The King's Bed and its furniture at Knole: this rare and magnificent seventeenth-century state bed and its accompanying furniture were probably made in Paris for the Duke of York, later James II. Christopher Rowell examines new evidence about their history

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Christopher Rowell

At Knole, the King's Bed was first listed in the 1706 inventory--taken the year after the death of the 6th Earl of Dorset--which reveals that it was not erected there in Dorset's lifetime. Together with James II's 1688 state bed (since at least 1765 in the Venetian Ambassador's Room), it was then in store in the library, having been moved to Knole from Copt Hall, Essex, Dorset's other seat, which was sold in 1701. By 1730, the King's Bed and its furniture had replaced a crimson damask beds (65) in the present 'King's Room' off the Cartoon Gallery and excited comment from visitors and in the early guidebooks for its grandeur and extravagance. Fanny Burney was the first visitor to refer to the bed, in 1779: 'the third state room was magnificence itself: it was fitted up for King William. The bed curtains, tester, quilt and valance were all of gold flowers, worked upon a silver ground: its value even in those days, was 7000 [pounds sterling] ... Nothing could be more splendid'. (60) In 1831, the novelist Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) wrote: 'in the silver room a bed as the show woman trumpetted [sic] forth of gold tissue which cost 8 thousand guineas new now in tarnished tatters not worth with Christie's best puffing 8 thousand pence this day'. (6)

The 1839 guidebook was more circumspect: 'the state-bed which cost 8000 [pounds sterling] is also very perfect considering its age ... the furniture (which begins to show symptoms of not lasting for ever), is of gold and silver tissue, lined with rose-coloured satin, embroidered and fringed with gold and silver'. (68) That the textiles of the King's Bed were in reasonable condition, pace Maria Edgeworth, is borne out by the nineteenth century paintings that incorporated the King's Bed (and other famous pieces of Knole furniture) in subject pictures, such as J.E.Millais's The Eve of St Agnes (Ashmolean Museum, 1863), or in vignettes of Knole itself. One of these, by W.S.P. Henderson, c. 1850, shows that the bed curtains still had their apparently unfaded crimson embroidered linings, but that the furniture, originally wholly gilded and subsequently partly silvered, had already been stained black. (69)

This black varnish was applied presumably as an element of mourning, or, as Edwards suggested, either to match japanned furniture in the room or in reaction to the blackening of the silvering by tarnishing. (70) The blacking still remains on the feet of the bed (in the form of lions, a traditional symbol of kingship, and appropriate for a royal duke or duchess) and on the two porte-carreaux. The rest of the carved woodwork was re-gilded and silvered in 1968 by the Rural Industries Bureau. (71) The rich textiles of the bed and the upholstery were mercifully untouched until their extensive conservation by the National Trust, begun in 1974 and completed in 1987. (72) Blackened and degraded by centuries of dust and dirt, they emerged in a remarkable state of preservation that gives an excellent idea of their intended flamboyance. Only the ostrich feather plumes or panaches proved too fragile to be coaxed back to their original red and white. Since then, a glass viewing box has preserved the King's Room in conservation conditions. There, sparkling in a perpetual evening of artificial light, the splendours of one of the most rare and extraordinary creations of Louis XIV's France remain largely immutable.