The Disgusting Treatment of the Body of Katherine of Valois | The Unburied Queen

BURIED, DISINTERRED, ABUSED and used as a dark tourism attraction for nearly 300 years, this is the disturbing story of the appalling treatment of the body of Katherine of Valois, Queen of England, wife of Henry V, mother of Henry VI and grandmother of Henry VII through her scandalous second marriage to Owen Tudor. The death of Katherine of Valois, Princess of France and one-time Queen of England occurred on 3 January 1437 at Bermondsey Abbey and she was respectfully buried in Westminster Abbey. She is still there in fact (or at least some of her is) but today, she does not have one of the most famous graves in Westminster Abbey. Yet for centuries this body of a Queen was one of its greatest attractions and the afterlife of Katherine of Valois was like something out of a nightmare. In 1503, during the reign of her grandson, Henry Tudor (Henry VII) she was disinterred so that he could build his famous chapel in the Abbey. The original coffin was disintegrating and so Katherine’s well-preserved body was placed in a new one which was not sealed and was laid next to the tomb of Henry V, elsewhere in the building. There the unburied Queen would remain until the 1770s. During that time her corpse was viewed as a macabre tourist attraction and repeatedly abused, broken up and mutilated by countless visitors. Many parts of the body were likely even stolen. One of the most disgusting stories comes from the diary of Samuel Pepys, who visited the Abbey on his birthday in 1669 and took great delight in kissing the desiccated remains. In this English royal history documentary from History Calling I take you through the story of what happened to the corpse of Katherine of Valois, from the time of her death until her eventual interment during the Victorian period. A Queen who was buried three times, I’ll explain how this happened and provide detailed, contemporary accounts of how she was mishandled during the time she was on display and descriptions of the condition of her remains over the centuries, including in 1878 when she was reinterred for (presumably) the last time.