The north transept is called the Statesman's Aisle, and is filled with
the statues of ministers of State and of other politicians; besides these
we find lawyers, soldiers, and sailors. From this point there is a good
view of Sir Robert Peel's statue in the right foreground, with Gladstone
and Beaconsfield prominent behind him. We look down the aisle and see
the rose window, which was filled with painted glass in the eighteenth
century under Dean Atterbury's rule, and the fine early wall arcadings
below. In the spandrels are two beautiful stone angels, which are just
visible in the illustration.
* * * * * *
Beyond are the tombs of the first and third Dukes of Newcastle. The
first, William Cavendish, was a loyal supporter of Charles I., in whose
service he lost his estates and fortune, but he returned to prosperity
after the Restoration. His wife shared his troubles and his rewards.
Her reputation as a literary woman and an authoress is marked by the pen
and inkhorn beside her effigy; in her hands is an open book. The third
Duke, John Holles, married their grand-daughter, and was reputed the
richest subject in the kingdom by his contemporaries. He lived in the
reign of Queen Anne, when the standard of wealth was far less high than
it is in these days. One of the slender columns in St. Michael's Chapel
behind still {113} retains the original polish, and gives us some idea
what the whole church looked like before our London atmosphere had
corroded and blurred the surface of the Purbeck marble. Statues of the
three Cannings stand between these two tombs. The nearest to our
generation, he died in 1880, is Stratford Canning, better known by his
title of the Viscount de Redcliffe, who was for fifty years British
Ambassador in the East. His cousin, Earl Canning, Viceroy of India
during the Mutiny, was succeeded in that post, after the outbreak was
quelled, by Lord Lawrence, whose grave and bust we saw in the nave. From
the third statue, that of George Canning, Prime Minister in 1827, we look
across the transept to his colleague in his last Cabinet, Lord
Palmerston, a statesman who must ever be associated with our foreign
policy for the first half of Queen Victoria's reign. Further to the left
we see another Tory politician, Viscount Castlereagh, with whom George
Canning once actually fought a duel; but the two men made up their
quarrel, and Canning afterwards succeeded his former foe at the Foreign
Office. Castlereagh was unfortunate in his end and unpopular during his
life. He committed suicide while temporarily insane, and his burial here
was the {114} occasion of a great outburst of feeling, when the indignant
mob outside hammered on the doors of the church while the funeral service
proceeded inside. The huge monument, which fills up the last arch on the
western side, was erected by Parliament, at the cost of 6000 pounds, as a
tribute to the fame of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Bacon was guilty
of this enormity, while Westmacott perpetrated the equally tasteless
allegorical group over the west door, which commemorates the younger
Pitt. Father and son lie together in this aisle. Not far from theirs
are the graves of two other statesmen, Henry Grattan, the eloquent Irish
orator, and his dear friend, Charles James Fox, "near whom in death it
would have been his pride to lie." We saw the monuments of Pitt and Fox
on our first entrance into the nave. Chatham's name must ever recall the
severance of the United States from the Mother Country, while his son,
"the great Commoner," is associated with our struggle to break the power
of Napoleon, whose downfall Pitt did not live to see. Between the last
columns further south is the statue of Chatham's brilliant legal
adversary, Lord Mansfield. Behind him stands another distinguished
lawyer, who belonged to a later generation, Sir William Webb Follett,
{115} Attorney-General in Peel's last Ministry. Before turning the
corner into the western aisle it is impossible not to notice the two
Admirals, Vernon and Wager, whose memorials unfortunately cover the wall
arcading on either side of the north door. Their very names are unknown
to the average person nowadays, but they did good service on the high
seas for England's glory in their own time, the eighteenth century.
Vernon owes a posthumous fame amongst sea-faring men to the fact that the
sailor's drink, a mixture of rum and water first introduced by the
Admiral, was called grog in his honour; he was familiarly known as "Old
Grog" on board ship, a nickname inspired by his grogram boat-cloak.
