"Kings are thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers."
From the reign of Edward the Confessor, the last sovereign of the royal
Saxon race, till the death of Elizabeth, the last Tudor queen, these
words of the old Hebrew prophet were literally applicable to the great
West Minster. When Edward knelt within the Benedictine chapel on
Thorneye, which had so miraculously withstood the ravages of the Danes,
and vowed to dedicate a new church on the same spot to the glory of God
and in the name of St. Peter, even his prophetic soul cannot have
foretold the high destiny of his beloved foundation. As the building
slowly grew during the last years of his reign, he conceived the idea
of its use as a sepulchre for himself and his successors. In his
visions he may even have foreseen the coronations of the English
sovereigns within its walls, his own canonisation, and the long
connection {4} between the throne and the monastery. All that the
words above imply would have appealed to the pious founder, but what of
his feelings could he have looked on through the centuries? He would
have seen much to vex, yet we venture to think he would have found
consolation, even in these latter days when the monks are no longer
here and the Roman Church has ceased to be the Church of his country.
Three hundred years after Edward's death came the destruction of his
church in the name of piety, but for this there was ample compensation
in the beautiful and stately buildings which were raised upon the ruins
of the old, and in the devotion to the first founder's memory shown by
Henry III. and his descendants. During the ages of faith, when the
Pope held sway over England, king after king gave liberally to the
fabric, while their queens may also be counted amongst the benefactors
to the West Minster. St. Peter, the patron saint to whom the church
was dedicated, was practically lost sight of in the halo which
surrounded the memory of the Saxon king, and it was to the English
royal saint rather than to the Hebrew apostle that the Abbey owed its
peculiar sanctity. From the first it was a royal foundation, a
building consecrated to the memory of a king, yet none of {5} these
considerations were weighed in the balance when the West Minster shared
in the general downfall of the English monasteries. The sovereign
himself laid violent hands upon the treasures presented by his pious
forefathers in honour of St. Edward, and the saint's body must surely
have turned in its coffin when, to save it from indignity, the monks
were obliged to lift it from the feretory and hide it beneath the
ground. The shrine which had been the pride of each king since the
days of Henry III., and honoured no less by the first Tudor sovereign,
was stripped of its glories: the shining golden top, which used to be
seen from end to end of the church, was melted down; the jewels, which
had been offered by royal worshipper and humble pilgrim alike, even the
precious images of sainted king and saintly evangelist, were ruthlessly
transferred to the palace treasury. None of these survive to-day, but
the mosaic pillars and the basement were concealed by the brethren
before they fled from the monastery, and the lower part of the shrine
was reconstructed by the daughter of the sovereign to whom the
devastation was due; to her also we owe the wooden top, which replaced
the glorious golden feretory. The monastic community, who were
restored to their home by the same {6} Queen, the "bloody" Mary of
Protestant history, survived a few years longer into the days of
Elizabeth, and the former intimate connection between the Crown and the
convent, severed with the final dismissal of the Abbot and monks, found
a pale reflection in the friendship which Elizabeth always showed to
the Dean of her new foundation. But the Maiden Queen was in very deed
the last royal person to whom Westminster Abbey owed substantial
benefits. She refounded the collegiate church, which finally took the
place of the monastery, and established Westminster School; before her
reign the only boys taught within the precincts were the few scholars
collected in the cloisters by the monks. She is, in fact, the
foundress of St. Peter's College, which thus owes its status as a royal
foundation to Queen Elizabeth.
Very rarely, however, in modern days has the church or the college been
honoured with a visit from the reigning sovereign _in propriâ personâ_.
At great functions, such as public funerals, the heir-apparent is
occasionally present, but the Crown is usually represented by a Court
official, and the Dean's stall, which is only vacated for the reigning
king or queen, has been occupied on very rare occasions in the last
hundred years. The Latin {7} play acted by the Westminster scholars
every winter term, was formerly a gala occasion on which royalty used
often to be present, but the old custom was gradually dropped. In the
year 1903, for the first time within the memory of this generation, a
royal person, H.R.H. the Duchess of Argyll, was present at the
performance.
