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  Mary I (r. 1553–1558) has not generally had a good press and has frequently been portrayed as an embittered and vindictive religious bigot. A judgement on the role she played in history is outside the remit of this book and suffice it is to say that her death was not accompanied by great outpourings of grief from most of her subjects. Attractive and vivacious when young, she had become careworn and somewhat shrewish by the time of her marriage in 1554 at the age of thirty-eight. Within months, Mary was displaying many desperately wished-for signs of pregnancy. No wish-fulfilment was achieved on this or a later occasion and she was totally bereft when her husband, with ill-disguised haste, returned to Spain for the last time. Everything was going wrong for Mary in her personal life and in her role as Queen. She lost weight and appetite but developed considerable enlargement of the abdomen in a grotesque parody of her fervent wish to pass on her genes. Current medical opinion is that she probably had cancer of the ovaries or possibly of the uterus. She was forty-two when she went into a final decline with long bouts of semi-consciousness interspersed by brief periods of lucidity during which she seems to have come to terms with her imminent mortality. There was little love lost between Mary and her half-sister, Elizabeth, who succeeded her on the throne. It is perhaps to Elizabeth’s credit that she paid for Mary to be buried in an appropriately fine tomb in Westminster Abbey. Mary’s heart was removed and placed into a casket where it was later joined by Elizabeth’s heart. Elizabeth’s tomb is adjacent. The two women, related by blood but disparate in so many other ways, are united in their last sleep.

  Charles I (r. 1625–1649), was a small man imbued with an enormous sense of his own importance. This was a natural accompaniment to his concept of the divine role and rights of kings. The stages by which the events unfolded that led to his being condemned to death for high treason have been examined and re-examined by historians and are not relevant to the present discussion. Anger reverberated around Europe about the heinous crime of commoners condemning God’s anointed to death. There were rumours of punitive interventions from overseas and many at home found the whole prospect an appalling one. However, having gone so far, his enemies had little option but to go ahead with the execution. The King displayed both courage and dignity on his way to and at the scaffold. The date was 30 January 1649 and the place was Whitehall. A low block was used for humanitarian purposes – it places the neck in such a way that it should be cleanly severed with one blow of the axe. This is indeed what happened and the King died instantaneously. The watching crowd emitted an eerie groan when the deed was done and then several people who had paid large sums of money for the privilege, came forward and soaked items of clothing in the King’s blood and even prized off pieces of blood-stained timber from the scaffold. An item imbued with the King’s blood was considered to be a powerful talisman. In 1813, when the tomb of George III was being erected in Westminster Abbey, workmen accidentally broke into the vault of Henry VIII where the body of Charles had been placed back in 1649. The opportunity to view the remains of the executed King was too good to miss and one of the royal physicians, Sir Henry Halford, examined the contents of Charles’s coffin. Somehow, Halford obtained the King’s fourth cervical vertebra and had it mounted for use as a salt cellar. If this was not indignity enough, it seems that one of the workmen managed to remove one of Henry VIII’s finger bones which he made into a knife handle.

  William III (r. 1689–1702) was not a merry monarch. He never seems to have found life in England very congenial and he always preferred the company of Dutchmen to that of his own subjects. William was a lifelong sufferer from asthma and although he seized the opportunity to be joint ruler of England very eagerly, he soon found that the damp climate of the British Isles exacerbated his respiratory problems. The death of his wife Mary from smallpox in 1694 affected him badly and he descended into a more-or-less constant state of gloom. He developed swellings in his legs, his breathing deteriorated and he became extremely irritable. In February 1702 he was riding from Kensington to Hampton Court when his horse stumbled on a molehill and he was precipitated to the ground, breaking his right collarbone. Complications ensued including pneumonia which made an existing heart condition more chronic and he is likely to have undergone a terminal pulmonary embolism. His death went largely unlamented, but the maker of the molehill which started the process gave rise to what became the traditional Jacobite toast: ‘To the little brown gentleman in the velvet waistcoat.’

  George II (r. 1727–1760) was a dapper little man who carried himself well. He married Caroline of Ansbach with whom he seems to have been genuinely in love but he had an eye for the ladies and would probably have had even more affairs had his health been better. The complaints that he suffered from were of the sort that he really wouldn’t want to tell new sexual partners about. He had a disease of the gall bladder with sporadic bouts of severe pain, recurrent excruciating piles and a fistula which involved an infected track from the rectum to the buttock. Problems in the same general area were eventually to bring him down. He got up at six in the morning on 12 October 1760 in St James’s Palace and, as was his custom, drank some chocolate before heading straight into what was coyly called his ‘close-stool’. His valet, used to hearing his master making straining noises on account of his constipation, was surprised to hear what he thought was a louder then usual royal breaking of wind. He was then thoroughly alarmed to hear loud groans coming from the close-stool. Increasingly concerned for the King’s welfare, the valet eventually decided to enter the private chamber. He found that the King had collapsed unconscious and cut his face badly as he did so. He was lifted and carefully placed in his bed but it was clear that he was beyond help. George II had died from a ruptured ventricle of the heart caused by aortitis. The King’s medical attendants believed that the condition was probably syphilitic in origin. George II was by no means the only British King to have syphilis. Technicalities apart, however, he remains the only King of England to have died while sitting on what is colloquially known as ‘The Throne’.

