Curiosity and a Frenzied Spirit of Vengeance the Principal Causes for
the Desecration of the Tombs of the Great—Dead Pope Placed on Trial—A
Skeleton Crowned as Queen.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Good Frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the Dust enclosed Heare:
Blest be ye Man yt spares thes stones
And Curst be he yt moves my bones.
_Epitaph on Shakespeare’s Tomb._
Possibly, on account of this epitaph which Shakespeare had inscribed
above his grave in the church of Stratford-on-Avon and which it would
need a bold man to disregard now, the ashes of the great dramatist have
been more fortunate than those of many distinguished men. Despite our
inherent horror of disturbing the dead and our respect for the grave as
consecrated ground, changed conditions, and, in some cases, mere
curiosity, have made the list of celebrities whose bones have been moved
a long one.
History shows that in securing immunity for one’s grave, neither the
lapse of centuries nor past greatness is of any avail. It is on record
that in the chaos of the end of the ninth century a pope had the body of
his predecessor dug from the tomb, dressed it in its pontifical
vestments, and had it tried and condemned by a synod. The hideous
mockery terminated only when the mutilated body was thrown into the
Tiber.
Dead Pope on Trial.
This scene, which marks the lowest point to which civil war and anarchy
in Rome reduced the papacy, took place in February or March of 897.
About eleven months before, Pope Formosus had died after a stormy
pontificate of five years. He was followed to the grave in fifteen days
by his successor. Then Stephen VI seated himself in the chair of St.
Peter. Stephen belonged to the faction opposed to Formosus’s ally,
Arnulf of Germany. Party feeling and party hatred ran high. The men
temporarily in power had injuries to avenge, and Stephen, in a fit of
almost insane fury, determined to try his predecessor.
On what charge the dead Formosus was actually tried is not now very
clear—probably this detail was never considered of much importance.
Stephen summoned a synod, dragged the corpse out of the grave, dressed
it in its full pontifical robes and himself presided over the court. He
made no pretence of being an impartial judge, however. Paying no
attention to the trembling deacon to whom had been assigned the hopeless
task of defending the dead Pope, Stephen turned savagely on the corpse.
“Why hast thou in thy ambition usurped the Apostolic Seat, who wast
previously only Bishop of Portus?” he demanded.
The synod played out its part in the wretched farce. Formosus was
convicted and solemnly deposed. The vestments were torn from the body of
the dead pontiff, the three fingers of the right hand used in bestowing
the benediction were cut off and the mummy, hauled through the streets
by the mob, was thrown into the Tiber. A few months later Stephen was
strangled in his palace.
Equally brutal was the treatment given to Cromwell’s body when the
Restoration brought Charles II back to England and the cavaliers to
power. Cromwell had directed that his interment be in Westminster Abbey,
and every effort was made to have his funeral as impressive as that of
any crowned king. The attempt, however, was not altogether successful.
In his famous diary John Evelyn notes:
Cromwell’s Body Hanged.
“It was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there were none that
cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with as barbarous noise,
drinking, and taking tobacco in the streets.”
On the eve of January 30, 1661, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and the
regicide Bradshaw were dug from their graves. The next day they were
dragged to Tyburn and hanged with their faces to Westminster Hall, where
they had sentenced Charles to death. The corpses were buried at the foot
of the gallows, where Connaught Square is now, and the heads, impaled on
pikes, remained for years above the entrance of Westminster Hall.
After many years a high wind carried the head of the Lord Protector
down. A soldier made off with it, and in 1779 it was on exhibition in
Old Bond Street. A private family is now in possession of the ghastly
relic—the features so well preserved that the large wart over one eye
which was so noticeable in life is still plainly visible.
Wyclif’s Bones Burned.
The bones of Wyclif were treated in much the same way by the Council of
Constance, in 1414, though there was, in his case, more of ceremony and
less of mere hatred. The remains of the English reformer were burned and
the ashes thrown into a brook, which, of course, ultimately emptied into
the ocean.
“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.
Argument being obviously of no avail, Buchanan told the little mob that
it was an Irish custom to drink spirits before visiting a grave and that
this custom he always observed. In a few minutes the crowd was too much
occupied with the Irish custom to annoy Buchanan and the consul
proceeded with his task.
The lid of the coffin was found to be broken and the roots of the
peach-tree had entwined themselves completely around the skull. The
bones were taken to a house near by, whence warned of rumors that the
body would be flung into the river, Buchanan was obliged to carry off
the coffin like a thief in the night, driving twenty-four miles to New
York.
Corpse of Paul Jones Identified.
The recovery of the body of John Paul Jones is still fresh in the public
mind. Unearthed after a protracted search in an abandoned Paris
cemetery, the features and body were so well preserved that there could
be no doubt of the identity. Once this was established, the transfer of
the body from French to American soil was made the occasion of a solemn
ceremony, in the course of which five hundred. American bluejackets
marched through the streets of Paris.
The remains of Jones, André, and Napoleon were exhumed in order that
they might be buried again with greater honor. In Westminster Abbey mere
accident or curiosity has several times disturbed the rest of the famous
dead.
The body of Ben Jonson has been especially unfortunate. Having obtained
a grant of “eighteen inches of square ground” in the Abbey, the poet was
said to have been buried there in an upright position with the famous
epitaph, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” over his head. In 1849 a new grave was
being dug close by when loose sand poured in and the clerk saw:
“The two leg-bones of Jonson fixed bolt upright in the sand as though
the body had been buried in the upright position, and the skull came
rolling down among the sand, from a position above the leg-bones, to the
bottom of the newly made grave. There was still hair upon it and it was
of a red color.”
Pope’s Skull in Museum.
