LONDON: Buckingham Palace has declined a request to return the remains of an Ethiopian prince, Prince Alemayehu who came to be buried at Windsor Castle here in the 19th Century.
Prince Alemayehu was taken to the United Kingdom aged just seven and arrived an orphan after his mother expired on the journey. Queen Victoria then took an interest in him and made arrangements for his education and ultimately his burial when he died aged just 18. But his family wants his remains to be dispatched back to Ethiopia.
“We want his remains back as a family and as Ethiopians because that is not the country he was born in,” Fasil Minas, one of the royal descendants told BBC. “It was not right” for him to be buried in the United Kingdom, he added.
But a statement sent to the BBC quoted a Buckingham Palace spokesperson saying that removing his remains could affect others buried in the catacombs of St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. “It is very unlikely that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity,” said the palace.
The statement further said that the authorities at the chapel were sensitive to the need to honour Prince Alemayehu’s memory, but that they also had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”.
It also said that in the past, the Royal Household had “accommodated requests from Ethiopian delegations to visit” the chapel.
Prince lived in exile for a decade
How Prince Alemayehu ended up in the United Kingdom at such a young age was the result of imperial action and the failure of diplomacy. According to details, in 1862, in an effort to strengthen his empire, the prince’s father Emperor Tewodros II sought an alliance with the United Kingdom, but his letters making his case did not get a encouraging response from Queen Victoria.
Angered by the silence and taking matters into his own hands, the emperor held some Europeans including the British consul hostage. This precipitated a huge military expedition, involving some 13,000 British and Indian troops, to rescue them.
In April 1868, the forces laid siege to Tewodros’ mountain fortress at Maqdala in northern Ethiopia, and in a matter of hours overpowered the defences. The emperor then decided he would rather take his own life than to be a prisoner of the British, a decision that turned him into a heroic figure among his people.
After the battle, the British plundered thousands of religious and cultural artefacts. These included gold crownsnecklaces, , manuscripts and dresses.
Historians say hundreds of mules and dozens of elephants were required to cart away the treasures, which can be found today across European museums and libraries, as well as in private collections.
The British also took away Prince Alemayehu and his mother, Empress Tiruwork Wube. They might have thought this to keep them safe and prevent them being captured and possibly killed by Tewodros’ opponents, who were near Maqdala, according to Andrew Heavens, whose book The Prince and the Plunder recounts Alemayehu’s life.
Following his arrival in the United Kingdom in June 1868, the prince’s predicament and his status as an orphan elicited the sympathy of Queen Victoria. The two met at the queen’s holiday home on the Isle of Wight, just off England’s south coast. She agreed to support him financially and put him in the guardianship of Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, the man who had accompanied the prince from Ethiopia.
The prince had a “hankering” to return home, correspondence quoted by Heavens suggests, but that idea was swiftly quashed.
Eventually, Alemayehu ended up being tutored in a private home in Leeds. But he became ill, possibly with pneumonia, and at one point refused treatment thinking he had been poisoned.
After a decade in exile the prince died in 1879 at the age of just 18.
