Chapter 5

Returning into the ambulatory we should look at this side of the royal tombs before passing round the corner into the chapel itself. From here the nearest is that of Richard II., which is raised too high above us to see well. The lower part was formerly in a very bad state of repair, and through the holes in the wooden chest which contained the royal remains the bones of Richard and his wife Anne could be clearly seen. Indeed, the schoolboys used to amuse themselves by flipping marbles into the sepulchre. The jawbone of the King is said to have been picked out by one bold youth; smaller bones and such-like curiosities were the easy prey of the less venturesome. Edward the Third's, on the other hand, which comes next, has never been thus tampered with, although a few shields have been carried off. But we can still see the six gilt brass images of his children on this side, those on the other have been stolen long ago; these are headed by Richard's father, the warlike Black Prince, whose tomb some of us know at Canterbury Cathedral. Queen Philippa's monument, the third in order, has been stripped bare of all the "sweetly carved niches" and little alabaster {69} figures, not to speak of the gilt angels and other beautiful decorations, which once adorned it. The same sad tale of spoliation and vanished splendour must be repeated when we reach the top of the wooden steps which lead up into St. Edward's Chapel. The battered oak effigy of Henry V. need not detain us now, we speak of that great monarch later. Standing before the shrine itself the oft-told tale of our Saxon founder must not be omitted--the fascinating legend of his strange visions, one of which led him to select Thorneye as the favoured site of his monastic foundation. The story of his life and death are illustrated by the stone pictures on the screen, which divides the chapel from the high altar, and was probably put up by the pious Henry VI. One of the favourite scenes is the remission of the Dane-gelt, which may have taken place in the old Treasury, the Pyx Chapel; here we see the King pointing to the casks which contain his people's hard-earned money; upon them formerly danced a demon Dane, thus thwarted of his due. Edward lies upon his bed in another, calmly watching the scullion who rifles his treasure-chest, and escapes with a mild admonition from the gentle King. Further on we see him seated at dinner between his wife {70} and her father, Earl Godwin, while in front her brothers Tostig and Harold are disputing, as they quarrelled years afterwards over the crown, and Edward is roused to a prophetical burst of wrath. The most significant are the last ones, which recall the famous legend of the ring and the consecration of the Abbey. St. John, who, disguised as a beggar, received the ring from Edward, is shown delivering it into the hands of two pilgrims, who are bidden to return with it to England and deliver it back to the King, with a message intimating his approaching end. This ring, taken from the incorruptible finger of the royal saint a century after his death by Abbot Laurence, was deposited amongst the relics, and no doubt the wedding ring of England, which is still placed upon the finger of the sovereign after he has received the insignia of royalty, had its origin in this sacred ring. We turn to the shrine itself, and try to picture it in all its pristine beauty before the sacrilegious hand of the despoiler had touched it. West of the shrine is a modern altar, the ancient one was destroyed long since, but hitherto a wooden table was temporarily placed here at coronations, for which this marble altar was substituted on the last occasion. The modern gilt {71} group over it and the gilded cornice sorely afflict the eye, and are sadly out of keeping with the artistic work of the Roman artisans, Odericus and Peter. The wooden top, of no merit in itself, but dating from Mary Tudor's reign, is now covered by a velvet pall, which unfortunately conceals the saint's coffin, formerly visible from the chantry. On either side of St. Edward's altar were once golden pillars presented by Edward II.; the golden image of St. John the Evangelist stood upon one, that of the Confessor himself upon the other. The stone basement was entirely covered with elaborate decorations, glass mosaic, precious stones, and enamels; and the twisted pillars, also richly decorated, remind the Italian traveller of those in the cloister at St. John Lateran. Within the niches sick persons used to crouch all the long night, believing that this mere proximity to the dead saint would cure their diseases. The coffin itself is above, raised high, as the old writers tell us, "on a candlestick, to enlighten the world." It was originally encased in a wonderful feretory, made of pure gold and decorated with golden and jewelled images of kings and queens, of saints and angels. This was melted down, and all the valuable ornaments were sold, when Henry VIII. suppressed the {72} monastery. The last Abbot, John Feckenham, did his best to restore some of its former glory to St. Edward's Chapel. He rebuilt the basement of the shrine, which the monks had concealed before they fled, and painted over the gaps left by the theft of the mosaic work. He also rewrote the inscriptions on all the royal tombs, probably in most cases restoring the ancient words.

