THE BURIAL OF ENGLAND'S MONARCHS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2094, 10 September 1901, Page 6

THE BURIAL OF ENGLAND'S MONARCHS.

England has not always sheltered the remains'of the monarchs who have ruled over it. Nine people out of ten, if asked where our kings and queens are buried, would say Westminster Abbev. But they would be wrong. It is one of the things which surprise us as soon as we look into them. Not half our rulers lie in the Abbey. Three queens—Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne—are there, but most of our kings have been buried elsewhere. Some have gone out of England altogether, and their graves must be sought in Germany and France; and others sleep in the great provincial towns and cities. Only one Hanoverian lies in the Abbev. The dust of George the Second mingles with that of good Queen Caroline, the wife he never really loved. It seems to have been taken for granted when Edward the Confessor built the Abbey that it would be the resting-place of all our kings; but it was not, as a matter of fact, until eight reigns after the Confessor that another king was buried on the same site. The Conqueror, who came into England from without, went out of it to sleep his last sleep in his favorite town of Caen ; and the body of his son, our secorid Norman king, has "had little peace in England. The monument of William 11. has been moved all round Winchester Cathedral, until now it probably shelters none of his bones, which the Puritans flung from the windows. The burial place of Henry the First is covered by a prison, and the grave of his successor,' Stephen, at Faversham, was broken open by thieves for the gain of the leaden coffin. ' The coffin of Edward the Confessor was similarly robbed hundreds of vears later, and a gold chain and crucifix taken from it was sold during the lifetime of Queen Victbria at a public auction in London. Edward the First was disappointed in his death. He wanted to die in a great convulsion, but he passed peacefully away, an old man and infirm, at a little village on the Solway Firth. He asked that his flesh should be boiled and his bones carried at the head of the English army till Scotland was subdued ; but instead they were buried at Waltham Abbey with great pomp, but brought to Westminster after fifteen weeks. His excitable spirit had some concessions made to it. however, for his body was perpetually "on the move". during the fourteenth' century. His successor, Edward 11., was buried at Gloucester, and then, for ,the first time, two kings were buried at Westminster in succession—Edward 111. and Richard 11. The tomb of Richard had an opening through which the curious could gaze on his bones ; but this was closed, and the next time his bones were exposed was when they were taken out to be measured, and the skull was photographed. Henry IV. lies at Canterbury, where he was allowed to rest in peace for 400 years. Then, five years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, an amazing thing happened. The authorities opened the grave to see if the King were really there. The marble pavement was dug up, and unsentimental men sawed through the middle of the wooden coffin, cut out a great piece of the leaden shroud, dragged off five thicknesses of leather in which the body had been rolled, and—gazed on the face of the King who had lived four centuries before ! As they gazed, the features of Henry the Fourth fell to dust, and the authorities were satisfied that the King was there indeed. . So it has ever been. The remains ot Edward IV. were buried at Windsor in the 15th century, disturbed in the 17th, and again violated in the 18th. Richard 111., buried at Leicester after Boswell Field, was exhumed, and his body thrown aside, his coffin becoming a horse-trough at an inn. The tomb of Henry VII., in the Abbey, has been -mutilated ; and that of Henry VIII., buried with great pomp at Windsor, was broken open by a soldier, who took out a bone and made a knife-haft of it. The grave of Edward VI.. in the Abbey, has been repeatedly disturbed, the wooden shell broken up, and the leaden coffin rent. Time has been no gentler with our queens. Did not Pepvs boast that he had kissed the mouth of Queen Katherine—wife of Henry V.. more than two centuries after she died? Marv was buried at Peterborough, but her crave was disturbed, and she was removed to the" Abbey, where Dean Stanley found in 1869 that' her coffin was being crushed by that of Queen Elizabeth—as if the fight between the sisters were not bitter enough in life ! The chief of the Stuarts rests at Windsor. Fate has been kindly to him in his death. He had little peace in his life ; but on that snowy morning when a little band of followers' carried his coffin, containing the body with the head sewn on, to St. George's Chapel, the storm came to an end, and his grave, at any rate, has been a place of peace.