THE mother of an eight-year-old boy who died of a rare form of leukaemia has been given permission to exhume his body from consecrated ground, despite objections from his father. The faculty was granted by the Consistory Court of Portsmouth diocese.
The boy died on 14 January 2023, and his parents were still in deep grief when the Portsmouth coroner released his body. The boy’s maternal grandmother then took control of all arrangements for his interment, and she had him buried on 24 February 2023 in consecrated ground at Kingston cemetery, where other members of the family had also been interred.
Neither of the parents, who are now separated, was brought up in the Christian faith, and their son had been raised an atheist. The mother was reported to believe that her son was in the wrong place.
She applied for a faculty to have his body exhumed and cremated. The father gave his consent to her petition within ten minutes of her request to him by email. The mother said that she had never wanted her son to be buried, and that, if she had been “in the right state of mind”, she would have chosen a cremation, as that was what “feels right”.
She said that she had made an at tempt on her own life because visiting her son’s grave was causing her mental anguish. She said: “I know that is not where he should be.”
The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful John Summers, granted the mother’s application for the faculty sought, and the exhumation was due to take place on 24 April 2025. On 20 April, however, the father notified the Portsmouth Registry by email that he was withdrawing his consent to the mother’s petition, and that he wanted to stop the exhumation.
The Chancellor then set aside his judgment and the order permitting exhumation, and remitted the matter for rehearing to the Deputy Chancellor, the Worshipful Mark Stewart. The father appeared as party opponent to the faculty.
The father said that he was now a Christian and that the “situation” did not “feel right” to him, and that he wanted the exhumation stopped. He said that, when he consented to the mother’s petition for exhumation, he did so to keep the peace with the mother. He was now trying to put his “faith back in God”. He added that he believed his son was now at peace; it felt “unnatural” to disrupt that.
The mother pointed to the father’s lifestyle and alleged that he had been imprisoned, and was a drug user.
The Deputy Chancellor said that in a Consistory Court setting there was no need to play out the parents’ evidence against each other; it did not assist in applying the legal principles.
The law was that burial within a churchyard or any consecrated land was, under the rites of the Church of England, to be regarded as permanent, a final resting place. That person was being entrusted to God for resurrection.
It was only in exceptional circumstances that that approach could be departed from. Mistake was often cited as an exceptional circumstance. It was a mistake that the parents had not known that the burial was taking place in consecrated ground. The Deputy Chancellor said that “for those without Christian beliefs, it may be said with some force that it is a fundamental mistake.”
The mother had demonstrated, he said, that “it was and remained a fundamental mistake” for her son to have been buried where he now lay, and how that came about had been “amply demonstrated” in the evidence of the grandmother, who said that it was all her idea.
The intervening event was the father’s change of mind. The Deputy Chancellor said that, if he acceded to the father’s objections, that “would be compounding the original mistake”, which the father had hitherto acknowledged.
He said that he understood that the father had embraced the Christian faith, but the fact remained that his son was not brought up in that faith. The father’s reasoning was not enough to displace the greater issue of the fundamental mistake, the Deputy Chancellor ruled, and the mother had demonstrated special circumstances to allow for exceptional exhumation.
A faculty was issued permitting the exhumation of the boy’s remains from Kingston cemetery.