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THE WEST END OF THE CONFESSOR'S SHRINE, SHOWING THE MODERN ALTAR

A small portion of the ancient shrine is given in this illustration, but we can see the only twisted pillar which retains any of its original Italian mosaic decoration, and behind the candlesticks is more of this beautiful work. The altar and the gilded group and cornice over it are of recent date, _i.e._ the Coronation of King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra; the red velvet pall with its blue linen cover were placed over the tomb of the saint at the same time. A portion of the tombs of Edward III. and Richard II. show on the south side of the chapel, with the windows of that of St. Edmund above.

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Neither Feckenham nor Queen Mary could afford to pay for a new golden top, and the present plain wooden one was perforce substituted. The only wonder is that the royal chapel was not stripped entirely bare of its treasures long before our time. The relics, no doubt, were taken at the suppression of the monastery. The silver head and armour of Henry V. were stolen in the reign of Henry VIII., after the monks, those careful custodians of the Abbey, had been dispersed. The silver cradle on the tomb of Edward IV.'s little daughter vanished later. We look around and see the empty places on Henry III.'s tomb whence the mosaics and jewels have been picked out; the arms of Richard II. and his queen are missing; that once wonderful work of art, Philippa's monument, so well described by Sir Gilbert Scott, is a ruin. The Coronation Chair, now raised safely out of {73} harm's way, is actually covered with the names of tourists. Yet neither Henry VIII. nor the Protestant Protector Somerset, not even those scapegoats the Puritan soldiers, are altogether to blame for these and other acts of vandalism. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries people seem to have roamed about the Abbey, occasionally accompanied by a verger, usually free to write their names or to break off relics. The glass cases of the wax effigies, which are covered with such records, bear witness to the careless guardianship of the church in former days.

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THE TOMB OF HENRY III. FROM ST. EDWARD'S CHAPEL, LOOKING EAST

The tomb of our second founder, the builder of this portion of the Abbey Church, has, like the shrine of St. Edward, suffered much from the despoiler's hand. The tomb was made by the same Italian workmen who were employed upon the shrine, but the effigies, both of Henry and his daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Castile, who is buried at his feet, are by an Englishman, one William Torel. We see on this side one of the porphyry slabs which Edward I. brought with him from the Continent, when he returned from the Crusades a year after his father's death. In the niches below, some of the most precious relics were kept. Beyond the small black marble tomb of Elizabeth Tudor is that of Queen Eleanor, first wife of Edward I., flanked by one of the entrance turrets to the Chantry of Henry V.

