All of King Henry VIII’s six wives were buried as queens, yet the centuries that followed treated their remains very differently. Some rested undisturbed for nearly five hundred years. Others were exhumed, examined, and even desecrated. The story of what happened to their bodies reveals as much about the changing centuries as it does about the women themselves.

Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, was the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Her marriage to Henry’s elder brother Arthur ended with Arthur’s death within months. She later married Henry, becoming queen in 1509. For years the marriage seemed successful, but it produced only one surviving child, Princess Mary.

Henry’s desperate need for a male heir led him to seek an annulment, arguing that Catherine’s earlier marriage to Arthur made their union invalid. Catherine fiercely rejected this claim, insisting her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated. The dispute stretched on for years and ultimately drove Henry to break with the pope, setting off the English Reformation. In 1533 Henry married Anne Boleyn while Catherine was stripped of her title and referred to only as the dowager princess of Wales.

Her final years were lonely. She was separated from her daughter and moved between residences under strict supervision, yet she never accepted the annulment and never recognized Anne as queen. Catherine died on January 7, 1536, at Kimbolton Castle, aged fifty. During embalming, examiners found a dark growth on her heart.

Rumors of poisoning spread quickly, but modern historians generally reject this theory, noting that disease could easily account for the discoloration. Her body was carried to Peterborough Abbey, now Peterborough Cathedral, where she was buried on January 29, 1536, near the high altar. Henry did not attend. During the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, soldiers damaged much of the cathedral, including parts of Catherine’s original monument, but the burial site itself remained intact beneath the floor.

New memorials were later erected. Today her grave remains one of the most visited sites in the cathedral. Remarkably, her coffin has never been confirmed as opened. No reliable evidence suggests her remains were ever exhumed or examined.

Because her burial location was always known, no search was needed, and there has been little practical reason to disturb it. After nearly five centuries, all soft tissue has long since decayed. Her bones almost certainly still lie beneath the cathedral floor, untouched since the day she was placed there. Anne Boleyn’s fate was entirely different.

After her execution on May 19, 1536, on charges of adultery, incest, and treason, her body was treated with shocking haste. She was beheaded by a French swordsman, and her body and severed head were placed in an empty elm chest that had been used to store arrows. The chest was taken to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London, where a shallow grave had been prepared under the floor. There was no monument, no marker, and no ceremony.

For more than three hundred years, the exact location of her grave was unknown. That changed in the 1870s, when Queen Victoria ordered extensive restoration work at the chapel. Dr. Frederick Mouat, a physician and former prison inspector with an interest in archaeology, examined the human remains uncovered as workers removed the floor.

One skeleton in particular attracted immediate attention. Beneath the altar area, workers found the remains of a female. The location matched the traditional burial site associated with Anne Boleyn. Mouat found an incomplete skeleton damaged by centuries of disturbance.

The bones indicated a woman of slender build and small stature, matching contemporary descriptions of Anne. One of the most striking discoveries was that the skull was separated from the rest of the body, consistent with execution by beheading. Mouat described the skull as thin and finely formed. The measurements suggested a woman who died in middle age, around thirty-five, matching Anne’s age at death.

While DNA testing was unavailable and the identification could never be absolutely confirmed, the evidence was compelling enough that most historians accepted it. The excavation also confirmed the simplicity of her burial. There was no elaborate royal coffin and no grand monument. The findings matched contemporary accounts of the hasty, unceremonious burial that followed her execution.

After examination, the remains were carefully reburied. Today a memorial marker identifies the place where Anne Boleyn rests, but the bones themselves remain undisturbed. Modern archaeologists have considered further investigation, but there are currently no plans to exhume her remains again. Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, holds a unique place in English history as the only one of his wives to give him a son and the only one to die as queen.

She became queen in May 1536, just days after Anne Boleyn’s execution. Unlike her predecessors, she was quiet, deeply religious, and avoided court politics. After sixteen months as queen, she went into labor at Hampton Court Palace in October 1537. The birth was long and difficult, lasting about two days.

On October 12, she gave birth to a healthy boy, christened Edward. Celebrations erupted across England. Jane initially seemed to recover, but her condition suddenly worsened. She developed a severe fever and died in the early hours of October 24, 1537, just twelve days after giving birth.

She was about twenty-nine years old. Modern historians believe she likely died of puerperal fever or complications from a retained placenta, conditions that were almost certainly untreatable in the sixteenth century. Henry was devastated. Her funeral was one of the largest royal funerals of the century.

Her body was embalmed, with internal organs removed and buried separately at Hampton Court. The embalmed body was dressed in royal robes and adorned with jewels, and a crown was placed on her head. On November 8, 1537, a great funeral procession left Hampton Court for Windsor Castle, accompanied by hundreds of mourners, including nobles, bishops, and clergy. Princess Mary served as chief mourner.

Twenty-nine noblewomen walked behind the coffin, each representing one year of the queen’s life. Jane was buried beneath the choir floor of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on November 12, 1537. When Henry died in January 1547, he made clear that he wished to be buried beside her. Today the two lie together beneath a simple black marble slab, one of the plainest royal monuments in England.

Henry had planned an elaborate Renaissance tomb, but it was never completed. Jane’s remains have never been formally exhumed or scientifically examined. For nearly five hundred years, her coffin has remained closed beneath the chapel floor. Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, was queen for only a few months.

She married Henry in January 1540 after he had been persuaded by Thomas Cromwell that a Protestant German alliance was valuable. Henry claimed he was disappointed by her appearance upon her arrival in England. The marriage was annulled in July 1540 after just six months. Unlike others who lost Henry’s favor, Anne survived unharmed.

She accepted the annulment wisely, and Henry rewarded her generously with estates, income, and the honorary title of the King’s Beloved Sister. She lived comfortably for the rest of Henry’s reign and maintained good relations with both Mary and Elizabeth. After Henry’s death, she lived on through the reign of Edward VI. When Mary became queen in 1553, Anne’s fortunes improved further, and she accompanied Mary during parts of her royal progress.

Anne’s health began to decline in 1557. She died on July 16, 1557, at Chelsea Palace, aged about forty-one or forty-two, of natural causes. Queen Mary ordered that she receive a funeral fitting for a former queen. Her body was embalmed and taken to Westminster Abbey, where she was buried on August 3, 1557.

Her tomb in Westminster Abbey is modest compared to the grand monuments of other royals, but it reflects her status as a former queen. Her coffin has never been opened, and her remains have never been exhumed for scientific examination. As with most burials of that era, only skeletal remains would remain today. She rests peacefully beneath the abbey stones, untouched except by the slow process of natural decay.

Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, met a far different end. She was the niece of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and a cousin of Anne Boleyn. During her youth, she was involved in relationships with two men, Henry Manox and Francis Dereham, which later played a central role in her downfall. In 1540 she entered court as a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves.

Henry quickly became infatuated with the young noblewoman, and they married on July 28, 1540. At first the marriage seemed successful, but by 1541 rumors of her past reached court officials. Investigations revealed that she had known Francis Dereham before becoming queen. More damaging were accusations that she had developed a relationship with Thomas Culpeper while married to Henry.

Catherine was arrested and taken to the Tower of London in November 1541. Parliament passed a bill of attainder declaring her guilty of treason, meaning she faced no formal public trial. On the morning of February 13, 1542, she was led to Tower Green. With a single stroke of the executioner’s axe, her life ended.

There was no great funeral, no procession through London, and no monument. Her body was carried a short distance to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, the same church where Anne Boleyn lay buried. She was placed in a simple wooden coffin and buried in an unmarked grave beneath the stone floor. During restoration work in 1876 and 1877, workers lifted the chapel floor and uncovered numerous skeletons.

Some were identified as Anne Boleyn and other known victims, but Catherine’s remains could not be identified with confidence. Her grave had never been precisely located, the burial had been disturbed over the centuries, and many bones had become mixed together. Unlike the identification of Richard III in 2012, no modern scientific identification was possible. Today a memorial plaque lists the names of those believed to be buried there, including Catherine Howard, but it does not mark an exact grave.

Somewhere beneath the chapel floor, among dozens of other graves, rest the remains of Henry’s fifth wife. Catherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, was the most radical in her religious beliefs. She married Henry on July 12, 1543, and served as queen until his death. She also acted as regent while Henry was in France and helped educate Princess Elizabeth.

After Henry’s death, she fell in love with Thomas Seymour, who sought greater power through marriage to the king’s widow. They married secretly, which caused a scandal when revealed. Catherine, who had never before been pregnant, conceived a child by Seymour at an age when childbirth was especially dangerous. She gave birth to a daughter on August 30, 1548, but never recovered.

She died on September 5, 1548. Her body was embalmed and buried in the Chapel of St Mary on the grounds of Sudeley Castle, where she died. An elaborate monument was erected over her grave, topped with a likeness of her. But over the following centuries, her remains were repeatedly exhumed and desecrated.

In 1642, during the English Civil War, soldiers from the Parliamentary army attacked the chapel, smashed her monument, and disturbed the grave. Mary Queen of Scots, wait, no, Catherine’s burial place was forgotten for about two hundred years. In 1782, a group of ladies arrived at Sudeley seeking the monument. Local men dug beneath a block of alabaster and found Catherine’s lead coffin.

When opened, they found her body wrapped tightly in waxed cloth. They cut it open and saw the queen’s face for the first time in two centuries. But once the body was exposed to fresh air, the color of her eyes changed and lost their brightness. The ladies asked for the body to be reburied, but a local farmer named Mr.

Lucas insisted on seeing the corpse himself. He opened the coffin, found the body wrapped in six or seven layers of waxed linen, intact and preserved. He cut into the cloth covering one arm, which was still white and moist. He also cut locks of the queen’s hair and pieces of her burial dress.

A year later, in 1783, the castle steward ordered the grave opened again. The body had begun to decompose rapidly. Onlookers noted that the queen’s feet were very small and she wore a shoe, and that her features were delicate and her hair golden. Four years later, the coffin was opened once more by a curious local clergyman.

He discovered that the queen’s head had completely decomposed and her teeth had fallen from her mouth, while her arms and hands had turned brown. He made a sketch of the remains. Six years after that, a group of drunken vandals entered the chapel, removed Catherine Parr’s body from the coffin, and desecrated it. Some of them danced with the corpse.

They threw it in a heap and left after pulling out some of her teeth. A man allegedly stabbed the former queen’s torso with an iron rod before the body was reburied. In 1817, during chapel restoration, the coffin was found overturned, and the body was nothing more than a pile of bones with small remnants of flesh and hair. It was placed in a stone vault and buried for the final time.

A new coffin was provided, bearing an effigy of the queen with her hands clasped tightly. She lies in that position to this day. Catherine Parr was considered the lucky one among Henry’s wives because she survived him, but what happened to her remains after death was horrifying.

Her coffin was opened repeatedly over the centuries following her death, her body was mutilated by curiosity, vandalism, and neglect, and only in the nineteenth century was she finally laid to rest again within the small chapel at Sudeley Castle.