Inside The Royal Vault At Windsor: Who Is Buried With Prince Philip?

On the 17th of April, 2021, the coffin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was carried into St George's Chapel at Windsor, on the back of a Land Rover he had spent 16 years helping to design. His widow, the Queen, sat alone in a near-empty chapel, masked, her head bowed, because a pandemic had stripped the funeral down to 30 mourners. And then something happened, that almost no royal funeral allows you to see. The floor of the chapel opened, the coffin was lowered slowly on a mechanical platform, down through the stone and out of the light into a chamber that has held the bodies of kings and queens for more than 200 years, the Royal Vault. So the question seems simple. Who is down there with him? Who shares that darkness with the husband of Elizabeth II? He was laid to rest in the Royal Vault. At least that is where most people still believe he is. The truth is stranger, and to reach it we have to go down the same shaft his coffin travelled, and meet the dead one by one. Windsor, 1810. A king who was going blind gave the order to dig. George III was past 70, his eyesight failing, his mind beginning to slip into the long darkness that would define his final years. For most of his life he had been told he suffered from a disease of the blood. Modern historians who studied his own letters and the records of his physicians now lean towards something else, a severe and recurring mania, what today we would recognise as bipolar disorder. We will come back to him. He is, after all, going to end up in the room he was about to build. The royal dead were running out of space. The vaults under Westminster Abbey where his own grandfather lay were crowded and grim. George III wanted something better for his enormous family. He had 15 children. He needed room, so he turned to the oldest, saddest corner of the site, a chapel that Henry VII had begun building in the 1490s as the place he intended to be buried, then abandoned when he changed his mind and chose Westminster instead. For three centuries it had stood as a kind of architectural ghost. A Catholic king had used it. A mob had wrecked it. By 1800 it was a ruin known simply as the Tomb House. The king gave the work to his favourite architect, James Wyatt, and beneath that ruined chapel, Wyatt carved out a burial vault. Press accounts over the years have described it as around 70 feet long and nearly 30 wide, with stone shelving for dozens of coffins. The chapel itself has never published the measurements, so treat the exact figures with care. What is not in doubt is the scale of the ambition. It was the largest private burial vault in England, built to hold a dynasty. He built it to be filled. It never has been. The first person carried down into that new vault was not a king. It was a daughter. Princess Amelia was the youngest of George III's fifteen children, and his favourite. She had been ill for years, and when she died in November 1810, aged 27, her father was already unravelling. People at court believed her death was the blow that finally pushed his mind over the edge. She was the first coffin laid in the royal vault. The chamber her father built to hold a dynasty opened, in the end, to receive his child. She was not alone for long, and the company that joined her tells you something this audience already suspects about royal history. It was never only about the crowns. Two of George III's sons had died as little boys, decades earlier. Prince Alfred at the age of one. Prince Octavius at the age of four. The king had adored them. He once said that if he were to have no Octavius in heaven, he did not want to go there. For years the two boys had lain in Westminster Abbey. In 1820 they were lifted out and carried to Windsor to be reunited with the family in the new vault. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because it is easy to lose it among the kings. Three of the coffins in the royal vault belonged to children. And then, in that same stretch of years, the vault took the king himself. George III died at Windsor in January 1820, blind, deaf in one ear, and so withdrawn from the world that he had not understood, fifteen months earlier, that his wife Queen Charlotte had died. She had gone down into the vault ahead of him. He never knew. He was lowered into the dark beside her and the daughter he loved best, in the room he had ordered dug while he could still see well enough to read the plans. That is the strange mercy of this place. The man who built it to outlast his children outlived three of them and then joined them. But the coffin that draws the eye in this vault is none of theirs. It belongs to a young woman who should never have been buried here at all. She should have been crowned. Her name was Charlotte. Princess Charlotte of Wales. And in 1817 she was the most important young woman in the world. She was the only legitimate child of the Prince Regent, the man who would become George IV. She was the only legitimate grandchild of the old king dying upstairs, which meant that one day, not far off, she would be queen. The whole future of the monarchy ran through this one bright, headstrong, popular girl. The public adored her. After years of a mad king and a despised, pleasure-soaked regent, Charlotte was the hope the country had been waiting for. In 1816 she married a handsome, minor German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg for love, which in a royal marriage of that century was close to a miracle. They were happy. Within a year she was expecting a child. The nation held its breath. An heir to the heir. The line secured for generations. On the 3rd of November, 1817, Charlotte went into labor. It lasted more than fifty hours. The doctors, terrified of harming the future queen, did almost nothing and waited and waited. The child, a boy, was stillborn. And then, in the early hours of the morning, Charlotte herself began to bleed and weaken and a few hours later she was dead. She was twenty-one. The grief was total. Shops closed. Even gambling houses shut their doors. People who had never met her wept in the streets. It is hard now to convey how completely the country had pinned itself to this one young woman and how completely