The trouble with Edward III was his fecundity, with so many children there were going to be problems further down the line. The conflict between his two grandsons, Richard and Henry, was only the beginning.
Richard II was the legitimate king but unhinged.
The panel below, shows his homage being received by the infant Christ and the angels of Heaven, all wearing the king's personal emblem of the White Hart.
His cousin, Henry, with less right to the throne was made for the job. When the increasingly tyrannical Richard banished Henry and seized his lands it quickly became a matter of life or death – for them both. Henry however prevailed, seizing what proved to be a poisoned chalice. Worn out by his exertions, Henry died in 1413. Deeply religious and consumed by guilt, he asked to be buried next to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury.
But even in death, neither king was left in peace.
Henry hadn't even been buried before rumours circulated. One in particular. En route to Canterbury a violent storm appeared from nowhere, threatening to overturn the barge carrying Henry’s coffin. Terrified, the boatmen threw the body into the Thames and the storm miraculously cleared. A judgement from God—a monk with a grudge duly noted—an empty coffin being buried at Canterbury.
The story was clearly absurd but in 1832, antiquarians with more time than sense decided to exhume the body just to make sure.
A section of the elmwood lid was sawn to allow a small cavity. Ropes of twisted hay used as packaging were removed. Beneath that lay a lead shroud in the form of a body. Two workmen removed an oval 7 x 4 inch section of lead only to find five layers of leather wrapping.The indefatigable antiquarians persisted.
The good news: they became the first people for over 400 years to see the face of Henry IV – the lower half at least: a rich auburn beard and a full set of teeth bar one at the front—probably knocked out in battle.
The bad news: an influx of air saw immediate decay, cartilage and nose withered, sank and vanished as they watched, though the embalmed skin remained moist and brown. Feeling cheated by not being able to see the top part of his face, one enterprising investigator wriggled his fingers in the small space remaining and ‘felt the orbits of the eyes prominent in their sockets.’
Over the years, Richard II's tomb in Westminster Abbey, fell into a gross state of repair. Five metal coats of arms had been stolen leaving behind five holes in the tomb. These remained unsealed for years, allowing anyone to put their hands inside and have a good grope.
In the 1870’s, under the auspices of Dean Stanley, everything was taken out piece by piece, labelled and catalogued. Queen Anne had more of her bones missing than her husband’s because most of the shield holes had been where she lay. Richard was less badly damaged, though his jawbone was missing.
In its place were random objects dropped in by visitors to the abbey or the boys of Westminster School: ‘marbles, three tobacco-pipe bowls, seventy-two copper coins, a peach stone; an iron buckle, a copper-gilt button, the bones of a bird; a small broken table-knife, the bell from a dog’s collar; parts of a leather ball.’
Only after meticulously restoring the tomb to its former glory did Dean Stanley receive a letter from a country vicar; it concerned a treasured heirloom passed down from father to son— King Richard II’s missing jawbone.
Back in the 1760s, his grandfather had been one of those sixteen year old schoolboys in Westminster. A fellow pupil had poked his hand through a hole in the tomb and dug a large piece of bone out and passed it out to the schoolboy in question. It had even been labelled ‘the jawbone of King Richard the Second taken out of his coffin by a Westminster scholar 1766’
Richard II, one suspects, would not have been amused.
No comments:
Post a Comment