Failed Commemoration: A Royal Tomb and Its Afterlife

Visitors to St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, are often surprised to discover that two of England’s most recognizable kings, Henry VIII and Charles I, are buried together in a vault beneath a rather plain tablet in the choir. Christopher Highley’s essay tells the story of how this strange postmortem pairing came to be and how writers of different religious and political persuasions after 1649 drew inferences from it about the nation’s past, present, and future. By exploring this marginal site on the map of royal England, the essay offers insights into the cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, and the political uses of the past.