The hingeless oval gold box is applied with a circular medallion embossed and chased with the pre-revolutionary coat of arms of the City of New York as it appeared on the city’s seal, above the date 1773 and the Latin inscription: SIGILIS CIVITAT NOV. EBORAC. (Seal of the City of New York), within palmettes.

By 1775, the minutes of the New York Common Council had recorded the presentation of twenty gold and three silver-gilt boxes, starting in 1702 with a gold box bestowed on Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (1661–1723) on his arrival as Royal Governor. Of these twenty-three boxes, only two survive: the present example and another oval box with engraved rather than chased arms on the lid, made by Charles Le Roux and presented in 1735 to Andrew Hamilton, the Philadelphia attorney.

The presentation of the Freedom of the City of New York to His Excellency the Honourable Thomas Gage, Lieutenant Commander-in-Chief of all His Majesty’s forces in North America, on 7 June 1773 was initiated by the Mayor of New York, Whitehead Hicks, with the agreement of his Common Council. At a meeting on 20 May 1773, Hicks “Communicated to this Board that General Gage Intends Shortly to Leave this province for Europe, & that as his Conduct has been Generally Approved of by the Inhabitants of this City, therefore proposed that this Board Should Address him & at the same time prefer him with the freedom of this Corporation, the Seal whereof to be Enclosed in a Gold Box”

The Freedom “engrossed on parchment” and the gold box “with the City Arms Engraved thereon” were most speedily completed and on 7 June the Mayor and Board waited on his Excellency to make the presentation accompanied by an elegant address.

Thomas Gage (1719/20–1787) came from a prominent Sussex family established at Firle since the fifteenth century. He was the second son of an Irish peer, Thomas, 1st Viscount Gage (d. 1754) and his wife Benedicta. He received his first commission in 1741 and served in Ireland, Flanders and in Scotland at the battle of Culloden. He first went to North America in 1754 to fight the French, alongside the then little-known George Washington, later his adversary. An enthusiastic and capable officer, Gage was commended for his “gallant conduct” and twice wounded in action.

After the British capture of Montreal and Quebec, Major-General Gage was appointed military Governor of Montreal where he was noted for his honest, capable and diplomatic administration.

In 1758, Gage married Margaret, the beautiful and well-connected eldest daughter of Peter Kemble, president of the council of New Jersey, and his wife Gertrude Bayard, with whom he was to have eleven children. He was named Commander-in-Chief of the whole British army in North America in 1763, and was in command of a vast military machine of more than fifty garrisons and stations stretching from Newfoundland down to Florida and from Bermuda to the Mississippi. Gage made his headquarters in New York where, helped by his wife’s family connections, the couple were popular in the city, entertaining frequently at their house in Broad Street, Manhattan. He was frugal, “not overly fond of liquor”, but a good natured and tactful host.

The general had problems however with the dissident citizens of Boston who resisted British acts and taxes more than the loyalists of New York. Despite or maybe because of the storm clouds gathering, Gage decided to visit England in 1773 for the first time in twenty years. The presentation of the Freedom of New York with its accompanying gold box, to mark his departure, placed a fitting crown on what Gage’s biographer called “probably the happiest years in the life of Thomas Gage”.

Sent back the following year as Royal Governor of the turbulent Massachusetts, the general, “a brave, though not brilliant, soldier” with a naturally conciliatory nature, found it impossible to steer a calm course between fierce demands for submission from the government at home and the unyielding stance of the colonists. On 18 April 1775 Gage dispatched eight hundred men to destroy arms which he had heard the colonists were illicitly gathering in Concord, some twenty miles from Boston, thus prompting Paul Revere’s famous ride to warn the colonists. Indeed, some modern historians credit Lady Gage herself with first having given word to her compatriots. Following the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the bloody battle of Bunker Hill which marked the outset of the War of Independence, and in the face of fierce criticism from London, Gage resigned his position and left America for the last time in October 1775.

America for the last time in October 1775. A brief note in the Common Council minutes for 7 June 1773, following the description of the presentation, requests the Treasurer to “pay to Otto Parisien or order the Sum of £30 : 16 for a Gold Box made by order of this Board, for Enclosing the City seal, Annexed to the Freedom, which the Corporation presented to General Gage this day”.

Otto Parisien, as he was commonly known, is believed to have arrived in Philadelphia from his native Berlin on board the Eastern Branch on 3 October 1753. He had moved to New York by 1757 when he joined the French Protestant (Huguenot) Church there. He married Esther/ Hester Sicard from New Rochelle, another Huguenot, with whom he had several children. Otto Parisien took the Oath of Colonial Naturalisation on 18 January 1763 as “silversmith”, and was admitted as a freeman on 31 January 1769. The progress of his career can be traced through a number of advertisements placed in local newspapers. These show that although plate was his primary concern, he also supplied gold Galanteriewaren such as “all kinds of gold lockets, pins and rings”, as well as gold cases or frames for miniatures. All the recorded advertisements make it clear that chasing was one of his skills, not common in New York at the time. Be that as it may, it seems quite extraordinary that Parisien, on the whole a domestic silversmith rather than a goldsmith, should have been able to produce an accomplished gold box in under three weeks.

In later years Parisien went into partnership with one of his sons, also called Otto, before retiring around the turn of the century to his wife’s home town of New Rochelle where he died on 17 January 1811.

minimize...