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Fortunately there is still much left, and nothing can touch the historical interest even of these mutilated tombs. One little pillar on the shrine itself is practically intact, and from the north ambulatory, above the reach of a man's arm, we shall see some of the mosaic decoration which once adorned the whole of the tomb of Henry III. Thanks to their grilles, the silver-gilt effigies of Henry and his daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Castile, were secure from the despoiler's hand, and remain as examples of the skill of an English artist, one William Torel. The exceedingly interesting iron grille which guards Eleanor's image is also by an English hand, that of Master Thomas of Lewes, a {74} Sussex smith, and we inform our friends that Sussex was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, probably till much later, an iron-smelting county--a fact which is recalled by the hammer ponds at the present day. Beneath our feet, protected by the linoleum, are fragments of the ancient pavement, and north and south of the shrine lie two Saxon queens whose bodies were removed here from the Confessor's church, when it was pulled down by Henry III. Both were called by the old English name of Editha. The elder is connected with the first historic foundation of the Abbey, for she, the Confessor's wife, was present at the consecration (Innocents' Day, 1066) of the choir and transepts, when her husband lay helpless on his deathbed. Her niece changed the Saxon name of Editha for the Norman Matilda or Maud when, by her marriage with Henry I., the two rival races were united in one family. It is pleasant here to turn to the foreigners amongst us and remind them that while we speak of English sovereigns who were continually at war with their ancestors, yet the discord was more apparent than real. For these very men, the sworn enemies of France and of Spain for many a long generation, were the husbands or {75} the sons of French, Spanish, and other foreign princesses. Not only were they blood relations, but the language of their courts and of their legal documents was French, and when they wasted the fair lands of France, or fought against Spain, Flanders, and Holland, they believed themselves to be striving to regain their lost heritages and the dowries brought them by their brides. Long after England and France were completely severed, Mary Tudor, herself the daughter of a Spanish mother, and the wife of a Spanish king, clung so fiercely to the last link which gave the English kings a claim to the fleurs-de-lis in their quarterings that her heart broke when Calais fell. We have already referred to the central tomb on the north of the shrine, which contains the body of our second founder, Henry III., himself by the way the husband of a French wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. To him we owe the present beautiful church, and not even the memory of the money ground out of the oppressed Jews, or gathered in the form of unjust taxes from his wretched subjects, can damp our enthusiastic gratitude. The slabs of porphyry and jasper upon both sides were brought by Henry's son, Edward I., from Italy or France, when he returned across the Continent from the Crusades a year after {76} his father's death. The coffin itself is, like that of the Confessor, in the upper part of the tomb, and, unlike those of Edward himself and Richard II., has never been tampered with; there is no doubt that the embalmed body of the King still rests here, untouched by the ravages of eight centuries. As we look upon the lovely face of Henry's daughter-in-law, who lies at his feet, we forget that this is no portrait but a conventional and ideal queen. We think only of the young Spanish princess in the early days of her married life, before the birth of thirteen children in quick succession, the loss of many of these little ones, and the privations she suffered in the Holy Land had marred her beauty. Vainly did the old King try to keep Eleanor at home when his son, Prince Edward, went off to the Crusade. She continued to urge her wifely duty in answer to his fatherly solicitations, and to repeat that the way to heaven is as near from Palestine as from England. By the time she returned her kind father-in-law was dead, and her restless warlike husband was henceforth rarely by her side. Years afterwards when the Queen died, Edward seems to have remembered her wifely devotion with remorse, for never did any former English queen-consort have so magnificent a burial {77} nor so costly a tomb. Two other monuments (which no longer exist), containing her viscera and her heart, were put up at Lincoln and Blackfriars. At every stage where the funeral procession rested between Lincolnshire and Westminster the King raised a memorial cross in his wife's honour. All have been destroyed save three, but the last was at one time a conspicuous object in Charing village, and a modern copy of it has been placed in the station-yard at "Charing Cross." Eleanor herself bequeathed money towards the expenses of her funeral, and Edward gave large sums to the three convents, chiefly to Westminster, in order to provide for anniversary services at his wife's tombs, where wax tapers were always to be kept burning, and prayers constantly offered to Heaven for the repose of her soul. Edward's son and successor was strangely lacking in filial obedience. With his dying breath the warrior King, who had hammered the Scots and harassed the Turks, gave orders that his body was to remain unburied till Scotland was subdued, the flesh boiled, and the bones borne at the head of the victorious English army. His heart was to be taken out and confided to a band of knights, who were to fight for the Holy Sepulchre, carrying the casket in their {78} midst. These commands were disobeyed, and the plain tomb, without effigy or monument, is a silent witness to the second Edward's failure to "keep troth." The embalmed corpse was buried here soon after the King's death, but the upper slab remained loose, and for many a long year the cere-cloth was kept waxed, perhaps with the idea of carrying out the dead sovereign's behests at some future time. In any case the cover was left as it was till the eighteenth century, when some antiquaries were allowed to raise it, and looking in they beheld the body of Longshanks lying there in royal state, wrapped in the coronation robes, with orb and sceptre in either hand, a linen cloth concealing the features. We cannot forgive the wanton destruction which ensued. Boiling pitch was poured in, and the lid hermetically sealed after these vandals had satisfied their curiosity and taken notes of every detail. Havoc also was wrought to the outside about the same period, when the canopy was destroyed during a riot which broke out at the patriot Pulteney's burial in the ambulatory below, and the iron grille, upon which were two little heads of the King, disappeared at the same time. The words "Scotorum Malleus" and "Pactum Serva" were painted by Abbot Feckenham's orders, but may have formed {79} part of the original inscription. The most important trophy which the English conqueror brought from Scotland was the stone of Scone, a reminder now of the union of the two kingdoms, but then a constant source of irritation to the Scots, who tried in vain to get it back. The chair which encloses the stone was made in Edward's time, and has ever since been used as the seat of our sovereigns at their coronations. Once and once only a man not of royal birth was privileged to receive the insignia of government seated in the Coronation Chair, when Oliver Cromwell was installed Lord Protector in Westminster Hall. The huge sword behind the chair, carried before Edward III. on his warlike expeditions into France and Scotland, was probably used on the memorable occasion when he entered Calais in state after the siege, and his wife Philippa begged her stern lord for the lives of the twelve burgesses who brought him the keys of the captured town. We turn to the left round the shrine and approach the despoiled tomb of that good Flemish lady, who endeared herself to the hearts of her English subjects by her wise and kindly rule during Edward's frequent absences abroad and in Scotland. The face, a portrait this time, shows us a homely countenance with full cheeks and rather prominent eyes, {80} but pleasant withal and full of character. The design of the whole was by a Flemish artist, but English stone-masons worked on the details, and a certain John Orchard, the artist of the copper-gilt angels, which formerly adorned the canopy, and probably also of the figures on the King's tomb, made the little alabaster figures of Philippa's two children in St. Edmund's Chapel for the sum of twenty shillings. The white stone canopy with the wrought-metal tabernacle work and gilt angels was actually removed as insecure in the eighteenth century. The thirty alabaster niches, each containing the statuette of a royal mourner, and the alabaster angels with gilt wings have all gone, except the fragments of one, which was put together by Sir Gilbert Scott, and is in a safe but dark corner. No trace remains of the iron grille which Edward bought for his queen from a bishop's monument in St. Paul's Cathedral. The King's own tomb is next to that of his wife: he thus kept the promise which he made to her as she lay dying, and lies beside her in the "Cloister" at Westminster. Froissart tells a touching story of the scene between the royal couple, when Philippa held the hand of the husband who had so often been faithless to her, and asked this, her last boon. {81} Near her bed stood Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the only one of her fourteen children able to be present at his mother's deathbed; he is buried close to her tomb. Thomas was murdered by order of his nephew, Richard II.--who was himself destined to come to an untimely end at the hands of a relative--and the grave of the victim is not far from Richard's own monument. We saw in St. Edmund's Chapel the fourteenth-century brass which marks the last resting-place of the Duke's widow, Eleanor de Bohun, who retired to a nunnery after her husband's tragic fate. We have looked at the tombs of Edward III. and of Richard II. from the ambulatory side; both are of English workmanship. That of the elder monarch is finer and more elaborate than the other, which Richard raised in his own lifetime to receive the remains of his beloved first wife, Anne of Bohemia, and destined for his own corpse. Edward's effigy is purely a conventional one, but the long hair and beard have often been pointed out as a mark of his neglected lonely deathbed. True enough this once powerful King died alone save for the ministrations of an old priest, saddened in his last hours by the loss of his heir, the Black Prince. But his end was less tragic than that of his successor and grandson {82} twenty years later, over the details of which a veil of mystery still hangs. We only know that his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, usurped the throne, and that the deposed Richard died in prison; his body was obscurely buried at King's Langley, and re-interred here long afterwards, with the honour due to a king, by his supplanter's own son, Henry V.

