This year is the tercentenary of the European discovery of the secret of hard-paste porcelain by Johan Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719), and next the establishment of the Meissen manufactory to exploit it. With unfortunate timing, it has now been established that the first European true porcelain was actually made a few years before Böttger’s birth, and not in Saxony, but at Vauxhall.

Burghley House, the seat of the Cecils, Marquesses of Exeter, at Stamford, Lincolnshire, is one of the great treasure houses of England, and its collections are among the best documented. A pair of small vases which have been recorded there since 1683 were long believed to be made of glass with enamelled decoration, despite one containing a note in the scholarly 9th Earl of Exeter’s hand, reading “Duke of Buckingham’s China”.

In 1991 tests by John Mallett and Aileen Dawson, of the British Museum suggested that the earl was right, and they were in fact soft-paste porcelain, like the early attempts to imitate Chinese ware being made at St Cloud in France and elsewhere from the mid-17th century.

The rediscovery of a third “Buckingham Vase” at Burghley has proved that assessment mistaken, although on the right line. This piece had been broken, allowing more extensive tests. Now research carried out by the BM’s scientific department, backed by archival delving for a thesis by Morgan Wesley, a graduate student of Sotheby’s Institute, has proved the three to be true hard-paste, by about 40 years the earliest to be made in Europe. An article on the findings and their implications by Mallett, Dawson and Wesley appears in the October issue of the English Ceramic Circle’s Transactions.

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628-87), was famously described by Dryden as “chymyst, fiddler, statesman and buffoon”, and the order is instructive. Buffoon or no, he was seriously interested in science, even setting up a laboratory when imprisoned in the Tower of London, and like Böttger he was an alchemist, seeking the philosopher’s stone to transmute base metal to gold.

He was also interested in plate-glass making in the 1660s, and in 1670 he took over a glassworks in Vauxhall, where his products were admired by Evelyn among others. He employed Venetians, headed by one Rosetti, but it is very likely that the duke actively involved himself in the chemical side of manufacture. The South Bank was a favoured spot for glass and pipe making because of the clay deposits, and glass and porcelain are close kin. Chinese porcelain was made from very high fired china clay mixed with petuntse, “china-stone”, or a close substitute. Böttger first substituted chalk and alabaster, and in the Buckingham Vases pipe clay is the second ingredient. Similarly, enamelling derives from glassmaking, and the vases also provide the first known European example of such decoration.

Horace Walpole referred to another Buckingham piece in the Royal Collection, although no trace of it can now be found. It is very possible though that other examples do exist, probably also assumed to be made of glass. Certainly families with connections to the duke should look in their cupboards.

Janet Gleeson, who had such a success with The Arcanum, her 1998 book on Böttger and Meissen, might now care to revisit the theme. Buckingham, the “B” in Charles II’s Cabal government, rake, soldier, poet, plotter, and now pioneering potter list, would make her a splendid central figure.