Part 2

What processions, triumphal or funereal, have passed along Mercery Lane and crossed the little open space before the gateway to the Precincts! Two French kings, and nearly every English sovereign till Queen Anne, have been here. Louis VII of France as a pilgrim, John of France as the captive of the Black Prince, Henry II on his bitter pilgrimage of penance in 1174; Richard Coeur de Lion with his captive, William the Lion of Scotland, in 1189; Henry III with the Magna Carta Archbishop Stephen Langton at the Great Pardon of 1220. Here before the Cathedral gate halted for a moment the weeping cavalcade when they buried the Black Prince, in 1376--

"To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation, Mourning when its leaders fall".

No man bearing weapons was admitted to the Precincts after the murder of Becket; therefore the two emblematic riders who had accompanied the bier from Westgate, "one bearing the Prince's arms of England and France, the other the ostrich feathers--one to represent the Prince in his splendid suite as he rode in war, the other to represent him in black as he rode to tournaments"--had here to fall out of rank. Here were borne to their grave Henry IV and his Queen Joan of Navarre. Dean Stanley remarks that Henry IV as a child of ten was perhaps present as a mourner at the Black Prince's funeral, unknowing that he should overthrow the Prince's son Richard II and finally rest by the famous warrior's side.

The devout but incapable and unfortunate Henry VI was at Canterbury eleven times, and more than once as a pilgrim. As a pilgrim, in humblest guise, he was here after his final defeat at Tewkesbury, his Queen in captivity, his son dead on the field "stabbed by the Yorkist Lords after Edward (the Fourth) had met his cry for mercy with a buffet from his gauntlet". Henry himself went hence to die in the Tower, and so end the hopes of the House of Lancaster.

The little open space between Mercery Lane and the Precincts gatehouse has seen many strange doings which we cannot record. In the thirteenth century Canterbury was requisitioned for a contingent of Edward I's Welsh invasion, and the monks refused to bear their share of the expense. This led to a furious dispute with the citizens, an embittered kind of "Town and Gown". A trench was dug before the gate to prevent ingress and egress of men or victuals, and the brethren appear to have been starved out. In the fifteenth century Edward IV hanged the Mayor and some of his friends here for complicity in treason.

But these "old, unhappy far-off things" were before the existence of the present beautiful Perpendicular gatehouse, depicted in our illustration. Its Norman predecessor was still standing, lower, plainer, grimmer, like most Norman buildings. Prior Goldston did not finish this one till 1517. In 1520, when its carvings were fresh and the stone bright in the sunshine, and the great statue of Our Lord looked down from over the archway, and the octagonal side-turrets, like those of St. Augustine's, were not within three hundred years of being pulled down that bank-clerks might see the Cathedral clock from the other end of Mercery Lane--then there came to the last of the Great Pardons, with trumpetings and gorgeous retinue, two great kings riding under one canopy. One was Henry VIII and the other the mightiest monarch in Christendom, Charles V the Emperor of Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, President of the Diet which tried to murder Luther, as the Council of Constance had murdered Huss; but a far better man than Henry, and uncle of Henry's Queen, Katherine. Before them rode Cardinal Wolsey, and there were Spanish Grandees, and English Nobles, and Queen Katherine herself. "The streets", says Dr. Cox, "were lined with priests and clerks from all the parishes within twenty miles of the city, with censers, crosses, surplices, and copes of the richest sort. At the great west doors of the church (still opened only for royalties and archbishops) they were met by the Archbishop, and after saying their devotions they proceeded to Wareham's Palace. On one evening of that week Wareham gave a great ball in the hall of the Palace, when the Emperor danced with the then Queen of England, and Henry with the Queen of Aragon, the Emperor's mother."

Henry, as we know, had a taste for cloth of gold, and the affair must have been sufficiently sumptuous. This was perhaps the last of the great pageants.

Charles I came here with his fifteen-year-old bride; Charles II was gracious at considerable expense to the citizens, and brought as his Archbishop the faithful Juxon, who had been chaplain on the fatal day at Whitehall and had received the mystic word "Remember"; Elizabeth in her haughty way was "exceeding magnifical" at the charges of Archbishop Parker, whose wife she declined to call Madam, since clergymen had no business with wives. The little square has also humbler associations. It has been a bull-ring, where the poor beasts were baited "to make them man's meat and fit to be eaten". It has had a beautifully carved Market Cross, which gave place to the doubtful memorial to Marlowe. The massive oaken doors bear Juxon's coat of arms, for he set them up in place of those destroyed by the Puritans. They are open; let us pass to the object of our pilgrimage, the great Cathedral whose builders built better than they knew, and left for all time a history of this land and its faith, written and illuminated in stone.