Another poet has suffered in much the same manner. The skull of
Alexander Pope is now in a private museum. On some occasion the coffin
was opened and a phrenologist gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the
sexton to be allowed to take the skull home overnight. In the morning
another skull was substituted and the poet’s deposited in the
phrenologist’s museum.
Against the curiosity of science there is no safeguard. Recently Kaiser
Wilhelm had the grave of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle opened again,
this time for the purpose of photographing the fabrics in which the hero
was wrapped. Against this violation of the sepulcher Jules Claretie, in
an article written for the Paris _Figaro_ and translated for the Boston
_Transcript_, has protested vigorously. Claretie says:
After such combats, labors, and mighty thoughts, he dreamed of repose,
like the poet Moses. Repose! There is none in this world for the
illustrious dead. We waken them through mere curiosity.
At Charlemagne’s Tomb.
Charlemagne’s grandsons believed that they were heirs to his glory
because for a moment they looked upon his skeleton or exposed his
remains to view.
Otho first opened the sepulcher. Cornélius has depicted that fantastic
scene in a celebrated fresco. Frederick Barbarossa followed Otho’s
example. He stood alive before the corpse. On his stone throne, he
contemplated the emperor, with huge hand grasping the scepter and the
globe.
Then the dead Charlemagne was torn from his marble resting-place; his
skull and the bones of his arms went to enrich the treasure of the
cathedral crypt. The throne became sacred in the eyes of emperors, and
Charlemagne—mutilated and dismembered—was partially restored to his
marble vault.
Barbarossa was more fortunate; he was drowned in the Cydnus, and no
one could profane his body.
Another emperor—Napoleon, in 1804—wanted in his turn to behold the
fantom. Bareheaded and preceded by Duroc, the emperor contemplated the
sacred bones.
“So this is he who was master of the world!”
And Napoleon, deeply moved, turned toward Canon Camus.
“Pray, Monsieur l’Abbé; pray for France, whose greatness Charlemagne
founded.”
Then, when the stone had been replaced, Napoleon vouchsafed the
“fantom emperor” a renewal of slumber.
Removed Emperor’s Shrouds.
Victor Hugo, while walking through Aix-la-Chapelle, complained even
then of the innumerable violations to which the great Charlemagne’s
tomb had been subjected.
“Some day,” said he, “I suppose that a pious and holy thought will
enter the mind of some king or emperor. Charlemagne’s remains will be
taken from the chest where the sacristans put them and again laid in
his tomb.
“What is left of his bones will be religiously reassembled. He will
regain his Byzantine vault, his bronze doors, and his marble armchair
with its fourteen plates of gold, and the kneeling visitor will be
enabled to behold, gleaming vaguely in the darkness, that fantom—crown
on head and orb in hand—that once was Charlemagne.”
Well, no such thing was accomplished. Once more the dignitaries of the
empire have assembled to open a coffin. The two shrouds that enveloped
Charlemagne have been removed—those Oriental fabrics that some calif
had sent to the emperor—and since, as the telegraphic despatches say,
“the light was not sufficient to operate,” they have been sent to a
Friedrichstrasse photographer, who will find light enough, egad!
Voltaire and Rousseau.
We have dug up Richelieu, opened Bossuet’s tomb, disturbed the great
Napoleon’s coffin. A few years ago I saw the sarcophagi of Voltaire
and Rousseau opened at the Panthéon. I saw the skull of the author of
“Candide” passed from hand to hand; I saw men’s finger-nails scratch
away its reddish coating (probably due, as Monsieur Berthelot told us,
to the sublimate that had preserved the corpse).
In his leaden coffin, with arms crossed upon his breast, I saw the man
who had written “The Social Contract”; I saw the onlookers—indifferent
or curious—poke their fingers into the empty sockets now bereft of
those eyes that had once gazed upon Madame de Warrens, or try to
snatch from a jaw-bone—“as a souvenir, monsieur!”—one of those teeth
that had touched cherries picked In Madame Gallet’s company.
I was present at that Dance of Death which men call “an historical
exhumation.” And the inevitable photographer was there at the
Panthéon, just as at Aix-la-Chapelle. Great men’s bones are hustled
about, their skulls are pried into and weighed, as if, forsooth, some
sparkle of genius could be got out of them!
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.
A handful of gray dust, all that was left of Pepin, the father of
Charlemagne, was flung to the wind, and one after another, Capetians,
Valois, and Bourbons were dragged from the tomb and tumbled into a
trench. On the pavement, one eye-witness says, rolled the heads of Louis
XII and Francis I, of Marshal Turenne and of the great Constable
Duguesclin.
For a short time the corpse of Henry IV, the most popular of all the
long line of French kings, was respected. Embalmed with the best Italian
skill, and so well preserved that the two fatal dagger wounds in the
chest were still plainly visible, the body lay untouched for two days.
Then some one shouted that Henry, like all the rest, had deceived the
people, and his body, too, was flung into the trench.
After the Restoration an attempt was made to return the royal bodies to
their tombs, but it was not altogether successful.
St. Swithin’s Troubled Rest.
If one passes from secular history to the legends of the saints, the
exhumations become innumerable. It is, tradition asserts, on account of
an attempt to remove the body of St. Swithin that we owe the prediction:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain na mair.
St. Swithin, chiefly notable for his mildness and humility, ordered that
he should not be buried in his cathedral of Winchester, but in a “vile
and unworthy place” among the common people in the churchyard. This the
monks could not bring themselves to consider right, and on one July 15,
they attempted to move the body of the bishop into the cathedral. But on
that day and for forty days thereafter it rained so hard that they
finally recognized in the weather the anger of the saint and abandoned
their idea.
Apparently, however, the good saint changed his mind half a century or
so later, for his remains were then brought into the cathedral and,
instead of manifesting any displeasure, two hundred miraculous cures
were credited to him in ten days.