We see here the portrait effigy of the effeminate young King, whose hand used to be clasped in that of his young foreign bride, but the arms are both gone. The robes are stamped with Richard's badges, the rising sun of Crecy and Poictiers, which was his father's favourite emblem, the broomscods of the Plantagenets, the fleurs-de-lis of France, symbolic of the constant claim of our sovereigns to the French crown, and many others. Beneath the canopy are traces of the two-headed eagle, the arms of Bohemia, and also of the imperial eagle, for Anne was a sister of Wenceslaus, the good King of Bohemia, and a daughter of the Emperor Charles IV.; at her feet is the Austrian leopard. As we look at this royal couple, that fateful day of Anne's funeral is recalled to our memory, when her bereaved husband in a fit of ungovernable rage struck one of the powerful {83} nobles, who came late for the ceremony, such a fierce blow that for the second time in Richard's unfortunate reign the pavement was stained with blood. On the first occasion a knight, who had taken sanctuary here, was slain by John of Gaunt's servants. And in each case the Abbey was placed under an interdict for a time, till by priest and bell the church was cleansed from pollution. There is another brass, hidden beneath the linoleum near Edward the First's tomb, which connects Richard with the Abbey, and marks the burial of a commoner within the chapel of the kings--the only person not of royal blood ever interred here. A storm of popular indignation burst out when Richard commanded the Abbot to grant a grave for his favourite, John of Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury, within these sacred precincts, and the King was forced to resort to bribery before he could gain his point.