Robert Henry Herbert, 12th Earl of Pembroke and 9th Earl of Montgomery (1791-1862) divided his time between his London residence at 7 Carlton House Terrace, and a Parisian residence at 19 Place Vendome, the Hotel d'Evreux. When the Earl gave up his London residence in 1851 a portion of the Storr service was sold by Christie’s. Lot 44 in that sale was catalogued as ‘A set of four double salts of elegant scroll pattern, each with two figures of boys’ and Lot 45 ‘A pair ditto’


Stipple engraving of Lord Pembroke, 1837

Robert Henry Herbert, 12th Earl of Pembroke and 9th Earl of Montgomery (19 September 1791 – 25 April 1862) was a British nobleman and peer. He was in line for great estates and position as head of the distinguished Herbert family and heir to the earldom of Pembroke but lived an irregular life in exile after a dissolute youth.
Herbert was born on 19 September 1791 at Hill Street, London, the second (but eldest surviving) son of the 11th Earl of Pembroke by his first marriage to his first cousin, Elizabeth (d. 1793), who was the daughter of Topham Beauclerk and the former Lady Diana Spencer, eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, and great-great-granddaughter of Charles II. He spent his childhood at Wilton House, the Pembroke country seat in Wiltshire.

After education at Harrow School, he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1810. He later travelled to Sicily. Against his father's wishes, Herbert made a disastrous clandestine marriage at the Butera Palace in Palermo on 17 August 1814. His bride was a Sicilian princess, Ottavia Spinelli (1779–1857), the recently widowed wife of the (much older) Prince Ercole Branciforte di Butera, and daughter of the Duke of Laurino.

Before the death of the Prince, the young Viscount Herbert had been the Princess's cavaliere servente. His father attempted to have the marriage dissolved without success but succeeded in persuading the Sicilian authorities to separate the parties. Accordingly, Lord Herbert was imprisoned in a fortress and his wife in a convent. Herbert managed to escape, however, to Genoa and returned to England, where his father persuaded him to abandon the Princess. She promptly took a house in London under the name of Lady Herbert and brought a suit for restitution of conjugal rights in the English courts in 1819. The marriage was annulled, and she was awarded £800 p.a., which it is said was later increased to £5,000, but Lord Herbert and the Princess never came together again.

Herbert succeeded to the titles on the death of his father in 1827 and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1833. Under a family agreement, his diligent younger half-brother, the statesman Sidney Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Lea, took control of managing the family estates centred on Wilton House, Wiltshire.


Wilton House
Subsequently, by 1837 Herbert was living in Paris, where Lord Malmesbury wrote of him, "Lord Pembroke lives in great state in Paris, and is as famous for his cook as for his horses. He is a very handsome man. Herbert owned Lancret's "Dance before a Fountain", previously in the collection of Catherine the Great.


Lancret's "Dance before a Fountain”

He lived out his exile at No. 19 Place Vendôme, during which time he sired some seven illegitimate children, most of whom adopted the surname 'Montgomery' (as other natural children of the Herbert family had done) or 'de Pembroke de Montgomery'. His frequent trips to London resulted in children by Alexina Sophia Gallot (born London 7 March 1821), daughter of John and Ann Gallot
 

Son of Thomas Storr of Westminster, first silver-chaser later innkeeper, born 1771. Apprenticed c'1785. Before his first partnership with William Frisbee in 1792 he worked at Church Street, Soho, which was the address of Andrew Fogelberg. This is also the address at which Storr's first separate mark is also entered. First mark entered as plateworker, in partnership with William Frisbee, 2 May 1792. Address: 5 Cock Lane, Snow Hill. Second mark alone, 12 January 1793. Address: 30 Church Street, Soho. Third mark, 27 April 1793. Fourth 8 August 1794. Moved to 20 Air Street, 8 October 1796, (where Thomas Pitts had worked till 1793). Fifth mark, 29 November 1799. Sixth, 21 August 1807. Address 53 Dean Street, Soho. Seventh, 10 February 1808. Ninth, 21 October 1813. Tenth, 12 September 1817. Moved to Harrison Street, Gray's Inn Road, 4 March 1819, after severing his connection with Rundell, Bridge and Rundell. Eleventh mark, 2 September 1883. Address: 17 Harrison Street. Twelfth and last mark, 2 September 1833. Heal records him in partnership with Frisbee and alone at Cock Lane in 1792, and at the other addresses and dates above, except Harrison Street. Storr married in 1801, Elizabeth Susanna Beyer of the Saxon family of piano and organ builders of Compton Street, by whom he had ten children. He retired in 1838, to live in Hill House in Tooting. He died 18 March 1844 and is buried in Tooting Churchyard. His will, proved 3 April 1844, shows an estate of £3000. A memorial to him in Otely Church, Suffolk was put up by his son Francis the then incumbent of the parish. For full details of Storr's relationship with Rundell, Bridge and Rundell please see N.M. Penzer, 1954 or Royal Goldsmiths, The Art of Rundell and Bridge, 2005.

Storr's reputation rests on his mastery of the grandoise neo-Classical style developed in the Regency period. His early pieces up to about 1800 show restrained taste, although by 1797 he had produced the remarkable gold font for the Duke of Portland. Here, however the modelling of the classical figures must presumably have been the work of a professional sculptor, as yet unidentified, and many of the pieces produced by him for Rundell and Bridge in the Royal Collection must have sprung from designs commissioned by that firm rather than from his own invention. On the other hand, they still existed in his Harrison Street workshop, until destroyed in World War II, a group of Piranesi engravings of classical vases and monuments bearing his signature, presumably used as source material for designs. The massiveness of the best of his compositions is well shown in the fine urn of 1800 at Woborn Abbey, but the Theocritus Cup in the Royal Collection must be essentially ascribed to the restraint of its designer John Flaxman, while not denying to Storr its superb execution. Lord Spencer's ice pails of 1817 show similar quality. Not all Storr's work however was of classical inspiration. The candelabra of 1807 at Woburn derive from candlesticks by Paul Crespin of the George II period, formerly part of the Bedford Collection, and he attempted essays in floral rococo design from time to time, which tend to over-floridity. On occasions the excellence of his technical qualities was marred by a lack of good proportions, as in the chalices of the church plate of St Pancras, 1821. In spite of these small lapses there is no doubt that Storr rose to the demands made upon him as the author of more fine display plate than any other English goldsmith, including Paul De Lamerie, was ever called upon to produce.