With the last of the Tudors there is no doubt that the strong and
living bond between the palace and the Abbey was slackened, although it
has never been altogether snapped, nor will it be as long as the
coronation of our sovereigns continues to take place in Westminster
Abbey. Then and then only does the king resume all his ancient rights,
the collegiate body is practically deposed, and people realise that
their national church is really a royal peculiar. For while the kings
came less and less to St. Edward's shrine, their subjects in
ever-increasing numbers, like the pilgrims in olden times, were and are
drawn hither as by a magnet, till Westminster has become the sanctuary
of a nation, and is no longer the sepulchre of the seed royal. A plain
English squire, one of that "happy breed of men" to whom his native
land--"this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea"--was
dearer than the blood of kings, was destined to inaugurate a new epoch
in the {8} annals of the Abbey. To this man, Oliver Cromwell, it is
that we owe the first conception of this church as a fitting
burial-place for our national worthies. From the State obsequies of
Admiral Blake, which were held here by Cromwell's command, has
germinated the seed which has borne fruit in the public funerals and in
the monuments, ordered and paid for by Parliament, of statesmen,
soldiers and sailors. The nineteenth century has closed, and there is
little space available in the Abbey for the worthies of the twentieth,
but the national feeling still turns instinctively to Westminster on
the death of a great man. For a long time past memorial services have
been substituted for the grave or cenotaph, so lavishly granted to
practically the first comer only a hundred years ago. Yet although the
material fabric of this ancient foundation can no longer receive her
sons within her bosom, her spirit is perhaps more alive than it has
ever been since her altars were demolished and the images of her saints
torn from their high places. No longer do the smoke of innumerable
candles and the fumes of incense blacken and obscure her arches, but
the spiritual breath of supplication and of thanksgiving still as of
yore ascends to heaven from this ancient church, consecrated by the
prayers of so many {9} past generations. The old order has changed,
and a Protestant form of worship has long taken the place of the florid
mass; what further changes the future has in store no man can prophesy.
But at present churchmen of all shades of religious feeling may worship
in this church with no extreme ritual to disturb their minds, and at
the same time with none of that irreverent and jarring carelessness in
the ordering of the services which vexed the souls of many in the days
long ago, before any of the present generation were born. On one
festival in the year, the Translation of St. Edward the Confessor, the
13th of October, Roman Catholics return in ever-increasing numbers to
the West Minster, which was once their own, and pilgrims may be seen
kneeling round the shrine, offering their devotions to the saint. On
this historic day the Abbey clergy, mindful also of the founder's
memory, keep his feast at their own service in the choir, by a sermon
preached in his honour, Protestants and Catholics thus uniting in a
common homage to the memory of the sainted English king.
There are several points of view whence the group of buildings formed
by the Abbey, St. Margaret's Church, Westminster Hall, and the Houses
of Parliament, can be seen above the {10} roofs of the houses, or
without any intervening obstruction. The foreigner who arrives at
Charing Cross first sees Westminster from the railway bridge, and gets
another and a nearer aspect as he reaches the bottom of Whitehall. Now
that passenger-steamers ply once again upon the river, many persons are
familiar with the unrivalled water approach, but no longer does the
wayfarer coming from the south or east hire a boat from the Lambeth
side, and thus follow the traditional route taken by St. Peter, when he
came to consecrate the original church on Thorneye. Although the Roman
road, which led from north to south of England, and crossed the river
here, is entirely lost sight of in London, the intending visitor will
be well advised if he walk to the Abbey by the parks. From the bridge
over the Serpentine he gets a distant view, and all the way, by Green
Park and St. James's, there are glimpses of the Westminster Towers. At
present, in the temporary absence of any building where the old
aquarium used to be, he has but to cross Birdcage Walk, take the old
Cockpit passage into Queen Anne's Gate, and from Dartmouth Street, just
across the way, he will see a magnificent view of the Abbey Church with
her small daughter, St Margaret, by her side. {11} As he approaches
nearer, down Tothill Street, the ugly Western Towers, which we owe in
the first instance to Wren's incapacity to understand Gothic
architecture, in the second to his successor Hawkesmore's want of taste
in the execution, become too prominent.
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[Illustration: View of the Abbey and St. Margaret's Church from
Whitehall]
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