On the night of 28 January 1547, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, hurried across London as fast as he could. He had been summoned to the bedside of a dying king. When he finally reached the chamber at the Palace of Westminster, Henry VIII was unconscious. The king could no longer speak; he could only communicate through the pressure of his hands.
Cranmer took hold of one of them and prayed for the king’s soul. At around two in the morning, Henry VIII died, most likely of kidney and liver failure compounded by the effects of his obesity and chronic ill health. It was, as Cranmer later described it, a dignified death for a man who had finally made his peace with God. For a monarch who had executed two of his own wives, one by sword and one by axe, who had turned on some of his closest friends and sent them to the block, who had ordered the destruction of monasteries and the deaths of countless others, it was a remarkably quiet end.
The man who had terrorised England for nearly four decades slipped away in his bedchamber, attended by a single archbishop and a handful of servants. But the peace of that death masked a reign of extraordinary brutality. Henry VIII is remembered primarily for his six wives, a fact of history that has overshadowed almost everything else about him. Yet the fuller picture is far darker.
He was among the most savage and cruel kings ever to rule England, a man whose wrath fell indiscriminately on those who opposed him and those who loved him alike. In his final years, he was so ill and so enormous that he had to be moved around his own palaces using a system of pulleys and wheeled chairs. By the standards of the Tudor age, he was grotesquely obese, a shadow of the athletic young prince who had once been the darling of the court. The story of how he reached that bedchamber, and what became of his body afterward, is a tale that stretches across centuries, touching on prophecy, explosion, and the final resting place of a tyrant who still refuses to rest easily in the historical imagination.
In the years before his death, Henry had grown increasingly immobile. A serious jousting accident had opened wounds on his legs that never properly healed, festering and causing him endless problems. The sores on his legs were a constant source of pain and infection, and they limited his movement more and more as time went on. By the end of January 1547, he had taken to his bed in the bedchamber of the Palace of Westminster, complaining that he felt unwell.
Those who served him could see clearly that he would not live much longer. It fell to Sir Anthony Denny, one of his closest attendants and a gentleman of the privy chamber, to deliver the news the king needed to hear. Denny was the man who helped clean the king after he had relieved himself, a task that placed him in the most intimate circle of royal service. Now he had to tell the ailing monarch the truth.
According to human estimation, Denny said, it was unlikely that the king would survive. Henry responded with a declaration of faith. The mercy of Christ, he insisted, could pardon all his sins—yes, even if they were greater than they were now. And so Henry VIII accepted that death was coming for him.
He asked for Thomas Cranmer to be brought to his deathbed. The archbishop came as quickly as he could, but by the time he arrived, the king was already unconscious. Cranmer could only hold the king’s hand and pray. There would be no final confession, no last words of repentance spoken aloud.
Henry VIII died in the early hours of the morning, and those present would later speak of how peacefully he had gone, a strange mercy for a man who had shown so little of it himself. Around his body, a conspiracy of silence formed. For days after his death, the king’s corpse lay in his bedchamber, unattended and unannounced. The news of his passing was kept secret, for it was feared that revealing the king was dead would destabilise the country and leave England vulnerable to invasion and attack.
A realm that had been torn apart by religious upheaval and political terror could not be allowed to know, even for a few days, that the iron hand that had held it together was gone. Eventually, the body was embalmed and placed in a lead-lined coffin. The funeral procession set out for Windsor, and the king was laid to rest in St George’s Chapel, in a small vault beneath the choir. He was buried alongside the coffin of his third wife, Jane Seymour, the mother of his heir, the future Edward VI.
It was an ironic placement, for Jane had been the one wife Henry had genuinely mourned, the only one he chose to be buried beside. But even in death, the king’s body would not remain undisturbed. A story emerged from the period following the embalming and the transport of the coffin to Windsor. On one of the evenings when the coffin was resting at Syon Abbey, a loud noise was heard from within it—something like an explosion.
The tale held that the king’s corpse had burst due to the accumulation of gases, that the wood of the coffin had cracked open, and that fluids had leaked from it. It was even claimed that dogs had licked up those fluids afterward. Whether this story is true remains a matter of debate. It may have been connected to a prophecy uttered by a preacher about what would happen to Henry’s remains after his death.
