It’s a complicated tale not many people know about, but it might result in the discovery of a long-lost treasure beyond anyone’s wildest imagination and resolve one of the greatest mysteries in British history. And it could be found right here in Windham.
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| One English Civil War silver coin recently sold for $80,000. A Windham man believes a treasure containing 3,700 English Civil War coins may be buried in Pride's Corner near Highland Lake. COURTESY PHOTO |
Here’s how it all started.
On Dec. 6, 1648, at the conclusion of the English Civil War, Colonel Thomas Pride and a contingent of soldiers stood outside the entrance to St. Stephen's Chapel in the House of Commons of England and as the Commons convened that morning, they arrested 45 members and excluded a further 186 Royalists. It became known as “Pride’s Purge” and eventually led to the trial of English King Charles I for high treason. Found guilty by an English court, King Charles was executed in public at Whitehall before thousands including English statesman Oliver Cromwell.
The identity of the executioner, hidden in a hood, wig, and fake beard, is officially unknown but a local family legend has now been confirmed by a riddle left by Oliver Cromwell before his death, six Massachusetts baptismal records from 1686, a direct statement by King Charles II which reveals the crown’s reasons for hiding the executioner’s identity for three centuries, and new revealing datasets from Ancestry.com show that Joseph Pride, the founder of Prides Corner, Maine, was the executioner of King Charles I.
A decade after the purge in 1658, General Thomas Pride, the Knighted Grandee of Oliver Cromwell's victorious New Model Army, and member of the English House of Lords, died. Two years later, after the English Restoration of King Charles’ son, King Charles II in 1660, the body of Thomas Pride was ordered dug up and posthumously executed, suspended on the gallows at Tyburn along with those of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, although it is said that the sentence was never carried out because his corpse was too far decayed. The Royalists then attempted to hang his son, Joseph Pride, who barely escaped.
“According to Pride family legend, the escape from the king’s men had a dramatic and ironic twist,” said Dan Pride, a descendant of Jospeh Pride. “With Red Coats hot on his heels, Joseph ran down a hill, out a dock, and dove into the sea and swam to a longboat that had already departed the dock. Purely by luck, it was the last longboat to a ship which was setting sail to the New World, and he got away.”
Upon the death of his father, Joseph Pride had inherited 4,000 silver coins from his father and is thought to have brought them with him to America.
Joseph Pride thereafter hid in Prides Corner in Maine for 26 years as the King of England and the entire British Empire sought him to kill him. He then emerged to baptize the six children he and his wife, Jane Pride, successfully raised on the shores of Highland Lake in the wilderness of Maine. They traveled with six small children on empty winter roads, avoiding the Red Coats, to the First Church in Beverly Mass. on Dec 12, 1686, one year after his pursuer, King Charles II, had died, and the fury of the manhunt for him had lessened.
His son, also known as Joseph Pride, registered a parcel of land in Falmouth/Westbrook area now known as Prides Corner and 65 years later in 1726, land registrations began in Maine.
The remains of his cabin, depicted on an early painted plate, circa 1725, are located at Mast and Pride Farm Road, and neighbor to the Puringtons. The area was plowed several years ago but was carefully examined beforehand. The painted plate was handed down through the generations, along with the story, and is missing today, Dan Pride says. The site of the farm depicted on the plate is against a gentle hill in a field, possibly covered with trees now.
According to Dan Pride, Joseph Pride would have been unable to spend the coins for himself, at any point during his lifetime. Circulating distinctive and uncommon New Model Army minted silver would have led the British Red Coats to his door in short order in the small and confined colonial economy. The coins were a mortal threat to him, not a source of wealth. It wouldn't matter if he spent them or someone else did, he would be dead either way, and it’s probably why he apparently never even told his kids about the coins.
Dan Pride suspects that to possibly conceal the silver coins, Joseph Pride partially melted 300 of them into the 50-pound silver lump found by the hunters near Highland Lake in the 1960s. He believes the other 3,700 coins were buried on or near his property and they remain there to this day. Recently one coin from the same period was auctioned for $80,000. That would make the missing coins worth $234 million in today’s currency.
Joseph Pride's refuge in the Mast Road area was no accident and it was not random, Dan Pride says. His father, Lord Thomas Pride, had become fabulously wealthy as a supplier of lumber and building materials used to build the British Fleet and the supplies used to sustain it throughout the 1650s. With an abundant supply of lumber, the Mast Road area served as a plentiful resource to build British sailing vessels. Whomever cut it, Highland Lake Masting created safe, extremely remote, and cleared land of the finest farming quality, functional transport both out for lumber and masts and in for supplies, not to mention for hiding 4,000 silver coins by burying them there.
The story of the coins was passed down through generations of Prides and now Dan Pride is about to embark upon a search to try and find the missing silver coins in conjunction with current property owners in the area. If he succeeds, the identity of the executioner of King Charles I will be confirmed, and the legend of the missing treasure will become a reality. <
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