Bankruptcy will likely push the company to auction off its 1670 charter in a matter of weeks, and it could fetch a price in the millions
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By Colby Cosh
Published Apr 23, 2025
Last updated 19hours ago
4 minute read
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The newspapers are whizzing with speculation about the fate of historical artifacts in the possession of the bankrupt Hudson’s Bay Company (1670-2025), and particularly the royal charter whereby King Charles II gave the company title to the nearly four million square kilometres of the Hudson Bay watershed. The dying HBC has long since donated its official corporate archives and related material to public museums, and it mostly retained what amount to a few absorbing display pieces. But these happen to include the 1670 charter, which is the legal basis of the company’s existence and a crucial documentary foundation of today’s Canada.
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The charter is nearly certain to be auctioned off in a matter of weeks, and heritage authorities, especially those on the soil of Prince Rupert’s Land, are scrambling to understand how it might be acquired for the public benefit. Not, mind you, that this benefit could be quantified. There’s a heavy element of superstition in this news story, an uneasy sense that a country which treats its history as a mere commodity is inviting damnation.
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Unfortunately, HBC will have a supreme fiduciary duty to get the maximum price on behalf of its creditors, including some unfortunate employees, so the charter will have to be won in a fair and open fight. If some Charles II admirer in the Saudi royal family felt like owning it — and it’s not at all impossible that a person fitting this description exists — there is not necessarily much we could do about it, short of an extraordinary intervention possibly requiring federal government resources.
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Indeed, I’m a little surprised nobody has tried to make an election issue out of this yet. A commitment to buy the HBC charter at auction would be of unpredictable fiscal size, but none of the party leaders seem especially afraid of that kind of thing, now do they?
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It has struck me that none of the news stories about the threatened charter have tried to assign a hard number to its prospective auction value, and it makes sense that museum professionals would be shy, because items of this nature and antiquity are almost never offered for sale in the first place. Unlike the HBC’s documentary archive, the charter doesn’t offer much opportunity for historical research in its own right. It’s valuable just because it is history — a fulcrum on which the fate of Canada’s West pivoted.
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If you tickle an AI chatbot’s gizzard, it is likely to talk about the fact that copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio change hands for anywhere from $3 million to $14 million — but that’s the magic of Shakespeare. About 10 years ago, one of 11 surviving copies of the so-called “Bay Psalm Book” (1640) sold for nearly $20 million; but this was the first book printed in North America, and is of value to book collectors just by virtue of being an early book.
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The nearest match I can find to the HBC charter, the closest thing in significance and nature that has been sold at auction in recent times, is a copy of the 1660 Declaration of Breda that Sotheby’s put on the block in 2023. The declaration is the handiwork of Charles II, and is of unquestionable global significance and interest. It’s the manifesto he wrote in exile, during the Interregnum, in order to persuade Britain that he would, if invited home as king, respect the political results of the violent revolution against his father Charles I. In other words, it’s not a legal-commercial document quite like the HBC charter, but it does have a similar quasi-constitutional status.
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The declaration worked like a charm as political theatre, which is the reason our head of state is now the third Charles. Charles no. 2 is known to have made five copies of the declaration. Two survive, with one in the possession of the U.K. government. The other, a copy made specially for the Royal Navy, came into the hands of the immortal diarist/bureaucrat Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and his heirs.
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It is that copy, the one read out loud to the sailors who brought Charles II home from the Netherlands, that changed hands in 2023. The actual sale price has not been published, but Sotheby’s estimated in advance that it would go for somewhere between £400,000 (C$740,000) and £600,000: the higher figure comes to $1.1 million in Canadian money at today’s rates.
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I would take this to be a decent order-of-magnitude anchor for the potential auction value of the HBC charter. Canadian buyers are probably not going to get away with buying it for $500,000, but they should not have to scrape up $10 million. There are quite a few Western Canadian businessmen who could probably find the necessary sum in their couch cushions. And, yes, many Saudis.
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