Henry VIII wanted a giant Tudor tomb. So why didn’t he get it?

It would be entirely possible to visit St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle and glance over the modest stone slab marking the grave of Henry VIII without noticing it.

Its setting might be grand, but the marker itself is startlingly small: which is striking, given that it denotes the resting place of a titanic monarch who dominated the first half of the 16th century of English history with his palaces, pageantry and sweeping religious reforms.

How exactly did a king famed for grandeur and excess end up with one of the least conspicuous graves of any English ruler? As historian Kate Williams explains, the anonymity was never Henry’s intention.

“Henry VIII wanted a giant tomb in St George's Chapel,” she says, on an episode of her HistoryExtra Academy course.

“But he made a big mistake.”

It was that mistake that would ultimately ruin his ambitious vision and leave him with the humble gravestone.

Henry VIII’s vast funerary vision

Henry VIII’s planned tomb was intended to be a memorial that also served as a message.

Late medieval and early Tudor monarchs used their tombs to assert legitimacy, commemorate dynastic claims and broadcast their religious identity. Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster, completed in gilded splendour, set a new standard. Henry VIII planned to exceed it.

“He wanted a huge tribute with a big bronze effigy of him,” says Williams, “surrounded by pillars and models of angels and saints. It was going to be inside a black marble chapel.”

The king saw that as befitting the scale of his ambitions and achievements in life. A tomb on this scale would have functioned as his final statement of royal authority, suitable as the resting place of a monarch who made himself head of the English Church.

But the mistake Henry made was that he didn’t complete it during his lifetime. Instead, he trusted his successors to see it through.

An unfinished project inherited by unwilling heirs

When Henry died in 1547, his tomb was incomplete and enormously expensive. It was a problem that his heirs had little appetite to solve.

Edward VI, aged nine, ruled through Protestant councillors who were cutting costs and scaling back on religious symbols. The Catholic-inspired elements of Henry’s design were at odds with the new regime.

“Edward VI didn’t continue with the plans for the tomb,” Williams says. “[Edward’s successor] Mary I didn't either.”

Mary’s decision was down to more personal reasons. Henry had annulled his marriage to her mother, Catherine of Aragon; their estrangement shaped Mary’s childhood. Honouring her father with a lavish monument held little emotional appeal.

• Read more | Henry VIII’s six wives: your guide to the Tudor king's queen consorts

Then there was the final, and longest-serving Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I. She inherited a financially stretched kingdom. “She took a look into the plans for the tomb and decided against it,” says Williams.

The cost was enormous. The political value was negligible.

Across a generation, the project moved further from relevance. What Henry imagined as a dynastic centrepiece morphed into a burdensome relic of a former monarch whom no successor wished to resurrect.

The Civil War destruction of Henry VIII’s incomplete tomb

But that still left the unfinished elements. What happened to these partially completed parts of Henry’s tomb?

During the Civil War, royal monuments across England were dismantled as symbols of Stuart kingship and Catholic “idolatry”.

Henry’s incomplete bronze effigy (which had never been installed) was seized. “Oliver Cromwell's soldiers melted it down,” Williams says. The destruction reflected widespread Parliamentarian iconoclasm targeting royal and religious imagery with equal fervour.

Other elements of the tomb took unexpected journeys. The elaborate sarcophagus originally crafted for Cardinal Wolsey, later claimed by Henry for his own tomb, was eventually repurposed. Today, it stands in the central crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, protecting the remains of Admiral Horatio Nelson, Britain’s most celebrated naval commander.

It's questionable whether any royal monuments have had stranger afterlives.

Windsor Castle’s modest marker

For generations after Henry’s death, his burial remained effectively unmarked. Only in the 1830s did William IV introduce the simple ledger stone seen today.

“William IV thought: ‘maybe we should commemorate the fact that Henry VIII is lying there,’ and he made that slab,” Williams says. But even in William IV’s age of revived Gothic splendour, there was no desire to recreate Henry’s original design. “There was no way he was putting in the black marble and the angels and all the rest of it.”

Henry VIII imagined a monumental afterlife. Instead, the king who reshaped England’s political and cultural milieu lies beneath a marker smaller than those of many of his courtiers.

The reasons speak to the politics of the Tudor succession, the emotional rifts within the royal family, shifting religious priorities and the disruptive violence of the Civil War. No heir shared Henry’s appetite (or financial capacity) for self-commemoration. By the time a monarch did finally choose to mark his grave, the opportunity for grandeur had long passed.

“Henry VIII thought that everyone loved him,” says Williams. “It wasn't quite the case.”

Kate Williams was speaking on her HistoryExtra Academy series, Royal residences: secrets and scandals. All episodes are available now ad-free on the HistoryExtra app. Start watching today.