MORE than two centuries after they were captured on the battlefield and whisked victoriously back to Britain, four rare flags from the American War of Independence were returned to their native soil when an anonymous bidder bought them at auction for $17.4 million (£9.4million).
The bids included the highest price paid for a flag at auction, and a record for any artefact from the conflict known in America as the Revolutionary War.
Sotheby’s, which conducted the sale in New York, refused to say whether the buyer was American, despite the intense speculation.
Before the sale David Redden, the auctioneer, said: “I’ll eat my hat if they don’t remain in the country.” Afterwards he quipped: “I won’t have to eat my hat.”
The return of the flags, the only ones still intact, to their homeland, brought not only a swell of patriotic pride but unexpected riches to the descendants of their original captor.
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The sale price exceeded a pre-auction estimate of between $4 million and $10 million, and as one expert noted, was greater than the cost of the entire Revolutionary War.
The flags were put up for auction by Captain Christopher Tarleton Fagan, the great-great-great-great-nephew of Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the firebrand British cavalry officer who provided the inspiration for the villainous commander in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot.
Tarleton was nicknamed “The Butcher” for the alleged slaughter of scores of Virginia troops after they hoisted a surrender flag at the Battle of Waxhaws in 1780, where he captured three of the flags that were auctioned.
In a memoir he wrote that “upwards of 100 officers and men were killed and three colours fell into the possession of the victors”.
Nine months earlier the 24-year-old had led his cavalrymen to capture the other flag from the American cavalry at Pound Ridge, Connecticut.
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The hand-painted Connecticut flag, the rarest of the four, fetched $12.33million while the other set went for $5.05million. The high price for what amounts to four pieces of fragile hand-stitched silk was because of “their rarity, their historic value and, to some collectors, their sacredness,” said Mr Redden.
In a country where the burning of even a $1 plastic flag may soon be outlawed, the revolutionary standards are rare objects of reverence, not only for the soldiers who gave their lives to defend them, but also for many ordinary Americans today. The flags may owe their preservation to their long sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic.
Of those that stayed in America, only around 30 remain, all in fragments. The flags had hung on the walls of Captain Fagan’s family home in Hampshire for more than a century. He was forced to sell them because he could no longer afford their insurance.