WHAT HAPPENED TO HENRY VIII’S BODY? | Gruesome dead body story | Tudor prophecy that came true

hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where i bring you new videos on all aspects of history every friday today on history calling we're asking what happened to henry viii's body after his death did his corpse really explode in his coffin as it's often rumored to have done was his blood licked up by dogs and did this actually fulfill a prophecy made to him 15 years earlier stay tuned to find out and at the end of the video i'll also share with you two additional gruesome dead body stories relating to two other english kings before we get started why not hit the subscribe button along with a little notification bell next to it so you never miss one of my videos if you'd like to follow me on instagram my username is historycalling and there's a link which will take you there in the description box below along with some suggestions for books movies and tv shows all about henry's life [Music] [Music] it's easter sunday 1532 and henry viii is attending a sermon at greenwich palace given by friar william pedo this sermon is a little different to those usually given before the king however forpedo takes him to task over the impending annulment of henry's marriage to catherine of aragon and intended marriage to anne boleyn according to the imperial ambassador eusta chapwi they say that the king was much displeased with the sermon owing to the provincial having alluded though in general terms to the fact that the excessive affection of princes and false counselors often precluded the knowledge of truth and i hear that the king himself happening to converse privately with the said friar after the sermon heard from his lips what was not much to his taste for the provincial spoke openly to him about the royal marriage in contemplation telling him in plain words that if he did not take care he would be in great danger of losing his kingdom since all his subjects high and low were opposed to it writing over 20 years later nicholas harpsfield who was archdeacon of canterbury during the reign of henry and catherine's daughter mary the first would go further stating that pito referenced the biblical story found in first kings chapter 22 about king akamp or ahab this was the husband of jezebel and like his wife he is presented in the bible as a great sinner who allowed his queen to negatively influence religious policy just as anne boleyn was blamed for the religious policy in henry's reign which culminated in the break from rome the section of the bible relevant to this story first describes akhab's death in his chariot after being wounded by an arrow it then says so the king died and was brought to samaria and they buried him there they washed the chariot at a pool in samaria where the prostitutes bathed and the dogs licked up his blood as the word of the lord had declared calling on this story pedo reportedly said to henry i beseech your grace to take good heed last if you will needs follow akhab in his doings you incur his unhappy end also and that the dogs lick your blood as they did his as i knew however henry would go ahead with the annulment and with his second marriage pedo meanwhile ended up in exile on mainland europe soon after this incident only returning to england during mary's reign we now move to 1547 until the death of henry viii in the early hours of the 28th of january that year at whitehall palace as his final resting place was to be next to his third wife jane seymour in st george's chapel at windsor castle the body had to be moved but this was not done right away instead henry's remains were embalmed placed in a coffin and lay in state in whitehall's presence chamber it was only on the 14th of february that they began their final journey and this is where things reportedly got gruesome according to harpsfield on the first night of the journey so the night of the 14th into the 15th of february the convoy transporting the corpse broke their journey at scion abbey which henry had suppressed as part of the english reformation and where five years earlier his fifth queen catherine howard had been held prisoner before her death harpsfield continues at which time were it for the jogging and shaking of the chariot or for any other secret cause the coffin of lead wherein his dead corpse was put being riven and cloven all the pavement of the church was with the fat and the corrupt putrified blood dropped out of the sad corpse farley in brood early in the morning those that had the charge of the dressing coughing and embalming of the body with the plumbers repaired thither to reform that mishap and low suddenly was their find among their legs a dog lapping up the king's blood as it chanced to king achab before specified this chance one william console reported saying he was there present and with much ado drave away the said dog we also have another account of this incident taken from historian agnes strickland's mid-19th century book on the lives of the queens of england strickland says that she is quoting a contemporary manuscript among the slum collection which is a collection held by the british library but to the best of my knowledge this document has not been found and so we only have her word for this she says it recorded that the king being carried to windsor to be buried stood all night among the broken walls of scion and there the lead and coffin being cleft by the shaking of the carriage the pavement of the church was wedded with henry's blood in the morning kim plumbers to solder the coffin under whose feet i tremble while i write it says the author was suddenly seen a dog creeping and licking up the king's blood if you ask me how i knew this i answer william greville who could scarcely drive away the dog told me and so did the plumber also strickland takes this to mean that the body had been left unattended overnight in an unsecured room to which a dog was able to gain access but in fact neither the source she quotes nor nicholas harpsfield say this indeed it's hard to believe that henry's corpse would have been left alone in most cases the bodies of royalty and even common people were watched over until they were in the grave if you've seen my video on the funeral of anne of cleves for instance i mentioned the guards over her coffin there to do otherwise it would have been a major breach of protocol it's possible though that a dog managed to make