Standing in the south-west corner of the nave, we get a view of the
interior of the church in its full extent as far as the east window.
Behind this we know, from our previous survey of the outside, is the
Chapel of Henry VII., and below, hidden from sight by the organ screen,
is the high altar, with the shrine of the founder, St. Edward the
Confessor, beyond. Formerly the rood was suspended from the nave roof
between us and the present wooden screen, which, although the stone below
is of fourteenth-century workmanship, is only about a hundred years or so
old. Just beyond the rood were also the Jesus altars, above and below,
but no trace of these nor of the wall or screen upon which they stood is
left. We see now only two large monuments on either side of the choir
screen, which, as we approach nearer, prove to be those of the great
philosopher, Sir Isaac Newton, and of a less renowned personality, Earl
Stanhope.
* * * * * *
Although practically impossible to stand at the west end and discourse at
any length on the history and architecture, it is well to get some idea
of the shape of the building and the period of each portion before we
start. On either side are the lower parts of the towers, behind us is
the great west window, finished, as we heard before, in the reign of King
Henry VII. The bells hang in the belfry, the south-west tower, and the
north-west tower is still called the baptistery, because baptisms used to
take place there. The font is now in Henry VII.'s Chapel. The glass of
the window over our heads dates only from George II.'s time; the two
smaller ones, left and right, are filled with fragments of ancient glass,
as is also the east window, which we see at the other end of the church.
The building itself is in the usual cruciform shape, and we stand now, as
it were, at the foot of the cross, the nave and ritual choir forming the
beam, the transepts the arms, and the apse, with its circle of small
chapels, the head. Behind the apse, we know from our previous survey,
{24} is the Chapel of Henry VII., which takes the place of the old Lady
Chapel. The nave is divided into twelve bays, intersected at the eighth
by the choir screen, upon which is placed the organ. At the twelfth bay,
where the nave properly so called ends, the ritual choir begins, and we
can see the sanctuary and high altar through the open gates. On either
side of the nave beyond the screen are the aisles, now included, as is
all this part at the present time, in the choir. Look first at the
graceful arcading of the triforium, then higher still from the clerestory
windows carry the eye to the roof, 100 feet above our heads, and thence
along the clustered columns and arches straight in front. The whole
resembles that magnificent and peculiarly English beauty, an ancient
beech avenue with its arching and interlacing boughs reaching up to
heaven. Except to the student of architecture, the church might have
risen from the ground in a single night, so harmonious and perfectly
proportioned are the lines, so carefully did the old builders follow out
the ideas of the thirteenth-century designers. Henry the Third himself
probably supervised the plans, and we know that the King had already seen
and admired Salisbury Cathedral, then quite a new building, before {25}
he arranged to rebuild Westminster in the same style. As a fact, no less
than two and a half centuries passed from the year 1245, when Henry gave
orders for the demolition of the whole of the eastern end--the same part
which the Confessor had watched grow up and had caused to be consecrated
before his death,--till the reign of his collateral descendant, the first
Tudor king, when the last bay was quite finished. Only an observant eye
can detect the slight differences, chiefly in the vaultings of the roof,
which mark the different stages of the western part, and it is difficult
to realise that the old Norman nave, divided by a wall from the new
Gothic church, existed long after Henry's death, and was taken down bit
by bit as the building slowly proceeded. Edward the First's period is
marked by metal rings round the columns, and only extended one bay west
of the present screen, where formerly the Jesus altars and rood loft
stood, with a stone wall behind, which is now concealed by the wooden
casing of the modern screen. Services for the ordinary worshippers, the
parishioners so to speak, were held by the monks at these altars, above
and below the rood screen, but the lesson, which was read from above, was
the only part of the High Mass celebrated in the choir intended for {26}
the congregation in the nave. With the early fourteenth century the
beautiful diaper work which decorated the triforium arcades ceased, and
this helps us to fix the date of the later part. During the century
which followed, the building practically stood still for a long time.
Edward II. gave the monks no help, and Edward III. was too poor and too
busy with his numerous wars to occupy himself with pious donations. But
at the end of his reign Archbishop Langham, formerly the Abbot here, left
a large bequest, primarily intended for the completion of the nave, which
was diverted by his successor Litlington to more pressing needs, such as
the rebuilding of the monastery, enlarging the cloisters, and, with the
help of gifts from Richard II., the addition of a rich porch outside the
north front. Henry IV. died in the precincts, but we have no record of
any generosity on his part; his son Henry V., however, gave an annual sum
to the work on the nave, which during his short reign progressed well.
