The hallowed stones of Westminster Abbey and the ancient walls of the Tower of London have long concealed a secret world beneath their floors, a world of forgotten monarchs, decaying coffins, and remarkable discoveries that have rewritten our understanding of England’s bloody past. Recent examinations of the royal burial vaults have revealed that the remains of some of the nation’s most significant sovereigns are not at rest in the manner we were led to believe, with bodies moved, coffins stacked, and remains left 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 for centuries.
The most stunning recent discovery involves the tomb of Edward I, “The Hammer of the Scots,” which was opened 467 years after his death in 1774. What investigators found was a startlingly well-preserved king, his face entirely recognizable despite the passing of centuries, his chin and lips intact, and even the cavities of his eyes still containing the remnants of his eyeballs, movable under the envelope of the cerecloth. The King, who was wrapped tightly in waxed linens, also retained the rich garments of his burial, wearing a tunic of red silk damask beneath a stole of white tissue, studded with filigree work of gilt metal set with imitation sapphires and rubies.
An examination of the vaults has confirmed that certain monarchs were not given the burial they sought, and in the case of Katherine of Valois, her treatment after death constitutes one of the darkest chapters in British royal history. The wife of Henry V, she was left unburied in an open wooden box for 400 years, her remains displayed to tourists passing through Westminster Abbey. In a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 historical note, diarist Samuel Pepys recorded that he kissed her remains on his birthday in 1669, a morbid souvenir he described as a birthday gift, deliberately defiling the body of the long-deceased Queen.
The strange fate of Katherine of Valois is tied to the whims of her second husband. She was seen as a liability to her own grandson, Henry VII, who actively sought to distance his dynasty from her lower-born and often troublemaking second husband, Owen Tudor. It was only in 1778 that her remains were finally placed into a vault under St.
Nicholas’s Chapel, before being moved once more to a permanent burial site under an altar in Henry V’s Chantry, marked by an inscription noting she had been “for long cast down” before being interred.
Within the heart of the Lady Chapel in Westminster, it has been confirmed that the vault containing Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York, is actually a multi-layered tomb, and it is the final resting place of King James I of England. To make room for the first Stuart king, the wooden coffins of the founders of the Tudor dynasty had to be removed, and even then, the tightly wrapped remains of Henry and Elizabeth were left lying on the floor of the vault, leaving the two monarchs entirely 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the elements within the chamber.
The rivalry between the two half-sisters, Elizabeth I and Mary I, extends into the afterlife, as it has been revealed that the “Bloody Queen” barely gets a voice to speak from her final resting place. Elizabeth I’s tomb is a vast opulent tomb with her effigy placed at the top of a magnificent monument, but the arrangement of the coffins below reveals the political reality of the era. In the vault, Elizabeth’s coffin is placed deliberately on top of Mary’s, showing that the Virgin Queen claimed seniority over her half sister even in death.
Inside this same vault is a small tin vessel, the container for their hearts, still fresh with the preserved remains of the queens.
A young boy involved in a clandestine vault inspection in that chamber was able to dip his hand into the lead-lined vessel, claiming he went to retrieve the hearts of both monarchs, noting the eerie, gristly red substance that could be felt by his fingers within. Mary’s ear contained the least moisture, he claimed, as he himself had touched the heart of the last Tudor Queen. Inside the Tower of London, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula has revealed its own secrets, as forensic examinations have confirmed the discovery of the remains of Queen Anne, the most notorious wife of Henry VIII.
In 1876, workmen in Transferred on the church moved the pavement of the chapel where she was said to have been buried and found her body, reduced to bones but identifiable as a woman of slender proportions, with delicate features and a graceful neck.
The exhumation of Anne in that church inadvertently led to a true crime investigation, as the body of the Queen was found interred 2 feet down, her remains disturbed and jumbled by the collapse of a decaying coffin of a woman who had been buried close to her in 1750. The doctor on site recorded that the vertebrae is that the Atlas joint, the one which connects skull to spine, showed clear signs of a warrior’s death, accurately confirming that her head had been severed clean from her shoulders. A subsequent examination determined she had a “short and slender neck” and a “rather square full chin,” breathing historical life into the queen whose fate was sealed on 19 May 1536.
Tragically, the remains of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, will never be found, by the king’s own explicit request. After her execution for accusations of adultery and treason, Henry VIII gave instructions for her beheaded corpse to be thrown into a grave, but ordered the workers to cover her body with quicklime to degrade her bones and completely dissolve her flesh. A further forensic search in the chapel found nothing but a discoloured patch, leading to the conclusion that his final act of cruelty which eradicated the queen from history, leaving behind only a memorial plaque with her name.
The Burial of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, remains a complicated story at Windsor Castle. Tucked away in the corner of the St George’s Chapel, her tomb is a plain altar tomb with the effigies of herself and Henry VIII lying above her, inside of a specially built vault. She is among the last to be buried alongside Henry, and the crypt itself is a complex puzzle of coffin shapes used for different layers of royalty.
However, the main Royal Vault beneath the chapel is at capacity.
George III ordered the construction of the “. The Tomb House” in the 1710s, a Vault that crisscrosses the chapel floor and holds bodies on iron grates, an arrangement that is nothing short of claustrophobic. Serving as the resting place for 25 individuals, it holds the remains of Princess Charlotte, who died in childbirth in 1817, and kings George III, George IV, and William IV.
The bodies are all still there today, with the monarchs left in the center of the space, and the lesser Dukes, Duchesses, and princes stacked in shelves on the sides, and left behind iron batons.
A box house is famously not refrigerated, and the Tomb House’s associates keep remains in surprisingly good condition due to the teas of the castle and the nature of the lead-lined coffins. The royals who are moved into the vault are not interred in the ground, they are literally slid into a slot on an iron shelf. It was from this vast, crypt that Queen Elizabeth II was symbolically lowered via an electronic lift during her funeral.
Her lead-lined coffin was later moved out of the Vault, to be buried in a private King George VI Memorial Chapel alongside her father and mother, with her husband’s coffin waited for him the year after until he could be buried with her.
The King’s funeral arrangements force a new solution to the overcrowding problem exhibited at St George’s Chapel, leading to the creation of the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore. This sentence exists because the Vault is essentially full. The 17th century Royal Vault was the result of King George’s realization that, as families buried in more generations, he needed a new bustling.
However, the Chapel itself is set in 30 acres of soggy ground, with a massive effect on the crypts below. Queen Victoria’s beloved Royal Mausoleum, which cost £23 million to create and was built with nine empty stone spaces for her children, has suffered from water damage and a poor drainage system, leading to concerns over the future preservation of her coffin and that of Prince Albert.
Funerals for the wider royal family now take place in St George’s Chapel before the remains are relocated to a quiet part of the park. The first internents in the Royal Burial Ground took place in 1928, and no member of the public is granted entry into this strictly private sector of Windsor’s landscape. It is the final resting place for the royals to have felt a shadow of 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁, chiefly the only sovereign, Edward VIII, the Nazi sympathiser who abdicated to wed AmericanWallace Simpson.
More than 23 members are buried here, discreet and modest, without regal effigies, cementing the water-logged sanctuary as the new resting ground for a fading royal status.