its way into the chamber in the morning when other attendants arrived to fix the leaking coffin even with this plot hole cleared up however how trustworthy are the two sources we have and how believable therefore are the stories of the 1532 prophecy by pedo and the episode at scion abbey in 1547 first let's look at harpsfield in more detail for there are all sorts of problems with him as a source first he was writing during mary's reign recounting events from at least six and a half years earlier in the case of the scion abbey story and over 20 years earlier in the case of william peto's supposed prophecy we have to consider that one or both anecdotes have been embellished or that his memory was inaccurate it's also suspicious that he is the first to mention the prophecy in writing and so long after the event used to chapuise contemporary description of peter's sermon to henry makes no mention of it though admittedly this doesn't mean it didn't happen chapwi you'll recall said that henry and peter spoke in private after the service so perhaps the warning was given then second we aren't told where harpsfield heard the story of pedo's prophecy was this information during the rounds at court in 1532 or later or did william pedo himself recount it to harpsfield when they were both in england during mary's reign which might lead us to wonder if pito invented it after the fact to make himself appear to be a prophet for that matter could harpsfield have made both prophecy and dog-licking stories up he was a catholic who was deeply opposed to the annulment of the aragon marriage and therefore heavily biased against henry and anxious to show that the king's actions were against god's will having the monarch's blood consumed by a dog in one of the abbeys his religious policies had suppressed certainly achieves that iam and with a degree of poetic justice too nor would it be the only time lurid stories were made up about the tudors to this day people are still repeating the lies fabricated by a disgruntled catholic exile in the 1580s that anne boleyn had six fingers and miscarried a deformed fetus it's possible therefore that at least some of the stories regarding the fate of henry's body are fictitious however it's also plausible that the prophecy never occurred but that the incident at scion did even if piedo didn't predict dogs licking henry's blood it seems unlikely that he or anyone else would later have said that he had unless they knew that the incident had ultimately occurred after all what would be the point in pretending two decades later that he'd made this prophecy if everyone knew it had never come to pass in the end harpsfield's work would not be published until 1878 over three centuries after his death but had queen mary lived longer it was surely his intention to have it in print during his lifetime and at a point when henry's death and funeral were still within living memory had he invented such an outlandish story we can expect that he would have been called out on it right away the issue of this posthumous publication brings us to my final problem with harpsfield as a source which is the subject of how his work has made its way to us here is one of the first pages from the book and as you can see from what is written at the bottom it hasn't been transcribed from harpsfield's original document instead it seems that the manuscript was found and removed from the house of one william carter during elizabeth the first's reign so by march 1603 at the latest by someone calling themselves top leaf it was then copied by a mr william eiston over a century later in 1707 having come to him via a mr francis hildsley then that copy was copied for publication in 1878. there were therefore plenty of opportunities for alterations accidental or deliberate to have been made it's also worth noting that the stuart clergyman and historian gilbert burnett bishop of salisbury repeated the prophecy story in his 1679 book history of the reformation of the church of england we don't know what his primary source was for this but it may have been harpsfield's original manuscript nevertheless even if we do have a true copy of harpsfield's words the other problems with his work are so numerous that if it was the only contemporary or rather near contemporary source for the posthumous adventures of henry's body i would be a lot more hesitant about believing him but there is also strickland as i've already said we don't know what source from the sloan collection strickland was quoting when she discussed the incident at scion abbey and therefore we can't judge its quality however her book was published in the 1840s before harps fields work and yet doesn't simply repeat it in other words it doesn't look as though strickland managed to see harpsfield's manuscript or a duplicate of it and copy out the details as the two stories though very similar do have some differences in particular there is the change in the name of the witness at scion from william coursel to william gravel neither of whom i've been able to trace by the way instead strickland seems to have been looking at an entirely separate source it's true that some other writer might have seen harps fields work written up a separate description of the incident at scion and that that is the source strictly saw in the sloan papers meaning that harpsfield is ultimately the only real source we have but this is a bit of a stretch furthermore when strickland mentions the prophecy she also differs from harpsfield as she instead places the events at greenwich in 1533 rather than 1532 so where does this complicated trail of evidence leave us well you can let me know what you think in the comments section but for my part i'm undecided as to whether or not peto predicted that henry's blood would be licked by dogs but i think that it's more likely than not that the incident at scion did occur that still leaves one of the big questions i started this video with however even if we accept that henry's coffin leaked does that mean that the king's body exploded the answer to this question is maybe you've seen the sources i've seen and you'll note that none of them actually say that the coffin was opened up at scion and the body inspected so there's no direct evidence that his corpse ruptured the fact that harpsfield says that the embalmers were among those who came back to the body after the coffin was found to be leaking might be taken as evidence