The pious Henry VI., who loved the Abbey and often walked here with the
Abbot and Prior, no doubt helped as long as he had the power, but the
civil wars soon put a stop to his aid. We know that he presented the
wrought-iron gates which divide his father's {27} mortuary chapel from
the shrine, and the stone screen to the west of the shrine probably
belongs to his time. His supplanter, Edward IV., when settled on the
throne, granted oaks and lead for the roof, while his wife, and the
little son who was born in the Abbot's house, gave thank-offerings of
money. Another gap followed during the troublous reign of Richard III.,
but by the end of the fifteenth century, when Henry VII. felt his title
absolutely secure, and his dynasty established, the west end was quite
finished, within and without, while then, and then only, the last remains
of the old nave were cleared away.
We have thus briefly sketched the building of the church in which we
stand, and now must turn our attention to the historic names which are
all around us on the walls and pavement. The very earliest monument, the
only tolerably artistic one in the nave, was put up in 1631 to a certain
Mistress Jane Hill, and till nearly the end of the seventeenth century
few others were added. But unfortunately from that time the custom grew
apace of covering the wall space, even the floor itself, with memorials
of soldiers, sailors, statesmen, physicians, men of science, and, in
fact, a truly miscellaneous collection of people, till not a vacant spot
is left, and {28} the ancient arcading is completely or partially covered
up, in some cases even cut away. The committee of taste appointed to
assist the Chapter were of some use here, for by their advice the Dean
moved one or two monuments from the centre to the wall, and the iron
railings in front of all of them were taken away. Dean Stanley, more
than a century later, curtailed some of the most aggressive memorials,
but none have been removed, for there would be no end to such a difficult
undertaking, and in any case the ancient arcading was already ruined.
Thus we start on our pilgrimage with some idea of the shape and the
history of the church which lies before us. First let us look into the
baptistery called Little Poets' Corner, where Wordsworth's seated statue
and some memorials of literary men are to be seen, such as the great
teacher, Dr. Arnold, who is close to his gifted son Matthew, in the
company of three notable divines, Maurice, Kingsley, and Keble. The
entrance is blocked by two huge eighteenth-century erections, the one to
Cornewall, a valiant sea-captain, put up by Parliament, the other to
Craggs, a young statesman, whose posthumous fame was sullied by his share
in the South Sea Bubble. The elder Craggs committed suicide {29} when
the Bubble burst, but the son died first, and Pope wrote a wordy epitaph
and superintended the erection of the monument. From this side we turn
to the other tower, but make no exhaustive survey of the "Whig Corner,"
for statesmen galore are to be found in the north transept, and we
mention the chief of these in connection with their contemporaries there.
The latest name here is that of General Charles Gordon, a bronze given by
the Royal Engineers seven years after the fall of Khartoum, but before
the fall of the Mahdi wiped out England's dishonour. It is not likely
that a Chinaman has joined our party; were one with us we would point out
Gordon's services to the Chinese government and the honours he received
from the Emperor. There is only one other memorial connected with China
(in the north choir aisle), put up a century ago to Sir George Staunton,
who went as Secretary on our first embassy to China. His son, a boy of
eleven, accompanied him, and actually learned enough Chinese on the
voyage to interpret for the party; he afterwards became a learned Chinese
scholar. We linger yet a moment to point out one of the few German names
in the Abbey, William Horneck, whose father, a Westminster Prebendary,
was a German {30} by birth; he was himself one of the earliest of our
Engineers, and won honour in the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns. When
we reach the south transept we shall see a more familiar German name on
the bust of Grabe, the well-known Oriental scholar.
We pass out now by the statue of a modern philanthropist, Lord
Shaftesbury, who fought as energetically for the freedom of the white
slave as did Zachary Macaulay, whose tablet is behind us in the tower,
for that of the black. Shaftesbury's efforts on behalf of the overworked
women and of the children in mines and factories will never be forgotten,
nor is the distinguished statesman Charles James Fox, whose connection
with the abolition of slavery is marked by the tasteless monument before
our eyes, in any danger of oblivion. The life-size group represents
Fox's dying agony in the arms of Liberty; a negro slave is kneeling at
his feet.
