A newly catalogued letter reveals the desperate measures employed by King Charles I to raise much needed funds in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Royal connections
One of the best known events to take place in Dorset during the Civil War was the siege at Corfe Castle. The castle had been purchased in 1635 by Sir John Bankes, who was the Attorney General to Charles I. Our project to catalogue the Bankes family archive has already uncovered some amazing documents relating to the family, and one of the most impressive is a letter sent to Sir John Bankes by King Charles I in December 1634 (reference D-BKL/8C/64). Charles I’s signature can be seen at the top of the letter.
To the pawn shop!
The letter lists a colossal fortune of jewellery that had been pawned in Holland to raise money for the King. Charles had ruled without Parliament for eleven years from 1629, meaning that he could not easily (or strictly speaking legally) impose taxation. This severely limited his income and lead to increasingly desperate and unpopular measures to raise cash; a major contributing factor to the start of the Civil War.
The letter requests that the King’s agents head to Holland and redeem pearls that had been pawned there for £13000. The agents were to sell the pearls for “Sixe & Twenty thousand pounds, or as much more as they can bargaine for”; this money was then to be used to buy back the other pawned jewellery. Although these do not sound like unimaginable amounts of money, today they would be the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds.
The Three Brethren
One of the items listed on the document is a jewel known as The Three Brethren, which can be seen worn as a pendant by Elizabeth I in her famous “Ermine Portrait”. Charles never managed to get the jewel back, and it had disappeared from the pages of history by the 18th century.
Follow the progress of the Bankes project and find details of upcoming events via the project blog.