The last English monarch to be killed in battle was Richard III, end of the Plantagenets, killed in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field. In 2012, his remains were discovered and identified, buried in what used to be a churchyard belonging to some friars and since having become a carpark (as the Brits say; you might say “parking lot” on this side of the pond). His royal bones were then reburied with great ceremony in Leicester Cathedral, replete with a big marble plinth. Richard III might be the most famous example of the odd practice of exhumation and reburial.
Human history, all the way back to the start, is defined by the ways that we bury our dead. Our early ancestors buried their dead in ways that indicate cultural meaning: in the fetal position or laid out, with fellows and alone, with grave goods like tools and jewelry. Even Neanderthals had their own customs and actions around burial, with pollen from flowers showing up in the samples of their grave dirt. Catacombs, ossuaries, and other arrangements have been made for human remains, even making bones into the main decorative feature, as in the case of the famous Sedlec Ossuary.
However, the practice of unburying and reburying the dead is a relatively recent one, made possible by the methods of preservation applied to corpses from ancient Egypt onward, and hewing to specific requirements about repatriation, border disputes, and even status among the deceased. But not all bodies are unburied to put them in their right place. Some dead are brought out to worse purposes.
Pharoah Tutankhamun lay undisturbed in his grave for three thousand years before his rude awakening. His mummified corpse has toured the world, being put on display for the benefit of school children and tourists, as well as scores of scientists and researchers. Though touted as a discovery that electrified the world, these are after all the remains of a very young man who died a sudden death and is not allowed to rest, for the crime of being too interesting. He was returned to the land of his birth in 2011, but remains on display. Not all the dead get to go back to sleep.
Murder victims, who cannot always said to be resting in their graves, are sometimes exhumed to obtain or confirm additional evidence long after their deaths. Katherine Menendez, a 17-year-old girl who was killed just outside of Cleveland, OH, was dug up 30 years after the end of her life to see if there was anything under her fingernails. The so-called “Lady of the Dunes,” Ruth Marie Terry, was killed in 1974, but her body was not identified until it was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013, and her husband was not named as her killer until 2023. Justice is often a long time coming, if she finds her blindfolded way at all.
Some bodies are exhumed for the purposes of disrespect, often by graverobbers. But some are singled out by people who figure that death simply let them off too easy. Oliver Cromwell, usurper of the British throne and statesman of the interregnum died in 1658 of (probably) sepsis, and left his son unable to carry on his work of keeping kings out of business. Despite this full defeat, the English were so determined to punish Cromwell for the loss of their monarchy (and possibly for his attempted genocide against the Irish) that they dug up his body out of its honored place in Westminster Abbey, and gave it a postmortem execution. Cromwell was hanged in chains, and his head was displayed at the palace of Westminster until it decayed too badly to stand, and what remained of him was subsequently reburied under humbler circumstances (and probably in a handful of places).
One of the most interesting exhumation and reburial events is the story of the Mercy Brown vampire incident in Rhode Island in 1892. In life, Mercy Brown was a nineteen year old girl who suffered a great deal of misfortune, including dying of tuberculosis along with most of the rest of her family. One of the other misfortunes was that tuberculosis or “consumption” as it was then known, was poorly understood. The people of New England at that time were superstitious and frightened, and believed that the persistence of the deadly illness could be blamed on the influence of the undead, or an indication of vampirism. Upon frenzied exhumation, Mercy’s body was found to be less decomposed than the diggers expected, and she still had blood in her heart. These signs made them feel even less scientific, so they burned her heart and liver, powdered the ash, and gave it to another tuberculosis sufferer to drink. He died. Mercy was reburied, after having been shown none.
Sometimes the dead are better off left alone. Some still have tales to tell. Most of us would prefer not to be forgotten beneath a carpark, but then again most of us aren’t a Plantagenet king…or an unlucky kid mistaken for a vampire. If we are lucky enough not to be murdered, if we have forethought enough to plan for own remains before the deadline, we might escape the final humiliation of being put on display for school kids at the Met. But just like exhumation, death can always take one by surprise.