In another place we have already dwelt at some length upon these makers
of our Empire in war and peace alike, whose names may be seen upon the
walls on every side. While the tariff question is the topic of the hour,
and Cobden, the original champion of free trade, is constantly appealed
to by our modern politicians, we must not omit to look at that
statesman's bust, which will be found, with a number of other interesting
memorials, at the back of Chatham's monument. Near this the tablet to
Warren Hastings records a page in the history of {116} our Indian Empire
which it is best to leave unturned, for it is stained with the life-blood
of a man's broken heart, a heart broken by a trial dragged out
interminably till the culprit, whether he were innocent or guilty, was
punished far beyond his deserts. Macaulay's famous description of
Hastings's trial is well known, and we are reminded of his no less
familiar essay on Lord Clive by the monuments of two men, a soldier and a
sailor, who co-operated with Clive in the foundation of our Indian
Empire. The East India Company is responsible for the inartistic,
grotesque erections which traduce the memory of these gallant men,
Admiral Watson and Sir Eyre Coote, while they also perpetrated the
scarcely less offensive, although smaller monument which commemorates
Major Stringer Lawrence, Clive's intimate friend and valued comrade, the
hero of Trichinopoly, which is near the west end of the nave. The
Admiral sits unclothed, save for a Roman toga, amongst palm-trees and
allegorical figures above the ancient doorway, while his chief
achievements are recorded in the inscriptions "Calcutta freed,"
"Ghereah," and "Chandernagore taken," with the dates 1756 and 1757.
Coote expelled the French from the Coromandel coast in 1761, and twenty
years later {117} defeated them again with their ally, Hyder Ali, in the
Carnatic. The General masquerades as a Roman warrior, with a native
captive and a figure of Victory on either hand. Such was, in fact, the
taste of the period when these preposterous groups were all the fashion.
We turn from this with pleasure to the fine bust of Richard Kane, which
is against the opposite wall, and single him out for a passing mention on
account of his connection, as Governor, with the Island of Minorca, one
of "the lost possessions" of England.
Facing us now, as we make our way westward, is the seated figure of Sir
Fowell Buxton, and a little further to the left Joseph's extraordinarily
vivid but unpleasing figure of William Wilberforce. Both men are
indissolubly connected in our minds with the abolition of Slavery. With
them are associated the pioneer of the anti-slavery agitation, Granville
Sharp, and their fellow-worker, Zachary, father of Lord Macaulay.
Sharp's tablet is not far from the latter's bust in the south transept,
and we have already noticed the elder Macaulay in the Whigs' Corner.
Between the philanthropists is Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of
Singapore, a man no less zealous than they in the struggle for the
suppression of slavery. To us Londoners his name {118} must ever be
dear, for we owe the Zoological Gardens to his initiative.
We are standing now in the aisle dedicated to the memory of that great
English composer, Henry Purcell, and thus often called the "Musicians'
Aisle," although the memorials to musicians are comparatively few.
Purcell's modest tablet with the well-known epitaph, "Here lyes Henry
Purcell, Esq., who left this life, and is gone to that blessed place,
where only his harmony can be exceeded," hangs against the pillar near
Raffles. We passed a modern one hard by to Balfe, a composer of many
popular ballads; while on the north wall are the monuments of Purcell's
master, Dr. Blow, who first preceded and then succeeded his young pupil
at the Abbey organ, and Dr. Croft, who followed after Blow. Stones in
the floor mark the graves of Dr. Samuel Arnold, another Abbey organist,
and Sterndale Bennett, who is considered by some authorities worthy to
rank with Purcell as a musical composer. A tablet to Dr. Burney detains
us for a moment, while we remind the lovers of literature in our party of
his daughter, the novelist, Fanny Burney, and of their friendship with
Dr. Johnson, whose grave we saw in Poets' Corner. Other memorials,
chiefly those to sailors, are upon this {119} wall, but we cannot tarry
much longer, our friends are craving mercy for tired brains and aching
limbs. Just before the iron gate the portrait medallion of Charles
Darwin, which is closely companioned by tablets to three other modern
scientists, Joule, Adams, and Stokes, attracts notice, and the next
moment we tread upon the graves of Darwin and Herschel, all placed
purposely in the vicinity of Sir Isaac Newton. Doctors of medicine as
well as men of science will be found in the nave. We have already
referred to the fashionable Dr. Mead, and his no less popular intimate,
Dr. Freind, is also here. Freind's brother was headmaster of Westminster
School, and many of the Latin inscriptions on contemporary monuments were
written by him, including the one under his brother's bust; so many in
fact that Pope, whose own pen was ever busy commemorating his cronies
with fulsome laudations, such as those on Kneller and Craggs, wrote the
following mocking lines:--
Freind, for your epitaphs I'm grieved
Where still so much is said,
One half will never be believed,
The other never read.