If there be any one interested in astronomy amongst us, he should turn
round to the tablet at the extreme west end, which commemorates young
Benjamin Horrocks, the first observer of the transit of Venus in 1639,
who was praised by Sir John Herschel as the pride and boast of modern
{31} astronomy. Herschel's own bust is on the north wall; he lies side
by side with Charles Darwin, near the iron gate. We now leave the west
end and progress up the centre of the nave, noticing on our way eastward
the old wooden pulpit, which has been brought here from Henry VII.'s
Chapel and replaces a heavy marble one given in Dean Trench's time to
commemorate the opening of the nave for evening services. Trench himself
passed from Westminster, as Archbishop of Dublin, to Ireland, his native
country, whither the pulpit has gone, but his body was brought back to
England, and his grave is beneath our feet. Behind it the name of the
American philanthropist, George Peabody, whose mortal remains rested in
the Abbey for a few days only, reminds all Londoners of the original
Peabody buildings, the first working-class dwellings on the block system,
which were founded by him and called after his name.
A few steps further and we stand above the grave of David Livingstone,
another ardent worker for the black man's cause, a personality dear to
white and black alike. Should some traveller from South Africa be with
us, he will be familiar with Livingstone's work amongst the natives and
the opposition he met with from the ignorant Boer {32} farmers, who could
not understand his enthusiasm for the coloured race. He lost his life
for their cause, and so greatly was he loved by his "boys" that two of
them carried the body through hardships and dangers innumerable across
the continent of Africa to the West Coast, where it was shipped for
England and finally brought safely here. Immediately in front, to our
left, we see the names of engineers and architects. To the engineers we
allude later; of two architects, Scott and Pearson, we have already
spoken, and may pass on to the men who crushed the Indian Mutiny, first,
however, pointing out the brass of Barry, the designer of the present
Houses of Parliament. Sir James Outram, Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, and
John, Lord Lawrence, rest in close proximity to one another, even as they
worked together for a common object in India. On Outram's monument,
which is against the right-hand wall, near Lawrence's bust, is
represented the meeting of the three Generals, Outram, Havelock, and
Campbell, when the latter finally relieved the Lucknow Residency, a task
bravely attempted by the two former, who were themselves beleaguered
after bringing in stores and ammunition to the garrison. Lord Wolseley's
recent Autobiography has vividly recalled the whole scene, and {33} bears
witness also to the valour of many a forgotten hero, with most of whom he
had previously fought in the Crimea. Seven of these officers are
commemorated by the very inharmonious painted glass below the rose window
of the north transept; amongst them may be mentioned in this connection
Lord Clyde's brigadier, Adrian Hope, who took a foremost part in the
relief of Lucknow, and was killed during the subsequent reconquest of
Oude. While Clyde may be styled the conqueror of Oude, Lord Lawrence, a
civilian not a soldier by profession, performed the task of reducing the
Punjab. In the north transept is the bust of Sir Herbert Edwardes, who
co-operated with the Lawrence brothers at the outbreak of the Mutiny, and
continued to support John in his arduous work after Henry's death at
Lucknow. Ten years before the Mutiny, Edwardes had already won undying
fame in the same district, the Punjab, when he stamped out the Multan
rebellion, and prevented that dangerous conflagration from assuming
serious proportions. A grave west of Clyde's, that of Sir George
Pollock, is a reminder of another part of our Indian Empire--an
ever-present source of anxiety--Afghanistan, where Pollock retrieved
England's lost prestige after the Cabul disaster.
{34}
Buried, as he would have wished, amongst these men of action is a sailor,
who resembled the free-booters and fighting seamen of the Elizabethan
age. Cochrane's feats of valour when in our navy surpassed those of all
his contemporaries, but a charge of betraying the country which he had
served so well, drove him into exile in 1814. His activity found new
scope abroad, and his memory is honoured by Brazil and Chili alike as the
founder of their navies; for the past few years Chilian sailors have laid
a wreath annually upon his tomb. The stain was removed from Lord
Dundonald's name before his death, and he was laid, as was justly due,
amongst his compeers; his banner and arms were long afterwards restored
to their places with those of the other Knights of the Bath, in Henry
VII.'s Chapel.
