A rare and impressive Charles II silvered mirror, decorated profusely throughout with ribbons, branches, berries, flowers and putti carved in the round onto a silvered backboard, the cresting featuring two putti above swags centring a central putto beneath a cornucopia basket, the sides with further putti, these with musical instruments, leading down to a large central sunflower above tulips.

England in the Late Seventeenth Century

Despite the victory of Restoration in 1660 and the optimism it fostered, England suffered greatly in the next decade. The economy underwent serious recession for the next three years as society salved the scars left by Puritan privations of the Protectorate. Not only were inns and theatres closed down, but most sports were banned as boys caught playing football on a Sunday could be whipped as punishment.

The nation’s political and economic fortunes reached their worst between 1665 and 1667 when London endured the Plague (1665), the Great Fire (1666) and a second Anglo-Dutch war (1665-67). With ‘public matters in a most sad condition’ and ‘all sober men…fearful of the ruin of the whole Kingdom’, on New Year’s Eve in 1666 Samuel Pepys saw no prospect of improvement, beseeching ‘good God [to] deliver us’.

Yet, from 1667 there began a remarkable recovery that developed into an economic boom lasting into the 1690s. England’s woollen cloth manufacturers, jointly the nation’s largest industry, rose to successfully challenge cheaper competition abroad and the English ‘New Draperies’ found new markets both at home and abroad, particularly in the Mediterranean and the Levant. All this, however, was outstripped by the booming re-export trade, which saw the goods flooding into London from Asia, Africa and the Americas sent on to all parts of Europe and the Mediterranean.

This seaborne trade which became the engine of commercial growth was supported by the massive expansion in England’s fleet. In 1663 the English merchant fleet amounted to 126,000 tonnes. By 1686 that number had increased to 186,000. Between 1664 and 1686 the number of ships bound for the Americas increased nearly threefold.

The buoyancy of the economy is reflected by the speed with which London was rebuilt following the Great Fire. By the end of 1671, only five years after the disaster, nearly 7,000 houses had been built to the new specifications of the 1667 Rebuilt Act, replacing the 13,000 smaller dwellings lining narrower streets. During this time, the foundations were laid for London’s great and fashionable West End. All these new houses needed furnishing, too. With this, the pace of stylistic and technical advancements greatly quickened as incomes rose nationwide and, for the first time, people had money to spend.

This mirror embodies this period of rejuvenation, prosperity and national happiness. Silvered and carved with berries, branches, flowers and a cornucopia, it symbolises economic growth, regeneration, abundance and plenty; decorated with ribbons, swags and putti playing musical instruments, the mood of excitement and celebration. After the hardship of the 1650s and 1660s, this mirror, made around 1685, represents the spirit of optimism and hope with which the nation in the years since was imbued.  

Provenance

The Hon. Catherine Mary ‘Kate’ Wass, OBE (1942-2021), the late owner of this mirror, was a direct ancestor of George III via his third son Prince William, Duke of Clarence, later William IV, and his mistress, the Drury Lane actress Mrs Jordan (1761-1816), who lived together for twenty years at Bushy House before, under pressure from his older brother the Prince Regent, the Duke eventually married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen.

Kate was descended from the Duke and Mrs Jordan’s eldest daughter, Lady Sophia FitzClarence (1796-1837) who in 1825 married Philip Shelly Sidney, 1^st Baron De L’Isle and Dudley (1800-1851), a British politician, collateral descendant of Elizabethan poet and soldier, Sir Philip Sidney, and first cousin of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their only son, Philip, 2^nd Baron, had three sons. The third, William, who became the 5^th Baron, was Kate’s grandfather, and his son, William Philip Sidney, 1^st Viscount De L’Isle (1909-1991), Kate’s father.

Lord De L’Isle is distinguished for receiving the Victoria Cross for leading a defence at Anzio during the Second World War and serving as Secretary of State for Air in Winston Churchill’s second administration, after which, between 1961 and 1965, he served as the 15th Governor General of Australia, the last Englishman to hold this post. In 1940 he married the Hon. Jacqueline Corrine Yvonne Vereker (1914-62), daughter of the Anglo-Irish peer, Field Marshal John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort (1886-1946).