The jibing prophecy has been literally fulfilled, for these Latin
epitaphs are most certainly never read, {120} while Pope's verses, which
are usually in English, stand a better chance. Close to us on the
right-hand wall is the bust of a great modern geologist, Sir Charles
Lyell, which stands above the monument of his distinguished forerunner,
Woodward, who is often called the founder of English geology. Opposite
is that of Dean Buckland, who was twice President of the Geological
Society and a distinguished authority in that science. The windows along
the north side commemorate celebrated civil engineers, Stephenson, Locke,
Brunel, and Trevithick. To the genius of these men and to James Watt,
whose statue we saw in St. Paul's Chapel, the wonderful railway and
steamship system of modern days was, in the first instance, due. Few,
indeed, are the arts, crafts, and sciences of the last two centuries
which cannot claim some representative in the Abbey. Thus, as we cross
over to the west cloister door on our way out, we tread upon the graves
of the father of English watchmakers, Thomas Tompion, and his clever
apprentice, George Graham; near them lies Telford, the builder of the
Menai Bridge; close to him is Robert Stephenson, the designer of the
tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, who was buried beside Telford,
twenty-five years later, at his own request.
{121}
We have brought our walk round the inside of the church to a conclusion,
but in order to complete the circuit of the outside, such of the monastic
buildings which are still extant must be visited on the way out. A
narrow doorway opposite Telford's grave leads immediately into the
cloisters, which formed the central part of the monastery. Here it was
that the busy daily life of a Benedictine brotherhood was carried on: in
this, the west walk, the monks kept a school, where the novices and boys
from the neighbourhood received the only education obtainable in England
before the grammar schools were founded. The adjacent north walk was
used as a library in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and divided
off by screens at either end. In this part used to be the Prior's seat,
and around him were bookcases containing parchment rolls and illuminated
missals, to which, after Caxton's time, printed volumes were added. The
Consuetudines of Abbot Ware, the Litlington Missal, the Liber Regalis,
and the Islip Roll are still extant, but most of the precious manuscripts
which the Westminster brethren illuminated and copied with such loving
care in this library, each scribe seated in his own alcove, were
destroyed or carelessly lost after the Dissolution, when the monks had
all been {122} dispersed, and printed books were rapidly superseding the
written folios. In the eastern walk beyond this the Abbot sat enthroned
on special days, in order to hear complaints and redress grievances.
There also it was that he held his Maundy on the Thursday before Good
Friday, and washed the feet of beggars. Towards the west in the southern
part, which completes the square and was used as a passage-way, is the
entrance to the great refectory where the brethren dined. Nothing of the
hall is left save the ancient wall, but outside the door are remains of
the niches which were used for towels; the lavatory itself was round the
corner in the west cloister. The cloisters, and the monastic buildings
which surround them, were built at different periods, chiefly by the
generosity and energy of the Abbots. The Norman monastery remained
intact long after Henry the Third's time, but the new cloister, which was
begun by Abbot Byrcheston, was gradually built as the church progressed,
and the north end of the eastern arm was practically part of the south
transept. Both the east and north walks were completed under Edward I.
in the same style, the Early English; but the other two were not begun
till Langham's abbacy in the fourteenth century, {123} and the cloister
was not entirely finished till the fifteenth. To Langham's generous
bequest and Litlington's talent for architectural design the monks owed
the completion of this most important part of their monastery. We shall
see as we go out the head of Litlington, carved on the archway in Dean's
Yard after his death, for he did not live to see the whole work which he
had planned carried out. In walking round the cloisters it must be
remembered, however, that successive restorations and remodellings of the
window traceries have in many instances destroyed all traces of the
earlier style, and the more ancient portions are now in so decayed a
state that a fresh restoration must soon be undertaken.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: The South Transept and Chapter House from Dean's Yard]
* * * *