The remains of an Ethiopian royal who was interred at Windsor Castle in the 19th century has been withheld by Buckingham Palace.
A descendent of Prince Alemayehu, an orphan who was loved and financially nurtured by Queen Victoria and passed away at the age of 18, has reportedly demanded that his remains be returned to Ethiopia. This is according to Mail Online.
The removal of the body, according to Buckingham Palace, would have an impact on other people buried in the catacombs of St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.
The chapel staff understood the need to honour Prince Alemayehu’s memory, the Palace stated, but they also acknowledged that they had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed.”
The Ethiopian prince’s bones are interred on the grounds of Windsor Castle, but Buckingham Palace would not return them.
After his father, Emperor Tewodros II, committed suicide in 1868 as British troops besieged his mountaintop residence in northern Ethiopia, Prince Alemayehu was taken to England.
Queen Victoria adored the seven-year-old orphan who attended Sandhurst Military Academy and received his education. However, he unfortunately passed away from pneumonia at the age of 18 in 1879 and was interred in catacombs close to Windsor’s St. George’s Chapel.
In 2019, the Queen forbade the return of his remains, but in the aftermath of a new biography of him, campaigners are now again calling for their return.
Buckingham Palace refuses to return remains of Ethiopian prince who is buried in Windsor Castle grounds.
One of his descendants Fasil Minas told the BBC: ‘We want his remains back as a family and as Ethiopians because that is not the country he was born in’, and added ‘it was not right’ for him to be buried in the UK.
But a Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘It is very unlikely it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity [in the catacombs of St George’s Chapel].’
The statement added that the palace also had a ‘responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed’.
The Ethiopian prince’s bones are interred on the grounds of Windsor Castle, but Buckingham Palace would not return them.
King Tewodros II, also referred to as “Mad King Theodore,” wished to be friendly with the British and wrote a letter to Queen Victoria in 1855. He is the father of Alamayu.
Tewodros held the British consul and a number of missionaries hostage in a high mountain cell when she ignored both that and a subsequent letter and didn’t respond.
To free the 44 prisoners, a British army of around 40,000 soldiers was dispatched. In April 1868, they successfully laid siege to Tewodros’ mountain fortress at Maqdala in northern Ethiopia.
Tewodros committed suicide as the mission’s triumphant end drew nigh. Alamayu’s mother, Tewodros’s wife, passed away while descending the mountain, leaving her son a fatherless child.
Along with the prince, the British also confiscated hundreds of religious and cultural items, including as gold necklaces and crowns.
Andrew Heavens, a historian, claims that this was accomplished to protect them from the Tewodros’ adversaries, who had been close to Maqdala.
He first met the Queen at her vacation house on the Isle of Wight, which is off the South Coast of England, in June 1868. He was described as “a very pretty sight, a graceful boy with beautiful eyes and a nice nose and mouth, though the lips are slightly thick” by the woman later in her diary.
The Ethiopian prince’s bones are interred on the grounds of Windsor Castle, but Buckingham Palace would not return them.
Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, who had travelled to Ethiopia with the prince, was appointed as Alamayu’s protector.
While the Queen had prefered that he stay on the Isle of Wight, he first travelled to India with Speedy before the Treasury mandated that he receive a suitable education.
He was sent to Cheltenham, Rugby, and finally Sandhurst, but had trouble at school.
When the prince slept outside one night, he contracted pneumonia. He lived in Headingly, in Leeds, and after refusing to eat, he died.
After learning of his death, Victoria wrote: ‘It is too sad! All alone in a strange country, without a single person or relative belonging to him… His was no happy life, full of difficulties of every king.’ Near his burial spot is a plaque bearing the inscription: ‘I was a stranger and you took me in.’
In the 1990s, the Ethiopian government requested the return of Alamayu’s remains for the first time. Officials from the Palace, however, have argued in the past that they cannot be recovered without disturbing others’.
The argument, according to activist Alula Pankhurst, a member of Ethiopia’s cultural restitution committee, is only a “excuse for not dealing with it,” she told The Times.
Bringing this young man home entails facing unpleasant truths that no one wants to face.
Fesseha Shawel Gebre, the ambassador of Ethiopia to London, urged the Queen to think about how she would have felt if one of her relatives had been interred abroad in 2019.
‘Would she happily lie in bed every day, go to sleep, having one of her Royal Family members buried somewhere, taken as prisoner of war?’ he asked. ‘I think she wouldn’t.’
He insisted that the boy was ‘stolen’.
