Death of King Henry VIII

Death of King Henry VIII

When King Henry VIII died at age 55 on 28th January 1547, Court embalmers replaced the swollen King’s innards with sawdust, resin and herbs to preserve the body.

Unfortunately, poor Henry was already rotting from the legs up!
The royal corpse was then placed in a sealed lead coffin.

An enormous regal funeral procession set off from Whitehall Castle, to Windsor Castle.
The funeral parade halted the first day at the old Syon Abbey.

In the middle of the night, the lead coffin exploded!!

Or did it?

Some historians suggest that it simply broke because Henry was quite large at the end of his life.

Tudor roads were also quite bad, and this jostled Henry about in his coffin.

However, contemporary morticians insist that gasses of decomposition can blow open even a modern sealed coffin.

The coffin was then soldered shut, and the parade hustled on to the burial at Windsor, an untidy end for a wonderful ~ and sometimes terrible king.

Henry VIII’s tomb at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.