ISLAND HISTORY
life
Old Curiosity
Shock!
JAN TOMS looks at a macabre
chapter in the Island's history
which involved Royal relics and
an unamused Queen Victoria.
When St. Thomas’s Minster
in Newport was rebuilt in
the 19th century, it brought
to light a nearly forgotten
burial. Princess Elizabeth,
the 15-year-old daughter of
King Charles 1, had been held
prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle.
In 1650 she died and to avoid
embarrassment was quickly
interred in the old church.
Surprisingly, permission
was granted to carry out
a postmortem on the
300-year-old old remains
and Ernest Powell Wilkins,
a surgeon of 95 High Street,
Newport, performed it.
After the examination the
princess was reburied, a plaque
marking the spot. But all
was not quite as it had been.
Unbeknown to the authorities,
William Ledicott, a Newport
shopkeeper, had acquired two
interesting relics - a bone from
the princess’s skeleton and a
lock of her hair.
At the time of the
exhumation the hair had still
been attached to the skull.
It was long and brown with
auburn tints. After some time
he displayed his trophies in the
window of his Old Curiosity
Shop in Holyrood Street, on
the corner of Crocker Street.
When Queen Victoria heard
of it she was less than amused
and, in 1890, Mr Ledicott
received a letter from the
Home Office telling him to
take the offending objects from
the window and have them
reburied next to the rest of the
remains.
Mr Ledicott was unrepentant,
replying he had owned the
objects for nine years and had,
in any case, never displayed
them in the window.
The correspondence
continued until 1898 when Mr
Ledicott finally returned the
bone and the hair to Queen
Victoria’s daughter, Princess
Beatrice, who arranged for
their burial near to Elizabeth’s
coffin.
The Queen, with true
Victorian sentimentality,
commissioned a statue of
Princess Elizabeth from one of
her favourite sculptors, Carlo
Marochetti.
Clearly Snr Marochetti had
not seen the results of Mr
Wilkins’ autopsy. It revealed
Princess Elizabeth suffered
from rickets, her spine being
curved, with a protruding left
shoulder blade.
The deformity of the legs
meant she was knock-kneed
and pigeon toed.
Her skull was longer at
the back, giving her face a
narrow appearance with a low
forehead and prominent chin.
The poor child was light years
away in appearance from the
elegant marble creature still on
display in the minster.
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