“Thus,” says one writer, “the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”
But it is not always the enemies of the dead who disturb their bones. There is no more remarkable tradition than the crowning of the dead Queen Inez de Castro when her lord, young Pedro, ascended the throne of Portugal in the fourteenth century. The death of Inez, murdered by the command of her father-in-law, Alfonso XII, had been avenged by Don Pedro, but the torture of the assassins did not satisfy the prince.
Queen’s Skeleton Crowned.
The tradition is to the effect, it is said, that when Pedro came to the throne a few years later, he had the bones of Inez taken from the grave, placed upon a magnificent throne, robed in royal purple, and crowned queen of Portugal. To the skeleton the courtiers did homage, one after another kissing the fleshless hand in which the scepter had been thrust. Then, lying in her rich robes, her crown upon her grinning skull, in a chariot drawn by twenty coal-black mules and with a funeral cortège which extended several miles, the skeleton of Inez was driven to the royal abbey of Alcobaca, where the bones were reinterred.
Even then, however, the dead queen was not to be left in peace. In 1810 the French troops broke into the abbey of Alcobaca, destroyed the magnificent monument which Pedro had erected, and tore open the coffin. The yellow hair of the queen was cut from the skull and preserved in reliquaries.
Reburial of Napoleon.
Like those of Inez, the bones of Napoleon were buried a second time with all the pomp and ceremony that a great nation could devise. The body of the great emperor was originally buried under a weeping willow in a secluded hollow among the rocks of Saint Helena. With the Revolution of 1830, however, came a change in the political situation, and this made it possible for the remains of the conqueror to be removed from the lonely island-grave to the magnificent tomb under the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides.
The body was exhumed at midnight on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Napoleon’s arrival at Saint Helena. For nine hours the engineers labored to dig away the earth from the vault, to remove the solid masonry and to lift the heavy slab which covered the sarcophagus. Within a triple coffin of tin, lead, and mahogany lay the emperor, dressed in white waistcoat and breeches, black cravat, long boots and cocked hat, with the cloak he wore at Marengo spread over his feet.
Body of André Disinterred.
The year that Napoleon died the body of Major John André was taken back to England. André had been buried in a field close to the spot where he had been hanged as a spy, and the grave was marked by two small cedars and by a peach-tree planted at its head. Some of the newspapers had declared that “any honor paid Major André’s remains was casting an imputation on General Washington and the officers who tried him.” Such logic as this had so stirred some ultra-patriotic citizens of Tappan that when Mr. Buchanan, the British consul in New York, arrived there to exhume the body quite a crowd was prepared to express its emphatic disapproval.