Symbolic burial 700 years after

Press, 25 July 1984, Page 12

Symbolic burial 700 years after

NZPA-AP Portsmouth A man who died in a Tudor warship 439 years ago has been buried in Portsmouth Cathedral at a service conducted mostly in the Latin of sixteenth-cen-tury rites. On the anniversary of the sinking of the Mary Rose, the pride of King Henry VHl’s fleet, about 1000 mourners attended the funeral of an unknown man whose skeleton was in the wooden hulk salvaged in 1982 and now in a museum. The symbolic burial was for all the 700 sailors, soldiers, gunners and servants who perished when the warship mysteriously keeled over and sank as it sailed from Portsmouth to fight the French while King Henry watched from the shore.

The bones were enclosed in a coffin of 2.5 cm-thick English oak, with a gabled top as in Tudor times, lined with oak leaves and sealed with pitch found in barrels in the hulk. The coffin was interred in the cathedral under a slab of Welsh slate inscribed, “Here lies a member of the ship’s company of the Mary Rose. May they rest in peace, 19th July 1984.” Among the mourners was Gwen Holder, a descendant of Captain Roger Grenville, who commanded the Mary Rose. “It was strange going to the service. I felt we were reaching out to the past,” Mrs Holder said. The service was conducted by seven Anglican and Catholic priests.