Statue of Richard I

Not to be confused with the equestrian statue of Charles I, which stands at Charing Cross and faces down Whitehall towards his execution site at the Banqueting House. This is by the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur. It was commissioned by Charles's Lord High Treasurer Richard Weston, probably in 1633, for the garden of his country house in Roehampton, Surrey. Following the English Civil War the statue was sold to a metalsmith to be broken down, but he hid it until the Restoration. It was installed in its current location, on the former site of the original and most elaborate of the Eleanor Crosses, in 1675. The cross, which was erected in the year 1291, had been destroyed in 1647 on the orders of Parliament.

The original of Marochetti's statue of Richard I was modelled in clay for the Great Exhibition of 1851, when it stood at the entrance to the Crystal Palace. It was so well received that two years later several illustrious subscribers, headed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, set out to raise money for it to be cast in bronze. After a lengthy dispute over its location, the bronze statue was installed in Old Palace Yard in 1860.

In September 1940, Richard I's statue was reportedly lifted off the ground, and suffered superficial damage, when a German bomb exploded a few yards away from it. It was restored after the end of the war, and again in 2009.

The two statues are a little over half a mile apart.