Exhumations of Noted Persons.

ByE. B. MITCHELL.Curiosity and a Frenzied Spirit of Vengeance the Principal Causes for the Desecration of the Tombs of the Great—Dead Pope Placed on Trial—A Skeleton Crowned as Queen.An original article written forThe Scrap Book.

ByE. B. MITCHELL.

Curiosity and a Frenzied Spirit of Vengeance the Principal Causes for the Desecration of the Tombs of the Great—Dead Pope Placed on Trial—A Skeleton Crowned as Queen.

An original article written forThe Scrap Book.

Good Frend for Jesus sake forbeare,To digg the Dust enclosed Heare:Blest be ye Man yt spares thes stonesAnd Curst be he yt moves my bones.Epitaph on Shakespeare’s Tomb.

Good Frend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To digg the Dust enclosed Heare:

Blest be ye Man yt spares thes stones

And Curst be he yt moves my bones.

Epitaph on Shakespeare’s Tomb.

Possibly, on account of this epitaph which Shakespeare had inscribed above his grave in the church of Stratford-on-Avon and which it would need a bold man to disregard now, the ashes of the great dramatist have been more fortunate than those of many distinguished men. Despite our inherent horror of disturbing the dead and our respect for the grave as consecrated ground, changed conditions, and, in some cases, mere curiosity, have made the list of celebrities whose bones have been moved a long one.

History shows that in securing immunity for one’s grave, neither the lapse of centuries nor past greatness is of any avail. It is on record that in the chaos of the end of the ninth century a pope had the body of his predecessor dug from the tomb, dressed it in its pontifical vestments, and had it tried and condemned by a synod. The hideous mockery terminated only when the mutilated body was thrown into the Tiber.

This scene, which marks the lowest point to which civil war and anarchy in Rome reduced the papacy, took place in February or March of 897. About eleven months before, Pope Formosus had died after a stormy pontificate of five years. He was followed to the grave in fifteen days by his successor. Then Stephen VI seated himself in the chair of St. Peter. Stephen belonged to the faction opposed to Formosus’s ally, Arnulf of Germany. Party feeling and party hatred ran high. The men temporarily in power had injuries to avenge, and Stephen, in a fit of almost insane fury, determined to try his predecessor.

On what charge the dead Formosus was actually tried is not now very clear—probably this detail was never considered of much importance. Stephen summoned a synod, dragged the corpse out of the grave, dressed it in its full pontifical robes and himself presided over the court. He made no pretence of being an impartial judge, however. Paying no attention to the trembling deacon to whom had been assigned the hopeless task of defending the dead Pope, Stephen turned savagely on the corpse.

“Why hast thou in thy ambition usurped the Apostolic Seat, who wast previously only Bishop of Portus?” he demanded.

The synod played out its part in the wretched farce. Formosus was convicted and solemnly deposed. The vestments were torn from the body of the dead pontiff, the three fingers of the right hand used in bestowing the benediction were cut off and the mummy, hauled through the streets by the mob, was thrown into the Tiber. A few months later Stephen was strangled in his palace.

Equally brutal was the treatment given to Cromwell’s body when the Restoration brought Charles II back to England and the cavaliers to power. Cromwell had directed that his interment be in Westminster Abbey, and every effort was made to have his funeral as impressive as that of any crowned king. The attempt, however, was not altogether successful. In his famous diary John Evelyn notes:

“It was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with as barbarous noise, drinking, and taking tobacco in the streets.”

On the eve of January 30, 1661, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and the regicide Bradshaw were dug from their graves. The next day they were dragged to Tyburn and hanged with their faces to Westminster Hall, where they had sentenced Charles to death. The corpses were buried at the foot of the gallows, where Connaught Square is now, and the heads, impaled on pikes, remained for years above the entrance of Westminster Hall.

After many years a high wind carried the head of the Lord Protector down. A soldier made off with it, and in 1779 it was on exhibition in Old Bond Street. A private family is now in possession of the ghastly relic—the features so well preserved that the large wart over one eye which was so noticeable in life is still plainly visible.

The bones of Wyclif were treated in much the same way by the Council of Constance, in 1414, though there was, in his case, more of ceremony and less of mere hatred. The remains of the English reformer were burned and the ashes thrown into a brook, which, of course, ultimately emptied into the ocean.

