Island Life June July 2015 June July 2015 | Page 21

Tale of a

poignant Princess

I

t’s easy to miss, but a tiny exhibit on
display at Carisbrooke Castle’s museum
is a poignant fragment of British Royal
history.
The item is a locket containing a lock of
hair from the head of Princess Elizabeth
the 14 year-old daughter of King Charles I.
A frail and sickly child, she was
imprisoned at the Castle after her father
was beheaded in 1649, for the crime of
being a Royalist.
Tragically, whilst exercising on the castle’s
bowling green, she caught a chill and was
found dead in her room by her captors,
her head resting on a small Bible that had
been the last gift from her father.
She was interred in a modest tomb at
St Thomas Church in Newport - and lay
there for over two centuries until her
Royal descendant Queen Victoria found
out about the humble burial place, and
was so outraged that she ordered a
white marble tomb more befitting of a
Princess.
Whilst the new tomb (which remains
to this day in St Thomas Church) was

being made, the Princess’s original coffin
and contents were stored in a shed in St
Thomas Square. This was when a local
doctor took it upon himself to surgically
examine the remains – and discovered
that most of the bones were misshapen,
suggesting that the tragic child had
suffered from rickets.
During his examination, the rogue
doctor removed a rib bone and some
scalp hair, which later found their way into
a curio shop in Newport. Not surprisingly,
the townsfolk were outraged by the
tasteless exhibit and pressure was put on
the owner Mr Ledicot for its removal.
He ignored all such pressures- until the
day Queen Victoria herself turned up at
the shop with her daughter Beatrice and
demanded the ghoulish items back. She
then had the bone placed in the tomb with
the rest of the girl’s remains, and kept the
lock of hair herself.
Ultimately this found its way back to
Carisbrooke Castle, where visitors can
now view it and ponder on the life of this
17th century adolescent Royal.

* The complete story is told as
part of the Newport Ghost Walk,
run every Monday at 8pm, by Marc
Tuckey of the Isle of Wight Ghost
Experience.
To hear this story and many
others, join the walk from its
starting point at the Wheatsheaf Inn
in St Thomas Square, Newport
www.visitilife.com

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