Duke pays £27,000 to bring plate back home

Nov 27 2009 The Journal

THE Duke of Northumberland has bought a piece of his ancestral heritage for £27,000 at auction.

The duke bought a rare mid 18th century plate, from a service other parts of which are on display at his Alnwick Castle home, at a sale at London auction house Bonhams.

Only a handful of pieces from the ‘Hanbury Williams/Duke of Northumberland’ service dated 1748-1750 remain on display at the castle.

The Meissen plate was a gift from Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams in 1748, probably passing to the then Earl of Northumberland in 1756.

The duke paid £27,060, way above the estimate of £15,000 to £20,000.

He used some of the money brought in by the controversial £22m sale of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks to the National Gallery in 2004.

The plate will be on display from next spring.

The duke said: “The Meissen Collection at Alnwick Castle is a special part of our heritage and I am delighted to have been able to retrieve one of the few missing pieces. The collection is on display and the new addition can be viewed when the castle opens in the Spring.

“When Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks was sold a few years ago, some of the proceeds were used to maintain and protect the art and chattels within Alnwick Castle and some have been used to purchase suitable additions such as this Meissen plate and a Death Warrant signed by Elizabeth the First, sealing the fate of my ancestor, the 7th Earl of Northumberland.”