that the corpse was inspected and given further treatments bodies bursting after death is also most certainly a thing and is caused by the buildup of gases in the corpse as it begins to decay moreover if henry did burst he wouldn't have been the first king to do so a contemporary account of the funeral of william the conqueror which took place in cannes in 1087 was written by the english chronicler orderik vitalis who recorded that when the corpse was placed in the sarcophagus and was forcibly doubled up because the masons had carelessly made the coffin too short and narrow the swollen vials burst and an intolerable stench sealed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd a thick smoke arose from the frankincense and other spices in the censors but it was not strong enough to conceal the foil ignominy so the priests made his to conclude the funeral rights and immediately returned trembling to their own houses embalming procedures which remove organs and bodily fluids should reduce the chances of this happening and we know that henry was embalmed but techniques were less well developed in 16th century england than in the modern era and he had been dead for two and a half weeks by the time he got to scion so some sort of rupture could still conceivably have happened alternatively the leakage may have been fluid derived from general by which i mean non-exclusive decomposition again we have a tale of another king of england who demonstrates this this is william the conqueror's son henry the first who died in 11 35 according to the contemporary historian henry of huntington in the process of preparing his body for burial the remainder of the corpse was cut all over with knives sprinkled with a great deal of salt this'll have been an early preservation technique and wrapped in oxides to stop the strong pervasive stench which was already causing the deaths of those who watched over it it even killed the man who had been hired for a great fee to cut off the head with an axe and extract the stinking breen although he had wrapped himself in linen cloths around his head so he was badly rewarded by his fee he was the last of many whom henry put to death they took the royal corpse to can and it lay there for a time in the church in which his father had been buried although it had been filled with much salt and wrapped in many hides a fearful black fluid ran down continuously leaking through the hides and being collected in vessels beneath the beer which is a stand that a coffin sits on was cast away by attendants who grew faint with dread as gruesome as the scene at scion abbey must have been at least henry viii's attendants weren't dropping dead while they watched over the coffin whatever condition the dead king's corpse was in by the time it reached windsor castle he was finally laid to rest next to gian seymour on the morning of the 16th of february beneath the floor of st george's chapel and in the presence of his widow catherine parr henry and jane's remains would later be joined by those of charles the first and one of queen anne stuart's many children see my video on her heartbreaking child bearing record for more on that to finish with there are two kudas to this teal from 1813 and 1888. the vault was accidentally discovered in the first year during work to open up a tunnel between the chapel and a newly built mausoleum and on the 1st of april it was examined by a selection of people including the prince regent here is what one had to say about henry's coffin the larger one meaning coffin supposed on good grounds to contain the remains of king henry viii measured six feet ten inches in length and had been enclosed in an l1 of two inches in thickness but this was decayed and lay in small fragments near it the laden coffin appeared to have been beaten in by violence about the middle and a considerable opening in that part of it exposed a mere skeleton of the king some beard remained upon the chin but there was nothing to discriminate the personage contained within it those present surmised that the coffin had been damaged during the hasty interment of the discrete charles the first in 1649 though queen jeans lying right next to it was in good condition some relics from charles the first coffin were removed at this point including part of his beard but in 1888 it was decided to replace these and the tomb was opened again according to a witness henry's coffin of wood was quite destroyed the inner coffin of lead was all open at the top so that we could see into it and there lay the bones and the skull of the king as they had been lying for 350 years i did not see the whole of the skeleton as it was partly covered by the pieces of the wooden coffin which had fallen across it but i saw many of the bones and skull a watercolour was also made at this point by mr alfred youngnut who was the surveyor to the dean and cannons of st george's chapel at the time as you can see for whatever reason whether shoddy workmanship leader damage or perhaps an exploding corpse henry's coffin was indeed in very poor repair despite the fact that gian's lead in coffin which is slightly older was still intact though her wooden one had decayed and that history lovers brings us to the end of the story of henry viii's body if you enjoyed this video please remember to give it a thumbs up and let me know in the comments section below which details if any of this story you believe do you think that henry viii's body burst and do you believe william pedo prophesied that the king's blood would be licked up by dogs or is it just a good yarn made up by henry's enemies after his death i look forward to reading your thoughts for more on henry and the rest of the tudors see my playlists on his six wives and on the tudor monarchs i'll be back next week with a new video but until then keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 573,862

Keywords: what happened to henry viii's body, gruesome dead body story, strange facts about henry viii, tudor prophecy that came true, prophecy that came true, little known facts about henry viii, History Calling, England’s most famous kings, famous Tudor King, Tudor history documentary, Henry VIII documentary, Henry VIII’s coffin, Henry VIII’s funeral, Henry VIII’s burial, St George’s Chapel, Tudor burials, royal deaths, royal burials, digging up Henry VIII, henry viii documentary

Id: j611gNdyuTs

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021