Royals spend their lives being treated in weird ways, and sometimes when they die,
it just gets even weirder. Joanna of Castille took her husband's body out to dinner, Richard
I had his parts spread around the world, and Anne of Brittany's heart was just stolen – literally.
William the Conqueror might have a cool name now, but as a kid he was known as "William
the Bastard." Despite the unflattering sobriquet, he was still a feared member
of the aristocracy who fought many enemies and successfully invaded England. It's enough to
make anyone hungry. And William certainly was, as he ate himself to a truly remarkable size.
There's nothing wrong with being large, but in this case, it directly killed William.
While off fighting more enemies in 1087, the king was stabbed in the stomach by his own saddle horn
and ruptured his intestines. It took him six weeks to die.
You'd think that would be long enough to plan a funeral fit for a king, but instead,
the second he was dead virtually everyone from the servants to the aristocrats fled.
Writer Orderic Vitalis recorded in his "Historia Ecclesiastica" that the king's
body was left almost naked on the floor of the house, as if he had been a barbarian.
The few people who remained buried William,
but at the funeral things got so much worse. As Orderic explained in a later writing,
"When the corpse was placed in the sarcophagus, and was forcibly doubled
up because the masons had carelessly made the coffin too short and narrow,
the swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the by-standers
and the whole crowd. A thick smoke arose from the frankincense and other spices in the censers,
but it was not strong enough to conceal the foul ignominy."
In other words – he exploded.
Sabata Dalindyebo was the paramount chief of the Themba people, who occupied an
area of South Africa that was supposedly independent from the all-white apartheid state.
While that sounds kind of like a good thing, these areas were carved out by the apartheid government,
and the African National Congress, as well as Chief Sabata, were extremely opposed to them.
The chief was outspoken about his support of a South Africa where every person was equal.
This made him a concern for the government, especially when he died in 1986.
They knew his funeral would be used as a large-scale protest against apartheid.
"It wasn't in fact a funeral to most of us. It was a political rally."
So they stole the chief's body. Not only was the corpse stolen,
but it was taken by Chief Sabata's archnemesis,
whom the Los Angeles Times says he referred to as "a usurper, scoundrel, and traitor."
The government hastily buried Chief Sabata, and the people were incensed. The chief's son asked,
"What crime is more despicable than stealing a man's body from his grieving family?
And when a chief ... is buried like a pauper,
then it is a crime against the whole nation, not just against his family."
Winnie Mandela, the activist and wife of Nelson Mandela, said of the government's burial,
”It really seems even in his death the late King
was a detainee. The King was virtually turned into a prisoner in his coffin.”
It wasn't until 1989 that Chief Sabata received an elaborate funeral.
France's famous Louis XIV, the Sun King, died in 1715.
He was buried in the traditional location for the country's royals: Paris' basilica of St. Denis.
When anti-monarchy mobs revolted in France in 1789, one of their targets was the basilica,
where the royal tombs were looted and destroyed.
Westminster Abbey claims Louis XIV's heart was taken from the tomb by a member of the
English aristocratic family, the Harcourts. They brought it to Britain, and in the mid-1800s,
the heart would have a fateful run-in with a man named William Buckland.
Buckland was a geologist, fossil-hunter, and noted next-level eccentric.
Buckland's main weird quirk was that he wanted to eat everything at least once.
When invited to a dinner at the Harcourt residence, Buckland was shown the family's
treasure: Louis XIV's preserved and shrunken heart in a silver box.
Instead of politely doing whatever you're supposed to do when shown a dead king's heart,
Buckland promptly grabbed it, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it, saying,
"I have eaten many strange things, but I have never eaten the heart of a king before."
Charles I was the only English monarch to be executed. After disagreements with Parliament,
which resulted in the English Civil War, Charles was put on trial and convicted of
treason against his own people. Since treason was a death penalty crime,
that meant Parliament was in the awkward and unprecedented position of executing the king.
There were legitimate worries about how this would play out. While the politicians had their reasons
for not liking the king, the regular people didn't necessarily agree. The execution would
take place in public, although attempts were made to keep the number of observers down to a minimum.
On January 30, 1649, Charles was led to the scaffold. He spoke to the crowd, but the presence
of loud drummers at the execution ensured he could not be heard. Then he laid his neck on the block.
An anonymous observer recorded what happened next:
"After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the executioner
at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people,
was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging."
How would the crowd react now the horrible deed was done?
It turns out ... really morbidly. The account continues:
"His blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends:
by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr."
In other words, they dipped things in his blood as souvenirs.
"Blood? Blood. Crimson, copper-smelling blood, his blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And bits of sick."
Although Anne of Brittany only lived to be 36 years old, she still managed to become queen of
France twice in that time. She was originally married to Charles VIII when she was 12,
and after he died she married his heir, which fortunately wasn't as gross as it could be,
since Louis XII was only Charles' second cousin once removed.
When Anne died in 1514, she was buried in the traditional tomb of the French royal family
at the Basilica of St. Denis but asked for her heart to lie next to her parents in Brittany.
