Bodies of former Archbishops of Canterbury discovered

The coffins of five Archbishops of Canterbury have been found in a church vault beside Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the prelate for almost 800 years.

They include Richard Bancroft, archbishop from 1604, who chaired the committee that oversaw the creation of the King James Bible, published in 1611.

The discovery was made last year during renovations in the former chancel at St Mary-at -Lambeth (pictured), a deconsecrated medieval church which houses the Garden Museum. Builders lifting Victorian concrete slabs found steps leading to a hidden crypt. The site manager, Karl Patten, said: “We got a camera on the end of a stick and discovered numerous coffins. One of them had a gold crown on top of it.”  That turned out to be a bishop’s mitre. In all 20 coffins were found, stacked on top of each other.

The museum’s director, Christopher Woodward, said that subsequent research in the church’s records indicated the remains of five archbishops were interred there. They included Frederick Cornwallis (in office 1768-1783), Matthew Hutton, (1757-1758) Thomas Tenison (1695-1715) and John Moore (1783-1805), whose wife, Catherine, was also found in the vault.

Mr Woodward said it was believed the church had no crypt as it is so close to the Thames that it would have flooded. He added: “We also knew that in the 1850s when the Victorians remodelled the church, they cleared hundreds if not thousands of coffins out to make this new building … no one told us to expect to find anything.”

St Mary’s was regarded as the family church of successive archbishops. It was deconsecrated in 1972 and closed in 2015 for a £7.5m redevelopment,  shortly due for completion.