The Search For The Missing King (August 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 5)

The Search For The Missing King

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Authors: Susan Elizabeth Lyman

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August 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 5

If, one of these days, someone in England comes across a huge chunk of lead, rather battered and defaced, but recognizable as the head of a certain British monarch, the finder will have his hands on a part of the most famous statue in early American history.

This was the equestrian statue of King George III which was pulled down by patriots in New York City on July 9, 1776, and hacked into pieces, some of which were subsequently cast into bullets. Although 42,088 bullets were made from the royal lead, some fragments escaped the bullet mold and, having gone through various adventures, remain today—some in private hands, others in a museum—to make a close tie with those first exciting days of the Revolution. It is also possible that other pieces will turn up and that even the head, last seen in London in 1777, still exists.

It all started on July 9, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the American troops in New York for the first time. Its unflattering references to His Absent Majesty spurred the listening soldiers and civilians to immediate action. Somebody thought of the statue of the King, which had been made in London by Joseph Wilton and erected with such ceremony only six years before, and, in the early evening, a crowd gathered at Bowling Green, where the 4,000-pound image stood on a high pedestal in the center of a little park. Ropes were thrown over the figure and made fast. Strong arms pulled. There was a heavy thud, then cheers and the clang of metal being chopped into pieces. Men cut the head from the body, then disfigured it by chipping the nose away and prying off the laurel wreath with which the head was crowned, finally they formed a noisy procession and straggled away into the night with their booty, while a life and drum played “The Rogue’s March,” the tune commonly used at a tar and feathering.

Before long the metal started on its travels, British forces were slowly closing in on Manhattan and it was only a matter of time before the city would be attacked. The head was filched at once by a group of American soldiers who lugged it up to their Fort Washington encampment on upper Manhattan. They had the idea of mounting it on a spike in the traditional English treatment of traitors and erecting it in front of the Blue Bell Tavern, which stood at what is today the corner of Broadway and 181st Street.

News of this plan reached the ears of Captain John Montresor, an engineer with the British army. He had his contacts, having lived in New York for years (his home was Randall’s Island), and he got word to one Corbie, an American who spied for the British. Corbie and John Cox, a Tory, seized the head and buried it, presumably near