Now I come to think of it, the case of Katherine Parr should have been the first of this whole project, because she’s where it all started.
When I was very young and very obsessed with everything to do with the Tudors, I read this book:
I was utterly engrossed – and then I came to the epilogue, which opens like this:
Nearly two hundred and fifty years after Katherine Parr’s death, in the summer of 1782, a Mr John Lucas discovered the coffin of Katherine Parr amid the ruins of the chapel at Sudeley Castle. With morbid curiosity, he ripped open the top of the coffin and found her body wrapped in six or seven seer cloths. The body was entire and uncorrupted, and, cutting through the seer cloths, he found the flesh of one of her arms to be still white and moist. He took a few locks of hair, which was auburn in colour, and returned the coffin to its grave.
I can’t have been more than ten, and I was transfixed. I knew about finding the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs, but the body of a Tudor queen?
The fascination was partly grisly, my own morbid curiosity. But there was also the sudden shock of the physical reality of a human being who had previously existed for me only in words and pigments.
Back then I had no idea that other royal graves had been opened, in entirely non-ruined churches – but discovering quite how many has done nothing to make me blasé.
Though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, Anthony Martienssen’s epilogue to Queen Katherine Parr must have inspired my epilogue to The Eagle and the Hart, telling the stories of the opening of the tombs of Henry IV and Richard II.
There’s still more to say about Richard’s tomb (and I will, in a future post) – but it turns out there’s a great deal more to say about Katherine Parr too.
The tomb-openings I’ve looked at in this series so far have ranged from the limited and meticulous to the wildly invasive, but all of them have had some measure of official standing.
The history of Queen Katherine’s grave, on the other hand, is a longer, stranger, and much more chaotic tale. Often garbled over the years, it requires some intricate unravelling.
Come with me, then, as we embark on a detective story that veers into the macabre . . .
Katherine Parr was the one that got away – surviving Henry VIII was no mean feat by the 1540s – but not for very long.
As her fourth husband she married the man she’d hoped to take as her third, before duty and a crown came calling: handsome Thomas Seymour, maternal uncle of the new little king Edward VI. Within a year Katherine was pregnant with her (and their) first child.
In the summer of 1548 she went into confinement at her husband’s castle of Sudeley in Gloucestershire. On 30 August she gave birth to a daughter. Six days later, in the early hours of the morning, she died. She was thirty-six years old.
An account of her funeral preserved in a 17th-century manuscript records that ‘she was cearied [probably meaning embalmed as well as wrapped in cerecloth] and chested in leade accordinglie, and so remayned in her pryvie Chambre until things were in a redynes’. Her coffin was carried to Sudeley’s chapel, which was hung with black cloth and the arms of Katherine herself and those of Henry VIII and Thomas Seymour. The service was conducted in English; 11-year-old Lady Jane Grey, Seymour’s ward, was chief mourner, and Miles Coverdale, translator of the Great Bible of 1539 and lately appointed Katherine’s almoner, preached the sermon. And then, while the choir sang, the queen was buried.
Six months after that, Thomas Seymour lost his head as a traitor. Sudeley passed into other hands.
In the 17th century the castle was damaged during the Civil War, and then slighted by the Parliamentarians to make sure it couldn’t again be used as a Royalist base.
Sudeley was left semi-derelict. By the mid-18th century its owner George Pitt, soon to be ennobled as Lord Rivers, didn’t live there; the inner court was in ruins, and tenants occupied the outer court.
Not only was the chapel reduced more or less to the shell of its external walls, but all memory of Katherine’s burial there had been lost. (As one later writer said, ‘How fleeting is human greatness! The splendours which had surrounded the favourite queen of the potent Henry, and the consort of the lofty Seymour, were insufficient to preserve even the recollection of the place of her death, or of her interment.’)1
In 1768, however, an antiquarian named the Reverend Mr R. Huggett came across the manuscript in the College of Heralds that describes her funeral. The Rev. Huggett wrote to inform Sudeley’s owner George Pitt that a queen was buried on his property. Via Pitt and his tenant at Sudeley, John Lucas, the information reached another antiquarian, Samuel Rudder, who included the description of Katherine’s burial in the history of Gloucestershire he published in 1779.2
The news was out.
The grave-related drama began three years later, in 1782.
There are two versions of what happened. The first comes from another antiquarian, the splendidly named Reverend Dr Treadway Nash, in a paper delivered to the Society of Antiquaries in 1787.3
Rudder’s New History of Gloucestershire, Nash says, ‘raised the curiosity of some ladies, who happened to be at the Castle in May 1782, to examine the ruined Chapel’. The ladies saw a large block of alabaster in the north wall, which they imagined might form part of an old monument.
Led by this hint they opened the ground not far from the wall; and not much more than a foot from the surface they found a leaden envelope which they opened in two places, on the face and breast, and found it to contain a human body wrapped in cerecloth. Upon removing what covered the face, they discovered the features, and particularly the eyes, in perfect preservation. Alarmed by this sight, and with the smell, which came principally from the cerecloth, they ordered the ground to be thrown in immediately without judiciously closing up the cerecloth and lead, which covered the face: only observing enough of the inscription to convince them that it was the body of Queen Katherine.
Nash has more to tell us; these unattributed revelations come only by way of introduction to his own viewing of the grave four years later (of which, more in a moment).
But his narrative raises disconcerting questions. ‘. . . they discovered the features, and particularly the eyes, in perfect preservation.' In what way particularly the eyes? Is Nash suggesting the eyes were open? Surely not? The mind boggles.
More fundamentally, who were these intrepid ladies, and how did Nash come by his information? He doesn’t say.
Perhaps they existed. (I hope so, for the sake of an entire chapter of a recent academic book which turns these unnamed and otherwise unattested ladies, without further detail or corroboration, into a group of ‘self-taught antiquaries’ who ‘perhaps thought themselves to be bluestockings’ and ‘were attracted to the legacy of intellectualism and scholarship with which Katherine had become associated’.)4
But there is a different account of the events of 1782. It wasn’t published until 1857, a delay which might argue against taking it seriously, except for the fact that it – unlike Nash’s version – offers a detailed provenance for its information.