  Only a handful of commoners, and even fewer of those of royal blood, have been killed by a cricket ball. This is the doubtful distinction that befell Frederick, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of George II. Frederick, who was known to all and sundry as ‘Poor Fred’, never really had a chance in life. His father and mother hated him from birth. George described his son as a ‘half-witted coxcomb’ and on another occasion as: ‘the greatest ass, the greatest liar, the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world and we would heartily wish he was out of it.’ For his part, Frederick described his father as ‘an obstinate self-indulgent miserly martinet with an insatiable sexual appetite.’ Given this antipathy, it must have come as a great relief to all concerned when in 1751 Frederick unwittingly accorded with his father’s wishes. The Prince was a keen cricketer and owned his own pitch at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire; it was while playing there that he received a hard blow on the chest with a cricket ball. An abscess developed which later burst and brought about his death. It is said that when his father was told of Frederick’s death, he didn’t even look up from his card game.

  There may seem to be a disproportionate number of members of royalty whose deaths were odd, but of course their deaths tend to be better documented than those of commoners. We hope, however, that we have managed to provide enough examples from other elements of London’s population as well to give at least a flavour of the strange circumstances under which they died.

  5

  Churchyards and Other Burial Places

  ’Tis now the very witching time of night,

  When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

  Contagion to this world.

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Churchyards elicit strong emotional responses. What may be a haven of peace and serenity amidst the hurly-burly of the metropolis, alive on a hot sunny day with the lazy buzz of insects and the soporific cooing of pigeons, changes, for atavistic and barely understood
reasons, into a place that most of us shun during the hours of darkness.

  The churchyards and burial places of London stand as evidence of the capital’s past and also of its continuity. Old London contained around 140 medieval places of worship of which over half still exist in some form today. While some churches have lost their churchyards, examples can be shown of churchyards that have survived their churches. An example is St Botolph in Aldersgate, EC1.

  How to dispose satisfactorily of the dead has been a problem that has always exercised the minds of human beings. The first inhumations or burials in the ground in Britain are thought by archaeologists to have been in about 24380 BC, at a time when cremation was by far the more common practice. In the Neolithic era (c. 4000–2400 BC) bones were often interred in chambers inside mounds known as long barrows. In the Bronze Age (c. 2000–500 BC) individual burials became more common and the size of some of the sites and the quality of the grave goods they contain are clear evidence of the existence of class and social status, factors which are evident throughout the history of funerals and dealing with death. By the time of Roman settlement in Britain, inhumation seems to have become the usual method for disposal of the dead.

  The origin of churchyards is obscure. Many of them undoubtedly stand where pre-Christian forms of worship took place. Ancient burial sites were frequently used by missionaries as places for spreading the Christian word. In AD 601 Pope Gregory stated that pagan shrines should not be destroyed but instead should be sanctified by the Church; pre-Christian altars were to be replaced by Christian ones. It was natural that many of them would develop permanent buildings in which a variety of religious functions could be performed and many were located adjacent to or actually within land that had been used previously for non-Christian burials. Sometimes crosses were erected to mark the place at which Christian worship regularly took place before a church was built on the site. Later on in medieval times virtually all churchyards would have possessed a cross and these symbolised the sanctity of the churchyard and acted as a collective memorial to the anonymous dead buried there.

  The churchyards of London today are largely isolated from the communities in which they are located. It often requires a deliberate effort to enter a churchyard and in so doing one may feel cut off from the surrounding clamour, but this was not always the case. In medieval times the church, or at least its nave, and the ground surrounding the church were at the absolute heart of the community. The churchyards of London and everywhere else in England were the place in which the spiritual and indeed much of the secular activity of the populace took place. In fact churches and their immediate environs would have been positively bustling and noisy for much of the time. Markets were frequently held in churchyards and inside the nave of the church in inclement weather. Hucksters bawled their wares and bargain-hunters haggled noisily over prices. The flat tops of table tombs made excellent places for vendors to display their goods. People negotiating financial transactions often bargained in the churchyard and then finalised the deal in the porch, which was considered to be an appropriate place for making a binding agreement.