THE CATHEDRAL

Once within Christ Church Gate, and in view of the whole southern side of the Cathedral, we may pause for a moment and enjoy the vision. That central tower, surely for dignity and beauty without its peer in the land, took from first to last fifty years in the building, and was christened from its first stone the Angel Steeple, from the figure with which it was to be crowned, though now, the Angel having taken flight, it is usually known as Bell Harry, from the great bell hung in it. Mark in the sunshine (for it is a sunny day) the depth and variety of shadows and lights on its moulded and sculptured surface. Not without pity and indignation do we read that Goldwell, the last of the priors who built the gatehouse and completed the tower, begged in vain, when a palsied old man, at the dissolution of the convent, to be continued in his old home as the first Dean. Nicholas Wotton, a wily monk not of the fraternity, whose stone effigy you will see kneeling in the Trinity Chapel, was appointed in his stead.

After Bell Harry, the next place in our admiration is due to the Norman staircase-turret, somewhat farther east, with arcading so fine and decorative as to remind us of arabesque. This turret, with its fellow on the north side, and the ruined staircase in the Green Court, are Norman work unsurpassed anywhere. The fivelight Decorated window of St. Anselm's Chapel is believed by well-qualified judges to be the most beautiful instance of early fourteenth-century tracery in the country. It is, of course, much later than the chapel, and was inserted, in 1336, by Prior Oxenden, whose account states the cost at L42, or about L650 of our money, all given by himself and his friends.

On our walk to the Norman turret and St. Anselm's Chapel we notice, under the east window of the Warrior's Chapel, a projection like a low buttress. It is the foot of Stephen Langton's tomb. He was originally buried within, when the chapel was built on to the transept; and later laid here, with the altar over his head, and his feet in the open ground.

As we move along the Precincts we are treading on the dust of the Cathedral-builders. For all this southern side was a graveyard--of the laity as far as St. Anselm's, and of the monks and clergy beyond. The two were divided by a wall, in which was set as gateway the gabled Norman arch which is now the entrance to the Bowling Green in front of us. It is a curious reflection that, in those days of primitive transport, these walls and towers were brought stone by stone from the quarries at Caen in Normandy. The barges crossed the Channel and were unloaded at Fordwych, about two miles from Canterbury. Formerly the tides came up the river in considerable volume, and Fordwych was a flourishing port with its Mayor and Corporation; and still has its queer little town hall, its ducking stool for scolds, and its prison, though only a tiny hamlet of one hundred and fifty people. When Louis VII of France made his annual grant of 1600 gallons of wine to Christ Church Priory, a fee was paid to the Mayor of Fordwych for the use of his crane in lifting the barrels from the boats. Not many years ago, at an audit of the Chapter Accounts, a yearly item of forty shillings was identified as this very fee, which has been regularly paid for centuries, after the "Wine of St. Thomas" had been consumed, discontinued, and forgotten. Whether this odd survival will more interest the historic, or shock the financial, sense of our American visitors is a question of psychology.

The nave was not built till the end of the fourteenth century, and is therefore one of the latest parts of the church. Of the two western towers the northern stood, as built by Lanfranc shortly after the Conquest, till 1834. During the excavations preparatory to the present structure it is said that the skeletons of a man and two bullocks were found in an upright position, as they had sunk into the marsh in Norman times. All this side was very marshy, and the crypt of the choir was frequently flooded. The ground-level has risen during the last few centuries, but is still only some 20 or 30 feet above the sea.

Above the outer entrance of the south-west porch is a bas-relief, blackened with age, of the altar which, after Becket's murder in the Martyrdom, was erected at the spot where he fell. It was called the Altar of the Sword's Point; and the fragment of Richard the Breton's sword, which dealt the last fierce blow, and was shivered on the pavement, is seen here at the foot of the altar. Above it is a crucifix with the figures of St. John and the Virgin. The pilgrims used to offer their gifts and prayers at three holy places in succession, at the "Sword's Point", in the Martyrdom; then at the earlier tomb of Becket in the crypt; and lastly at the shrine in the Trinity Chapel.

Inside the porch, when Erasmus was here (1513), there were three stone figures of the murderers in full armour, "enjoying", he says, "the same sort of fame as Judas, Pilate, and Caiaphas". In Saxon times the porch served not only as entrance to the church, but also as courthouse and muniment room, where the Kings of Kent did justice and judgment. Of course the present structure is much later, but both porch and nave cover the ground-plan of the ancient church of Lanfranc, which had a short choir, and an apse like that of a Roman basilica.

