At around two in the morning on the 28th of January 1547, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, stood at the bedside of a king who could no longer speak. Henry VIII had been the most feared monarch in Europe, a man whose temper had sent two wives and countless nobles to the block, but now he lay in a bed at Whitehall Palace, his body ravaged by obesity, infection, and open sores that had turned gangrenous. Cranmer asked the dying king to give a sign that he trusted in Christ’s mercy, and Henry squeezed the archbishop’s hand. Moments later, he was dead, at the age of fifty-five.
The news was kept secret for three days. Under Tudor custom, it was treason to predict the king’s death while he still lived, and even after it happened, the privy council needed time to organize the succession. Henry’s only legitimate son, Edward, was just nine years old, and the factions at court were already circling. Courtiers continued to deliver meals to the king’s chambers to maintain the illusion that he was still alive, and the death was not publicly announced until the 31st of January.
Henry’s body was embalmed and placed in a lead-lined coffin, but even that could not preserve his enormous corpse. When the coffin rested overnight at Syon Abbey before the funeral procession continued to Windsor, it leaked fluid through the lead, and dogs were found licking the blood that had seeped onto the floor. Later chroniclers, such as Gilbert Burnet, saw this as divine retribution for Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries. On the 16th of February 1547, the king was buried at St.
George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in a vault beneath the choir, next to the coffin of Jane Seymour, his third wife, who had died giving birth to his long-desired son. Henry had planned a grand tomb for himself with gilded effigies and angels, but it was never completed. His children never finished the construction, and his body was simply left inside the vault, marked today only by a simple black marble slab placed there in the nineteenth century. The vault was never meant to be his permanent resting place, and its history would become stranger than anything Henry could have imagined.
A century after his death, the executed corpse of King Charles I was interred there. Parliament, the king’s enemy, had decided to bury Charles quietly inside Henry’s vault. When the vault was opened, Henry’s coffin showed signs of damage and cracking, possibly caused by an explosion of gases from within. Those who entered claimed they could see the king’s beard on his face through the damaged coffin.
Later, a foot soldier who worked inside Windsor allegedly drilled a hole into the coffin and stole a bone from Henry VIII, intending to craft a knife handle from it. The theft was discovered and the bone returned, but by the time the vault was opened again, Henry’s embalmed remains had decayed to a complete skeleton. Today, the vault contains three coffins: Henry’s, Jane Seymour’s, and Charles I’s, along with the remains of a small child of Queen Anne, and it is not believed the bodies have been disturbed in over a century. Henry’s death and burial were the end of a long physical decline that had begun more than a decade earlier.
Born in 1491, the second son of Henry VII, he had become king in 1509 at the age of seventeen. In his early years, he was the embodiment of Renaissance kingship: tall, handsome, educated, and athletic. But a jousting accident in January of 1536 changed everything. His horse fell on him, leaving him unconscious for two hours and causing a severe leg wound that never healed properly.
Chronic ulcers developed, festering and discharging pus for the rest of his life. The imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, wrote that the stench from Henry’s sores was unbearable. Combined with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and a gluttonous appetite, the leg wound contributed to his rapid physical decline. By the 1540s, Henry reportedly measured over fifty inches around the waist and required a mechanical hoist to be lifted onto his horse or into bed.
The Venetian ambassador noted that the king was scarcely able to walk and was as full of sores as a foul leper. His declining health only intensified his paranoia and cruelty. He executed two of his wives, Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Katherine Howard in 1542, and countless nobles and former allies, including his trusted minister Thomas Cromwell. By the 1540s, his mind appeared clouded by bitterness and suspicion, lashing out at both Protestants and Catholics.
