Twenty-seven years after the Revestment, Parliament sent Commissioners to investigate. What they found was a catalogue of failure: harbours in ruins, buildings decaying, courts atrophied, a population diminished by emigration, and an administration that answered to nobody.

George Moore’s verdict — the most damning sentence in the island’s historiography — documented twenty-eight years without a single indication of concern from London. The Crown had purchased the sovereignty of an ancient kingdom, collected its revenues, garrisoned its castles, and let everything else decay.

The settlement would not come until 1866, when Tynwald finally recovered a measure of fiscal autonomy — a century after the Revestment, and only after the surplus had been extracted, the Duke compensated, and the Crown repaid in full from the revenues of the people who had never been consulted.

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