THE Consistory Court of Portsmouth diocese has granted the mother of an eight-year-old boy who died of a rare type of leukaemia a college to exhume his body from consecrated ground, despite objections from his father.
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 he or she had him buried on 24 February 2023 in consecrated ground at Kingston cemetery, where other family members had also been interred.
Neither of the parents, who at the moment are separated, was brought up within the Christian faith, and their son had been raised an atheist. The mother was reported to imagine that her son was within the fallacious place.
She applied for a college to have his body exhumed and cremated. The father gave his consent to her petition inside 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 correct mind-set”, she would have chosen a cremation, as that was what “feels right”.
She said that she had made an attempt on her own life because visiting her son’s grave was causing her mental anguish. She said: “I do know that will not be where he must be.”
The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful John Summers, granted the mother’s application for the college sought, and the exhumation was as a result of happen on 24 April 2025. On 20 April, nonetheless, the daddy notified the Portsmouth Registry by email that he was withdrawing his consent to the mother’s petition, and that he desired to stop the exhumation.
The Chancellor then put 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 college.
The father said that he was now a Christian and that the “situation” didn’t “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 maintain the peace with the mother. He was now attempting 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 daddy’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 have to play out the parents’ evidence against one another; it didn’t assist in applying the legal principles.
The law was that burial inside a churchyard or any consecrated land was, under the rites of the Church of England, to be considered everlasting, a final resting place. That person was being entrusted to God for resurrection.
It was only in exceptional circumstances that that approach may very well 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 happening in consecrated ground. The Deputy Chancellor said that “for those without Christian beliefs, it might be said with some force that it’s 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 the way that got here about had been “amply demonstrated” within the evidence of the grandmother, who said that it was all her idea.
The intervening event was the daddy’s change of mind. The Deputy Chancellor said that, if he acceded to the daddy’s objections, that “can be compounding the unique mistake”, which the daddy had hitherto acknowledged.
He said that he understood that the daddy had embraced the Christian faith, but the actual 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 elemental mistake, the Deputy Chancellor ruled, and the mother had demonstrated special circumstances to permit for exceptional exhumation.
A school was issued permitting the exhumation of the boy’s stays from Kingston cemetery.