Lord and Lady De L’Isle had five children. Their second child was Kate, born in 1942. After Lady De L’Isle’s death in 1962, she and her younger sister Anne stepped into their late mother’s shoes to act as their father’s official hostesses in Australia. Kate married firstly, in 1964, Martin John Wilbraham (1931-2018), son of Major Jack Wilbraham, MC, with whom she had three sons, and secondly, in 1983, Nicholas Hyde Villers (1939-98), amongst whose ancestors are the 4^th Earl of Clarendon (1800-70), the 1^st Earl of Verulam (1775-1845) and the 1^st Earl of Liverpool (1729-1808). Kate remarried following her second husband’s death and was in 1995 awarded the OBE.

6^th Viscount Gort

It was not only Kate’s father who was distinguished militarily but her maternal grandfather too. The 6th Viscount Gort, known by his soldiers as ‘Tiger Gort’, was one of the most decorated soldiers of the First World War, during which he was mentioned in dispatches eight times. On 27^th September 1918 he received the Victoria Cross for his actions at the Battle of the Canal du Nord, near Flesquieres, France, where, despite being severely wounded twice, he continued to lead his battalion under heavy fire. The official citation reads, ‘For most conspicuous bravery, skilful leading and devotion to duty…By his magnificent example of devotion to duty and utter disregard of personal safety all ranks were inspired to exert themselves to the utmost’.

In 1937, Gort was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and in 1939 named Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Gort’s decision, in defiance of orders, to withdraw the BEF to Dunkirk in May 1940 is considered by historians to have saved the BEF, enabling it to fight on for the rest of the war.

In 1941, Churchill made Gort Governor of Gibraltar and a year later sent him as Governor to beleaguered Malta, then the ‘most bombed place on earth’, where his resolute leadership and calmness under fire gained him the admiration of the Maltese who awarded him the Sword of Honour. He supervised the distribution of scarce food and water supplies so successfully that at the height of the crisis 200,000 people were receiving rations each day. In 1943, Lord Gort received his Field Marshal’s baton from King George VI for having so effectively defended the island. In 1944-45 Lord Gort briefly served as High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in Palestine until terminal illness forced him to return to Britain.

7^th Viscount Gort

This mirror was in the collection of the 6th Viscount Gort’s brother and Kate’s great uncle, Standish Robert Vereker MC, the 7^th Viscount Gort (1888-1975), an important connoisseur and collector of fine and decorative art, who completed important restoration works at Bessie Surtees House in Newcastle and Bunratty Castle in County Clare, Ireland, which he finished with furniture from his collection of English, French, German and Dutch dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and French, German and Flesh artworks. Gort’s importance as a collector, however, is exemplified by his acquisition, in 1948, of the magnificent cabinet-on-stand attributed André-Charles Boulle (1642-1732) for the Gort country seat, Hamsterley Hall, County Durham, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Museum reference: 77.DA.1). The cabinet’s near-counterpart is in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Drumlanrig Castle, Scotland.

The Viscount and Viscountess donated generously throughout the course of the lives. In 1954, the Viscount arranged for the ownership and contents of Bunratty to be held in trust for the Irish people and in 1973 donated an important collection of fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance paintings to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, including two portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder (G-73-61 and G-73-51) and The Bisham Abbey tapestries, the ‘Book of Tobias’, by the workshop of Bernard Van Orley, c. 1530 (G-73-84 to 85). The Canadian link was established through an uncle, Jeffrey Edward Prendergast Vereker, who had resigned his commission in the army and moved to Kenora in north-western Ontario. In 1911, Lord Gort travelled to Winnipeg, Manitoba and eventually established a major real estate holding there that included the Viscount Gort Hotel on Portage Avenue.

Viscount Gort’s primary residence was Hamsterley Hall, which, his preference being for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fine and decorative art, he renovated richly with furniture, tapestries, wainscot, chimneypieces and windows of the period. In this way, the drawing room is decorated in the Georgian Gothic manner and distinguished by its magnificent ceiling, illustrated in Country Life, 2^nd March 1939, p. 230. The article also discussed Viscount Gort’s acquisition of important works of art from other important houses, namely the aforementioned Bisham Abbey tapestries and the Stoke Edith bed from Stoke Edith House. It is in the bedroom where this bed was placed that this mirror can be seen in the reflection of the mirror above the fireplace, photographed in the same article by Country Life.