The Man Who Ate Louis XIV’s Heart: William Buckland’s Strangest Meal

“I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before.” - William Buckland

n 1848, an unusual object was apparently passed around during a dinner at Nuneham House in Oxfordshire. It was small, shrivelled and kept inside a silver container. The object was said to be part of the preserved heart of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King who had ruled France for more than seventy years and built Versailles into one of the most extravagant royal palaces in history. Most people presented with the mummified heart of one of Europe's most famous monarchs would probably have inspected it carefully before handing it to the next person. William Buckland was not most people.

According to the famous account later recorded by writer Augustus Hare, Buckland looked at the relic and announced that although he had eaten many strange things, he had never eaten the heart of a king. Before anyone could stop him, he swallowed it.

Centuries of French monarchy, royal ceremony and careful preservation had apparently ended in the stomach of an eccentric Oxford professor during dinner in Oxfordshire. It sounds like the sort of story invented about an eccentric Victorian long after his death, and there are reasons to be cautious about some of the details. Unfortunately for Buckland's reputation, almost everything else we know about him makes the story remarkably believable.

William Buckland was born in Axminster in Devon in 1784 and became one of the most important British scientists of the early 19th century. He studied at Oxford University, entered the Church of England and eventually became Oxford's first Reader in Geology. He later became Dean of Westminster and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. If his life had ended there, he would have been remembered as a respected Victorian clergyman and academic. Instead, Buckland combined serious scientific achievement with a personality so eccentric that stories about his dinner table have survived almost as well as his geological discoveries.

His scientific achievements were considerable. In 1824, Buckland published the first full scientific description of an animal that would later be recognised as a dinosaur. Fossil bones discovered around Stonesfield in Oxfordshire belonged to an enormous extinct reptile that became known as Megalosaurus, meaning “great lizard”. The word dinosaur did not yet exist and would not be introduced by Richard Owen until 1842. Buckland therefore found himself describing the first scientifically named dinosaur without actually knowing that dinosaurs were a distinct group of animals.

He also became famous for his investigation of Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. The cave contained fossilised bones belonging to animals including elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and hyenas, which raised the rather obvious question of what they were doing beneath Yorkshire. Buckland studied bite marks, broken bones and fossilised animal droppings and concluded that the cave had once been occupied by prehistoric hyenas. His work was important enough to earn him the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1822, one of the most prestigious scientific awards in Britain.

Buckland had a particular fascination with fossilised faeces and helped popularise the term coprolite for them. To test his theories about the Kirkdale Cave, he compared ancient droppings with those produced by living hyenas. This included feeding animals to a captive hyena and examining what emerged afterwards. Most people would probably consider studying fossilised excrement strange enough, but Buckland's curiosity rarely stopped when a less sensible option remained available.

His interest in animals extended naturally to eating them. Buckland developed a reputation for attempting to taste as much of the animal kingdom as possible, a habit sometimes described as zoophagy. Guests at his home were presented with meals that could include creatures rarely encountered on an ordinary British dinner table. Accounts associate Buckland with crocodile, ostrich, hedgehog, tortoise, mice and various other animals. John Ruskin later regretted missing one of Buckland's breakfasts because it included what he described as a “delicate toast of mice”.

Not everything impressed Buckland's palate. He reportedly considered mole particularly unpleasant and later decided that bluebottle fly was even worse. There is something admirable about the fact that he apparently reached this conclusion through personal experimentation. Anybody can claim that eating a fly would probably be unpleasant. William Buckland appears to have required evidence.

His Oxford lectures reflected the same extraordinary personality. He was known for moving enthusiastically around the room, waving specimens, telling stories and even imitating the movements of extinct animals. He carried fossils, bones and other geological objects around with him and surrounded himself with specimens at home. Visitors encountered a household that combined serious scientific investigation with a menagerie of unusual animals and an equally unusual menu. His wife Mary was herself an accomplished scientific illustrator and naturalist who contributed significantly to his work, including producing illustrations connected with Megalosaurus.