Chronic headaches, obesity, and leg ulcers may have been symptoms of type 2 diabetes or Cushing’s syndrome, and some historians have suggested he suffered from McLeod syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that can cause mental deterioration. Despite this, he continued to rule absolutely, his courts indulging his whims and his last wife, Katherine Parr, nursing him devotedly, reading scripture and tending to his wounds. By late 1546, his condition had become critical, and the royal physicians could do little, especially since Henry distrusted doctors and often dismissed or punished them for failure. It fell to Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the privy chamber and one of the few men Henry still trusted, to break the news on the evening of the 27th of January that, in man’s judgment, the king was not like to live long.
Henry responded with calm resignation, asking whether he should receive the sacrament, and when Denny said yes, he replied that he placed his faith in God through the merits of Christ’s passion. By the time Cranmer arrived, Henry could no longer speak, and the king’s final gesture was the squeeze of his hand. Henry’s only acknowledged illegitimate child, Henry FitzRoy, had once seemed a possible answer to the succession crisis that haunted his father. FitzRoy was born around mid-June 1519, the son of Henry VIII and Bessie Blount, one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting.
He was conceived while Katherine was awaiting the birth of one of her children, a fact that says much about the kind of man Henry was. Bessie Blount never returned to court after the birth, but Henry was enamored with having a son, and FitzRoy was given a royal upbringing in the nursery alongside the king’s legitimate children, Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward. He was called Lord Henry, and the king had great plans for him. In June of 1525, FitzRoy was taken down the River Thames and made Duke of Richmond and Somerset in the presence of his father, the highest rank of the peerage.
He also inherited much of the lands belonging to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, and was granted an annual gift of almost £5,000. Katherine of Aragon was not happy, resenting the honors conferred on the king’s natural son, and it was said she remained dissatisfied. FitzRoy was made a Knight of the Garter, Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral of England, and Lord President of the Council of the North, despite being a child. He was raised at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire, dealt with like a prince.
Henry even considered marrying his daughter Mary to FitzRoy, which would have meant the boy marrying his own half-sister, but instead, the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, arranged a match between FitzRoy and his own daughter, Lady Mary Howard. FitzRoy was present at the execution of Anne Boleyn as a witness for the king, but he fell ill in July of 1536 and succumbed quickly, likely to tuberculosis or some lung condition. He died at the royal palace of St. James’s in London on the 23rd of July 1536, aged just seventeen.
The king was devastated, but his father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk, took over the funeral arrangements. FitzRoy’s body was embalmed, his internal organs removed and placed in a separate box, and the body wrapped in a thick cerecloth, practically mummifying the young teenager. Under cover of darkness, the coffin was taken out of London in a closed cart, with only two attendants acting as mourners, and buried in a straw-filled wagon at Thetford Priory, the mausoleum of the Howard family. It is not known why there was so much secrecy, but it was what the king wanted.
In February of 1540, when the dissolution of the priories and monasteries began, Thetford was to be shut down. Howard appealed to the king, but Henry ordered the priory closed and wrote to Howard expressing his anger and upset that FitzRoy had been buried with no pomp and no ceremony. At some point around 1540, the body of Henry FitzRoy was exhumed from the Howard mausoleum and taken to Framlingham, specifically the church of St. Michael.
Thomas Howard had ordered two tombs to be made at Framlingham, one for himself and one for FitzRoy, but Howard fell from favor, was thrown into the Tower of London, and the building work came to a halt. The tomb was finished around the year 1555, almost twenty years after FitzRoy’s death, and his body was exhumed from its grave inside the church and placed inside it. The tomb is a large chest without any effigies, covered in Howard heraldic shields and scenes from the Old Testament. In 1841, excavation work was conducted under the tombs of Thomas Howard and Henry FitzRoy, right next to the altar.
Under the floor, a vault was discovered containing two bodies: one belonging presumably to Henry FitzRoy, and the other being his wife Mary Howard, who had died later. FitzRoy’s remains were described as having perfect teeth and belonging to a young man, meaning his body had at some point been disturbed and probably taken out of the cerecloth wrapping, exposed to the air, and decayed. Today, FitzRoy is still buried under the floor of Framlingham Church inside a vault, with his skeletal remains present, and many mysteries remain about the boy who could have easily been king. He would have been Henry IX.
Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I, who ended the Tudor dynasty, also met with a strange fate after death. By 1602, Elizabeth was nearing seventy, an exceptional age for a monarch in the early seventeenth century. The deaths of her trusted friends hit her especially hard, and the passing of Katherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham, in early 1603 was devastating. Some accounts say the queen never recovered.
After Nottingham’s death, she became withdrawn and melancholy. She suffered from swelling in her legs, likely dropsy, a condition caused by heart or kidney failure, and grew increasingly weak, struggling to eat. Yet she refused medical treatment or bed rest, knowing that any signs of illness could spark instability or plots. By March of 1603, it was clear Elizabeth was dying.
She spent long hours standing or sitting on cushions, staring into space, refusing to sleep. Her ladies-in-waiting and counselors, including Sir Robert Cecil, begged her to allow physicians to examine her, but she resisted. She had always distrusted doctors, and she seemed determined to let nature take its course. As her strength faded, her mind wandered, but she remained politically sharp enough to understand that England needed a clear successor.
For decades she had refused to name one, but now, when pressed by the privy council, she raised her hands to indicate James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. It was a symbolic act that paved the way for a peaceful transition and the beginning of the Stuart era. On March 24th, 1603, at Richmond Palace, Elizabeth I died quietly in the early hours of the morning. She was sixty-nine years old.
No dramatic final words were recorded. Her death ended the Tudor dynasty, which had begun with her grandfather Henry VII over a century earlier. Her funeral on the 28th of April was one of the grandest seen in England. Her coffin, covered in purple velvet, was carried through London from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, with a life-sized effigy of the queen lying on top, dressed in her robes of state, scepter in hand.
Crowds lined the streets to mourn the only monarch many had ever known. She was initially buried inside the vault of her grandfather Henry VII, but her successor, James I, ordered a large tomb to be made for her out of respect, and her coffin was exhumed and moved to its final resting place beneath it. Not many people know that Elizabeth I was a queen who was actually buried twice. There are darker secrets.
Immediately after her death, her body was embalmed in a harrowing and brutal manner, traditional for monarchs of the time. Physicians cut open a large cavity in her chest and cut out her heart, lungs, intestines, and other internal organs, in an attempt to preserve her corpse. The body was then washed and wrapped in a cerecloth, a thick wax-coated shroud. The internal organs, including the heart, were placed in a separate lead container and interred with her body, later moved from the first vault to her final resting place.
In 1670, over sixty years after her death, a young choir boy named William Taswell found the organ box inside the vault. He opened it and dipped his hand in, later writing that he took out of each of two urns a kind of glutinous red substance somewhat resembling mortar. One urn was appropriated to Queen Mary, the other to Queen Elizabeth, and Mary’s contained less moisture. Taswell had reached in and touched the heart matter of Queen Elizabeth I.
When the burial vault was opened in the nineteenth century, it was discovered that Elizabeth was not buried alone. Her coffin was found sitting directly on top of the coffin of her half-sister Mary I, placed there to symbolize that she was a greater, more historic, and more superior queen. The carved Tudor rose and initials Elizabeth Regina, along with the date 1603, were found on the coffin, which was made of fine oak an inch thick and covered in red silk velvet. Inside Elizabeth’s tomb, at the head, is a large stone urn that contains the bones and remains of possibly the Princes in the Tower, the two sons of King Edward IV who were allegedly murdered inside the Tower of London on the orders of their uncle, King Richard III.
