“Obscure the place, and uninscrib'd the stone,” by H.M. Castor

Portrait of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck 

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

First, a confession: I owe the idea for today's post entirely to my aunt Ruth Hayward, who is currently involved in some fascinating historical research and writing of her own. Thank you, Ruth!

Last month I wrote here about the recent archaeological dig which uncovered the skeleton of Richard III, and a few days later A.L. Berridge posted a fantastic piece about a number of other finds that hold (for me) a grisly yet compelling fascination, including the head of Henri IV, the blood of Louis XVI, and the heart of Louis XVII (you can read it here).

In response, Ruth very kindly emailed me about another significant royal disinterring that occurred in 1813, and I thought it might interest readers of this blog too.

On 23rd March 1813, the Duchess of Brunswick died. She was Princess Augusta, elder sister of King George III, and not only aunt to his son the Prince Regent (the future King George IV) but also the Prince’s mother-in-law.

Princess Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick, by George Knapton 

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The decision was taken to bury the Duchess beneath the ‘Quire’ in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (the Quire is the place at the chapel’s east end where the Garter and choir stalls stand). It was while the necessary excavations were being undertaken to make a place for the Duchess that another vault, containing the coffin of Henry VIII, was accidentally disturbed.

It’s unlikely, you might think, that anyone could bump by mistake into Henry VIII, living or dead, but Henry’s tomb didn’t at this point have a permanent marker. As the St George’s Chapel website explains,

“On Queen Jane Seymour’s death in 1537 shortly after the birth of their son, Edward, Henry VIII ordered her burial in a vault under the Quire of St George’s Chapel... In his own will of 1546, he requested to be buried with Queen Jane in the Quire, half way between the high altar and Sovereign’s Garter stall… The resting place of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour… was intended to be temporary while a grand monument was completed. However, the tomb was never finished and the location of the vault which Henry had intended to be temporary was not permanently marked.”

…hence the accidental disturbing of Henry’s vault – which took the form of a hole in one of the vault’s walls. Through that hole, it was noticed that Henry and Jane’s coffins did not lie there alone: someone else was with them.

Here, we can turn to an account of what ensued that was written in 1813 by the royal physician of the time, Henry Halford. It is available to read for free on Google Books here, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who has the stomach for a few grisly details.

Halford tells us there was reason to believe that this extra occupant of Henry VIII’s vault might be the executed Charles I – whose coffin had commonly been thought to be lost. Exactly 100 years previously, indeed, in 1713, the poem ‘Windsor Forest’ by Alexander Pope had been published, in which Pope complained about Charles's burial place being unmarked:

Make sacred Charles's tomb forever known,

(Obscure the place & uninscrib’d the stone)

Oh Fact accurst! what tears has Albion shed,

Heav'ns, what new wounds! and how her old have bled!

Although it seems it had been recorded at some point that Charles lay in Henry's vault, few people were aware of this and there was in any case uncertainty as to whether it was true. Halford tells us that the Prince Regent, therefore, upon being told of the extra coffin, saw “that a doubtful point in History might be cleared up by opening this vault,” and gave the order that after the Duchess of Brunswick’s funeral, investigations should be made.

So, on April 1^st, the day after the Duchess’s funeral, a small party of men (which included the Prince Regent, his brother the Duke of Cumberland and Halford himself) gathered to witness the opening of Henry VIII’s vault.

The extra coffin was examined and opened and did turn out to contain the body of Charles I. Halford’s description of Charles’s face, in particular, is very vivid and well worth reading, but I will not repeat it here to save anyone of delicate sensibilities. I think I can say, though, that a similarity to Van Dyck’s portraits (see the top of this blog) is mentioned. It was also found that Henry VIII’s coffin “appeared to have been beaten in by violence about the middle” and, moreover, had a great big hole in it – probably made by the hurried addition of Charles’s coffin to the vault – but all that was visible through the hole was part of Henry’s skeleton and a little bit of beard. There was another, younger, occupant of the same vault, too – a coffin containing a stillborn child of Queen Anne’s.

A lock of hair was taken from Charles I’s head; the Prince Regent gave it to the Duke of Cumberland, who had a locket made to house it. The locket, complete with its contents, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and can be seen here. 

Charles I was then re-interred with Henry VIII, and the Prince Regent requested that a slab should be laid in the floor of the Quire to mark the place. This wasn’t in fact done until the reign of King William IV, and according to the St George’s Chapel website, modern research suggests it’s not even in exactly the right spot.

