Lord Burghley's silver spice dishes

Apollo, Feb, 2004 by Timothy Schroder

Among the most striking and beautiful pieces of Elizabethan silver in the new British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a silver-gilt dish, hallmarked for 1573-74. It is engraved in the centre with an Old Testament scene, surrounded by a broad band of mermen and sea monsters. Around the border is a series of panels and roundels with birds and animals amidst scrolling foliage and with a coat of arms. It is one of a set of six dishes acquired by the museum in 1946 (Figs. 1-3), (1) which had evidently descended through several generations of the Montagu family, since they bear their distinctive arms, 'three lozenges within a bordure' (Fig. 4). According to Charles Oman and Jonathan Mayne, writing in the Burlington Magazine in 1947, 'all the late owner [Captain Frederick Montagu] could tell of the history of the plates was that he inherited them from his uncle Andrew Montagu, of Ingmanthorpe Hall, Yorks, and Papplewick Hall, Notts, who could trace his descent in the female line through the Earls of Halifax to Henry Montagu, created Earl of Manchester in 1626.' They speculated that since the arms include an annulet, denoting a fifth son, they were probably for the Earl's uncle, William Montagu of Oakley, 'a shadowy person" who was the fifth son of Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu (d. 1556). (2)

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However, as Oman and Mayne recognised, the Montagu arms are not original, and are quite coarsely pricked in contrast to the fine surrounding engraving. Traces can still be seen of three shields evenly spaced around the border of each dish. The engraving that originally filled these shields has been erased and replaced, in one case with the pricked arms and in the other two with a continuation of the engraved foliage in the panels to either side. Beneath the first of these it is just possible to make out faint traces of the original arms. Previous writers have been unable to make anything of these, (3) but a careful examination of the dishes has revealed enough of the original engraving to show that the arms were quarterly of six, that the first and sixth quarters were unusually composed of several bars charged with small shields and that the ordinary of the fourth was a bend. This is enough to establish beyond any doubt that the original arms are in fact those of Queen Elizabeth I's Lord Treasurer, Sir William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley (1520-98) (Fig. 5). In common with many Elizabethans, Cecil did not always marshal his arms in the same way, including sometimes more and sometimes fewer quarterings. But this particular marshalling, quartered with the arms of Winston (in the second and third), Heckington and Wallcot, (4) is his usual blazon and is displayed, for example, over the fireplace in the Great Hall at Burghley House and in the famous Mule portrait of about 1575 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Fig. 6). (5)

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Cecil was one of the richest and most accomplished patrons of his age. The virtually unchanged exterior of Burghley House is a powerful testimony to his resources and his interest in architecture and design. Nevertheless, by all accounts even that was overshadowed by his eat house at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, which Baron Waldstein visited in 1600 and described as being magnificently furnished. (6) The patronage of the early Cecils across a broad spectrum has recently been the subject of a major study, (7) but relatively little attention has been paid to Lord Burghley's role as a patron of goldsmiths' work, probably because no inventory of his plate appears to have survived. As a result, the evidence on which we can build any sort of picture is very slender, limited to a few surviving objects which can with greater or less certainly be associated with him, to some scattered descriptions in the Royal Jewel House inventory and to a few documents of other kinds. This article looks first at this documentary evidence, and then considers the museum's plates in the context of Burghley's wider patronage.

The only piece of plate with Burghley's arms that until now has been recognised is an unmarked but very refined silver gilt mounted glass tankard of about 1575 in the British Museum (Figs. 7 and 8). To this can perhaps be added the group of beautiful silver gilt mounted Chinese blue and white porcelain vessels formerly at Burghley and possibly inherited by his elder son, Thomas, 1st Earl of Exeter (1542-1622), (8) as well as the cluster of mounted hardstone pieces still at Hatfield. (9) The sophisticated taste of these objects is echoed in the documents. Among the references in the Jewel House inventory, compiled in 1574 and added to over the following years, are a small number of objects listed as having been 'given by the Lorde Burghley Lorde Threasourer', all of which are characterised by great richness of materials and complexity of ornament. In 1574, he gave the queen a 'Jug of Christall garnished with silver and guilt divers plates [panels?] enamelid with birds', and in 1588 he gave a 'Porrynger of white Purselyn garnissid with golde the cover of gold with a lyon one the toppe thereof'. But particularly telling is his presentation al Theobalds in 1585 of a 'basson and layre [ewer] of mother of pearl garnished with gold the bacsyd of the bassoon silver and gylte enamelled with Skriptures and devyses of Cosmogerefy, the layre having a falcon in the top with a septer' (the queen's personal badge), and around 1588 of a 'plate of golde graven on the one side with Astronomy and on thother side with a Shypp called the Tryumphe'. (10) As we shall see, such subject matter fits well with what we know of the decorative programmes at Theobalds.