Ah, 23 February — 354th anniversary of the time Samuel Pepys celebrated his birthday the way any normal person would: by grasping the corpse of a queen consort who’d been dead for 232 years and kissing it on the mouth
Up: and to the Office, where all the morning. And then home, and put a mouthful of victuals in my mouth; and by a hackney-coach followed my wife and the girls, who are gone by eleven o’clock, thinking to have seen a new play at the Duke of York’s house. But I do find them staying at my tailor’s, the play not being to-day, and therefore I now took them to Westminster Abbey, and there did show them all the tombs very finely, having one with us alone, (there being other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday); and here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois; and I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birth-day, thirty-six years old, that I did first kiss a Queen. But here this man, who seems to understand well, tells me that the saying is not true that says she was never buried, for she was buried; only, when Henry the Seventh built his chapel, it was taken up and laid in this wooden coffin; but I did there see that, in it, the body was buried in a leaden one, which remains under the body to this day.
Poor Katherine had been uncovered at some point during the reign of Henry VII — which ended in 1509, when she would have been 72 years dead. She was finally re-interred while Victoria was queen (and she ascended to the throne around 400 years after Katherine had vacated this mortal coil).
