Did Henry VIII Ever Pull a "Cask of Amontillado" ?

(If you don’t understand the reference, go read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”)

Apparently I answer Tudor and Shakespeare questions in way too much depth on Reddit for fun now. I’ve had trouble writing or revising fiction since the pandemic and self-isolation began, but researching and writing about history calms me down in a way nothing else does. And AskHistorians on Reddit has a wonderful supply of various questions that haven’t been answered yet.

This one was a particularly out of left field one but I had fun figuring out how to answer it!

So here ya go.

Original Question on r/AskHistorians - Is there any evidence of Henry VIII walling his enemies in buildings?

I've never heard of any English monarch pulling a "Cask of Amontillado" before, and I've been obsessively reading about English history between 1400-1620s for several years now. I dug into this a bit more to see if I could find an answer, but I could not find any sources that indicate that there have been any bodies buried in walls in England. However, as we all know, just because there isn't a source saying it DID happen, doesn't mean it definitely /didn't/ happen.

Human bodies are commonly found buried all around London and England in general, but honestly, that's true of most cities with at least a couple hundred years of history under their belts. It's just something that happens when a place has a very long history dating back before modern regulations on where bodies can be buried. If a house was unknowingly built on top of a burial site, the bodies may be found in the cellar You can read more about that in Smithsonian Magazine here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/dead-beneath-londons-streets-180970385/

I think it's very unlikely that Henry VIII in particular would have engaged in this practice though, for a few specific reasons:

Woodblock by Michael Wolgemut (1434 – 1519) of A Danse Macabre.

-Henry VIII was quite notoriously terrified of illness and sickness, and specifically the Sweating Sickness, likely due to his brother Arthur's death from it in 1502 ( https://www.history.com/news/the-mysterious-epidemic-that-terrified-henry-viii ). He studied medicine and tried to make his own potions to protect him against disease. (http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue42/article546.html?ts=1586114679&signature=51f561c9c7014194d1a849cdaac3de68 ) He also founded the Royal College of Physicians in 1518, made improvements to England's public health services, and ushered in legislation regulating the licensing of medical practitioners (Source: Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England, by Elizabeth Lane Furdell).

At the time, the miasma theory was one of the dominant theories of disease, which basically said that bad smells cause disease ( http://broughttolife.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/miasmatheory ); decaying corpses, rumor has it, smell pretty foul. Given his obsession with medicine and health, not just for himself, but also for his people, it seems unlikely that Henry would have approved of interring a body into the walls of any building or structure in England.

- He also was a very religious man, who heard mass 3-5 times a day and even wrote a theological argument against some of the teachings of Luther in 1521 ( https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/rulers/henry-viii.html ). There were numerous religious rites around death and dying, which require last rites, funeral rites, a vigil for the deceased, and ceremonies by the graveside. Thus, it also seems unlikely that a religious man like Henry VIII would have approved of such mistreatment of a body after death.