it came apart when she died. Her obstetrician, broken by the blame, took his own life three months later. She was carried into the royal vault with her stillborn son in her arms. And of all the Hanoverians lying in that chamber, she is the only one given a great public memorial, paid for by ordinary people who could not bear to let her vanish. A sculpture of her body under a sheet, and her soul rising above it, with her baby. This decision, this terrible accident of a long labor and cautious doctors, seemed like the end of one story. It was the start of a different one entirely. Because when Charlotte died, she took the future with her. The old king's many middle-aged sons, who had spent their lives ignoring their duty to marry, suddenly had a reason to. The succession was wide open. There was a scramble, almost unseemly, as elderly princes raced to find young wives and produce the next heir. One of them, the Duke of Kent, married a German widow and fathered a daughter in 1819. That daughter was Victoria. Had Charlotte lived, there is almost certainly no Queen Victoria. No Victorian age bearing her name. The entire shape of the next two centuries of this family bends around a girl who bled to death in a country house, and who lies tonight in the vault beneath our feet. Remember that line as we go down further. We are going to need it before the end. There is one more thing the workmen found in this part of the chapel. They were not looking for it. And what they did when they found it, has never quite been forgiven. We are about to open a coffin that was never meant to be opened again. If you want to keep going down with me, take a second to subscribe, because the channel lives on people who care about the forgotten parts of these stories. Now, back into the dark. 1st of April, 1813. Workmen are widening a passage near the royal vault, making it easier to bring coffins through. A wall gives way. And on the other side, where no plan said anything should be, they find a small forgotten chamber holding three coffins. I have to stop you here, because this is the exact detail this audience will check, and they will be right to. This chamber is not the royal vault. It is a separate, much older vault, directly under the centre of the choir, and it had been lost for so long that breaking into it was an accident. Two different burial places, a few feet of stone apart. If you take one fact from tonight, take that one, because of who was inside. The largest coffin, in the centre, was solid lead. The wood around it long rotted away. The smaller one beside it, the same. Together they were the bodies of King Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, the only one of his six wives he chose to be buried with, the one who gave him his son and died doing it. And the third coffin, draped in the remains of black velvet, belonged to a king the English had executed, Charles I. The monarch this country put on trial and beheaded in 1649, his head and body sewn back together and buried here, quietly, almost in secret. Three of the most consequential corpses in English history, in a hole no one had opened in generations. That was the discovery the public was told about. Behind the scenes, something less dignified was about to happen. Word reached the prince regent, the future George IV, the same vain and pampered man whose daughter Charlotte we just buried, and the regent could not resist. Curiosity, he decided, outranked the peace of the dead. On his order, in the presence of his brother and the royal physician Sir Henry Halford, they opened the coffin of Charles I. Enter Sir Henry Halford, and it is his account, written afterwards, that gives us everything we know about what was inside, so take the most theatrical parts as one man's telling. Halford wrote that the king's face was still recognisable from his portraits, the pointed beard intact. He claimed that as the coffin opened, the left eye was for a moment open and full before it dissolved away. Whether that happened exactly as he described, we cannot know. He is the only witness who wrote it down, and he was not a modest man. What is harder to dispute is the part that matters. Halford lifted the head, and it came away loose in his hands, and the fourth bone of the neck had been cut cleanly through. A single, smooth surface, the kind of cut that can only be made by a heavy, very sharp blade brought down with force. After more than a century and a half, the lead coffin of Charles I still carried the physical proof of the axe. The execution, written into the bone. And here is the detail everyone walked past at the time. They did not just look. The royal physician took souvenirs. A tooth. A fragment of that severed neck bone. A portion of the king's beard. He carried them away from the coffin of an anointed king of England as keepsakes, and for years afterwards Sir Henry Halford was said to produce that piece of Charles I at dinner parties to show his guests. A future king pried open a dead king's coffin for entertainment, and let his doctor pocket the bones. So, not exactly a nation's finest hour. The public, it turned out, understood their prince perfectly. The cartoonists fell on him. Here was a man so cruel and so trapped in his own loveless marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. A man desperate to be rid of a wife and unable to manage it, peering greedily into the coffin of Henry VIII, the king who had disposed of wives whenever he pleased. The joke wrote itself. The regent gazing at Henry, who got rid of six while he could not get rid of one. The bones did not stay taken forever. Decades later, in 1888, the relics were quietly returned to the coffin by another Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, sealed in a small lead casket and lowered back into the dark where they belonged. Three quarters of a century after the powerful had treated a dead king as a curiosity, the powerful at last put him back together. Today a plain black slab in the chapel floor marks where Henry VIII and Charles I lie. Most of the people who walk over it have no idea they are standing on a beheaded king. Now back to the other vault. Back to the room we actually came down here for. Because for all its kings, the royal vault has a secret of its