BURIALS of the Tudors

"The body of Henry's last Queen had quite a turbulent history, and her lovely tomb and monument are of relatively recent origin.
Katherine's original unmarked grave in the chapel of Sudeley Castle was left to fall into neglect, because of the execution of her husband, Thomas Seymour, Lord of Sudeley, less than a year after her death. Sudeley Castle was razed during the English Civil War and by 1752, no one knew where her grave was. Thirty years later, KP's coffin was discovered by chance, by a man who occupied the land on which the ruins of the chapel lay. He ripped open the lead coffin to expose Katherine's amazingly well preserved body. Apparently it was left exposed and later observers remarked on the rapid decay and stench. Finally someone reburied it, placing a stone slab over it to deter the curious. It was disinterred again after 10 years by a party of drunken roysterers who danced around it, then reburied it upside down. The Rector of Sudeley in 1817 set out to find the coffin which he discovered full of ivy, resealed the lead, and gave it a respectul burial. In 1837, the Dent family bought Sudeley and restored the site and the chapel, erecting an altarpiece, containing KP's coffin, dedicated to the late Queen with an effigy whose face was based on her portraits. A replica of the coffin plate with its inscription identifying her as 'quene Kateryn Wife to Kyng Henry the VIII And Last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley, High Admyrall of England (sic)...' is near the tomb."

Thank you for that information,I had no idea Katherine's body was so ill-treated.

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"Kind of a morbid and odd question...I was looking at the pics of all the burial sites and noticed how small Catherine Howards was. Did they burry they standing up so to speak or is there a burial under the floor?"

As Hever and angelosdaughter have noted yes, they're buried under the floor in the normal fashion. Usually people who are actually burried under the floor of a chapel (instead of just having a memorial paver or slab on the floor but burried elsewhere, big difference to note!) are actually buried in a vault beneath the floor that contains the coffin (if they had one). Usually these markers don't mark exactly where the bodies rest (like in an outdoor grave yard), it's sometimes not possible to have a marker directly above where a vault is located and I'm not sure if Anne and Katherine's are in a vault and if they mark exactly where their bodies are located although I think I remember reading they are located somewhere beneath the altar of the chapel.

I've seen some burial markers in churchs that have read "somewhere beneath this stone lies...", that tells you that the body is not located directly beneath the stone.

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