Bones belonging allegedly to the two children were discovered centuries later, and King Charles II, so moved, ordered them placed in the urn and interred within Elizabeth I’s tomb. The urn was opened at the start of the twentieth century, and the bones were found to fit the boys’ ages, but no DNA tests were done, and animal bones were also found inside. Finally, Elizabeth is buried opposite her once great nemesis, Mary, Queen of Scots, the woman she ordered to execution. Elizabeth’s tomb is actually slightly smaller than Mary’s, a deliberate choice by James I to give his mother a dignified burial while taking a subtle dig at the Tudor dynasty, as James was a Stuart.
The woman who made the Tudor dynasty possible was Elizabeth’s great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, born on the 31st of May 1443 at Bletsoe Castle in Bedfordshire. She was the only child of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, the third son of King Edward III, making her a member of the powerful royal-adjacent Beaufort family, albeit one tainted by the technical illegitimacy of its line. The Beauforts had been legitimized by royal decree but barred from inheriting the throne. Margaret’s father died when she was an infant, and she became a wealthy heiress, a valuable marriage pawn in a turbulent era.
Her first marriage, at the age of twelve, was to Edmund Tudor, the half-brother of King Henry VI. Despite her youth, Margaret became pregnant almost immediately, and in 1456, at just thirteen years old, she gave birth to her only child, Henry Tudor, at Pembroke Castle in Wales. The birth was traumatic, leaving Margaret unable to have further children. Edmund had died of plague in captivity before Henry was born, leaving Margaret a young widow.
During the Wars of the Roses, Margaret was a staunch Lancastrian and used every means at her disposal to protect her son’s claim to the throne. She married twice more, first to Sir Henry Stafford, a moderate Yorkist, and then to Thomas Stanley, whose eventual betrayal of Richard III would help secure her son’s crown. It was through her secret communications and alliance with Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV, that the idea of uniting the warring houses through marriage was born. Margaret proposed that her son marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter, thus joining Lancaster and York.
In 1485, her son landed in Wales and defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, claiming the throne as Henry VII. Margaret did not fight on the battlefield, but her political negotiations and intelligence network were vital. Upon Henry’s coronation, she styled herself not as queen mother, which would have implied competition with her daughter-in-law, but as “My Lady, the King’s Mother,” a unique title she insisted upon. She retained her own household and influence, acting as a co-ruler with Henry, sitting in on royal councils and managing finances.
Margaret was deeply pious and highly educated. She funded the founding and endowment of Christ’s College and St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge, and was responsible for the translation and printing of many religious texts. She lived to see her grandson Henry VIII become heir to the throne following the death of his elder brother Arthur.
In June of 1509, she had her final illness while staying in the Abbot’s house at Westminster for the coronation of her grandson. Bishop John Fisher was called to her bedside, and he later described her death, saying her merciful and liberal hands endured the most painful cramps, so grievously vexing her and compelling her to cry, that it pierced the hearts of all her true servants. When the sacrament was held before her, with all her heart and soul, she raised her body to make an answer, and so soon after, she departed and yielded up her spirit into the hands of the Lord. She was buried on the 9th of July 1509 in the south aisle of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey, placed inside a burial vault.
On top, a large tomb showing her effigy, made using her death mask, shows her in old age. The tomb chest is of black marble and covered in inscriptions, one stating: “Margaret of Richmond, mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII, who gave a salary to three monks of this convent and founded a grammar school in Wimborne, and to a preacher throughout England, and to two interpreters of scripture, one at Oxford, the other at Cambridge, where she likewise founded two colleges, one to Christ and the other to St. John his disciple. ”
It is unclear whether Margaret’s tomb or burial vault was ever opened.
As she was not a queen or ruler in her own right, the interest probably wouldn’t have been there. This leads to the conclusion that five hundred years on from her death, her body could very much still be tightly wrapped inside the tomb, wrapped in the thick linen cerecloth dipped in wax, which would mean her remains would be in a very good state and could be very lifelike if the tomb was ever opened. But there is likely no reason to do this. The fate of hearts removed from Tudor bodies was a separate and peculiar matter.
