Aliscotia

By Aliscotia

Sudeley Castle

Julia, Laura and I had a great day out to Sudeley Castle near Winchcombe. It's the final resting place (at the Chapel in the grounds) of Queen Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's final wife who outlived him.
The Castle was destroyed after the Civil War and Katherine's tomb was forgotten until 1782 when a group of lady sightseers noticed an alabaster panel in the ruined Chapel and asked a tenant farmer to dig under the wall. He soon found a lead coffin with the inscription "Here Lyeth Quene Kateryn, wife to King Henry Viii. He opened the coffin to find her corpse "entire and uncorrupted". Somehow the body had been preserved by the six or seven seer cloths of linen in which the body had been wrapped. The coffin was opened several more times over the following decades to corroborate this story and eventually the body did decay. When the chapel was restored in the 19th Century the body was reburied there in the fine alabaster tomb you can see in the extra photos. My main blip is a view of the Chapel from one of the upstairs windows in the Castle. 

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