5 oz Queen's Virtues Silver Coin

The 5 oz Queen's Virtues Silver Coin

The Queen's Virtues is a six-coin tribute to Queen Elizabeth II from The East India Company, issued as legal tender of Saint Helena between 2021 and 2023. Each design is drawn from one of the six allegorical figures on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace: Victory, Truth, Charity, Justice, Courage, and Constancy. The 5 oz silver version delivers those Sir Thomas Brock-inspired sculptural designs in a large brilliant uncirculated format of .999 fine silver, with five times the canvas of the standard 1 oz issue.

The 5 oz weight (155.517 g) is itself an unusual choice. It gained mainstream recognition through the US Mint's America the Beautiful series and is otherwise a niche format, sitting between the liquidity of 1 oz silver coins and the premium efficiency of 10 oz bars. Five-ounce silver coins typically carry collector premiums above bar premiums, so this is a design purchase, not a cost-per-ounce purchase. The relief work based on the memorial sculptures benefits visibly from the larger flan, which is the point of the format.

One fact matters more than any other for UK buyers: despite the British monarch's effigy and the GBP-pegged face value, these are Saint Helena legal tender, not UK legal tender, so they are not CGT-exempt. UK dealers list the series explicitly as "VAT exempt, CGT not exempt" on the gold versions; the silver attracts VAT like any non-UK silver coin. Collectors after the limited-issue series accept that; investors optimising for UK tax should look at the silver Britannia instead.

Queen's Virtues 5 oz Silver Specifications

The 5 oz coin is the largest silver coin format in the Queen's Virtues programme, which spans silver, gold, and platinum.

The wider series includes a 1 oz silver BU (.999, 38.61 mm, £1 face value), 1 oz gold BU (.9999, £100 face value), 1 oz and 1/10 oz platinum (.9995), and even a 10 oz silver bar format. Proof versions run to certified limited mintages: 2,500 for the 1 oz silver proof and just 250 for the 1 oz gold proof per design, with sequential numbering, tamper-evident packaging, and certificates of authenticity.

The six designs released over three years carry their own inscriptions: Victory ("Victory Through Harmony", 2021), Truth ("Truth Conquers All", 2021-22), Charity and Justice ("Let Justice Be Done", 2022), Courage ("By Wisdom and Courage", 2022), and Constancy completing the set in spring 2023. The Justice reverse pairs a winged angel holding a sword with a child carrying the scales, representing unbiased justice. All share the Rank-Broadley effigy and a consistent sculptural style, so a complete six-coin set reads as a unified series.

Queen's Virtues Silver Tax Treatment

Saint Helena's status as a British Overseas Territory creates the trap in this series' tax treatment: the coins look British, carry the Queen's effigy, and are denominated in a currency pegged 1:1 to sterling, yet they are not UK legal tender.

• UK: Silver versions attract 20% VAT on new purchases, and the coins are not CGT-exempt because CGT exemption applies only to UK legal tender coins like the Britannia and Sovereign. UK dealers state this explicitly. Pre-owned examples sold under a dealer's margin scheme reduce the VAT to the dealer's margin only.
• US: Treated as bullion; no federal sales tax, with around 35 states exempting bullion and several applying purchase thresholds. A 5 oz silver coin typically clears the $1,000 thresholds in New York and Massachusetts at current prices only as part of a larger order, so state rules are worth checking. Long-term gains are taxed at the collectibles rate of up to 28%.
• Canada: 0% GST/HST, since the .999 fineness exceeds the federal 99.9% purity requirement for silver coins.
• Australia and New Zealand: GST-free as investment-grade silver (both apply a 99.9% purity threshold, which .999 meets); New Zealand has no formal CGT.
• EU: full local VAT on new silver, 17-27% by member state.
• Singapore and Hong Kong: no GST in Singapore for qualifying 99.9% silver legal tender coins and no CGT; Hong Kong has no sales tax or CGT at all.

The gold Queen's Virtues coins sit differently: they are VAT-exempt in the UK and EU as investment gold, making the silver-versus-gold decision partly a tax decision in those markets.

Six Virtues from the Victoria Memorial

The series translates a London landmark into bullion. The Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace was designed and sculpted by Sir Thomas Brock (1847-1922) after Queen Victoria's death in 1901, though the monument took a decade to build and was inaugurated in 1911 by King George V, with Brock knighted at the unveiling ceremony. The winged angel of Victory tops the monument, with Constancy, Charity, and Courage beneath her, while Justice and Truth are carved from marble blocks around the base. The Queen's Virtues series lifts each of those six allegorical figures onto a coin, recasting a memorial to Victoria as a tribute to Elizabeth II.

Release ran across three years: Victory launched as a proof in October 2020 with the BU following in 2021, Truth spanned 2021-22, then Charity, Justice, and Courage through 2022, with Constancy closing the set in spring 2023. The series was among the last to carry the Elizabeth II effigy before her death in September 2022, which gives the set a period-piece quality; the final Constancy coin may carry either the Elizabeth II or King Charles III effigy depending on production timing.

The issuer deserves a footnote of its own. The East India Company behind these coins is a modern luxury brand founded by Sanjiv Mehta in 2010, licensing the historic name from the UK Treasury; it has no operational continuity with the trading company dissolved in 1874. Saint Helena, the issuing territory, is best known as the island of Napoleon's exile from 1815 to 1821, and its pound is one of the few currencies pegged 1:1 to sterling without being sterling, which makes the face values on this series unusually substantive.

Queen's Virtues vs Queen's Beasts and Britannia

The closest rival in spirit is the Royal Mint's Queen's Beasts series, which ran from 2016 to 2021 and overlapped with the Queen's Virtues launch. Both are finite, themed multi-coin programmes built around royal symbolism. The differences favour each side: Queen's Beasts offered ten designs to the Virtues' six, is UK legal tender and therefore CGT-exempt for British sellers, and was struck in higher mintages. The Queen's Virtues counters with lower mintages and its sculptural Victoria Memorial sourcing, positioning it as the scarcer, more collectible set.

Against the silver Britannia, the comparison is investor versus collector. The Britannia is UK legal tender with CGT exemption, unlimited bullion mintage, and global dealer recognition; the Queen's Virtues is Saint Helena legal tender without the CGT exemption and with limited, collectible positioning. For UK investors optimising tax, the Britannia wins outright. The Virtues series appeals to buyers who want a complete, finite set with a unifying theme.

The 5 oz format adds its own comparison set. The best-known 5 oz silver coins are the US Mint's America the Beautiful quarters (2010-2021, .999 silver, 76.2 mm), now secondary-market only, and the Mexican 5 oz Libertad with its very low annual mintages. Like those, the 5 oz Queen's Virtues trades on design and scarcity rather than cost efficiency; stackers wanting five ounces of silver at the lowest premium would buy a 5 oz silver bar at 4-7% over spot instead. Within Saint Helena's own output, the East India Company also produces the Una and the Lion and Goddess series, so the Virtues set is one strand of a broader collector programme.