Whatever the case, the vault was disturbed multiple times in the centuries that followed, as other kings and members of the royal family were buried within it. The small vault beneath the choir of St George’s Chapel became a crowded resting place, and Henry VIII’s coffin would not be left alone. If one were to open the vault today, nearly 480 years after his death, what would be found? Most likely, the remains would consist essentially of the king’s skeleton.
The skull, the jawbone, the spine, and the larger limbs would probably still be present, though their condition would be uncertain. There might be a small amount of dried soft tissue in some protected areas of the body. There would also be the remnants of the burial shroud, the coffin lining, and other materials related to his funeral. This could include the thick heavy canvas that had been wrapped around the king’s body.
If the story of the explosion is to be believed, the large coffin itself would be expected to show damage. What certainly would not be found is a body resembling the images of that heavyset Tudor monarch. The facial features, the skin, and most of the internal organs would have faded away through decomposition, unless the body had been extraordinarily well preserved. But the coffin of Henry VIII is not alone in the vault.
He is buried with Jane Seymour, his third wife, and also with King Charles I, the Stuart monarch who lost the Civil War and was executed, as well as an infant child of Queen Anne of the Stuart line. Henry would have been furious at this arrangement, for he considered the Stuarts his sworn enemies. Plans of the vault show that Henry’s coffin is badly damaged and broken. And here the story takes an even more remarkable turn.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, in the late nineteenth century, people actually entered Henry VIII’s burial vault and looked inside the king’s coffin. In 1888, investigators opened the vault and examined the remains. The largest coffin, based on strong evidence, contained the remains of King Henry VIII. It was six feet ten inches long and was encased in elm wood one to two inches thick.
But that wood had decomposed and existed only as small fragments nearby. The lead coffin appeared to have suffered a violent blow in its middle, and a large opening in that section revealed nothing but the skeleton of the king. Some beard hair remained on the chin, but there was nothing else to distinguish the figure within. It is not unlikely that the coffin of Henry VIII was damaged by the introduction of the coffin of King Charles I.
What this means is that when Henry’s body was seen in 1888, more than three hundred years after his death, it was confirmed that his remains were a skeleton. One of the strangest features of that discovery was the survival of some beard hair on the chin of the skull—a remarkable detail given how long it had endured. Yet the investigators did not take a close look at Henry’s remains, and they made no attempt to open the lower part of the coffin to check the condition of the legs, which, if they had been well wrapped, might have still looked lifelike. Why was Henry VIII’s coffin so badly damaged?
The investigators considered the possibility that the damage occurred when King Charles I was hastily buried in the vault. After all, it was a small vault, meant to be only a temporary resting place for the Tudor king. During Charles’s burial, perhaps the supports of Henry’s coffin broke, causing the coffin to slam against the bottom of the vault and the floor. There is also the possibility of gas accumulation within the sealed lead.
But whatever the cause, the king’s skull and face were completely exposed to view, and the damage had occurred near the head of the king. Even today, the exact cause of that damage has never been confirmed. So what lies within the burial vault of King Henry VIII today? The most likely belief is that the skull and skeletal remains of the king are still there, with his shattered lead coffin.
The outer cover and the wooden coffin have crumbled and broken apart, for the wood is old and has probably deteriorated significantly. He lies beside Jane Seymour, King Charles I, and an infant child of Queen Anne. The vault was last opened in 1888, so there is no way to know whether the bones have shifted or deteriorated further in the intervening years. But the astonishing historical fact remains: the skull of King Henry VIII may still be visible inside the broken coffin of that Tudor monarch, centuries after his death.
The man who had once commanded the mightiest court in Europe, who had broken with the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, and sent his own wives to the block, now lies in a damaged lead box in a small, crowded vault, his grinning skull perhaps still gazing out through the crack that killed his coffin’s integrity—a final, silent judgment on a king who never stopped demanding the world bend to his will. The body that had once been carried through his palaces on a system of pulleys and chairs, too massive to walk, had been reduced to bone and a few strands of beard hair. The quiet death in the bedchamber had given way to a violent afterlife of explosions, broken coffins, and careless burials. For a man who had sought to control everything, even the fate of his own remains had escaped his grasp.
And so he rests, shattered and exposed, beneath the chapel floor at Windsor, next to the wife he had loved, surrounded by the Stuart enemies he had despised, waiting for a vault door that no one may ever open again.
