During the reigns of James II, William III and Queen Anne, the great majority of seat furniture for the Royal Palaces was supplied by the joiner and carver Thomas Roberts.' In 1686 Roberts succeeded Richard Price as maker of bed frames, seat furniture and miscellaneous items to the Royal Household, working from premises known as 'The Royal Chair' in Marylebone Street, Westminster, until his death in 1714. Throughout Roberts's time changes in English chair design were rapid and frequent, and are minutely recorded in Roberts's bills which survive in the Lord Chamberlain's accounts, so that the development of the English chair during this period can be reconstructed in considerable detail.2 This unrivalled documentary record formed the basis of R.W. Symonds's scholarly accounts of Carolean chair design which were first published in the 1930s.3 The chronology constructed by Symonds has been followed without substantial modification by furniture historians in Britain and America ever since.' This article will suggest a different interpretation of some of the terminology in the bills, and proposes a new chronology for late seventeenth-century English chair design.

A somewhat crudely ornamented ivory-veneered chair of the 'burgomaster' type, manufactured in Vizagapatam c. 1770 (Fig. 14) and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bears a silver label which proudly proclaims: 'Formerly the property of Tipu Saib, taken after the storming of Seringapatam and presented to Queen Charlotte by Warren Hastings'. Its provenance can, in fact, be traced only as far as the Cliveden sale of 1967,' but it is by no means the only item of ivory furniture to claim an origin from the treasures unveiled in Tipu Sultan's palaces at Seringapatam after the notorious ruler of Mysore had been defeated by British forces in 1799. At Newstead Abbey, for example, there is a partly gilt solid-ivory armchair (Fig. 15) described in the guidebook of 1953 as 'one of a set of six received by Warren Hastings from Tippoo Sahib, and later in the possession of Queen Charlotte',2 while an ivory-veneered commode now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (Fig.18), bears an old clipping stating it was 'Formerly the property Of TIPOO SAHIB',3 and an elaborate suite of ivory-veneered funiture at Kedleston Hall (Fig. 17) was until recently succinctly labelled: 'IVORY FURNITURE OF TIPPO SAHIB'.4 Indeed, so liberally has Tipu's name been applied to Anglo-Indian ivory furniture that there are few surviving pieces which have escaped the association (see Appendix I below).