It was put in a gold case, and even managed to avoid being destroyed during the French
Revolution, when anything royal the mobs could get their hands on was trashed.
So it was especially upsetting when, in 2018,
thieves stole the heart from the Thomas-Dobrée museum in Nantes.
People were shocked. Philippe Grosvalet, president of the group that oversees the museum, said,
"The thieves attacked our common heritage and stole an item of inestimable value.
Much more than a symbol, the case containing the heart of Anne of Brittany belongs to our history."
He asked them to come to their senses:
"If the thieves were motivated by the fact that it is shiny and made of gold, they should
understand that its historical and symbolic value far outweighs its 100 grams of gold."
The BBC reports that thankfully the heart was found, safe and intact, a month later.
When you go down in history as Philip the Handsome, you know you've done well for yourself.
Philip, Duke of Burgundy married Joanna of Castile in 1496. But he cheated on his
wife constantly. This made her jealous and unhappy, and then Philip died. This didn't
stop Joanna's obsessive love for her husband, and one historian at the Spanish court at the
time said she suffered from "the same jealousy that tormented her during her husband's life."
After his death, it's said that she would take his coffin with her everywhere, even eating next
to it at dinner. A chronicler recorded that she would visit her husband's body every day,
kissing the corpse's feet, driven, quote, "to the point of love madness ... the Good
Queen had no more profit or repose than a woman damned or deranged."
This is the old-school way of looking at what happened to Joanna, which earned her the sobriquet
"Juana la Loca" or "Joanna the Mad."
The men around her wrote down how she'd completely cracked, the poor
weak lady who couldn't handle her husband's death and did gross stuff with his corpse.
But revisionist historians are taking another look. People, including her own father,
were always trying to overthrow Joanna, and by keeping her husband's body near her,
she may have been using it as a symbol, both of her power and the legitimacy and rights of
her children. Rather than being an unstable woman who was unable to deal with her loss,
she might have been calmly and coldly defending her throne, using the corpse as a weapon.
"That rules."
Richard I, a.k.a. Richard the Lionheart, is famous for being king of England,
probably because of the many times he's mentioned in the Robin Hood tales.
But in reality, Richard wasn't in England all that much. He had land in France he liked,
plus he was always off fighting one Crusade or another. But it was while combining those
two loves and fighting some enemies in France that he was shot with a crossbow bolt and died.
Sometimes, important people in the Middle Ages would have their heart buried separately from
their body. Richard actually had three bits of his body buried in completely different locations ...
but despite this, they were all in France – he couldn't even spare a pinky toe for poor England.
Richard's body is in Fontevraud Abbey, his "entrails" went to the chapel in Châlus,
and his heart was taken to the Rouen Cathedral.
Over 800 years after Richard died in 1199, scientists analyzed his heart and found it
had been embalmed using ingredients that, as the Daily Beast notes, would have cost a pretty penny.
According to the BBC, French forensic scientist Philippe Charlier explained,
"The spices and vegetables used for the embalming
process were directly inspired by the ones used for the embalming of Christ.
For example, we found frankincense. This is the only case known of using frankincense ... That
consciousness of using very high-quality herbs and spices and other materials that
are much sought after and rare does add to that sense of it being Christ-like in its quality."
Samuel Pepys was a relatively middle-management courtier to Charles II,
but his name has gone down in history because he was very,
very good at writing in his diary. And he might have said too much.
In 1669, he wrote of a family outing to Westminster Abbey, where they got a tour of the
royal tombs. This included that of Catherine of Valois, the 15th century French wife of Henry V.
The tomb was broken, and they could see her corpse exposed, skeletal with scraps of leathery flesh.
This isn't surprising, but what Samuel Pepys did with the corpse is.
Telling on himself in his own words, he wrote,
"I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth,
reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen,
and that this was my birth-day, thirty-six years old, that I did first kiss a Queen."
That's certainly one way to treat yourself on your birthday. Samuel Pepys has been dead since 1703,
but still, if you ever see him? Call the cops.
"What a creep."
The 16th century Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões called Inês de
Castro "the one who after being killed was queen."
In the 1400s, Pedro I, the heir to the Portuguese throne, met Inês and fell madly in love,
but his dad King Afonso IV made him marry someone else. But Pedro refused to stop seeing Inês,
having kids with both her and his wife. To solve this problem, the king had Inês killed.
After Pedro inherited the throne, he wanted his children with Inês and not his wife to be his
heirs, so he claimed that he and Ines secretly got hitched before he was officially married.
This would make him a bigamist, but he was king, so everyone let it go. Regardless, Pedro used his
claim to make his kids legitimate, which meant Inês had been the real queen the whole time.
Now, the rest of this is just legend, and didn't appear in any records until the 1500s,
according to Google Arts and Culture. It's said that Pedro dug up Inês, sat her on the throne,
and made the whole court kiss the hem of her skirt as a sign of fealty to her.
Other sources, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, say a crown was placed on her head and courtiers
had to kiss her hand. While it's probably apocryphal, if any part of it is true,
it's definitely one of the weirdest things ever done to a royal after they died.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more videos about messed-up history are
coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.