No Seated Queen!

01/04/1964

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When in 1963, the market moved from its centuries-old site in the middle of the city, the council set about realigning the road to ease traffic flow. This involved taking down the Gates Memorial, the drinking fountain monument to the city’s first mayor, Henry Pearson Gates. It had been donated to the city by his wife and erected in 1898. The public were asked to suggest a new name for the site and ‘Cathedral Square’ was selected. However, the council had its own ideas about what should replace the memorial. It asked four sculptors to submit ideas and designs. In February, it had brought in three art experts to advise which was best. They unanimously selected one called ‘The Seated Queen’. The council promptly put a model of ‘The Queen’ on display for public approval, despite one councillor saying: ‘anything of a modern sort is going to create comment from those that don’t understand it’. How right he was. Nobody wanted to ‘understand’ it, the ‘locals’ couldn’t understand it and didn’t want it anyway. It was on this rather appropriate day 1 April that the council finally erased ‘The Seated Queen’ from their plans and cost estimates! (Harper-Tee, John, ‘The Peterborough Story’, Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 1992)

Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.

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Burial of Mary, Queen of Scots

30/07/1587

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On 8 February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed at Fotheringhay Castle. There her body stayed, embalmed and sealed in a lead coffin, until this day when it was moved, in the dead of night, to Peterborough. On the instructions of Queen Elizabeth I, the burial was a formal affair fit for a queen. The coffin, followed by the royal standard of Scotland, was moved in procession from the Bishop's Palace to the cathedral. As well as the nobility, the Bishop and Dean of Peterborough and the Bishop of Lincoln, 100 poor widows dressed in black walked in procession following the coffin. Following a sermon preached by the Bishop of Lincoln, the dean oversaw Mary's interment. A magnificent funeral banquet, paid for by Queen Elizabeth, followed in the Bishop's Palace. The cost of the whole burial is said to be over £300 - a vast sum. In 1612 Mary's body was exhumed when her son, King James I of England, ordered she be re-interred in Westminster Abbey, in a chapel opposite the tomb of Elizabeth I. (Carnell, Geoffrey, The Bishops of Peterborough, RJL Smith & Associates, 1993; Gunton, Symon, The History of the Church of Peterborough, ed. Symon Patrick, 1990; People of Peterborough, Peterborough Museum Publications, 2009)

Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.