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[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.--FRONT.]
THE CHILDREN OF
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
STUDIES IN ENGLISH HISTORY
BY
ROSE G. KINGSLEY
[Illustration: EDWARD THE SIXTH]
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
BOSTON
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY
FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS
Copyright, 1886.
by
D. LOTHROP & COMPANY.
Dedication
TO MY NEPHEWS
RANULPH AND FRANCIS
KINGSLEY
_Tachbrook Mallory_
Oct. 16, 1885
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
I. The Building of the Abbey--Princess Catherine
and Prince Henry 7
II. The Conquest of Wales--Prince Alfonso 31
III. John of Eltham, the Young Knight 57
IV. Edward the Fifth, and Richard, Duke of
York 79
V. King Edward the Sixth 105
VI. Miss Elizabeth Russell, "the Child of Westminster" 130
VII. The Princesses Sophia and Mary 155
VIII. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 176
IX. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (_continued_) 196
X. Lord Francis Villiers 222
XI. Princess Anne, and Henry, Duke of Gloucester 243
XII. William Henry, Duke of Gloucester 269
ILLUSTRATIONS.
(_From rare old Prints and Photographs._)
PAGE.
Westminster Abbey.--Front Frontis.
Westminster Abbey.--North Entrance 12
Shrine of Edward the Confessor.--At left, Tomb of Henry the Third 25
Dean Stanley 37
Chapel of Henry the Fifth 45
Effigy of John of Eltham 58
Tomb of John of Eltham, St. Edmund's Chapel 61
Ancient Canopy of the Tomb of John of Eltham 67
Tomb of William of Windsor and his Sister Blanche 74
Edward the Fifth 83
Memorial Urn in Henry the Seventh's Chapel 101
Interior of the Chapel of Henry the Seventh 107
Exterior of the Chapel of Henry the Seventh 113
Edward the Sixth.--_From a Painting by Holbein_ 119
Queen Elizabeth.--_From Painting in the English National Portrait
Gallery_ 137
Monument to Miss Elizabeth Russell 147
The Monument to Queen Elizabeth in the North Aisle 157
The Cradle Tomb 165
The Monuments of Princess Sophia and Princess Mary 171
Entrance to Bramshill House 179
Bramshill House, from the North 189
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 203
Westminster Abbey, from the North 215
Tomb of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 227
Lord Francis Villiers.--_After Vandyck_ 235
The Effigies of the Lady Anna 245
Henry, Duke of Gloucester 253
Princess Elizabeth in Prison 261
Westminster Abbey, looking toward the Altar.--_From
Etching by H. Toussaint_ 273
The Old Dormitory at Westminster School 279
Dining Hall, Westminster School 285
A Westminster Boy 289
THE CHILDREN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
CHAPTER I.
THE BUILDING OF THE ABBEY.
Twelve hundred years ago, in the reign of King Sebert the Saxon, a poor
fisherman called Edric, was casting his nets one Sunday night into the
Thames. He lived on the Isle of Thorns, a dry spot in the marshes, some
three miles up the river from the Roman fortress of London. The silvery
Thames washed against the island's gravelly shores. It was covered with
tangled thickets of thorns. And not so long before, the red deer, and
elk and fierce wild ox had strayed into its shades from the neighboring
forests.[1]
Upon the island a little church had just been built, which was to be
consecrated on the morrow. Suddenly Edric was hailed from the further
bank by a venerable man in strange attire. He ferried the stranger
across the river, who entered the church and consecrated it with all the
usual rites--the dark night being bright with celestial splendor. When
the ceremony was over, the stranger revealed to the awestruck fisherman
that he was St. Peter, who had come to consecrate his own Church of
Westminster. "For yourself," he said, "go out into the river; you will
catch a plentiful supply of fish, whereof the larger part shall be
salmon. This I have granted on two conditions--first, that you never
again fish on Sundays; and secondly, that you pay a tithe of them to the
Abbey of Westminster."[2]
The next day when bishop and king came with a great train to consecrate
the church, Edric told them his story, presented a salmon "from St.
Peter in a gentle manner to the bishop," and showed them that their
pious work was already done.
So runs the legend. And on the site of that little church dedicated to
St. Peter upon the thorn-grown island in the marshes, grew up centuries
later the glorious Abbey that all English and American boys and girls
should love. For that Abbey is the record of the growth of our two great
nations. Within its walls we are on common ground. We are "in goodly
company;" among those who by their words and deeds and examples have
made England and America what they are. America is represented just as
much as England "by every monument in the Abbey earlier than the Civil
Wars."[3] And within the last few years England has been proud to
enshrine in her Pantheon the memories of two great and good
Americans--George Peabody, the philanthropist, and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, the poet.
Come with me, in spirit, my American friends, and let us wander down to
Westminster on some warm June morning.
