Edward the Confessor.
Other kings than Charlemagne have had their slumbers broken. Since the coffin of Edward the Confessor was placed, on January 6, 1066, before the high altar of Westminster Abbey it has been opened for one purpose or another three times. Venerated as the last lineal descendant of Cedric, Edward was buried in his full regalia, the crown on his head, the gold crucifix in his hand, and the pilgrim’s ring, said to have belonged to St. John, on his finger.
It was thus that the body was found when Bishop Gundulf opened the coffin thirty years later and plucked a hair from the dead king’s long white beard. The coffin was opened again when Edward was canonized in 1163, and the body of the saint was then found to be in complete preservation.
Abbot Laurence, however, was harder to satisfy than Gundulf. From the dead man’s finger he took the ring of St. John, depositing it in the abbey treasury as a relic, and the vestments in which the corpse was wrapped were made into three magnificent copes. Another century passed and then Henry III had the coffin opened, when he removed it to the east of the high altar, where it has since remained.
Identifying Dead Kings.
Equally troubled has been the repose of Edward I, “The Hammer of the Scots.” When the old warrior died in 1307, he ordered that his flesh should be boiled and his bones carried at the head of an English army until Scotland should be conquered. Though this wish was calmly disregarded, one custom which antiquarians have been at a loss to explain, may be in some way connected with it. Until the overthrow of Richard III on Bosworth Field ended the Plantagenet rule, the tomb of Edward I was opened every two years and the cerecloth renewed. With the Tudors this strange rite fell into disuse.
For three hundred years the body of Edward was left in the tomb in peace. Then the Society of Antiquarians opened the coffin in 1771. The king was lying in his royal robes, the “long shanks” from which he derived his nickname, covered with a cloth of gold. Six feet two inches was the dead man’s height. Lean and straight as he was, Edward I must have been an imposing figure.
Only two other kings of England—James I and Charles I—have been exhumed. Their coffins were opened for the purpose of identification. James had the body of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, taken from Fotheringay to Westminster but, on the whole, the royal family of England has been little disturbed.
French Royal Tombs Robbed.
Not so the French. For three days in the Reign of Terror a Paris mob raged in the abbey church of St. Denis, which for centuries was the chosen burying-place of the French kings. In this sanctuary of the Old Régime the mob respected nothing. The silk robes were torn from the bodies of Hugues Capet, Philip the Hardy, and Philip the Fair.