A George I burr walnut bureau attributed to Peter Miller.

Note: The bureau retains all the original brass handles and escutcheons. The backboards of both the bureau section and the base section are inscribed in ink:
‘To His Grace the Duke of Chandos att Shaw Hall Near Newbury Barks’.

James Brydges’ father was the 8th Baron Chandos, an influential member of the Levant Company who was appointed Ambassador to Constantinople from 1681 to 1687, a position that considerably increased his wealth.

James Brydges was created Earl of Carnarvon on his father’s death in 1714, and became 1st Duke of Chandos in 1719. Like his father before him, he too was a member of the Levant Company, becoming its Governor from 1718 to 1735. He entered the Privy Council in 1721.

Between 1713 and 1724 he built Cannons, a mansion in Middlesex on an estate acquired from the uncle of his first wife, Mary Lake. Its vast cost (equivalent to over £33 million today), together with heavy losses when the South Sea Company and the York Buildings Company both crashed, greatly depleted the family fortune. The 1st Duke died at Cannons in 1744. His son, Henry Brydges, 2nd Duke of Chandos, was unable to afford the house’s upkeep and in 1747 he held a twelve-day sale of both the contents and parts of the structure, culminating in its demolition.

The 1st Duke had purchased Shaw House in Berkshire with his second wife, Cassandra Willoughby, in 1728. He stayed there for a few months in 1730 after arranging for furniture, including the walnut bureau, to be sent there from London, but after Cassandra died in 1735 he never returned. Shaw House stood empty, with the furniture dispersed among his tenanted properties at Scotland Yard in London.

The bureau was later passed on to one of his tenants, Thomas Alexander Brown, who subsequently gave it in lieu of school fees to the Reverend William Shepard, the minister at Gateacre, a private boarding school in Liverpool. It was then purchased by Shepard’s niece, Hannah Mary Fletcher, in the sale of her late uncle’s effects. Hannah in turn bequeathed the bureau to her nephew, Colonel Samuel Archer, who gave it to his son.