The last will of Henry IV
Choices, Canterbury, and the workings of conscience
Why is Henry IV buried in Canterbury Cathedral?
It’s an excellent question.1 As you’d expect, the cathedral is crowded with the tombs of its archbishops, but Henry is the only king in England’s history to have chosen Canterbury as his resting-place.
In fact, after the Conquest of 1066 the cathedral’s only previous royal burial of any kind took place during Henry’s lifetime: that of his uncle Edward, the ‘Black Prince’ of Wales, in 1376. In his will, written that summer when he knew he was dying, the prince left detailed instructions for his own funeral and monument. He had a particular devotion to the Trinity and to Canterbury’s martyred archbishop Thomas Becket, and he was laid to rest a few feet from the saint’s shrine, on the south side of the Trinity Chapel behind the high altar.
By then the necropolis of England’s kings was established elsewhere, in the chapel of the saint-king Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey. The tombs already clustered around the Confessor’s shrine included those of Henry’s great-great-great-grandfather Henry III, his great-great-grandparents Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, and his grandmother Philippa of Hainault. During the last decades of the 14th century they were joined by his grandfather Edward III, and the double tomb commissioned by his cousin Richard II after the death of Richard’s queen Anne of Bohemia.
Henry didn’t grow up knowing he would one day be king. For the first thirty-two years of his life, his future lay with the duchy of Lancaster, his inheritance from his mother Blanche and his father John of Gaunt, who were buried in a magnificent double tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Gaunt and Blanche, however, were Lancastrian outliers. If there was an emerging Lancastrian mausoleum, it was the church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke at Leicester, which housed the tombs of Henry’s Lancastrian grandfather and great-grandfather, his first wife Mary de Bohun, and his stepmother Constanza of Castile.2
Everything changed in 1399. That autumn Henry deposed his cousin Richard and took the throne for himself. On 13 October, the feast of St Edward the Confessor, he was anointed and crowned in Westminster Abbey as King Henry IV. Fourteen years later he was praying at the Confessor’s shrine when he collapsed, and died shortly after in the Jerusalem Chamber of the abbot’s lodging nearby.
But this unexpected king who died in Westminster Abbey did not choose to be buried there with his royal ancestors, or at Leicester or St Paul’s with his Lancastrian ones. The question remains: why Canterbury?
