A MISSING MACE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 12 July 1917, Page 5

A MISSING MACE.

Some fables die hard. Among them (says Sir Henry Lucy, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald) is the statement that the mace of the House of Commons, which Cromwell contemptu_ ously ordered to be "taKen away," found its home in Jamaica, and to this day has awarded to it an honored place in gubernatorial ceremonies. In connection with the presentation of a new mace to Canada, by the ex-Lord Mayor, the story is going the rounds again. It came prominently to the front during the Speakership of the late Lord Peel, who took a keen interest in the matter, and caused private inquiries to be made through the Colonial Office, over which at ,the time, Lord Knutsford presided. During the last three hundred years there have been three maces m use in the House of Commons. When. Charles I. died on the scaffold, and with his head went the monarchy, there was a third more mysterious disappearance. The mace vanished from the House of Commons, and was never traced. Crom_ well ( coming; into power, ordered another to be made and laid on the table of the House. This was the bauble which, the House. This was the bauble which, in altered mood, he had removed. His command was iso thoroughly obeyed that this mace also disappeared^ The third mace made in 1660 on tho restoration of Charles 11., is the one which does duty in the House of Commons to this day.

It is the second mace, the lauble of Cromwellian times, that Jamaica claims to have inherited. Lord Peel told me that his inquiries on the spot absolutely disposed of the tradition. He found that in 1662 Lord Windsor the first Governor of Jamaica, sent from England by Charles 11., brought with him a mace, a personal gift from the King. After Lord Windsor's return to England, the first Assembly was convened by Sir Charles Littleton, at St. Jago de la Vega, on January 20, 1664, and then adjourned to meat on May 17 at Port Royal. No record exists to show that during that century the Council subsequently met elsewhere, xt is~probable that the mace was in Port Royal in 1672. and went down with the public buildings and all the records in the great earthquake of that year. A comparison of dates makes it obvious that the Windsor mace, which thus went the way of its class by unaccountably disappearing, could not have been Cromwell's bauble.