“Thus,” says one writer, “the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”

But it is not always the enemies of the dead who disturb their bones. There is no more remarkable tradition than the crowning of the dead Queen Inez de Castro when her lord, young Pedro, ascended the throne of Portugal in the fourteenth century. The death of Inez, murdered by the command of her father-in-law, Alfonso XII, had been avenged by Don Pedro, but the torture of the assassins did not satisfy the prince.

The tradition is to the effect, it is said, that when Pedro came to the throne a few years later, he had the bones of Inez taken from the grave, placed upon a magnificent throne, robed in royal purple, and crowned queen of Portugal. To the skeleton the courtiers did homage, one after another kissing the fleshless hand in which the scepter had been thrust. Then, lying in her rich robes, her crown upon her grinning skull, in a chariot drawn by twenty coal-black mules and with a funeral cortège which extended several miles, the skeleton of Inez was driven to the royal abbey of Alcobaca, where the bones were reinterred.

Even then, however, the dead queen was not to be left in peace. In 1810 the French troops broke into the abbey of Alcobaca, destroyed the magnificent monument which Pedro had erected, and tore open the coffin. The yellow hair of the queen was cut from the skull and preserved in reliquaries.

Like those of Inez, the bones of Napoleon were buried a second time with all the pomp and ceremony that a great nation could devise. The body of the great emperor was originally buried under a weeping willow in a secluded hollow among the rocks of Saint Helena. With the Revolution of 1830, however, came a change in the political situation, and this made it possible for the remains of the conqueror to be removed from the lonely island-grave to the magnificent tomb under the dome of the Hôtel des Invalides.

The body was exhumed at midnight on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Napoleon’s arrival at Saint Helena. For nine hours the engineers labored to dig away the earth from the vault, to remove the solid masonry and to lift the heavy slab which covered the sarcophagus. Within a triple coffin of tin, lead, and mahogany lay the emperor, dressed in white waistcoat and breeches, black cravat, long boots and cocked hat, with the cloak he wore at Marengo spread over his feet.

The year that Napoleon died the body of Major John André was taken back to England. André had been buried in a field close to the spot where he had been hanged as a spy, and the grave was marked by two small cedars and by a peach-tree planted at its head. Some of the newspapers had declared that “any honor paid Major André’s remains was casting an imputation on General Washington and the officers who tried him.” Such logic as this had so stirred some ultra-patriotic citizens of Tappan that when Mr. Buchanan, the British consul in New York, arrived there to exhume the body quite a crowd was prepared to express its emphatic disapproval.

Argument being obviously of no avail, Buchanan told the little mob that it was an Irish custom to drink spirits before visiting a grave and that this custom he always observed. In a few minutes the crowd was too much occupied with the Irish custom to annoy Buchanan and the consul proceeded with his task.

The lid of the coffin was found to be broken and the roots of the peach-tree had entwined themselves completely around the skull. The bones were taken to a house near by, whence warned of rumors that the body would be flung into the river, Buchanan was obliged to carry off the coffin like a thief in the night, driving twenty-four miles to New York.

The recovery of the body of John Paul Jones is still fresh in the public mind. Unearthed after a protracted search in an abandoned Paris cemetery, the features and body were so well preserved that there could be no doubt of the identity. Once this was established, the transfer of the body from French to American soil was made the occasion of a solemn ceremony, in the course of which five hundred. American bluejackets marched through the streets of Paris.

The remains of Jones, André, and Napoleon were exhumed in order that they might be buried again with greater honor. In Westminster Abbey mere accident or curiosity has several times disturbed the rest of the famous dead.

The body of Ben Jonson has been especially unfortunate. Having obtained a grant of “eighteen inches of square ground” in the Abbey, the poet was said to have been buried there in an upright position with the famous epitaph, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” over his head. In 1849 a new grave was being dug close by when loose sand poured in and the clerk saw:

“The two leg-bones of Jonson fixed bolt upright in the sand as though the body had been buried in the upright position, and the skull came rolling down among the sand, from a position above the leg-bones, to the bottom of the newly made grave. There was still hair upon it and it was of a red color.”

Another poet has suffered in much the same manner. The skull of Alexander Pope is now in a private museum. On some occasion the coffin was opened and a phrenologist gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the sexton to be allowed to take the skull home overnight. In the morning another skull was substituted and the poet’s deposited in the phrenologist’s museum.

