King Henry VIII's Coffin Exploded — And Dogs Licked His Remains

King Henry VIII's Coffin Exploded — And Dogs Licked His Remains

When Henry VIII died in 1547, he weighed nearly 400 pounds. His waist measured 54 inches. He had to be carried around in a specially built chair.

His body was sealed in a lead-lined coffin and placed on an enormous gilded chariot pulled by eight horses. The funeral procession stretched four miles long — over a thousand mourners on horseback, hundreds more on foot.

On the first night, the procession stopped at Syon Abbey to rest. By morning, something had gone very wrong. The gases from his decomposing body had built up so much pressure that the coffin split open. Blood and putrid matter leaked onto the chapel floor.

And then a stray dog wandered in and started licking it up. Here's where it gets eerie:

Twelve years earlier, a friar named William Peto had preached directly to Henry's face — warning him that if he divorced Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, God's judgment would fall upon him. He told the King that dogs would lick his blood, just as they had licked the blood of the wicked King Ahab in the Bible.

Henry threw the friar in prison. But he didn't execute him. And twelve years later, in the very abbey Henry had seized and shut down during his break with the Catholic Church... the prophecy came true.

Divine justice? Coincidence? Either way, even in death, Henry VIII couldn't escape his own excess.