The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1838-09-14 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

BUCKINGHANI, BEHEADED AT SALISBURY.—A correspondent of the Salisbury Journal has furnished that paper with a most interesting account of the recent discovery of the mutilated remains of the celebrated Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who was beheaded in that efts, in 1483. History records, that Henry Stafford. Duke of Rockingham, the "cousin of Buckingham" of Shakspear's immortal page, having failed in his plan of insurrection against Richard 111, took refuge in the house of his servant Bannister, near Shrewsbury; that be was "by that wretch betrayed" into the hands of the king, then at Salisbury, and suffered death at that city. without form of trial, according to the summary method of that age, by decollation and amputation of the right arm. Tradition assigns the court-yard of the Blue Boar Inn as the scene of this bloody tragedy. During the alterations and improvements which are still in progress at the Saracen's Head Inn, ( which there can be no (15ubt formed part of the premises originally attached to the Blue Boar,') it became necessary to remove the brick flooring of one of the rooms, and dig to some depth. In the course of this operation, about eight inches below the surface of the soil, they came to a human skeleton. The place here indicated can only be a few yards, possibly feet, from the very spot where Buckingham suffered decapitation. The remains so discovered were evidently those of a human being, and the skeleton was complete, save that it wanted the head and right arm. The first impression on the mind of the landlord, Nr. Shuker, was that the remains thus discovered were those of some travelling pedlar; who had been murdered in the house, and for secrecy buried on the spot. The absence of the arm, it seems, suggested the idea that such might possibly have been the vocation of the deceased, and they accounted for the non-appearence of the head by supposingthat it had been cut off by the murderers, on finding that the grave they had excavated was too small to contain the body. With this impression the landlord himself took up one of the ribs, and measured it by his own, averred that the deceased must have been of large dimensions. The servant maid had laid irreverent hands on the neck-bone, little suspecting that those same miserable relics had once been adorned with a jewelled collar, with the "George" thereto appended; and one " rude knaVe" actually seized the " reeky shanks" of the honoured left leg, once encompassed with the glittering insignia of the most noble order of the garter. The spinal column appeared completely imbedded in the clay; and on handling or taking tip some of the detached verterbrw, they crumbled into dust in their hands. As may be supposed, the whole remains were in a like friable condition; and acting on the uncomplimentary impression that what was once the most high and puissant Prince Henry of Buckingham, was no other than a murdered pedlar, they actually, with their dirty shovels," knocked about his " noble dust," and in a few minutes compounded it with the clay " whereto 'twas kin !" Those who would view the spot where lie the undoubted remains of the once "high reaching" Buckingham, the tyrant Richard's tool and victim, must &en visit the Saracen's Head, Salisbury. In the bar of that inn they may moralise over his uutionoured clay; and there, like Anacreon, mingling wisdom with their wine, and imbibing philosophy with their potations, with peculiar and significant emphasis ejaculate—" So much for Buckingham !"—Salopian Journal.