Against the curiosity of science there is no safeguard. Recently Kaiser Wilhelm had the grave of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle opened again, this time for the purpose of photographing the fabrics in which the hero was wrapped. Against this violation of the sepulcher Jules Claretie, in an article written for the ParisFigaroand translated for the BostonTranscript, has protested vigorously. Claretie says:

After such combats, labors, and mighty thoughts, he dreamed of repose, like the poet Moses. Repose! There is none in this world for the illustrious dead. We waken them through mere curiosity.

Charlemagne’s grandsons believed that they were heirs to his glory because for a moment they looked upon his skeleton or exposed his remains to view.

Otho first opened the sepulcher. Cornélius has depicted that fantastic scene in a celebrated fresco. Frederick Barbarossa followed Otho’s example. He stood alive before the corpse. On his stone throne, he contemplated the emperor, with huge hand grasping the scepter and the globe.

Then the dead Charlemagne was torn from his marble resting-place; his skull and the bones of his arms went to enrich the treasure of the cathedral crypt. The throne became sacred in the eyes of emperors, and Charlemagne—mutilated and dismembered—was partially restored to his marble vault.

Barbarossa was more fortunate; he was drowned in the Cydnus, and no one could profane his body.

Another emperor—Napoleon, in 1804—wanted in his turn to behold the fantom. Bareheaded and preceded by Duroc, the emperor contemplated the sacred bones.

“So this is he who was master of the world!”

And Napoleon, deeply moved, turned toward Canon Camus.

“Pray, Monsieur l’Abbé; pray for France, whose greatness Charlemagne founded.”

Then, when the stone had been replaced, Napoleon vouchsafed the “fantom emperor” a renewal of slumber.

Victor Hugo, while walking through Aix-la-Chapelle, complained even then of the innumerable violations to which the great Charlemagne’s tomb had been subjected.

“Some day,” said he, “I suppose that a pious and holy thought will enter the mind of some king or emperor. Charlemagne’s remains will be taken from the chest where the sacristans put them and again laid in his tomb.

“What is left of his bones will be religiously reassembled. He will regain his Byzantine vault, his bronze doors, and his marble armchair with its fourteen plates of gold, and the kneeling visitor will be enabled to behold, gleaming vaguely in the darkness, that fantom—crown on head and orb in hand—that once was Charlemagne.”

Well, no such thing was accomplished. Once more the dignitaries of the empire have assembled to open a coffin. The two shrouds that enveloped Charlemagne have been removed—those Oriental fabrics that some calif had sent to the emperor—and since, as the telegraphic despatches say, “the light was not sufficient to operate,” they have been sent to a Friedrichstrasse photographer, who will find light enough, egad!

We have dug up Richelieu, opened Bossuet’s tomb, disturbed the great Napoleon’s coffin. A few years ago I saw the sarcophagi of Voltaire and Rousseau opened at the Panthéon. I saw the skull of the author of “Candide” passed from hand to hand; I saw men’s finger-nails scratch away its reddish coating (probably due, as Monsieur Berthelot told us, to the sublimate that had preserved the corpse).

In his leaden coffin, with arms crossed upon his breast, I saw the man who had written “The Social Contract”; I saw the onlookers—indifferent or curious—poke their fingers into the empty sockets now bereft of those eyes that had once gazed upon Madame de Warrens, or try to snatch from a jaw-bone—“as a souvenir, monsieur!”—one of those teeth that had touched cherries picked In Madame Gallet’s company.

I was present at that Dance of Death which men call “an historical exhumation.” And the inevitable photographer was there at the Panthéon, just as at Aix-la-Chapelle. Great men’s bones are hustled about, their skulls are pried into and weighed, as if, forsooth, some sparkle of genius could be got out of them!

Other kings than Charlemagne have had their slumbers broken. Since the coffin of Edward the Confessor was placed, on January 6, 1066, before the high altar of Westminster Abbey it has been opened for one purpose or another three times. Venerated as the last lineal descendant of Cedric, Edward was buried in his full regalia, the crown on his head, the gold crucifix in his hand, and the pilgrim’s ring, said to have belonged to St. John, on his finger.

It was thus that the body was found when Bishop Gundulf opened the coffin thirty years later and plucked a hair from the dead king’s long white beard. The coffin was opened again when Edward was canonized in 1163, and the body of the saint was then found to be in complete preservation.

Abbot Laurence, however, was harder to satisfy than Gundulf. From the dead man’s finger he took the ring of St. John, depositing it in the abbey treasury as a relic, and the vestments in which the corpse was wrapped were made into three magnificent copes. Another century passed and then Henry III had the coffin opened, when he removed it to the east of the high altar, where it has since remained.

