In April 1660, after nearly a decade in exile in the Netherlands, Charles II of England signed in the Declaration of Breda the conditions that Parliament would end up accepting for his proclamation as the new king, a document that will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on May 4.
On the occasion of the official coronation of Charles III (May 6), the London auction house will hold a special session dedicated to the monarchy in which one of the five original copies of the Breda manuscript will be the star, with an estimated price of between 400,000 and 600,000 pounds (450,000 to 680,000 euros).
“This is one of the few transformative royal documents that changed royal power forever, and as such is the most important of its kind ever to come up for sale,” Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s manuscript specialist, said in a statement. .
The conditions established in the document, which continue to apply to the British Crown 350 years later, include freedom of religious worship, as well as guarantees that Parliament would be free from interference by the monarch.
In his exile in the Netherlands, Charles II prepared five copies of the manuscript, which were sent to the House of Commons, the City of London, the House of Lords, the Navy, and the Navy.
Three of those copies have been lost, while the House of Lords keeps theirs in the parliamentary archives, and the one received by the Navy, which the future sovereign refers to as “the wall of the realm”, is the one that now it is auctioned.
Then-General of the Seas Edward Montagu kept the document, passing it down to his descendants until it was first put up for auction in 1985.
Montagu was precisely the one who commanded the fleet that brought Charles II back from the Netherlands, who arrived in London on May 29, 1660, the day of his thirtieth birthday, to seal one of the most important constitutional changes in the history of the Kingdom. United. EFE