Buckland's son Frank inherited much of this enthusiasm and later became a well-known naturalist with his own reputation for eating unusual animals. Between them, father and son transformed experimental dining into something approaching a family tradition. This background matters because without it, the story of Louis XIV's heart sounds ridiculous. With it, the more surprising outcome would almost have been Buckland politely returning the relic.

Louis XIV had died in 1715 after one of the longest reigns in European history. French royal burial traditions could involve removing and preserving the heart separately from the body, allowing different parts of a monarch to be interred or honoured in different religious locations. Louis XIV's heart was associated with the church of Val-de-Grâce in Paris. The French Revolution later brought widespread destruction and desecration of royal monuments and remains, creating an environment in which royal relics could disappear, be sold or find their way into private collections.

Exactly how part of Louis XIV's heart supposedly reached England is considerably less certain. The traditional version states that a member of the Harcourt family acquired the preserved fragment and brought it to Nuneham, their grand Oxfordshire residence. Another colourful version of the story claims that portions of the heart passed through the hands of a painter and may even have been associated with the production of “mummy brown”, a genuine pigment historically manufactured using material obtained from mummified human remains. The provenance becomes increasingly difficult to prove the further backwards we travel, which is important because even if Buckland swallowed something at dinner, establishing beyond doubt that it genuinely came from Louis XIV is another matter entirely.

The famous dinner is usually dated to 1848. Westminster Abbey's account of Buckland's life states that while dining at Lord Harcourt's residence at Nuneham, he was shown a silver locket containing an object resembling a piece of pumice stone. According to that version, Buckland put it into his mouth and swallowed it. The more entertaining account comes from Augustus Hare, who later wrote that conversation had turned to the preserved heart of a French king kept at Nuneham. Buckland supposedly examined it, delivered his famous remark about never having eaten the heart of a king and promptly gobbled it down.

There is one difficulty. Hare published his account decades after the supposed event and described the relic only as the heart of “a French King”, rather than specifically identifying Louis XIV. Later accounts firmly attached the Sun King's name to the story, and Westminster Abbey itself identifies the object as part of Louis XIV's mummified heart. The basic story therefore has respectable historical pedigree, but the exact details have become tangled with anecdote, family tradition and repeated retelling.

This uncertainty actually makes the story more interesting. William Buckland unquestionably existed, unquestionably possessed exceptionally unusual eating habits and unquestionably moved within the social circle associated with Nuneham.

Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts confirm that his guests encountered bizarre food and that he boasted of eating his way through the animal kingdom. The disputed question is not whether Buckland was capable of eating a preserved royal heart. By everything we know about him, he absolutely was. The question is whether the walnut-sized object placed in front of him really belonged to the most powerful king in 17th-century Europe.

Buckland's later years were less amusing. During the late 1840s his mental and physical health deteriorated significantly and he spent much of the remainder of his life seriously unwell. He died in 1856 at the age of 72 and was buried at Islip near Oxford. Even his burial managed to produce one final geological joke. When workers attempted to dig his grave, they encountered solid Jurassic limestone only a short distance beneath the surface and reportedly required explosives to break through it.

It was an unusually appropriate problem for a geologist to cause from beyond the grave.

William Buckland should be remembered as an important scientist. He helped establish geology and palaeontology as serious disciplines in Britain, investigated prehistoric ecosystems and produced the first scientific description of a dinosaur. Yet history has an unfortunate tendency to remember the most interesting detail about somebody rather than necessarily the most important one. Buckland spent decades examining rocks and fossils, won major scientific honours and became Dean of Westminster, but none of those achievements are quite as memorable as what supposedly happened during one dinner in 1848.

Louis XIV spent seventy-two years on the French throne, constructed Versailles and became known throughout Europe as the Sun King.

More than a century after his death, William Buckland may have turned what remained of his heart into dessert.