  Some London parish churches housed the activities of the local guilds. One example was St Helen’s in Bishopsgate which had strong connections with the Merchant Taylors. Sometimes the archery butts were located in the churchyard. The longbow was medieval England’s ultimate deterrent and men were required to practice their skills regularly. Itinerant entertainers performed in churchyards. Miracle plays were staged. Football, wrestling and other sporting activities took place there. On feasts and festivals, the place was en fête and virtually the entire population would converge on church and churchyard. There would be much merrymaking and bawdy behaviour of the sort that accords ill with what we regard, even in a secular age, as the sanctity of hallowed ground. The Church authorities frowned on much of this activity although the local priest often encouraged it because he might be able to do some fundraising, by providing refreshment, for example. Certain parts of the rituals associated with baptism, marriage and burial took place in the churchyard. All in all, there was never a dull moment.

  Class and status have been factors in death as much as in life. Although Death has been described as the ‘Great Leveller’ and the Church made pious statements about the equality of all in the eyes of God and about the sanctity of poverty, the reality was more hardnosed. Both the place of burial and the nature of the memorial commemorating the deceased closely reflected his or her wealth and influence. Members of the medieval lay social elite were keen to be buried within the precincts of a religious establishment and they were prepared to ‘buy their way in’ with generous benefactions. Very senior clerics would also expect to be interred intermurally, that is, within the main church building of the cathedral, church or monastery with which they were associated. Their relative status can often be gauged by their proximity or otherwise to the high altar or to any prominent reliquaries. The grandeur of their funerary memorials is of course another factor reflecting status. Most lay people were buried in the churchyard in what by later standards were shallow graves. They were usually unmarked until the fashion for headstones developed.

  There may have been as many as fifty monasteries inside and outside the walls of the City of London before the Dissolution in the late 1530s. Many had cemeteries largely for the interment of the deceased members of their communities. Of these burial grounds, few traces survive although spaces which may have once been used for burials can still be seen at Christ’s Hospital in Newgate Street and at St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield. The churchyard of St Catherine Cree, Leadenhall Street, is the successor to the burial-ground of Holy Trinity Priory. The little churchyard of St Martin Outwich, Camomile Street, covers some of the space allotted for burials at the former Priory of St Augustine Papey. St Helen’s churchyard on Bishopsgate Street probably stands on a site previously used for interments in St Helen’s Priory. The churchyard of St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, may cover parts of the cemetery attached to the great Bermondsey Abbey of the Cluniac order.

  From the Reformation, churchyards began to be used much less for secular purposes and almost exclusively for burials. By the sixteenth century the churchyard was being used for the burial of the rich as well as the poor and funerary memorials, where they survive, provide much evidence of the social distinctions and the mores of their time. There were favoured sites within churchyards: the rich had a preference for their burial places to be close to the main paths so that they could be seen. Their family members were often interred in close proximity to each other. The north side of the church was known as ‘the Devil’s side’ and considered unlucky. Before the nineteenth century when the overcrowding of churchyards became a major problem in London and elsewhere, these parts were usually reserved for strangers, paupers, unbaptised infants, those who had died a violent death and for suicides.

  To remind people of the imminence of the afterlife, the gates to churchyards were often decorated with various gruesome devices. St Nicholas, Deptford and St Olave, Hart Street displayed skulls; those at St Olave being impaled on spikes. St Catherine Cree had a skeleton lolling malevolently in a pediment. St Olave is believed to be the church mentioned by Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller. What he must have seen sounds daunting:

  As I stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails, I can peel the rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible tombstones are all lopsided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in the rains of a hundred years ago … One of my best loved churchyards, I call the churchyard of St Ghastly Grim … It is a small, small churchyard with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and crossbones, larger than life, wrought in stone; [and] thrust through and through with iron spears.

  Churchyards need to be differentiated from cemeteries. Many parish churches date back at least in part to as early as AD 1000. The churchyards in which they stand may be even older as sites of worship. Cemeteries, on the other hand, are
a later attempt, usually from the nineteenth century, to solve the problems of shortage of space for burials in churchyards and the desire of Nonconformists, Jews and others to run their own burial grounds.

  Before the rapid growth in population and the great expansion of the urban areas which we associate with the Industrial Revolution, churchyards had been able to deal with the normal rate of burials. In the eighteenth century, the birth-rate and the population may have grown at unprecedented speed, but there was also, paradoxically, a marked increase in death rates. Existing churchyards were becoming grossly overcrowded. Some, such as St Paul’s, had been in continuous use for the best part of 2,000 years. Bodies were piled one on top of the other and the increasing use of coffins meant that interments took up considerably more space. The ground level of many churchyards was well above that of the foundations of the church and of adjacent streets. A handful of Jewish burial grounds and others attached to Nonconformist chapels had come into use in London, but with about 40,000 deaths occurring each year, matters had literally reached breaking point and the situation was not just an administrative scandal but a potent health hazard. One contemporary expert reckoned that 2,572,580 cubic feet of noxious gas was emitted annually from the putrefying corpses buried in London. Miasmic theories about the spread of disease were still prevalent and so there were many people who believed that the loathsome stench emanating from so many burial grounds was at least partly responsible for the scourge of cholera.