So, do you think our present Queen would mind if I fetch my spade…?

H.M. Castor's novel about Henry VIII - VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, Penguin in Australia, and will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US later this year.

Cleopatra and other royal connections. By Adèle Geras

I wish I kept a diary. Then I could date the occasion (I think sometime in 2006) when I had a personal brush with royalty. Sort of. In a way. My dealings with Cleopatra go back to 2005, when my agent rang to tell me that Kingfisher Books had invited me to write about Cleopatra for children of about 9 or 10. This book was to take the form of a diary written by a child (to give the child’s eye view) and would be very lavishly produced and illustrated in full colour throughout. One half of the book would be the diary, written by me and the second half would be full of proper historical, factual information that students of the period might want to know. The second half, it was made quite clear, would NOT be my responsibility, but researched and written by someone else. This is a picture of the hardback (which led to one of the best emails I ever got in my life: So sorry we can’t send you a colour proof of the cover but we’re having a bit of trouble embedding the jewels. Yes, those emeralds and rubies you can see at the top and bottom of the picture are in fact very authentic-looking bits of plastic which give the book the kind of glamour its subject would have appreciated. The paperback, which appears on the 15th of this month, is less dazzling but perhaps more child-friendly and also shows off the wonderful artwork by M.P.Robertson.

My first impulse was to wonder why a story so full of sex and death would be suitable for 9 year olds and then I thought: why not? They’re as interested in both subjects as anyone else. My second thought was a panicked question: what on earth do I know about Cleopatra? Well, I’d seen the George Bernard Shaw play so I knew about her arriving wrapped in a rug and being unrolled in front of Julius Caesar. I’d read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and knew the speech . “The barge she sat in like a burnished throne” etc. But most clearly of all, I knew Elizabeth Taylor in yellow chiffon (when in Egypt) and gold from top to toe (for Rome and her triumphal procession) wearing more viridian eye shadow than any eyelid should be required to carry and with black eyebrows like small caterpillars over each violet eye, fainting with desire in the arms of the slightly square but very delicious Richard Burton. Of course I agreed to write my part of the book at once. I couldn’t resist.

My editor and also the chief writer of the other half of the book, and the person who was in charge of sending me all the research notes I needed was the excellent Alison Stanley. At a certain point (oh I wish I’d kept a diary) Alison emailed me proposing a meeting. We could either meet in Manchester, where I was living back then, or I could come down to London to the Kingfisher offices, or I could come to her house in Windsor. Her husband, Roger Judd, was assistant organist at St George’s Chapel, a post he held for more than twenty years. Well, which would you have chosen? Of course I accepted Alison’s kind invitation.

Alison and Roger have moved since then but at the time they lived in a house known as Marbeck, after the first organist and choir master John Marbeck who took up his post at St George's in in 1551. In those days, the choristers used to live and work in the same house as their master. Next door to Alison and Roger’s house was Vicars' Hall which is said to have been the venue for the very first performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. I couldn’t believe I was going to have lunch in such a place.

The fun started when Alison and I walked in past the guard at the gates of Windsor Castle. Alison greeted this soldier, complete with busby, by his first name and he just waved us through. I don’t remember anything about the editing, though we must have discussed the book, I’m sure. I remember a very delicious lunch - how come I can ALWAYS remember meals? - and then a private tour of St George’s Chapel which, because I was with Alison, meant we could go up to the organ loft and look down at the whole Chapel. I was shown the small hidey-hole with a view over the nave from which Queen Victoria witnessed the marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1863,when her mourning for Prince Albert prevented her from appearing in public. Every member of the Chapel staff whom we met was kindness itself and showed me things not generally seen by the public, such as a kind of filing system for clerical robes and other accoutrements: a chest -of- drawers made up of many very wide , thin drawers in which fabrics could lie flat until they were needed. Anyone who’s been to St George’s Chapel will know how beautiful it is. This link,http://www.stgeorges-windsor.org/worship-and-music/experience-st-georges/st-georges-panorama.html if you click on it, will take you to some virtual tours. I loved being there and I’m still grateful to Alison for making that possible. I’m also grateful to her for making the second half of my book a really terrific resource for anyone studying the clever, sexy, dangerous and tragic queen of Egypt whose lustre is undimmed, many centuries after her death. Shakespeare, as usual, said it exactly: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety.