flora/Columbine,⁵⁶ Herodias with the Head of St John the Baptist,⁵⁷ and the Infant Christ and St John Embracing,⁵⁸ (identified according to their modern titles). The Flora/Columbine was attributed to Leonardo, or his school, in 1639; the Herodias was attributed to Luini in 1649; they were both ‘upgraded’ as autograph works of Leonardo in the mid 1660s. The painting now known as the Infant Christ & St John Embracing may be the item described as ‘Christ & St. John of the painteing of Leonardo da Vinci’, purchased by Charles II from William Frizell in 1660 for 1,500 Dutch florins.⁵⁹ With the exception of the Salvator Mundi, these items remain in the Royal Collection today, where they are attributed to Bernardino Luini, Cesare da Sesto, and Marco d’Oggiono, respectively. The Herodias, the Flora, a ‘Socrates with his wife riding upon his shoulders’, and an item described prosaically as a Man’s Head, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, were recorded in inventories taken after the accession of James II in 1685;⁶⁰ the Infant Christ & St John Embracing reappeared after 1700.⁶¹ The Salvator Mundi was not recorded in the Royal Collection after the reign of Charles II.

The internal evidence of the inventory provides further insights to Charles II’s appreciation of these Leonardesque paintings. All four items were hung at Whitehall Palace. The Herodias was placed in the ‘Long Matted Gallery’; the Flora/Columbine hung in the second privy lodging room; the Infant Christ & St John Embracing, presumably the painting handpicked by Charles II from Frizell, hung in the king’s closet, as did the Salvator Mundi. The proximity of these items to the king suggests they were highly prized. The inventory provides the dimensions of the majority of the paintings, with—vexingly—the notable exception of the painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi. The detailed description of the iconography of the painting confirms that it was indeed inspected at the time the inventory was compiled, but why Chiffinch failed to measure its dimensions is a mystery. Was the painting removed to another location before his task was completed? The hang in the king’s closet was dense; secular and sacred paintings jostled for space; there were a number of limnings by Peter Oliver after Charles I’s Titians, and here too was the former companion to the Salvator: Carracci’s Agony in the Garden. As we have seen, the recuperated collection had been replenished by gifts and purchases since the first months of the Restoration, but perhaps the hang in the king’s closet iterated a relic of Caroline placement.

There are a few eyewitness accounts of the art collection and library at Whitehall during the reign of Charles II; they explain who gained access, and by what means. John Evelyn, witness to the dismemberment, sale, and reconstitution of the Royal Collection, was a regular visitor to Whitehall. At the beginning of September 1680, he enjoyed a few days of uninterrupted access while the king was away at Windsor, later penning an extensive entry in his diary.

September 2: I went to Lond: because of an Opportunity I had of his Majesties being yet at Winsor, to see his private Library at Whitehall, which I now did at my full Ease; and went with expectation of finding some Curiosities: But tho there were about a thousand Volumes, there were few of any great importance, or which I had not perused before … I spent 3 or 4 entire daies locked up, & alone among these books &c: There is in the rest of the Private Lodging contiguous to this, divers of the best pictures of the greate Masters, Raphael, Titian, &c (& in my esteeme) above all the Noli me tangere of our B: Saviour to M: Magdalen, after his Resurrection, of Hans Holbeins, than which, in my life, I never saw so much reverence & kind of Heavenly astonishment, expressed in Picture … An antient Woman, who made these lodgings Cleane, & had all the Keyes, let me in at pleasure, for a small reward, by the meanes of a friend.⁶²

The ancient servant, from whom Evelyn procured access to the king’s private quarters, was probably the famous ‘necessary woman’ Bridget Holmes, memorialized for posterity by John Riley, Painter and Picture Drawer in Ordinary to Charles II.⁶³ Holmes had served Charles I, and continued under William and Mary; dying at the reputed age of 100, she was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

