355 Year Old Royal Charter Sells for $13M in Canada

The 355-year-old Hudson’s Bay Company Royal Charter from 1670 has been bought for C$18 million by the Weston family and David Thomson to keep the historic document in Canada.

sarah

Dec 4, 2025 - 10:08

355 Year Old Royal Charter Sells for $13M in Canada

The 1670 Hudson's Bay Company Royal Charter, considered one of Canada's earliest documents, has been purchased by two of the country's wealthiest families for C$18 million ($13 million; £9.6 million).

This 355-year-old charter, which granted the Hudson's Bay Company various powers over large parts of present-day Canada, went up for auction after the company filed for bankruptcy over the summer.

The offer from firms owned by the Weston family and Thomson Reuters Chairman David Thomson will keep this historically significant document in Canada.

And the charter—which was once kept in a rural estate in the UK during the Blitz during World War II—will now be in the shared custody of various museums and archives across Canada.

The bid also includes a C$5 million donation to the custodian museums for the document's care and public education about it.

The final sale is still pending court approval.

The Hudson's Bay Company said in a statement Wednesday that "the Charter will be placed in the care of trusted institutions that, among other things, are committed to working in consultation with Indigenous communities to ensure the Charter's complex history is acknowledged, explained, and shared with all Canadians."

The Manitoba Archives, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Royal Ontario Museum will have joint possession of the document.

Granted by King Charles II in 1670, the Charter gave the company, a key player in the powerful continental fur trade and later an iconic Canadian department store, the power to legislate and establish colonies in parts of modern-day Canada.

"The Hudson's Bay Company was able to use the language of this charter to function as both a corporation and a government," said Cody Grote, assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at Western University.

He noted that the early colonies were where it could pass laws and enter into treaties with Indigenous peoples—"all of this is tied to this initial document signed by King Charles II."

According to Grote, this charter also provided the company with the legal basis to sell its North American territories to Canada in 1869 without the consent of the Indigenous peoples living there. The document was initially kept at Windsor Castle, then moved to the company's London headquarters by 1940. During World War II, it was kept at an estate in Hertfordshire for safekeeping, and finally, in the 1970s, it found a place at the Hudson's Bay Company's new Toronto headquarters.

Many of the Hudson's Bay Company's archival records were donated to the province of Manitoba in the 1990s, but not the charter.

When the firm filed for bankruptcy last summer, facing heavy debt and declining sales, and closed all its department stores, there was pressure to somehow keep the charter—a valuable corporate asset—in the public domain.

"We've seen this ongoing opposition over time," Dr. Grote said, "and we've seen these wealthy families and corporations make very large bids to purchase it and then immediately donate it to a public institution."

Ultimately, DKRT Family Corp., under David Thomson, and Wittington Investments, Ltd., owned by the Weston family, emerged as the successful bidders at Wednesday's auction.