This is a highly important set of three silver salvers made by the most famous English silversmith Paul de Lamerie. All three salvers are beautifully chased and engraved to the centre with the arms of the Duke of Montrose. 

Originally the fourth Marquess of Montrose, James was elevated to a dukedom in 1707, as a reward for his important support of the Act of Union, whilst being Lord President of the Scottish Privy Council. He was Lord High Admiral of Scotland from 1705 to 1706. He was Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland from 1709 to 1713 and served as Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland from 1716 to 1733. He was also a Lord of the Regency for Great Britain in 1714, upon the death of Queen Anne. Furthermore, he served rather shortly as Secretary of State for Scotland at the time of the Georgian ministry of Lord Townshend. In 1719 he was one of the main subscribers to the Royal Academy of Music (1719), a corporation that produced baroque opera on the stage. He served as a Governor of London's Foundling Hospital at the time of its foundation in 1739. For much of his adult life he was Chancellor of the University of Glasgow.


 

Paul de Lamerie arrived in England with his Huguenot parents in or before 1689, having been baptized at 's Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands in 1688. In 1703 he was apprenticed to the Huguenot goldsmith Pierre Platel, and after being admitted to the freedom of the Goldsmiths' Company, he registered his first mark and set up a workshop in Windmill Street, Soho, in 1712. He took thirteen apprentices between 1715 and 1749 who paid premiums varying between £10 and £45m In 1716 he married Louisa Juliott, also a Huguenot, and by her had six children, three of whom died in childhood. Little more of his personal history is known, although his career in the Goldsmiths' Company is comparatively well documented. By 1717, he was already referred to as 'the King's Silversmith' but again in a complaint 'for making and selling Great quantities of Large Plate which he doth not bring to Goldsmith's Hall to be mark't according to Law.' He joined the livery in 1717; fourteen years later he was elected to the court of assistants. In 1743 he was appointed fourth warden and in 1747 second warden; that he never became prime warden probably due to ill health. From the outset he had wealthy clients such as the Honourable George Treby and the Duke of Sutherland. Among his more important later patrons were Sir Robert Walpole, Baron Anson, and the fifth Earl of Mountrath. A gradual expansion of his business culminated in his move in 1739 to considerably larger premises in Gerrard street. His pre-eminent position in the trade is signified by the commission he received in 1740 from the Goldsmiths' Company to provide two of their most splendid pieces of ceremonial display plate, a silver-gilt inkstand and the famous rococo ewer and dish.