Digging up kings #1

Henry IV in Canterbury Cathedral

These days – whether you’d call it squeamishness or proper sensitivity – we’re mostly reluctant to disturb burial sites. It’s unthinkable, now, that a royal grave might become a research project (unless, of course, one turns up unexpectedly in a car park).

But it wasn’t always so.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our forebears were much more gung-ho. As a result, many of the tombs of England’s medieval kings have been opened and investigated or otherwise inspected – and, in an occasional series here, I’m going to look at how and why.

Sometimes, there was restoration in train, with archaeologically minded antiquarians in charge.

Sometimes – as in today’s example – it was a much more ad hoc, get-stuck-in operation.

Tomb of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre in Canterbury Cathedral (photo by Renaud Camus, Wikimedia Commons)

When he died in 1413, Henry IV was buried, as he had asked, in Canterbury Cathedral beside the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The marble monument that stands above the grave was commissioned a decade later by his widow, Joan of Navarre, whose alabaster effigy lies alongside Henry’s on the tomb chest.

But a strange story persisted over the centuries: that Henry’s body didn’t, in fact, lie in his grave.

The tale came from a fifteenth-century manuscript about the ‘martyrdom’ of Richard Scrope, the archbishop of York who lost his head for rebelling against Henry. It told of a storm blowing up while the king’s coffin was being transported by barge along the Thames. The terrified boatmen, fearing for their lives, opened the coffin and threw the royal corpse into the raging water. Immediately the river stilled. They replaced the lid and its cloth-of-gold covering, and continued to Canterbury where the empty coffin was buried, with no one else the wiser.

It’s clear that this was a morality tale: the tempest a sign of God’s judgement on Henry for killing his archbishop. But still, the manuscript’s author, a monk named Clement Maidstone, claimed his father got the story in 1413 from the horse’s mouth, in the shape of one of the boatmen. The whole text was printed in 1691 by Henry Wharton, the historian who discovered the document in a Cambridge college library, and then again as part of a historical miscellany by the antiquarian Francis Peck in 1735.

By 1834 the story was familiar to a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries named Alfred John Kempe, who recounted it in a paper he wrote about the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, the room where Henry died. The ‘well known superstition among sailors’ that carrying a corpse was ‘most inauspicious to the safety of a vessel’, Kempe said, gave ‘some shade of possibility’ to an otherwise improbable anecdote. Overall, he thought it

… just sufficient perhaps to justify a desire that it might be refuted or confirmed by an examination of the royal tomb.

What Kempe didn’t realise – with that tentative just sufficient perhaps – was that someone had got there before him: the tomb had already been opened two years earlier. But the Society knew; and they appended to Kempe’s paper the eyewitness account of the Reverend John Spry, one of the prebendaries of Canterbury Cathedral, who had been part of the investigating party.

I’ve told the story in my own words in the epilogue to my book about Henry and his cousin Richard, but what I want to do here is give you Spry’s version, in all its dubious glory. I have thoughts; but I’ll leave them till the end.

At pains to impress upon the august members of the Society that this was a carefully conducted investigation to advance historical knowledge, Spry begins with a review of the Maidstone tale and the question it raises about the tomb.

… it has long been one of the desiderata curiosa of antiquaries to ascertain the truth or falsehood of Clement Maydestone’s narrative, by an actual examination of the coffin; and for this purpose the royal vault was opened on the 21st of August last [1832], in the presence of a few individuals, under the sanction of the Dean of Canterbury; and the following account has been drawn up from notes taken on the spot at the time, by one of those individuals.

That individual, it’s clear from the Society’s introduction, is Spry himself. He goes on with the party’s observations.

On removing a portion of the marble pavement at the western end of the monument, it was found to have been laid on rubbish composed of lime dust, small pieces of Caen stone, and a few flints, among which were found two or three pieces of decayed stuff, or silk (perhaps portions of the cloth of gold which covered the coffin), and also a piece of leather.

When the rubbish was cleared away, we came to what appeared to be the lid of a wooden case, of very rude form and construction, which the surveyor at once pronounced to be a coffin. It lay east and west, projecting beyond the monument towards the west, for about one-third of its length. Upon it, to the east, and entirely within the monument, lay a leaden coffin without any wooden case, of much smaller size, and very singular shape, being formed by bending one sheet of lead over another, and soldering them at the junctions a––b, as shewn in the section here given.

This coffin was supposed to contain the remains of Queen Joan, and was not disturbed.

Not being able to take off the lid of the large coffin, as a great portion of its length was under the tomb, and being unwilling to move the alabaster monument, for the purpose of getting at it, it was decided to saw through the lid, about three feet from what was supposed to be the head of the coffin.

And this being done, the piece of wood was carefully removed, and found to be elm, very coarsely worked, about one inch and a half thick, and perfectly sound.

Immediately under this elm board was a quantity of haybands filling the coffin, and upon the surface of them lay a very rude small cross, formed by merely tying two twigs together, thus +. This fell to pieces on being moved.

