The Queen Whose Death Broke a King

She died trying to save her dynasty from a curse, and her death threw a king into a state of pure, terrifying madness. Elizabeth of York was the beloved Queen of Henry VII and the mother of Henry VIII. In 1503, desperate to secure a male backup heir after her eldest son suddenly died, she fell pregnant at 37. The birth went horribly wrong; the child died, and Elizabeth was consumed by a rapid, agonizing childbed fever. When she breathed her last, Henry VII completely lost his mind with grief. He banned everyone from the palace, locked himself in a dark room, and refused to let anyone touch her body. For days, her corpse sat in a warm royal bedroom, rapidly decomposing before the council could secretly bypass the king. They had to pack her body with expensive spices, wrap it tightly in heavy lead sheets, and literally smuggle her rotting remains out of the tower in a plain wooden coffin under the cover of night just to prevent the stench from consuming the castle.

Interesting Fact Henry VII’s grief was so pathological that he ordered a massive, unprecedented amount of wax—over 5,000 pounds—to be converted into hundreds of giant candles that burned continuously around her tomb for a year. He became a paranoid recluse after her death, locking away his surviving son, the future Henry VIII, in near-total isolation to protect him from the same fate.

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