THRICE EXHUMED QUEEN

Evening Star, Issue 21994, 2 April 1935, Page 12

THRICE EXHUMED QUEEN

The movement for a fund for the purchase for Kendal of the Book o| Prayer and Meditation used: by Queen Catherine Parr, who was born and brought up in Kendal Castle, may serve to recall the remarkable acquirements of Henry VHl.’s last and sur* 'viving queen, states the ‘Manchested Guardian.’ There has been a general tendency; to regard Catherine Parr as< a somewhat uninteresting person off whom there is nothing much' to be said except that she was lucky enough! to escape the fate of her predecessors* Actually, however, she seems to have been an unusual person 'even in that age of; infant prodigies. We leant that she read and wrote Latin ‘ with; facility ... . . possessed some knowledge of Greek, and was well versed'in! modern languages. How perfect ai mistress she was of her own, the elegance and beauty of her devotional writings' are a standing monument. StType quotes a story of her that “somebody skilled in prognostication* casting her nativity, said she was horn: to sit in the highest seat of imperial majesty, having all the eminent stars and planets in her house. This she and took so much notice of than when her mother • used sometimes th call her to work she would reply, ‘ My hands are ordained to touch crowns afad sceptres, and not spindles ana needles/” • . ? However, her mother seems to hava been unimpressed by that argument, for there remain some remarkable products of Catherine’s needle in embroidery work. Catherine was not so fortunate at the close of her life. She married her old admirer Admiral Lord Seymour, two months after the King’s death,; and died giving birth to her first child when she was thirty-six. She wa« buried in the private chapel at Sudeley, Gloucestershire. For nearly twa and a-half centuries her grave was un* disturbed, but in 1782 some women! archaeologists digging in the ruined chapel came upon her coffin, and Had it disinterred. They ordered . the leaden shell to be cut open in two places, and in morbid curiosity uncovered the face of ■ the long. dead queen, which they afterwards described as well preserved and still showing traces of beauty. ' ; A few years later the grave waa again reopened by the tenant of the land on which the chapel stood; Miss Strickland has described the scandalous sequel and how the body was taken out of its coffin and laid on’ a’, heap of rubbish for the curious to gloat on. Rather tardily the vicar or the parish at length put an end .to the gruesome "show,” and Catherine wasagain buried. But two years later 1 a' 1 party ,of inquirers reopened the grave,-, the body was again examined, and a! report of this • final investigation was published in ‘ Archseologia ’ in 1787.