3 - The Funeral of Henry V

Summary

King Henry V of England died at the Chateau de Vincennes, to the east of Paris, ‘between the second and third hour after midnight’ on 31 August 1422, two weeks short of his thirty-sixth birthday. Exactly 575 years later, not just to the day but almost to the minute, at around 3 a.m. on 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales also died in Paris, aged thirty-six years and two months. The uncanny symmetry of these two famous royal tragedies is matched by the reactions of contemporaries. If we seek to understand the mood in England at the news of Henry’s death, it is the outpouring of national grief at Diana’s funeral that comes to mind. In her case, this was compounded by shock at the suddenness and violence of her death. Henry, in contrast, had been ill for several months with a chronic intestinal condition, and his death was not unexpected. Yet there was no hiding the grief, one measure of which is the fact that there are more, and more detailed, contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of his funeral than of any previous English king.

At the time of his death, Henry was not only king of England but also regent of France and heir apparent to the French throne, and understandably some Frenchmen wanted him to be buried in Paris. However, the instructions he had left in his will were unambiguous: he was to be buried in Westminster Abbey ‘among the tombs of the kings, in the place which now contains the relics of the saints’ – that is, the shrine of Edward the Confessor, where Henry III, Edward I, Edward III and Richard II were buried. Thus only his heart and entrails remained in France, for the first step after his death was to eviscerate and embalm the royal corpse in order to delay putrefaction, following which the viscera were boiled and taken to St-Maur-des-Fosses, also in the eastern suburbs of Paris, where they were buried in the abbey church. Meanwhile, the embalmed corpse was wrapped in a cerecloth (cloth impregnated with wax, commonly used for wrapping the dead) and placed in a wooden coffin shrouded in lead and filled with aromatic spices, on top of which was placed a life-size effigy of Henry referred to in some accounts as the curbyl, since it was made of boiled leather (cuir bouillé).