When the haybands, which were very sound and perfect, were removed, we found a leaden case or coffin, moulded in some degree to the shape of a human figure; and it was at once evident that this had never been disturbed, but lay as it was originally deposited, though it may be difficult to conjecture why it was placed in a case so rude and unsightly, and so much too large for it, that the haybands appeared to have been used to keep it steady.

In order to ascertain what was contained in this leaden case, it became necessary to saw through a portion of it, and in this manner an oval piece of the lead, about seven inches long, and four inches over the widest part of it, was carefully removed. Under this we found wrappers, which seemed to be of leather, and afterwards proved to have been folded five times round the body. The material was firm in its texture, very moist, of a deep brown colour, and earthy smell. These wrappers were cut through, and lifted off; when, to the astonishment of all present, the face of the deceased King was seen in complete preservation. The nose elevated, the cartilage even remaining, though, on the admission of the air, it sunk rapidly away, and had entirely disappeared before the examination was finished. The skin of the chin was entire, of the consistence and thickness of the upper leather of a shoe, brown and moist; the beard thick and matted, and of a deep russet colour.

The jaws were perfect, and all the teeth in them, except one fore tooth, which had probably been lost during the King’s life. The opening of the lead was not large enough to expose the whole of the features, and we did not examine the eyes or forehead. But the surveyor stated, that when he introduced his finger under the wrappers to remove them, he distinctly felt the orbits of the eyes prominent in their sockets. The flesh upon the nose was moist, clammy, and of the same brown colour as every other part of the face.

Having thus ascertained that the body of the King was actually deposited in the tomb, and that it had never been disturbed, the wrappers were laid again upon the face, the lead drawn back over them, the lid of the coffin put on, the rubbish filled in, and the marble pavement replaced immediately.

And with that, the investigation was done.

I have mixed feelings, I have to say. I am immensely grateful for the information. If the grave hadn’t been opened, we would never have known about the humble furnishings of Henry’s burial: a coarsely worked elm-wood coffin packed with haybands – ropes of twisted hay – and a rudimentary cross formed of two tied twigs.

Spry couldn’t understand ‘so rude and unsightly’ a container for a royal body, but the will Henry wrote during a bout of serious illness in 1409, four years before his death, helps us make sense of it.

The text is full of anguish – ‘I, Henry, sinful wretch’, it begins – and a desperate concern that what he had done in life might put him beyond reach of redemption. He showed no interest in the pomp and circumstance of a royal funeral, instead leaving all arrangements to his spiritual mentor, a man who had always held him to account for his actions: his other archbishop, Thomas Arundel.

… I bequeath to Almighty God my sinful soul, the which had never been worthy to be man but through His mercy and His grace; which life I have misspent, whereof I put me wholly in His grace and His mercy, with all my heart. And what time it liketh Him of His mercy for to take me to Him, the body to be buried in the church at Canterbury after the discretion of my cousin the archbishop of Canterbury.

The austerity of Arundel’s choices for Henry’s burial is a measure of both men, and one I find deeply moving.

But I can’t help feeling that the conduct of the 1832 investigation is less edifying. Spry’s sober tone is a thin veneer on a day’s work that seems the very definition of ‘ad hoc’ and ‘gung ho’.

A footnote to his account gives the names of the ‘few individuals’ present in the cathedral ‘under the sanction of the Dean of Canterbury’. They were the Dean himself, Richard Bagot, who had retained his office at Canterbury despite being promoted to the bishopric of Oxford three years earlier; Bagot’s wife Harriet and his brother Sir Charles; two clerics at the cathedral, Spry himself and the Rev. W.F. Baylay; the cathedral’s Surveyor (its official in charge of building works), George Austin; and two labourers, John Pedder and Thomas Laming.

I’m delighted to know the names of Laming and Pedder – it’s vanishingly rare in these circumstances to learn anything at all about the workmen, as well as distinguished visitors. But it’s hard to see that the rest of the party had much in the way of relevant knowledge about what they were trying to do.

(I was tempted to leap to the conclusion that Bishop Bagot was the prime mover in this apparently impromptu project, but I learn from the Dictionary of National Biography that he was a man of such nervous disposition that he never fully recovered from an accident in which he swallowed some cotton wool, so perhaps I’m wrong.)

Certainly, the work itself can only be described as rough and ready, with all the hacking and the sawing and the sticking in of fingers. And if Spry thought the coffin rudimentary, I’m not sure what adjective to use for the sketches he included with his final report. All in all, his satisfied conclusion not only ‘that the body of the King was actually deposited in the tomb’ but that ‘it had never been disturbed’ seems almost beyond parody.

My objection, I suppose, is the lack of care. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and a painstaking examination could have gathered so much more information.

But we do now know that Clement Maidstone’s parable of Henry’s body being flung into the Thames – like the myth about Richard III’s corpse being hurled into the River Soar – isn’t true. Still, I suspect he’d be delighted to hear that his story led directly to such a rude interruption of Henry’s eternal rest.

I’ll leave you with the final paragraph of Spry’s report which – moved though I am by the facts of Henry’s burial – never fails to raise a smile.

It should be observed, that about three feet from the head of the figure was a remarkable projection in the lead, as if to make room for the hands, that they might be elevated as in prayer. The accompanying outline may give some idea of this formulation. J. H. S.