Immediately before us now, on either side of the choir screen, two
eighteenth-century monuments attract attention. The one to the right
commemorates several of the Earls Stanhope, notably the first Earl, whose
dashing valour might well be compared with Dundonald's, but whose
military career ended in disaster and imprisonment. The feat usually
connected with his name is a brilliant charge of cavalry at Almenara, one
of the battles in the Peninsular War, when he killed a Spanish general
{35} in single combat. On the left is a man of peace, Sir Isaac Newton,
whose discovery of the law of gravitation brought him world-wide fame,
and whose reputation as a natural philosopher and mathematician was
unrivalled in his generation. His funeral was attended by "the chief men
of the nation," and many distinguished foreigners; amongst them was the
French philosopher, Voltaire, who carried his enthusiasm for Newton to
such a height that he placed the English scientist at the head of all the
geniuses in the universe. Those who are familiar with Roubiliac's
portrait-statue at Trinity College, Cambridge, will note the extreme
inferiority of this one (Rysbrack's), which represents the great Newton
reclining on a couch, wrapped in a dressing-gown, and surrounded by the
allegorical figures and emblems so dear to eighteenth-century artists.
It is well now to shape our course towards the east, turning to the right
aisle, but ere we reach the iron gate, one or two memorials call for some
remark. Thus our long wars with the Moors are brought to mind by Sir
Palmes Fairborne's tablet, upon which is inscribed a bombastic epitaph
usually attributed to Dryden. Fairborne, as Governor of Tangier, fought
valiantly for a losing cause, and {36} three years after his death, the
place, which had passed into the possession of the English Crown as part
of the dowry of Charles the Second's queen, Catherine of Braganza, was
finally abandoned to the Moors. Fairborne is not the only Englishman in
the Abbey whose prowess against these black races is worthy of
remembrance, but while he bore a _Turk's_ head for his crest as a proof
of his early valour in Candia, the other knight, Sir Bernard Brocas,
rests his head upon that of a crowned _Moor_. No record remains of the
doughty deed which caused Edward III. to grant Brocas this special crest,
but the vergers in Addison's time used to point out his tomb, which we
shall see presently in St. Edmund's Chapel, as that of "the old Knight
who cut off the King of the Moors's head."
* * * * * *
[Illustration: St. Edmund's Chapel, showing the Tomb of the Duchess of
Suffolk, Lady Jane Grey's mother]
* * * *
ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL, SHOWING THE TOMB OF THE DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, LADY
JANE GREY'S MOTHER
This chapel is dedicated to St. Edmund, the martyred King of East Anglia.
The illustration shows part of the Duchess of Suffolk's altar tomb with
her recumbent effigy, while beyond, Prince John of Eltham's monument is
partly visible against the screen; above the screen are the canopies over
the tombs of Richard II. and his Queen, and Edward III. The red velvet
pall over the shrine of Edward the Confessor shows between the canopy and
tomb of Edward III.
* * * * * *
Our friends from the States will certainly pause before the monument of
that ill-fated young British officer, Major André, for upon it is a small
figure of General Washington. André, caught within the American lines
during our war with the colonies, dressed as a civilian, and with
suspicious papers in his boots, was hanged as a spy and buried beneath
the gallows. We see André here vainly petitioning Washington for a
soldier's death, while in the background all is prepared for his
ignominious {37} fate. The heads of both these statuettes were
constantly stolen by tourists in old days, as far back in fact as the
time of Lamb, and a fresh supply was always kept in stock by the Clerk of
the Works. Andre's bones, brought back to his native country, forty-one
years after his death, by a royal prince, were buried near the monument,
which was erected earlier at the expense of George III.
Beyond the gate, to our left, another pictorial monument appeals to
Londoner and countryman alike, for here is represented the assassination
of Tom of the Ten Thousand, a younger member of that well-known Dorset
family the Thynnes, Marquesses of Bath. His murderers were hired by a
notorious foreign count who desired to gain Thynne's rich young bride for
his own wife, but failed to persuade the lady to recognise his claims.
