The corpse once believed to be that of the last Briton to be publicly beheaded for treason may have been a wealthy woman from London.
For centuries it was thought that the contents of a casket held at Wardlaw Mausoleum near Inverness were those of Simon Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat, who was executed in 1747. A DNA investigation confirmed that the headless cadaver was not “the Old Fox” but a young female pretender.
The results of further study suggest that she may have been from an affluent area of London. The breastbone was sent to Ceiridwen Edwards, senior research fellow in archaeogenetics at the University of Huddersfield, in the hope of recovering DNA. Dr Edwards sent a small sample to Peter Ditchfield at
