The History and Politics of Exhumation by Michael L. Nash

Author:Michael L. Nash
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030240479
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This particular lock referred to passed into the possession of the Marquis of Chandos, and was sold with the rest of the Duke of Buckingham’s treasures at Stowe in 1848, as has been seen.

In addition to this, the tomb was removed, and the coffin was deposited just below the level of the pavement, where it still remains, beneath the slab of Petworth marble, marked with five crosses, which covered the original structure. For a time, Dr. Symond’s inscribed tablet occupied a panel beneath the east window, but it was subsequently removed to its present position on the north side of the sacrarium, two or three yards west of Mary’s last resting place.

Mary’s Book of Hours of the Virgin, of the fifteenth century, with elaborate illuminations by a French or Flemish artist, formerly belonging to “Marye the Quene”, was disposed of in 1874 at the sale of Sir William Tite’s library, and is now in the library of Queen’s College, Oxford.

The good writer concludes “the chief object (of the work) is to keep alive the memory of Mary Tudor in the neighbourhood with which she is so intimately connected, and in the town which has the custody of her mortal remains, nevermore, it is hoped, to be disturbed by the hand of man”.

Agnes Strickland would have been proud to have found a fellow champion for the worthy cause of her reparation.

In 1788, Parliament passed a law to restrain the growing commerce in corpses, which gangs known as the “Resurrection Men” were engaged in, robbing cemeteries and churchyards of fresh corpses to supply the medical men who wanted them for dissection and for student demonstrations. Inevitably, men like Burke and Hare later on would miss one step out, and go straight for convenient murder, rather than exhuming recent corpses.

The tomb of Edward IV was rediscovered in 1789, three years after the examination carried out by Treadway Nash on the remains of Mary Tudor. This was during restoration work on St. George’s Chapel. When the coffin was opened, some long brown hair was found near the skill, with shorter hair of the same colour on the neck of the skeleton. In the bottom of the coffin was a dark liquid, which immersed his feet to a depth of three inches. A physician at Windsor analysed the liquid and concluded that it was from the dissolution of the body. After the discovery of the tomb, many relics were removed, including locks of the king’s hair and a phial containing some of the liquid. One is tempted to conclude that this type of collection mirrored the relic collectors of pre-Reformation times; and that this was the Age of Reason, Georgian England. It seems that this is a pattern of human behaviour which will always be there in some form or other.

Edward’s skeleton was found to measure six feet three inches and his long brown hair was still in perfect preservation.26 It is interesting now to look at the will of Edward IV, which had been written on June 20, 1475, eight years before he died.

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