The cockney gazes in wonder at Pall Mall as it appeared in 1682, when it
was a lonely road between meadows, where highwaymen were apt to demand
your money or your life. The Welshman, if one be here, is pleased to
recognise a countryman in the coachman, whose descendants long boasted
that their ancestor was to be seen in the Abbey, on the box of Squire
Thynne's carriage. A little further is the recumbent tomb of one {38} of
the same family, William Thynne, who was Receiver of the Marches for many
years under the Tudor sovereigns. As yet we have been unable to single
out one of the many sailors whose memorials surround us in the nave, but
now we are brought up short, so to speak, by a monstrous figure with a
huge periwig and lolling on cushions, which, we are almost ashamed to
explain, is meant for one of our most noted eighteenth-century admirals,
Sir Cloudesley Shovel to wit.
It is better to distract attention to the bas-relief of the wreck below,
and relate the story of Shovel's youthful valour, when he swam from ship
to ship under fire carrying despatches in his mouth, for all the world
like a Newfoundland dog. The strange and tragic history of his end must
also be retold, when the flagship was wrecked on the treacherous Scilly
rocks, and the Admiral's unconscious body received the _coup de grâce_
from a callous fishwife, who stole his signet ring, and after concealing
it for thirty years, confessed her crime and returned the ring to
Shovel's representatives on her deathbed. No less wanting in taste is
the monument above to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter of simpering
beauties at the Courts of five sovereigns, from Charles II. to George I.,
and the only memorial to {39} an artist, with the exception of Ruskin, in
the whole Abbey. Kneller swore a mighty oath that he would not be buried
at Westminster, "They do bury fools there," he grumbled, but he himself
designed his most inartistic cenotaph, while his friend Pope wrote the
epitaph, which begins with the extravagant line: "Kneller by Heaven and
not a master taught."
While most of our party are attracted towards the last two conspicuous
monuments, the Non-conformists, should any be amongst us, are sure to
linger by the mural tablet, with medallion portrait heads, which Dean
Stanley allowed the Wesleyans to put here in memory of the brothers John
and Charles Wesley. Upon it are the appropriate words: "I look upon all
the world as my parish," which John Wesley literally interpreted. Near
by was already the memorial to Dr. Isaac Watts, the great dissenting
minister of an earlier generation, whose hymns are still popular in
church and chapel alike, as are to a greater degree those of Charles
Wesley.
To a Frenchman or Italian a humbler tablet on the opposite side with a
long inscription is of more interest, for it commemorates Pasquale de
Paoli, the champion of Corsican independence, {40} who took refuge in
England, the home of liberty, and died here in 1807. The ladies, leaving
the men to their study of the seamen and soldiers, with whose names the
walls are covered, ask for information about the bust of a young woman,
just beyond Paoli. Grace Gethin, although the only authoress in the
Abbey who has a monument to herself,--for the learned Margaret, Duchess
of Newcastle, shares her husband's tomb in the north transept,--has no
real claim to this distinction. Her immortal work, which she bequeathed
to an admiring circle of blue-stockings, proved to be a mere book of
extracts culled from popular writers. The playwright, Congreve, whose
own medallion is below the Abbot's Pew in the nave, showed his want of
literary cultivation by not only composing a poem in praise of the young
writer, but allowing it to be published as a preface to the book, which
went through several editions before the fraud was discovered. The
annual sermon, which was long preached in the Abbey in memory of the
youthful heiress (she was only twenty-one) who left a bequest for the
purpose in her will, has become a thing of the past.
While the artistic persons with us have been bewailing the ruthless
destruction of the wall {41} arcading and will have cause to lament still
louder in the transepts, the student of heraldry is attracted to some
defaced shields which repay a closer attention, and have helped
antiquaries to fix the dates of the choir and nave. The Confessor's,
with the familiar five birds, and Henry the Third's arms with three lions
are easily identified in this aisle, and the learned in such matters
point out many others, chiefly the coats of Henry's relations, such as
his father-in-law, Raymond de Beranger, Count of Provence, and his
brother Richard, King of the Romans, one of the royal princes selected to
carry St. Edward's coffin from the palace to the new shrine.
We have now reached the crossing, and should all our party desire to make
an exhaustive circuit of the church to-day, the south transept is our
next goal. When time presses it is wisest for the guide to pause here,
merely point out the Statesmen's Aisle and the Poets' Corner, and then
pass on at once through the iron gates to the royal chapels.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: Interior of the South Transept]
* * * *