Let us enter, and, having looked at the great west window, filled with thirteenth-century glass from other parts of the Cathedral, let us face eastward, with the vast piers and lofty arches on either hand. We see the long flight of steps up to the choir, and perhaps get a glimpse, through the door in the screen, of the farther and higher flight up to the Holy Table. This long vista, with its double ascent, is said to have greatly impressed the mediaeval pilgrims, as indeed it still impresses us. There is nothing, I think, elsewhere quite like it; and it was doubtless intended to symbolize and accentuate the idea of "going up to" the shrine, which was in the exalted Trinity Chapel as in a throne-room. Incidentally this unusual elevation of the eastern floor of the church made possible one of the finest crypts in existence, which for space and dignity is a church in itself.

As we go forward to the choir steps, and stand below the screen and under the central tower, there is much to observe. Overhead are the carved stone "struts" or crosspieces with which Prior Goldston buttressed his piers, and distributed the strain of the tower's enormous weight. Their date is marked by the rebus of the builder's name T and P (for Thomas, Prior), and between the letters a gilded stone. A similar rebus is in the crypt on Cardinal Morton's monument--a mort or hawk perched on a tun or barrel.

The great window in the south transept, on our right, belongs to the fifteenth century, but is filled with magnificent glass brought from the choir clerestory, and 200 years older than the mullions which frame it. The corresponding north transept window was filled with splendid glass by Edward IV; the ecclesiastical figures in the topmost tracery, some borders, and the panels representing the King with his two sons who perished in the Tower, and his Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, with her daughters, still remain. The eldest girl is Elizabeth of York, who married Henry VII, and so ended the feud of York and Lancaster. The rest of the glass, which illustrated the life of the Virgin, and the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, was smashed by the pike of the Puritan miscreant Culmer, who gloried in having "rattled down Becket's glassy bones". It is strange that he spared three of the unique thirteenth-century Becket windows in the Trinity Chapel. It is said that, as he was at work on his ladder, a townsman below enquired what he was doing. "The work of the Lord," was the reply. "Then if it please the Lord I will help you," and an adroit boulder was flung at his head. This may have cooled his zeal; but, alas! there is room for misgiving that he ducked his head in time. So the happiest hopes of history have sometimes miscarried.

On our right, again, is the entrance from the south transept into St. Michael's, or the Warriors' Chapel, where the honoured grave of Langton, the Magna Charta archbishop, is half inside and half outside, the wall striding over him by an arch so that his head should lie under the altar. This chapel contains, and was probably enlarged to contain, the extremely fine monument of Lady Margaret Holland and her two husbands, which is a perfect study of the armour and dress of the early fifteenth century. The first husband was Earl of Somerset and half-brother of Henry IV, and the second was, curiously, nephew of the first and brother of Henry V. The lady outlived them both and placed their effigies here with her own between them. She was the stepdaughter of the Black Prince.

On our left again, in the north transept, is the far-famed Martyrdom, the spot where Becket died and became St. Thomas. Here is the ground on which the hunted prelate, powerful in body as in mind, caught up Tracy in his full armour and flung him on the pavement. Here is the door from the cloister through which Becket came for sanctuary, and which he refused to bar against his assailants come for murder--"The Church must not be turned into a Castle." Here is the place where the slain Archbishop lay, his head "four feet from the wall", where afterwards was erected to his memory the Altar of the Sword's Point.

From hence he was carried to the tomb in the crypt, where he lay for fifty years until the Translation to the Shrine in Trinity Chapel in 1220. It is not for me in this brief sketch to tell what has been told so dramatically by Stanley in his _Memorials_, and with such historical insight by Green in his History. It was a duel between the Civil and the Ecclesiastical sovereignties, represented respectively by Henry II and his Archbishop; both of them, for all their genius, too haughty, violent, and headstrong to bring a difficult controversy to a close, or even to a lasting truce.

Before we leave the Martyrdom we must notice the oldest effigy in the Cathedral, that of Peckham, Edward I's Archbishop, who died in 1292, and beside it that of Wareham, the last archbishop before the Reformation, who half yielded to Henry VIII and repented of yielding, and in a few months died, partly perhaps of the sore perplexity and trouble of the time. A comparison of the two canopies will mark for us the advance in decorative art between the thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The door into the cloister has its brighter as well as its dark memory. For here, at the entrance of what was then deemed the most sacred enclosure in the land, was Edward I, that great, stern, tender-hearted King, married to Margaret of Anjou, nine years after he had lost the wife of whom he wrote: "I loved her tenderly in her life; I do not cease to love her now she is dead".

The pilgrims were usually conducted from the altar in the Martyrdom to the "Tumba" or first resting place of the "holy blissful martyr", which was in the crypt. The whole of the crypt was dedicated to the Virgin, and the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft, though now dark and deserted, is still enclosed by the lovely stone tracery placed round it by the Black Prince as a memorial of his marriage. When Erasmus was here he said it was "so loaded with riches" as to be "a more than royal spectacle", and he added: "It is shown but to noblemen and particular friends". Doubtless though the treasures were hidden from the common pilgrim, the altar was always accessible to his devotion. Cardinal Morton desired to be buried near the image of Our Lady of the Undercroft, and his tomb is close by. He may be remembered as the minister of Henry VII and author of _Morton's Fork_. It was an eminently successful method of finance, which may remind us of a modern Budget. Its principle was that those who spend much can obviously afford to pay, and those who spend little can well afford the taxation of their savings.

