Kevin approached me as a best-selling historian to research his discovery.
The crowned golden figure, holding a shimmering orb and sceptre, stands on a spotted antelope, which I recognised immediately as the heraldic beast of the 15th century Lancastrian king Henry VI.
A pious man who suffered bouts of mental illness, Henry’s failed rule had led to the period of civil strife we know as the Wars of the Roses.
He was murdered in 1471 on the orders of his victorious rival, the Yorkist king Edward IV. But Henry VI had a remarkable afterlife.
People decided that, while he had been a bad king, he had been a good man, and declared him a saint. Subsequent “miracles” attested to his power.
Has a detectorist uncovered part of Charles I’s lost epiphany crown?
The discovery by one man and his metal detector in a Northamptonshire field has been the cause of much interest for the British Museum
18 December 2020 • 6:00am
On January 30 1649, Parliament cut off Charles I’s head. A year later, his state crown was “totally broken and defaced”. Parliament valued it at £1,100, the jewels were sold, the gold melted for coin. Nothing survived – or so it was thought.
In the vaults of the British Museum lies a treasure handed over by a 49-year-old metal detectorist, Kevin Duckett. He had flipped a clod of earth in a Northamptonshire field on a sunny day in 2017 and poking out, “like a partially unwrapped present”, was the gold figure of a king.