Secrets of a Radical Duke

"The research team I directed at Harvard had just made a startling discovery. As part of a project to find all copies of the Declaration of Independence produced between 1776 and 1826, we had stumbled on something special the previous year in the small West Sussex Record Office, in Chichester."

"Prior to this find, it had been thought that a single large-scale parchment existed: the one tourists can see protectively encased at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. Although the Sussex Declaration, as it is now called, has the names of the signatories written out in a single clerk's hand, rather than with actual signatures, and is engrossed on sheepskin rather than the more expensive calfskin, it is otherwise as grand and impressive as the parchment in Washington."

In the summer of 2016 a family traveled to England and learned from a taxi driver in Lewes that Thomas Paine had lived there for six years as a tax collector. A Harvard research team discovered a large-scale ceremonial parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester. The Sussex Declaration features signatory names in a single clerk's hand and is engrossed on sheepskin rather than calfskin, yet matches the Washington parchment in grandeur. Researchers hypothesized the parchment may have belonged to Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, whose family seat Goodwood is in Sussex and who held radical political views.

Read at The Atlantic