Death Is Not The End (But You Might Wish It Was).

Dying doesn't look much fun. No matter how you do it. Alone, surrounded by loved ones, in a hospital, at home, on a battlefield. The act of dying just isn't one that people tend to look forward to. But being dead? That's okay. You don't know anything about. It is, they say, only sad for others. You just get a long long sleep with no dreams.

That's what I reckon anyway. But for some people, famous people more often than not, death is not the end of their story and last night I was at The Bell in Whitechapel for a London Fortean Society talk called Posthumous Indignities of the Famous that looked into exactly that subject. The gleeful and dapper speaker was City of London tour guide and 'cemetery supremo' (there's a job that'll look good on your CV) Rob Stephenson (he works at both Kensal Green and West Norwood among others) and if his talk was more a list of short stories than one all enveloping look at the subject then that's fine. There's not much to link those in his illustrious role call except that they all suffered the aforementioned 'posthumous indignities'.

There was a lot of 'em so I won't go into them all and some I'll only touch on but first a bit of background. You can't own a human body after death. Bodies are not considered property. Often once buried they are disturbed or even defiled. This can be due to vengeance, curiosity, or even veneration. For years the theft of a dead body was considered a minor misdemeanour but that all changed with The Anatomy Act of 1832 which came about at a time when grave robbing was rife and something, it seems, needed to be done. 

Louis XIV of France died in 1750 and was buried, according to French tradition, at St Denis but during the French Revolution his grave was raided and his heart was sold on. More than once. Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland was, famously, beheaded. But he had his head sewn back on afterwards and in 1813, 164 years after his death, his vault - which he shared with the corpses of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, was reopened for uncertain reasons.

The wife of Henry V, Charlotte of Valois, managed to, in a way, be unfaithful from beyond the grave when Samuel Pepys gave her a kiss over two hundred years after her death (yeah, I know it's on him and not her, it's just a joke). The poet John Milton had his teeth knocked out with a stone and his hair torn out after his death, Edinburgh graverobber William Burke was hanged for his crimes and his skin used to bind a book, and Tristram Shandy author Laurence Sterne, after dying of pleurisy on Bond Street, ended up on an anatomy slab in Cambridge. He was recognised so they didn't cut him up and in 1969, two centuries after his death, he moved to Yorkshire.

Emanuel Swedenborg was Swedish but he died while visiting the UK so his body was put in Hawksmoor's St George in the East church. Eventually it was sent back to Sweden, as requested by the Swedes, but unfortunately they'd lost his head. It later turned up in an antique shop in Cardiff.

King Mausolus of the Achaemenid Empire was a one. He married his sister and on his death she (his wife/sister) was so upset she built a huge tomb for him, thus giving us the word mausoleum (it's the one that was in Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World). She didn't stop there though. She had his body cremated and used to sit by his tomb eating the cremated remains and washing them down with a nice glass of wine.

When William I, the Conqueror, fell off his horse and died in battle in France his armour and robes were stolen almost immediately and then at his funeral a fire broke out. Then it turned out he was too big to fit in his coffin. Centuries later the Calvinists prised open his grave and tossed his bones around and all that was saved was one thigh bone and that wasn't found again until 1988. If you look at his grave in Normandy now all that's inside it is that thigh bone.

Richard III's case is one of the most famous. He was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and buried in Leicester. As with William I he was stripped naked and, also, his grave was too small for him. When his body was finally found, in 2012 - you'll likely remember it, it became apparent that his skull had suffered post-death damage.

 

Oliver Cromwell was buried in Westminster Abbey but was later dug up and paraded around London, even spending an evening in a pub on Red Lion Square - fittingly enough home to Conway Hall, the Fortean's other venue, before he was hung and beheaded. Despite already being dead.

After falling out of favour with Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh ended up in the Tower of London but when James I came to power he sent Walter to South America to find gold. En route, he attacked a Spanish galleon (at a rare point when England was not at war with Spain) so received the death penalty. After being beheaded, his wife carried his head around in a red leather bag for twenty-nine years. It must have honked.

There was Geoffrey de Mandeville, a much unloved criminal who had been excommunicated. So after being executed they couldn't find anywhere to bury his lead coffin and he waited in some kind of limbo for twenty years until the pope absolved him.

Popes themselves don't miss out on the fun and the best one has to be Pope Formosus who was head of the Catholic Church from 891 to 896 during a very turbulent era. His successor hated him so had him exhumed and put on trial. Dressed up in vestments and sat on a throne the pope's corpse was found, unsurprisingly, guilty and his papacy declared null.

His body was weighted down and thrown in the Tiber but somehow still washed up on the banks of the river where people started reporting it was responsible for miracles. On this his successor was strangled and the next pope up passed a motion banning dead popes from being put on trial.

John Wycliffe, the theologian, reformer, and master of Bailliol College at Oxford was buried in Leicestershire but after death this works were denounced as heretical and his body was bug up, burnt, and thrown in a river. Alas Wycliffe's corpse couldn't pull off the miracle trick that Formosus had.

The author D. H. Lawrence died in France but the plan was to bury him in New Mexico. Trouble is his body was very heavy to carry so the person tasked with the job had him cremated in Marseille before taking the ashes on to America. Where they were refused entry because Lawrence's books had been banned in the US!

Einstein wished to be cremated and have no grave but a Dr Thomas Harvey was not happy with this. He wanted to keep Einstein's amazing brain so he did. And then he divided it into two hundred separate parts. Some of which ended up in Texas. Most of it is now in Princeton, New Jersey.

Our speaker, who had well and truly warmed to his theme, ended the night with the story of a corpse that was not defiled. But was stolen. Charlie Chaplin was so famous, some say the most famous person in the world at one point, that after he died in 1977 his body was stolen and his wife received a ransom note. £400,000 and she could have the body back.

She said her husband lived in her head and in her memories so they never got their ill earned money and it's a sweet story to end on after all that macabre and ghastly business. The Q&A continued in much the same theme with talk of Rasputin, Jeremy Bentham, Napoleon's knob, Eva Peron, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Gunther von Hagens, Lee Miller (whose new retrospective at Tate Britain I am very much looking forward to), headshrinking, and the difference between being hanged and being hung.

Apparently, you are hanged to death but if you are hung you may not die (or you may already be dead). Thanks to Rob Stephenson, thanks to the LFS and The Bell, thanks to Pizza Union on City Road for food beforehand, and thanks to Jade for keeping me company (as well as Tim, Michael, Veronica, David, and Paula for brief chats and hellos). What a strange, but fan, way to spend an evening.