It seems from the Knole furniture, and a comparison of the designs with those of some of the tables and other woodwork produced during the same reign, bearing the impress of the more severe style of Inigo Jones, that there were then in England two styles of decorative furniture. One of these, simple and severe, showing a reaction from the grotesque freedom of Elizabethan carving, and the other, copied from Venetian ornamental woodwork, with cupids on scrolls forming the supports of stools, having these ornamental legs connected by stretchers the design of which is, in the case of those in the King's Bedchamber at Knole, a couple of cupids in a flying attitude holding up a crown. This kind of furniture was generally gilt, and under the black paint of those at Knole are still to be seen traces of the gold.
Mr. Eastlake visited Knole and made careful examination and sketches of the Jacobean furniture there, and has well described and illustrated it in his book just referred to; he mentions that he found a slip of paper tucked beneath the webbing of a settle there, with an inscription in Old English characters which fixed the date of some of the furniture at 1620. In a letter to the writer on this subject, Mr. Lionel Sackville West confirms this date by referring to the heirloom book, which also bears out the writer's opinion that some of the more richly-carved furniture of this time was imported from Italy.
In the Lady Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral there is a monument of Dean Boys, who died in 1625. This represents the Dean seated in his library, at a table with turned legs, over which there is a tapestry cover. Books line the walls of the section of the room shown in the stone carving; it differs little from the sanctum of a literary man of the present day. There are many other monuments which represent furniture of this period, and amongst the more curious is that of a child of King James I., in Westminster Abbey, close to the monument of Mary Queen of Scots. The child is sculptured about life size, in a carved cradle of the time.
In Holland House, Kensington,[9] which is a good example of a Jacobean mansion, there is some oak enrichment of the seventeenth century, and also a garden bench, with its back formed of three shells and the legs shaped and ornamented with scroll work. Horace Walpole mentions this seat, and ascribes the design to Francesco Cleyn, who worked for Charles I. and some of the Court.