Throughout the centuries, many civilizations have removed parts of the body after death symbolically, but the Tudors cut out the hearts and interred them in different places. The heart of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife, was cut out after her death and buried under the altar of the Chapel Royal in Hampton Court Palace, while her body was buried in Windsor. A few of the lead vessels that contained the hearts of powerful people still exist today. One was seen in the British Museum, a heart-shaped lead casket that had contained the heart of Sir Henry Sidney, the former Lord Deputy of Ireland and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I.
After Sidney’s death in 1586, he was buried at the family seat of Penshurst in Sussex, but his heart was buried in his daughter Ambrosia’s tomb in Ludlow St. Lawrence’s Church, allegedly as a way of showing his devotion to his daughter and his loyalty to the town of Ludlow. The casket contains a coat of arms on the lid, and Sidney’s name and initials surrounded by a garter. Heart burial vessels like these are very rare.
One from 1562, belonging to John Peck, was found in Yorkshire in 2009; Peck may have served with the Knights Hospitaller, as his heart vessel was decorated with their symbols. There have also been legends about the hearts of Henry VIII’s wives. Anne Boleyn, his executed second wife, allegedly had her heart removed and buried elsewhere. A legend in Suffolk emerged after the alleged discovery of a heart-shaped vessel inside a small church in the village of Wathin, said to contain Anne’s heart.
The heart-shaped tin casket was discovered in a chancel wall and reinterred beneath the organ with a small plaque marking the spot. Anne’s uncle owned the land and the nearby mansion, and she spent many happy days there as a child, playing in the gardens around the church, so there was a possible thread of believability. Some historians have doubted the legend, but the villagers still believe to this day that Anne Boleyn’s heart lies inside that chapel. Elizabeth I, Anne’s daughter, had her heart removed after death despite her specific instructions otherwise.
She hated the idea of being embalmed and eviscerated, but the doctors worked quickly, making a large incision into her chest while she was still inside her bed chamber, cutting out her heart, entrails, and internal organs and placing them in a lead casket. Her wishes were ignored. Her heart was interred inside the same burial vault as her, and her remains were later removed and placed in the same vault as her half-sister Mary I. One account describes her funeral procession, saying the city of Westminster was surged with multitudes of all sorts of people in the streets, houses, windows, and gutters who came to see the obsequies, and when they beheld her statue or effigy lying on the coffin, set forth in royal robes, having a crown upon the head thereof and a ball and scepter in either hand, there was such a great sighing, groaning, and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man.
This same effigy is believed to still be inside Westminster Abbey. Another account says the corpse of the late queen lay in state at St. James’s for more than three weeks while mourning clothes and funeral arrangements were prepared. On the day of the procession, the funeral cortege formed in the courtyard of the palace.
A hundred poor men in black gowns kept watch over her body all night, holding long torches, with soldiers of the royal guard standing around them. The next day, the requiem mass was sung, and when the eulogy was over, the coffin was carried to Henry VII’s chapel in the abbey and placed in a grave on the north side, her heart being severally enclosed in a coffin covered with velvet bound with silver and then separately interred. The household officers broke their staves and threw them into the grave, and as they did so, the trumpet sounded, signaling the beginning of the funeral banquet. The chief mourners went to dinner, leaving the funeral trappings unguarded, and in a few minutes, the servants, hired mourners, and Londoners who had come to see the queen laid in her grave tore down the banners, standards, arms displayed around the altar, and hangings fastened to the walls.
They scrambled and fought one another for scraps of cloth until the embroidered cloths were in shreds and the queen’s eulogy pulled into a hundred pieces. The most famous royal burial to be disturbed was that of Anne Boleyn. On the 19th of May 1536, Queen Anne, the second wife of Henry VIII, was summoned from her prison cell inside the Tower of London and informed that she was about to die. A few things about her execution were rather disturbing, including the fact that Henry had ordered a French swordsman for the job weeks before her trial had even taken place, showing it was more of a murder than a judicial execution based on legitimate crimes.
