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.
The circle of kingly tombs, which include those of two small princesses,
is completed at the eastern end by the memorial of Henry V. The chantry
chapel above is apparently in the shape of the King's initial, but this
proves to be a mere coincidence, as the letter H was made after a
different pattern in the fifteenth century. Henry IV. was {84} taken ill
when saying his prayers before the shrine, and died in the Abbot's
withdrawing-room, the Jerusalem Chamber; but the son erected no tomb here
for his father's remains, rather the first act of his reign after the
coronation was, as we have already pointed out, to bring his murdered
cousin's body from King's Langley, and to inter it with royal pomp in the
tomb which Richard had prepared for himself years before. In the
Jerusalem Chamber we shall see the busts of the two Lancastrian kings.
Here is only a bare and headless effigy to recall the victor of
Agincourt, and a dilapidated helmet, saddle, and shield, on the bar
above, all of which were carried at Henry's funeral. Henry's own will
provided for the erection of this large memorial, which encroaches on the
eastern part of both Eleanor and Philippa's monuments. We reach the
chantry chapel above his tomb by stone steps worn by countless pilgrims,
who painfully climbed them on their knees when they came here to pray for
the dead hero's soul. Looking down from this chapel before the pall
covered the shrine we used to see the Confessor's coffin, and can still
enjoy the most striking view that exists of the church from east to west.
On either side just below are the apsidal chapels. Facing the north {85}
ambulatory and forming part of the screen to St. Paul's Chapel is the
monument of Henry's standard-bearer, Lord Robsert, who received this
coveted post as a reward for his valour at Agincourt. Amongst the now
defaced shields round the tomb ancient students of heraldry believed that
they discovered the quarterings of Chaucer's father-in-law, Sir Payne
Roet of Hainault, and Robsert's crest was even identified with his.
Inside, the chapel itself is blocked up by the huge statue of James Watt,
one of the inventors of the steam-engine, but there are many fine old
monuments against the walls. From here we have a good view of an altar
tomb in the centre of the same chapel, the alabaster effigies upon which
are in the costume of the early Tudor period, and represent Sir Giles
Daubeney, the friend and Lord Chamberlain of Henry VII., with his wife
Magdalen. Above them are suspended the banners of the Delavel family,
which are over two hundred years old.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: St. Edward's Shrine and the Chantry Chapel of Henry V.]
* * * *