She’s the DISAPPEARING QUEEN but how did Queen Katherine Howard vanish from her final resting place? Henry VIII’s fifth wife was executed alongside her ladyinwaiting, Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford, on 13 February 1542 at the Tower of London. It has always been said that both were buried in the Chapel of St Peter Ad Vincula next to Katherine’s cousins, Queen Anne Boleyn and George Boleyn (who was also Jane’s husband). However when the floor in front of the altar was excavated by the Victorians in the 1870s in order to carry out restoration work on the Chapel, no bones belonging to Katherine were found, though Anne and Jane were both located. The disappearance of Katherine Howard was explained by the theory that her bones must have dissolved in lime due to her youth at the time of her death and this idea has been accepted by many ever since. Modern science has proved it to be false however. Lime does not speed up the decay of a corpse, it retards it and therefore it cannot explain what happened to Katherine Howard’s body. So what other reasons might explain the complete absence of her remains? In this six wives documentary from History Calling, we go back to the original sources to study this Tudor mystery in more detail, starting with the death of Katherine Howard, what we hear about her burial and then asking, what happened to the body of this infamous Queen and might we ever find these missing royal remains? Is she one of the famous historical figures who is buried at the Tower of London, or is she not? Possibilities I’ll discuss include whether the bones of Katherine Howard were stolen, if she was buried somewhere else, if she decomposed naturally, or if the Victorians simply missed her.

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LEARN MORE:

[FREE] Eline M.J. Schotsmans, Katrien Van de Vijver, Andrew S. Wilson and Dominique Castex, ‘Interpreting lime burials. A discussion in light of lime burials at St. Rombout's cemetery in Mechelen, Belgium (10th–18th centuries)’ in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, vol. 3 (September 2015), pp 46479.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII (2017). https://amzn.to/3xldHhi (UK link) OR https://amzn.to/2VExTgg (US link)
Josephine Wilkinson, Katherine Howard: The Tragic Story of Henry VIII's Fifth Queen (London, 2016). https://amzn.to/3x7MxdO (UK link) OR https://amzn.to/3rbFuPj (US link)
David Starkey, Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII (Vintage, 2004) https://amzn.to/3k9uD4Z (UK link) OR https://amzn.to/3wImKIh (US link)
Antonia Fraser, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII (2nd edn, Phoenix, 2009) https://amzn.to/3atiEfi (UK link) OR https://amzn.to/36IqD5r (US link)
Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (WileyBlackwell, 2005) https://amzn.to/3xLivgr

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