The vault beneath St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle was never meant to be seen again, but in March 1789, workmen laying a new pavement accidentally breached the tomb of King Edward IV and his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, unleashing a grotesque and macabre scene that has shocked historians for centuries.
The discovery was made on Friday, March 13, 1789, when stones sealing the entrance to the royal vault fell out during construction supervised by architect Henry Emlyn. What they found inside was a gruesome tableau: the lead coffin of Edward IV, crushed and partially decayed, with a liquid “coffin goop” three inches deep at the foot end, in which the king’s leg bones were immersed.
On top of Edward’s coffin lay the scattered remains of his wife, Elizabeth Woodville. Her wooden coffin had completely rotted away, leaving only a skull, some bones, and fragments of pine wood. The queen, who had requested a simple burial beside her husband in 1492, was reduced to a pile of debris atop his leaden casket.
Emlyn’s detailed account, later published by the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1796, described the king’s skeleton as remarkably intact. Measuring six feet three and a half inches, Edward IV was a giant for his time, towering over nearly everyone in medieval England. Long brown hair still clung to his skull, matching the portraits of the Plantagenet monarch.
But the most stomach-churning detail was the liquid at the bottom of the coffin. Emlyn noted it was about three inches deep, dark brown, and described by Dr. James Lind, a prominent Scottish physician, as resembling “walnut-pickle.”
Lind, in a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 breach of modern medical ethics, tasted the fluid. He reported it was “inodorous and tasteless, excepting a small degree of roughness or astringency.”
Lind’s analysis concluded that the liquid was not a preservative but the result of the body’s own decomposition. He evaporated and filtered the goop, then heated the residue, producing a “smell rather agreeable” and ashes that tasted saline. He even compared the aged fluid to wine that becomes tasteless over centuries.
The exhumation was not authorized. King George III was in the midst of a severe mental breakdown, and oversight at St. George’s Chapel was lax.
Emlyn and his team took advantage of the chaos, and soon the public flocked to see the royal remains. According to Charles Knight’s “The Windsor Guide,” souvenir hunters began stealing pieces of the king.
“One secreting some hair, a second a tooth, a third a finger,” Knight wrote. Chapel authorities eventually put a stop to the looting, but not before numerous locks of Edward’s brown hair had been cut from his skull and scattered across the world.
Horace Walpole, the famous politician and antiquarian, obtained a few hairs just a week after the tomb was opened. In a letter dated March 20, 1789, he wrote, “I have got a few hairs of Edward IV’s head, not beard; they are of a darkish brown, not auburn.” That lock was later sold at auction in 1842 for three pounds and three shillings.
Another lock was taken by a man named Henry W. Legee, who boasted in a letter that he had “took it from the scull with my own hand.” He offered to share more of his trove, noting the hair could be washed with soap and water to become “a fine colour, and elastick.”
Today, at least nineteen locks of Edward IV’s hair are believed to exist in collections worldwide. The Society of Antiquaries of London still holds a six-centimeter-long lock, presented in 1790 by John Douglas, then Dean of Windsor. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has another, from which an unsuccessful attempt to extract DNA was made in 2007.
Golden rings and brooches containing the hair have been sold at auction for thousands of pounds. In November 2024, a diamond brooch with Edward’s hair twisted into a bow shape sold for £9,450. A mourning ring sold by Christie’s in 1995, and another ring now in the National Museum of Western Art in Japan, all claim to contain genuine relics of the Plantagenet king.
The coffin goop itself was collected in vials, one of which was sent to the Society of Antiquaries along with fragments of Elizabeth Woodville’s pine coffin. That vial is now lost, and the wooden fragments have also disappeared from the Society’s collection, according to historian Dr. John Ashdown-Hill.
The remains of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville were eventually resealed in their vault, but the damage was done. The king’s skeleton was measured, his hair stolen, and his bodily fluids tasted. Modern historians are left to wonder what else might have been learned if the Victorians had been as thorough as they were with the supposed grave of Anne Boleyn in 1876.
Emlyn’s drawings and descriptions are all that remain of the 1789 exhumation. They show a cramped vault, barely nine feet long, with Edward’s lead coffin lying at a slight incline. The queen’s skull and bones are depicted scattered on top.
The inscriptions on the vault walls, including “Edward IIII” written in chalk, confirmed the identities.
The discovery raises uncomfortable questions about the treatment of royal remains. Should tombs be opened for research, or should the dead be left in peace? The 1789 incident was not a scientific excavation but a construction accident that turned into a free-for-all of grave robbing.
Edward IV died on April 9, 1483, at just 41 years old. His cause of death remains a mystery, with contemporary accounts suggesting everything from melancholy to poison. He was buried with great ceremony in the chapel he had built, only to have his rest disturbed 306 years later.
Elizabeth Woodville, who endured the loss of her sons, the Princes in the Tower, and the seizure of her lands, died in 1492 at Bermondsey Abbey. She was buried quietly beside Edward, as she had requested. Her simple wooden coffin was no match for the centuries, and her remains were reduced to a few bones and a skull that Dr.
Lind identified as belonging to an “aged person.”
The story of what was found inside Edward IV’s coffin is a grim reminder of the fragility of royal legacies. The king who towered over his court, who fought in the Wars of the Roses, who built St. George’s Chapel, ended up with his hair in jewelry boxes and his bodily fluids in a physician’s mouth.
As the Society of Antiquaries continues to hold that lock of brown hair, and as auction houses sell mourning rings for thousands of pounds, the icky things found inside Edward IV’s coffin continue to fascinate and horrify. The dead king’s remains have traveled further than he ever could have imagined, scattered across museums, universities, and private collections around the world.