Equally troubled has been the repose of Edward I, “The Hammer of the Scots.” When the old warrior died in 1307, he ordered that his flesh should be boiled and his bones carried at the head of an English army until Scotland should be conquered. Though this wish was calmly disregarded, one custom which antiquarians have been at a loss to explain, may be in some way connected with it. Until the overthrow of Richard III on Bosworth Field ended the Plantagenet rule, the tomb of Edward I was opened every two years and the cerecloth renewed. With the Tudors this strange rite fell into disuse.

For three hundred years the body of Edward was left in the tomb in peace. Then the Society of Antiquarians opened the coffin in 1771. The king was lying in his royal robes, the “long shanks” from which he derived his nickname, covered with a cloth of gold. Six feet two inches was the dead man’s height. Lean and straight as he was, Edward I must have been an imposing figure.

Only two other kings of England—James I and Charles I—have been exhumed. Their coffins were opened for the purpose of identification. James had the body of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, taken from Fotheringay to Westminster but, on the whole, the royal family of England has been little disturbed.

Not so the French. For three days in the Reign of Terror a Paris mob raged in the abbey church of St. Denis, which for centuries was the chosen burying-place of the French kings. In this sanctuary of the Old Régime the mob respected nothing. The silk robes were torn from the bodies of Hugues Capet, Philip the Hardy, and Philip the Fair.

A handful of gray dust, all that was left of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, was flung to the wind, and one after another, Capetians, Valois, and Bourbons were dragged from the tomb and tumbled into a trench. On the pavement, one eye-witness says, rolled the heads of Louis XII and Francis I, of Marshal Turenne and of the great Constable Duguesclin.

For a short time the corpse of Henry IV, the most popular of all the long line of French kings, was respected. Embalmed with the best Italian skill, and so well preserved that the two fatal dagger wounds in the chest were still plainly visible, the body lay untouched for two days. Then some one shouted that Henry, like all the rest, had deceived the people, and his body, too, was flung into the trench.

After the Restoration an attempt was made to return the royal bodies to their tombs, but it was not altogether successful.

If one passes from secular history to the legends of the saints, the exhumations become innumerable. It is, tradition asserts, on account of an attempt to remove the body of St. Swithin that we owe the prediction:

St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,For forty days it will remain:St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,For forty days ’twill rain na mair.

St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,

For forty days it will remain:

St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,

For forty days ’twill rain na mair.

St. Swithin, chiefly notable for his mildness and humility, ordered that he should not be buried in his cathedral of Winchester, but in a “vile and unworthy place” among the common people in the churchyard. This the monks could not bring themselves to consider right, and on one July 15, they attempted to move the body of the bishop into the cathedral. But on that day and for forty days thereafter it rained so hard that they finally recognized in the weather the anger of the saint and abandoned their idea.

Apparently, however, the good saint changed his mind half a century or so later, for his remains were then brought into the cathedral and, instead of manifesting any displeasure, two hundred miraculous cures were credited to him in ten days.

THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD.

Despite All the Advantages That Have Resulted from Modern Invention, Artists, Architects, and Engineers of the Present Time Are Dwarfed by Those Who Wrought the Marvels of Ancient and Medieval Days.

There are two groups of “wonders of the world,” the first belonging to the period which we distinguish by the term antiquity, and the second to the Middle Ages. Considering the lack of facilities for building in the earlier period, it seems that the wonders of antiquity are much more remarkable than those of the medieval age; but these are stupendous marvels also, and deserve their fame, every one.

The Pyramids of Egypt rank first, being the oldest as well as the most permanent things which man has ever built. They are situated in middle Egypt, and there are now in existence some seventy-five; of this number there are some which are crumbling into shapeless masses, but the group of Ghizeh, which is the most important, stands in sturdy and unyielding strength.

The Pyramids are the tombs of Egypt’s dead kings, and date back to the Fourth Dynasty—about three thousand years before Christ. The largest covers an area of nearly thirteen acres, was originally four hundred and eighty-one feet high, and had a length on each side, at the base, of seven hundred and fifty-five feet.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by Nebuchadnezzar for his queen, Amytis, and their site has been located at the northern end of the city. They consisted of a series of terraces rising to a considerable height, and laid out as a park; it is probable that such gardens would have been near to or adjoining the king’s palace, but whether or not they were has not as yet been discovered. The reign of Nebuchadnezzar was about 600B.C.

The Tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, at Halicarnassus, was built about 352B.C.From this great monument, built by the king’s widow, Artemisia, as a memorial to him, the word mausoleum of our common speech is derived. The tomb seems to have been preserved up to the twelfth century, but earthquakes probably started its ruin soon after this, and the stones from it have been used in many other buildings, so that now even its general appearance can only be guessed at.

The Temple of Diana, at Ephesus, was built at the public charge, though King Crœsus is believed to have contributed largely to it. It was one hundred and sixty-four by three hundred and forty-two and a half feet, and the height of its columns was fifty-five feet. It was begun in the sixth century before Christ, and one hundred and twenty years are said to have elapsed before it was completed. It was the seat of the worship of the goddess Diana.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of Helios, the sun-god, which was made from the spoils left by Demetrius when the city was successfully defended against him, after a long siege. Its construction occupied the artist twelve years. It stood near the harbor, but not across the entrance, as was at one time supposed. It was erected about 280B.C., and thrown down by an earthquake some sixty-six years later. Its height was something over one hundred feet.

The Statue of Jupiter at Olympia was the work of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias by name, who was born about 490B.C.This heroic figure was about forty-two feet high, and represented the god seated on a throne. It was made of ivory and gold.

The Pharos of Egypt was begun under Ptolemy I, and was finished by his son about 282B.C.It was a lofty tower, built on the eastern extremity of the rocky island from which it took its name, and was the great lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor of Alexandria. The light was furnished by a beacon-fire on its summit. Its height was four hundred and fifty feet, and the light could be seen at a distance of one hundred miles.

The Palace of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, is also mentioned as one of the wonders of the ancient world, though the preference is given to the Pharos of Egypt by the best authorities. This palace was cemented with gold.

The wonders of the Middle Ages seem quite modern compared with the marvels of the ancient world, long since crumbled into dust.

The Colosseum of Rome heads the later list. This was built by Vespasian, and dedicated by his son Titus, in 80A.D.According to a document of the fourth century, this great amphitheater seated eighty-seven thousand persons, its dimensions being six hundred and seventeen by five hundred and twelve feet. It was the scene of the bloody sports in which the Romans delighted, and of the martyrdom of many of the early Christians.

The Catacombs of Rome, the earliest burial places of the Christians, are outside the city walls, within a radius of three miles; they were excavated wherever the soil was suitable for such tunneling, but were not secretly made, as the old tradition would have us believe. Their length has been estimated variously at from three hundred and fifty to eight hundred miles, and the number of dead which they contain is from six to seven millions.

The Great Wall of China was built by the founder of the Tsin dynasty, in 256B.C.Its length was once more than one thousand two hundred and fifty miles, and it is the largest defensive work in the world, being thirty-five feet high and twenty-one feet thick. It follows an irregular course, marking the northern boundary of the empire, and is not deflected by natural obstacles. There are towers at frequent intervals, presumably for lookout.

Stonehenge is the most remarkable example of the ancient stone circles and stands, a magnificent ruin, on Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, southern England. It is at least as early as the Bronze Age, according to the most modern research, and that was from 2000 to 1800B.C.From the arrangement of the stones with reference to the sun, It is believed to have had some connection with sun worship.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the most remarkable of these slanting campaniles, though not by any means the only one. It was begun in 1174 and finished in 1350. Its height is one hundred and eighty-one feet, and it is fifty-one and a half feet in diameter at the base. It inclines thirteen feet eight inches toward the south. The opinion prevails now that the slant is intentional in all these leaning towers, though the reason for it is not clear.

The Porcelain Tower of Nanking, which was erected early in the fifteenth century, was an octagonal structure, faced with variegated porcelain. Lamps and bells were hung from it. It was destroyed by the Taipings in 1853, but many miniatures of it are in existence in various parts of the world.

The Mosque of St. Sophia, in Constantinople, is one of the most magnificent edifices in the world. It was begun by Justinian inA.D.532 and was completed in five years. Originally it was named the Church of St. Sophia. Its walls were decorated with beautiful mosaics, which have been partly effaced or partly covered with inscriptions from the Koran. It was converted into a mosque by Mohammed II, in 1453, and four minarets were added, while the golden cross was replaced by the crescent. Its dome is one hundred and five feet in diameter and one hundred and eighty-four feet high inside.

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