After the Resurrection, this tomb is crammed with the remains of former Archbishops of Canterbury.
Last year, during the refurbishment of the Garden Museum, which is housed in a deconsecrated medieval parish church next to Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official London residence, builders made the discovery of a lifetime: a cache of 30 lead coffins that had lain undisturbed for centuries.
Closer inspection revealed metal plates bearing the names of five former Archbishops of Canterbury, going back to the early 1600s.
Building site managers Karl Patten and Craig Dick made the find by chance, as the former chancel at St Mary-at-Lambeth was being converted into an exhibition space. Stripping some stone to even out the precarious flooring and enable disabled access to the old altar, they accidentally cut a six-inch diameter hole in the floor and noticed a hidden chamber beneath.
Attaching a mobile phone to a stick, they dropped it into the void. What they filmed astonished them – a hidden stairway leading to a brick-lined vault. Inside, piled on top of each other, were the coffins. On top of one rested an archbishop’s red and gold mitre.
Two had nameplates – one for Richard Bancroft (in office from 1604 to 1610) and one for John Moore (in office, 1783-1805), whose wife, Catherine Moore, also had a coffin plate. Also identified from a coffin plate was Dean of Arches John Bettesworth (who lived from 1677 to 1751), the judge who sits at the ecclesiastical court of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
St Mary-at-Lambeth’s records have since revealed that a further three archbishops were probably buried in the vault: Frederick Cornwallis (in office from 1768 to 1783), Matthew Hutton (1757-1758) and Thomas Tenison (1695-1715). A sixth, Thomas Secker (1758-1768), had his viscera buried in a canister in the churchyard.
“It was amazing seeing the coffins,” says Patten. “We’ve come across lots of bones on this job. But we knew this was different when we saw the archbishop’s crown.”
Details of the find have been kept secret for months until Easter Day to make the vault safe ahead of the museum’s grand reopening next month. As the tomb had been undisturbed for centuries, there was a fear the roof may have been unstable.
A square manhole has now been let into the chancel floor, with a glazed panel that will offer a glimpse of the steps down to the vault. The coffins – which have been left exactly where they were discovered, undisturbed – will be out of bounds, for good reason. Most lead sarcophagi contain dry remains, but some bodies decompose into a viscous black liquid known as “coffin liquor”. Should the ancient casings crack, it will spray forth.
Today, I am the first outsider to be allowed a look into the hidden tomb. I lie on the newly flattened altar, stare deep into the gloom, and point my torch at that mitre, still gleaming away on the jumbled pile of archbishops’ coffins. It is a spine-tingling view – one that astounded Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum when he first heard of the discovery.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “I knew there had been 20,000 bodies buried in the churchyard. But I thought the burial places had been cleared from the nave and aisles, and the vaults under the church had been filled with earth.”
Woodward was not alone in this. St Mary’s crucial role in the history of Lambeth Palace’s most prestigious residents had been lost over time. It was originally an Anglo-Saxon church, built in 1062. Lambeth Palace was built later, in the 13th century. As the palace grew in importance, St Mary’s was overshadowed, literally and metaphorically.
There were records of archbishops being buried in the church, from the 17th to the 19th centuries. But it was thought their coffins had been swept away in 1851, when the ancient church was almost entirely rebuilt, except for its tower. Historians, Woodward included, believed the vaults had been filled in. And so they had been, except for the one beneath the holy altar, the most important spot in the building.
Woodward employed archaeologists, who photographed the coffin plates and researched burial records. Finally, last month, they came up with their staggering conclusions.
Of the identified coffins, the most important belongs to Bancroft, the chief overseer of the publication of the King James Bible. Production began in 1604 and the Bible was finally published in 1611, the year after Bancroft’s death. To find his coffin after all these centuries is astonishing.
“Archbishop Bancroft was chosen by King James I to put together a new English translation of the Bible,” says Woodward. “He didn’t write it, of course, but he made it happen, and the words he forced into print still ring out across a thousand churchyards every Sunday morning. It feels very precious to have his coffin as cargo in our hold.”
Woodward has also consulted Dr. Julian Litten, Britain’s greatest expert on ancient funerals and author of The English Way of Death. The Lambeth mitre chimed with his research into senior church funerals. Archbishops were buried with painted, gilded mitres placed on their coffins as part of their funerary achievements.
Litten concluded that the Lambeth mitre was a fine, 17th-century example. He also worked out, from the stamped plate on the casket beneath, that the coffin was made between 1775 and 1825, probably by the crown undertakers, Banting of St James’s. In other words, the mitre belonged to an older coffin, lower down in the pile, and had been moved on top of the new arrival to prevent damage.
“There is no other vault in the UK so rich in its sacerdotal (priestly) contents,” says Litten. “In short, it is the only archiepiscopal vault in the UK and, therefore, unique in the true meaning of the word.”
You might think Archbishops of Canterbury would be buried in Canterbury Cathedral. And, indeed, more than 50 of them are. But there is no rule saying their remains must be interred there. Six are buried in Croydon; three in Oxford; one in St Lawrence Jewry, in the City of London; one in Westminster Abbey; two in Winchester; and several on the Continent, from Normandy to Viterbo in Italy.
It isn’t surprising, then, that six were buried in Lambeth, residence to Archbishops of Canterbury for nearly 800 years. What is surprising is that they should be in tiny St Mary’s, rather than mighty Lambeth Palace itself.
The archbishops lived in glitzy splendour in the palace, with their own grand apartments, hall and sprawling gardens. Today, the Archbishop of Canterbury still has his own magnificent, 13th-century chapel and crypt within the palace walls. But his predecessors were buried not inside the palace chapel, but in the humble church next door.
How the old archbishops adored the church. Every time a member of the royal family visited Lambeth Palace, the bells of St Mary’s were rung. When a new rector was recruited for the church, he was often one of the Archbishop’s own chaplains or household officers.
“St Mary’s was unique as a London parish church as it was also, in effect, an annex of Lambeth Palace,” says Woodward. “This discovery opens up that whole story.”
Deconsecrated in 1972, St Mary’s pews and bells were transplanted to churches and houses across the country. It was even due to be demolished before becoming the Museum of Garden History (later renamed the Garden Museum) in 1977.
How wonderful that while St Mary’s has risen from the dead, its ancient, holy spirits are still sleeping under the altar.
