ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Lord Egremont for permission to publish information on his plate, and to Christie’s for providing images. 1. J.A. Home (ed.), The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, 4 volumes, London, 1889–96, vol. 2, p. 130. 2. E.H. Burn, Modern Law of Real Property, London, 2000, pp. 1007–08. The situation was changed by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which was superseded by the more comprehensive Married Women’s Property Act of 1882.
Prior to these acts a married woman could hold and devise landed property (not personal estate) but any decisions about it were dependent upon the consent of her husband. A queen regnant was excepted. 3. Archives of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, List of the ninth Earl of Northumberland’s plate, 1617–22. By comparison, Henry Howard, first Earl of Northampton, James I’s Lord Privy Seal and the builder of Northampton (subsequently Northumberland) House, had
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6,222 ounces of plate on his death in 1614 and Bess of Hardwick had 8,270 ounces in 1601. E.P. Shirley, ‘An inventory of the Effects of Henry Howard, K.G., Earl of Northampton, taken in 1614, with a Transcript of his Will’, Archaeologia, vol. 42, 1869, pp. 347–78; Santina Levey and Peter Thornton (eds.), Of Houshold Stuff: The 1601 Inventories of Bess of Hardwick, London, 2001, pp. 57–61. 4. Neither maker’s mark has been identified. That on the waiter is ‘IH’ with a fleur-de-lys between pellets beneath. See Ian Pickford (ed.), Jackson’s Silver & Gold Marks, Woodbridge, 1989, p. 136. That on the caster is ‘RR’ with an annulet between two pellets beneath, which does not appear in this work. 5. Burn, op. cit., p. 1008; A.C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, London, 1985, pp. 13, 409–11. 6. Library of the Goldsmiths’ Company, Ledger of Thomas Wickes. The document is unpaginated. 7. Ibid.
8. R. Bucholz, ‘Seymour [née Percy], Elizabeth, duchess of Somerset (1667–1722)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition [accessed 30 March 2018: https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/21925]. 9. In 1702 the Duchess was appointed one of Queen Anne’s ladies of the bedchamber and in 1711 she was elevated to groom of the stole and mistress of the robes. The latter two roles brought a total salary of £2,600 per annum. See Petworth House Archive (PHA) 300
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