own. It does not keep them. Here is the thing about the royal vault that the funerals never tell you. It was built to be a Look at who passed through. Edward VII was lowered into this vault in 1910, then moved to a permanent tomb elsewhere in the chapel. George V, the same. George VI, the father of Elizabeth II, lay in this vault too, before he was moved to a memorial chapel built specially for him. Again and again, a king goes down into the royal vault, and then, when his proper tomb is ready, a king comes back out. The chamber George III built to hold his dynasty forever became the room his dynasty only passes through. The grand vault, the largest in England, is in practice a waiting room. You would think that a place this carefully built would be where royalty finally stops moving. It is the opposite. It is where they pause. About two dozen people remain down there permanently now, and the exact count shifts depending on who is counting, because over the years coffins have been brought in, moved out, and rearranged. Queen Victoria herself had the whole vault reorganized after Albert died. The coffins pushed back into the wall niches and sealed behind heavy iron grills, each with a name. Some junior royals were later moved out altogether to make room. So the real question is what happens behind those iron gates after the cameras leave and the chapel floor closes over a coffin? The answer, more often than not, is that the wait begins. The vault holds you until somewhere better is ready, which brings us back to the man we started with. Because if the royal vault is a waiting room, then Prince Philip, lowered into the dark in front of the whole world in 2021, was not arriving. He was waiting. And if this story ended at his funeral, he would still be down there tonight. It does not end there. In September, 2022, 17 months after Philip's funeral, Elizabeth II came home to Windsor to be buried. At her committal service, in front of cameras watched by millions, her coffin was lowered on that same platform into the same royal vault, down to where her husband had been waiting since the spring of the year before. For a few hours, on the 19th of September, the Queen and her Prince lay together in the dark chamber George III had built. And then, that evening, away from the cameras, the family did the thing this vault was always built to allow. This is where the story turns in a way almost no one expects. They moved them both. Philip's coffin was lifted back out of the royal vault. So was Elizabeth's, and the two of them were carried a short distance to a small, quiet chapel, built onto the side of St. George's, and laid to rest there together, for good. The King George VI Memorial Chapel. So the honest answer to the question we started with, who is buried with Prince Philip, is this. Not the kings of the royal vault. Not George III. Not Charlotte. Not the children. He does not lie with them anymore. He lies under a single slab of stone with four other people, and their names are cut into the floor. King George VI, Elizabeth's father, who never expected to be king, and whom the strain helped kill at 56. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The ashes of their daughter, Princess Margaret. Then Elizabeth II. And then last, Philip. Five members of one family under one stone. That is who Prince Philip is buried with. The woman he stood behind for 73 years, and her closest blood. So when people say Prince Philip rests in the royal vault, they are describing a room he has not been in since the night of his wife's funeral. The vault was the waiting. The stone beside Elizabeth is the rest. And now follow the line out of that chapel and into daylight, because this is the part this family has always been about. The man lowered into that vault in 2021 is not gone in any way that matters. His son sits on the throne tonight as Charles III. His grandson William will follow. His great grandson George after that. The surname they carry when they need one, Mountbatten-Windsor, is Philip's name fused to the crown. The blood that went down that shaft is the same blood ruling from London this evening. He is in the ground at Windsor. And he is also, quite literally, on the throne. And remember Charlotte, the queen we never had, lying in the vault we just left. Her death is the reason this particular family holds the crown at all. It rerouted the line through Victoria, and Victoria's line runs straight to the man buried beside Elizabeth, and to his son wearing the crown now. The girl who never got to be queen made every monarch since possible. In 2015, when William and Catherine had a daughter, they named her Charlotte. The official reasons given were her grandfather Charles, the late queen, and William's mother, Diana. People who know this history heard the older echo too, the lost princess of the vault, though the family never said so. Make of that what you will, the yeast bloodline never actually disappeared into that dark, it only ever passed through. Go back to where we started. April 2021. A coffin sinking slowly through the floor of a chapel, out of the light, while a widow watches alone. It looked that day, like the most final thing in the world. The end of a man who had lived almost a century, going down into a king's vault to stay. But he did not stay. He went down to wait, and then he was raised again, and carried the last few steps to lie beside the only person he had ever truly stood behind. The descent everyone watched was not the ending. It was the pause before it. That is the strange truth of the royal vault at Windsor. A grieving, half-blind king dug it two centuries ago to hold his family forever, and forever never came. The shelves still wait, half-empty, in the dark. The dynasty it was built for sleeps one room over, under a plain stone, and rules from a palace twenty miles away. The vault keeps its children and its lost queen, and the cut bones of a beheaded king a few feet to the west. But the ones it was truly built for, the kings and the queens, it only ever borrows. If you want more of the forgotten corners of these families, the heirs who vanished and the graves nobody turned the right way up, stay with us. There are a great many of them, and almost no one tells their stories properly.