Anne made the short walk from her prison cell to the execution scaffold, built on the side of the White Tower, the oldest central part of the Tower. Her execution was allegedly private, despite the fact that hundreds had gathered to see her fate. As she was led up to the scaffold, she saw the executioner and remained calm, then made a short speech to the crowd: “Good Christian people, I am come hither to die. For according to the law and by the law, I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it.
I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you. For a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never. And to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best.
And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all. And I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord, have mercy on me. To God I commend my soul.
”
The French swordsman stood behind her, Anne knelt down, and he struck once with his sword, taking her head clean off. After the execution, Anne’s ladies, who were crying, collected her body and remains and placed them inside a large oak chest which previously had housed bows or arrow staves. They carried it into the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, next to the scaffold, where a short burial ceremony took place.
Her remains were joined by others who would be executed inside the Tower of London and on Tower Hill during the Tudor period, and for around three hundred years they were left undisturbed. In 1848, a historian who visited the chapel where Anne had been buried expressed disgust at what had become of the site, saying it had been transformed into the likeness of a meeting house in a manufacturing town and that there was no sadder spot on earth than that little cemetery. The chapel was in a bad way, and Queen Victoria approved significant improvements to the burial site. One of the biggest issues was that the floor was sinking and heavily damaged.
One of the builders stated that on removing the stones of the pavement, it was found that the resting places of those buried within the walls of the chapel during the troublesome times of the sixteenth century had been repeatedly and it was feared almost universally desecrated. Bodies of those who had perished on the scaffold or died as prisoners had been buried in great obscurity, but even memorial stones had not protected them. In the instance of three Scottish lords, Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, their graves were specifically marked by a stone, but their bones had been much disturbed, beyond all possible means of identification. It was even feared that in some instances coffins had been broken up and their contents scattered to make room for fresh occupants.
Mixed into the collection of remains were the bones of local people who had come for years to the chapel to worship. However, one of the bodies the builders discovered was analyzed by archaeologists and specialists and confirmed as being the remains of Queen Anne Boleyn. Dr. Frederick Millet, professor of medicine to Queen Victoria, helped carry out examinations and stated that Anne’s body belonged to a female between twenty-five and thirty years of age, of delicate frame, slender and perfect proportions.
The forehead and lower jaw were small and especially well-formed, and the vertebrae were practically small, especially the atlas, the one next to the skull, bearing witness to the queen’s little neck. He said the bones were certainly those of a female in the prime of life, all perfectly consolidated and symmetrical, and belonging to the same person. The bones of the head indicated a well-formed round skull with an intellectual forehead, straight orbital ridge, large eyes, oval face, and rather square full chin. The remains of the vertebrae and lower limb indicated a well-formed woman of middle height with a short and slender neck, and the ribs showed depth and roundness of chest.
The hands and feet bones indicated delicate and well-shaped hands and feet with tapering fingers and a narrow foot. He said Anne would have been roughly five feet to five feet three inches when alive, and he confirmed that a sharp weapon had been used to take her head from her body. The remains of Anne were taken outside the chapel and stored inside the Queen’s House for a number of months while the building work took place. They were then sealed up inside a new lead coffin, and copper plates were placed on top identifying who the remains belonged to.
On a rather cloudy day in April, the bones were reinterred inside the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. Builders watched on as the boxes were re-eried four feet below the surface, and the positions of the burials were carefully noted. On top of where Anne was buried, a marble decorative tile floor marks the place, below the communion table, second in from the left on the first full row of burials, between her brother George Boleyn and Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset.
No DNA analysis took place on her remains, which would have completely confirmed that the bones belonged to Anne. There have been rumors that some of her remains may have been moved out of the Tower, but still today it is believed, even by the Beefeaters who work inside the Tower of London, that the bones of Anne Boleyn are interred below the altar of the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula.