Artists connected to the court of Charles II enjoyed privileged access, which they cheerfully exploited to keep their customers supplied with copies after popular or prestigious paintings belonging to the king. Peter Lely and Emmanuel de Critz’s hastily returned ‘discoveries’ ensured them a place in the administration and supply of the reassembled Royal Collection.⁶⁴ As early as June 1660, de Critz was firmly ensconced and showed Samuel Pepys around the galleries at Whitehall. Pepys borrowed Peter Lely’s portrait of Lord Montagu, commissioning de Critz to make him a copy.⁶⁵ As it had been during the time of Belcamp, the restored Royal Collection was a useful store of models, ripe for plunder by its keepers and curators. Lely’s friend and protégé Mary Beale borrowed paintings from friends and clients, making copies after old masters and also after Van Dyck and Lely. In 1674 she borrowed eleven of the king’s Italian drawings via William Chiffinch, Page of His Majesty’s Bedchamber and Keeper of the King’s Private Closet.⁶⁶

The Invisible College and the King’s Cabinet

One very significant, and until this study, overlooked witness of Charles II’s collection of Leonardo did not need to bribe the ‘necessary woman’, nor did he need to sneak into the king’s privy lodgings. Walter Charleton was Charles I and Charles II’s Physician-in-Ordinary.⁶⁷

Introduced to natural philosophy as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, by his tutor, John Wilkins, Charleton later took up medicine, and was soon afterwards appointed physician in ordinary to Charles I, assisting Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. Charleton published one of the earliest works of natural theology; he was a member of the circle of Hobbes and Digby, and latterly of Margaret Cavendish. One of the earliest fellows of the Royal Society—the ‘Invisible College’—he became a fellow, anatomy reader, and Harveian Orator of the Royal College of Physicians, giving the inaugural lectures in the new Cutlerian anatomy theatre in 1679. These were published in 1680 as Enquiries into Human Nature in VI anatomic praelections in the new theatre of the Royal Colledge of Physicians in London. The opening words of the sixth lecture, ‘Of motion voluntary’, are startling:

For Painting, I recommend to them the incomparable Lionardo da Vinci, della Pittura: not only because he was eminently skill’d in all parts of Anatomy, as appears by the accurate Figures that illustrate and adorn Vesalius’s noble Volume De Corporis humani fabrica, all of which were drawn and cut by Da Vinci’s own hands; and the original Draughts of which are yet extant in a large Manuscript of his in Folio, in the Italian language (but written from the right hand to the left) carefully preserv’d in His Majesties Cabinet at White-Hall, where I have had the good fortune sometimes to contemplate them: but also because in his Treatise Della Pittura just now mention’d, he seems to me to have describ’d the figures, motions, forces and symmetry of the limbs, their Articulations and Muscles, in various postures, more clearly than any Writer I have hitherto read.

The significance of this passage cannot be overstated, not only because of the early discussion of Leonardo as an anatomist, the direct association of his drawings to the edition of Vesalius, and to specific passages in the editio princeps of Leonardo’s treatise on painting, published in 1651. The astonishing revelation of the passage is the clear identification that the Windsor Volume belonged to Charles II, and was kept in the cabinet at Whitehall Palace. Until now, the first concrete evidence of the presence of the great volume of Leonardo’s drawings in the Royal Collection is the reference to it by William III’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, who, in his diary entry of 22 January 1690, wrote that he went to Whitehall Palace ‘to the rooms underneath the King’s Closet, where we saw four or five books with drawings among others of Holbein’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s’.⁶⁸ Sir Walter Charleton’s words date from 1679, and he infers that he had the opportunity to peruse the volume for some years before that date, so it seems the Windsor Volume was among Charles II’s most precious possessions during the 1670s. His description of the manuscript in folio refers to standard measures of books; the dimensions of the Leoni binding (47 × 33 cm) roughly correspond to Folio (12" × 19"). The proximity of the king’s cabinet and his closet at Whitehall holds out the tantalizing possibility that Charleton also saw the Salvator Mundi, but on this subject he is silent; frustratingly, his extensive personal papers preserved at the Bodleian Library and his many publications make no further mention of Leonardo.

In the accounts of Evelyn, Pepys, and Charleton, all of whom had access to the king’s private quarters throughout his reign, the Salvator Mundi is invisible, a mute presence. Was the painting again hidden from sight in a private closet, or had it been removed from the palace?