The discomfort in Britain was acute. William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that he ‘deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army’. He urged that they ‘be held only until they could be restored’. When, in the summer of 1902, the Ethiopian Prince Ras Makonnen came to England for the coronation of King Edward VII and saw some of the manuscripts owned by Lady Meux, who resided at Theobald’s Park, he, according to The Times, knelt down and prayed for the souls
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