Dead Europe
I remember seeing the Archbishop when I was a child. I was about nine, he was nearly five hundred years old. His name was Simon of Sudbury, and his skull - tautly covered with yellow shriveled skin - was kept in a box in the vestry in a church in Sudbury, Essex.
For the aficionado of burial customs, Europe is full of intriguing sights. One of the classiest must be the Kapuzinergruft, in Vienna. Here, in a series of subterranean vaults, are buried the Emperors of Austria, from 1633 until 1916. The earliest sarcophagi have the Roman severity of the Renaissance; they stand tall on clawed feet, lacking all ornamentation bar a lion or a skull at the end, and classical mouldings on the edges. But my favourites are the baroque sarcophagi; they are no longer even coffin-shaped, but bulge and squeeze into the shape of gigantic soup-tureens or teacaddies. The skulls that stand guard on their corners are dressed in gauze, or armed with paladins’ helmets, or crowned and veiled; foliage and drapery hides the sarcophagus.
Every monarch of Austria bar two - Ferdinand II and Karl I - is buried here. The English monarchs, on the other hand, are dispersed around their dominions: the early Plantagenet kings are buried in Fontevraud, France; William the Conqueror in Caen; and only a minority in Westminster Abbey. Our non-royal ruler, Oliver Cromwell, is less easy to track down. When the King came back in 1660, Cromwell’s remains were dug up so that due punishment could be meted out posthumously. His head is said to be buried in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge - but no one will tell you where. It seems to be a secret as well kept as the recipe for Coca-Cola. The kings of France are even less happy; though their monuments remain in Saint-Denis, most of their remains have been scattered, and whatever was recovered has been heaped in one grave.
Some of them were never all here anyway; there are a couple of heart burials, with their simple monuments of an urn on a pillar. (Earlier, crusading kings had their guts scooped out, and buried where they fell, so that their bodies could be dried out and brought back to France; later, the science of embalming appears to have improved, so that Nelson’s body was pickled in rum and brought back from Trafalgar to St Paul’s in a barrel.) Even so, Saint-Denis is perhaps the most perfect royal burial place in Europe. You wouldn’t think so when you arrive in Saint-Denis, an industrial suburb of Paris; but inside the church, only a dim light penetrates through the many pillars, and the atmosphere is heavy. Even after a thorough restoration, Abbot Suger’s romanesque masterpiece remains impressive, with its chevet for the first time bringing light - symbol of the divine presence - into the church through the side chapel windows. The most striking monuments are those of the Renaissance kings; the living men kneel above, their dead bodies are stretched out below, to show the living what they too will be. In the vault below, Carolingian kings mingle their dust with the last of the monarch, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