Under the south choir transept is another memorial of the Black Prince. It is the double chantry exacted by the Pope as the price of a dispensation to marry his cousin. The Prince came to Canterbury himself, met the prior and the mason, and gave orders for the work, which perhaps included the sculptured face of his beautiful wife in one of the bosses of the roof. The chantry, with its two apses for the mass priests, is now the Chapel of the French Protestants, who have had services here since the royal permission in 1575. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the refugees are said to have numbered three thousand, and to have gained for Canterbury a large trade in silk-weaving and paper-making. Their descendants are now merged into the English population, but their names and the weekly French service still survive.

There have been two comparatively recent discoveries in the crypt. One is the well which probably supplied the water for the "ampulles" or leaden bottles of the pilgrims, the other is a stone chest containing bones which many believe to be the actual remains of Becket. They are certainly those of a tall man, placed in a receptacle which was not their original coffin, and there is certainly the mark of violence on the skull. It has been cogently argued by Dr. Moore, a canon of this Cathedral, and Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford, in a lecture which will, I hope, be printed, that as the bones of Dante at Ravenna, and of Cuthbert at Durham, were removed from their shrines to avoid violation, and others substituted to avoid discovery of the removal, so the bones of Becket were removed and hidden by the monks in the interval of suspense before the King's final orders arrived. They remain where they were found, and the slab above them, though it bears no inscription, will be readily pointed out by a guide. Before we bid farewell to the crypt we must call to mind one of the earliest and greatest of all the pilgrims. In 1174, not quite four years after the murder, Henry II, as a barefooted penitent, laid his head on the tomb of Becket between those two slender pillars, and gave his back to the scourge of the monks and clergy. How far this suffering and humiliation, which brought on a serious illness, was dictated by penitence and how far by policy will never be known. But urgent dangers were closing round the King, which were immediately afterwards dissipated in a series of triumphs which he may have thought due to miraculous interposition.

Following the track of the pilgrims, we leave the crypt on the south side, emerge into the transept, and ascend, along the south choir aisle, by steps worn hollow by penitential knees (for it was a kind of _scala santa_--a sacred stair) to the Trinity Chapel, the sanctuary of the martyr's shrine. Let us try to recall what this was like. It stood in the centre of the now vacant space beneath the crescent in the vaulted roof. Three steps led up to a platform figured with a kind of mosaic. The lowest step, worn by pilgrims' knees, and three of the inlaid "roundles" form part of the present pavement. On the platform three arches sustained the body of the saint in a gilded and richly wrought coffin. Two of these arches, with their columns, were hung with the precious offerings of those who had sought or received benefit by the saint's intercession. Through the third, suppliants were allowed to pass, that by contact with the pillars they might derive some virtue from the relics. The whole was enclosed in an elaborate oaken case, which was let down and drawn up by ropes and pulleys from above. One of the monks had charge of the proceedings--the Mystagogus or Master of the Mysteries, as Erasmus, with a touch of mockery, calls him--and when a sufficient concourse had assembled he drew up the cover and revealed to the wondering throng all the splendour of gold and gems.

Within thirty years of Erasmus's visit every vestige of this magnificence was swept away; and so completely were all memorials of Becket destroyed that only one representation of the shrine survives. This, perhaps, was overlooked, for it is a small panel of stained glass, and may be found in the highest group of the central of the three thirteenth-century windows on the north side of the Trinity Chapel. St. Thomas is mitred and in full canonical vestments, leaning from or coming out of his shrine, above a figure lying on a bed or couch below. It is a pictorial record of a vision of the saint which is related by Benedict, his historian, as having appeared to himself. The inscription is _Prodire Feretro_, which fails in grammatical construction, but probably is intended to mean _Issuing from the Shrine_.

It should be noted that the casket or coffin portrayed elsewhere in these windows, is not the great shrine in the Trinity Chapel, but the earlier "tumba" at which Henry II did his penance in the crypt. The determination of Henry VIII to obliterate everything which could minister to the cult was probably due not merely to zeal against superstition, but was part of his policy of stamping out the resistance of the clergy to common law; for in the history of Becket, and in the honour paid to his remains, was the chief support of their claim. This throws light on the extraordinary legal process by which, more than three hundred years after his death, "Thomas Becket, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury", was summoned, tried, and condemned for treason, contumacy, and rebellion.