We will go down Parliament street from Trafalgar Square, along the road
that English kings took in old days from the Tower of London to their
coronations at the Abbey. Whitehall is on our left; and we remember with
a shudder that King Charles stepped out of that great middle window and
laid his unhappy head on the block prepared outside upon the scaffold.
On our right "The Horse Guards"--the headquarters of the English army,
with a couple of gorgeous lifeguardsmen in scarlet and white, and
shining cuirasses, sitting like statues on their great black horses.
Through the archway we catch a glimpse of the thorns in St. James' Park,
all white with blossom; and we wonder whether their remote ancestors
were the thorns of Edric's time. Next comes the mass of the Foreign
Office and all the government buildings, with footguards in scarlet
tunics and huge bearskin caps standing sentry at each door. Parliament
street narrows; and at the end of it we see the Clock Tower of the
Houses of Parliament high up in the air, and the still larger square
Victoria Tower. Then it opens out into a wide space of gardens and
roadways; and, across the bright flower beds, there stands Westminster
Abbey.
What would Edric, the poor fisherman, think if he could see the
Thames--silvery no longer--hurrying by the wide granite
embankments--past Doulton's gigantic Lambeth potteries and Lambeth
Palace and the River Terrace of the Houses of Parliament--covered with
panting steamboats and heavy barges--swirling brown and turbid under the
splendid bridges that span it, down to the Tower of London, and the
Pool, and the Docks, where the crossing lines of thousands of masts and
spars make a brown mist above the shipping from every quarter of the
globe? Poor Edric would look in vain for fish in that dirty river; and
full four hundred years have passed since "the Reverend Brother John
Wratting, Prior of Westminster," saw twenty-four salmon offered as tithe
at the High Altar of the Abbey.
What would King Sebert the Saxon think if we took him into the glorious
building that has risen upon the foundations of his little church in the
marshes?
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.--NORTH ENTRANCE.]
At first sight Westminster Abbey is a little dwarfed by the enormous
pile of the Houses of Parliament and their great towers. And St.
Margaret's Church, nestling close to it on the north, mars the full view
of its length. But when we draw near to it, all other buildings are
forgotten. Crossing St. Margaret's churchyard where Raleigh sleeps, we
seem to come into the shadow of a great gray cliff. Arch and buttress
and pinnacle and exquisite pointed windows tier upon tier, are piled up
to the parapet more than a hundred feet over our heads. Before us is the
north entrance--well named "Solomon's Porch." It is a "beautiful gate of
the temple" indeed, with its three deep-shadowed recesses, rich with
grouped pillars supporting the pointed arches above the doorways--its
lines of windows and arcades above and below the grand Rose Window, over
thirty feet across--its flying buttresses and delicate pinnacles
terminating one hundred and seventy feet above the ground--the whole
surface wrought with intricate carving, figures of saint and martyr,
likeness of bird and flower, grotesque gargoyles, fanciful traceries and
lines and patterns--a stone lace-work of surpassing beauty.
We gaze and gaze, and try to take in the wonder of stone before us.
Then, through the bewildering noise of London streets, the rattle of
cabs and carriages, the whistle and rumble of underground railways, the
ceaseless tramp of hurrying feet on the pavement--"Big Ben" booms out
eleven times solemnly and slowly from the Clock Tower. We pass the
photograph and guide-book sellers, and push open the doors under the
central archway of Solomon's Porch. In an instant the glare and noise
and hurry are left behind. We find ourselves in a sweet mellow
silence--in a dim tender light--in a vast airy stillness, such as you
find at noontide in the depths of a beech forest. But here the boles of
the beech-trees are huge pillars of stone--the branches are graceful
pointed arches that spring from them, and vaultings and ribs that flash
with gold through the blue mist that hangs forever about the roof a
hundred feet overhead. Outside the Abbey surge the waves of the great
city. We hear a faint murmur of the roar and turmoil of its restless
life breaking like distant surf upon the shore. But within these walls
we are still and peaceful--and, if we will, we may read in "brass and
stony monument" the story not only of England's worthies, but of her
religion, her politics, her art, and her literature for full eight
hundred years. Yes! for eight hundred years. For although the present
Abbey is but six centuries old, there are still remains to be seen of
an earlier building.
Morning service is just over. The choir boys have slipped off their
white surplices, and are setting the music books in order. The crowd of
sight-seers is beginning to wander about the Abbey. The monotonous
voices of the vergers are beginning their explanations of tomb and
chapel to the eager strangers. Let us get my good friends Mr. Berrington
or Mr. Deer who show the tombs, to come quietly with us in their black
gowns. Let us stand within the Sacrarium--the wide space inside the
altar rails. The splendid reredos glittering with gold, mosaic, and
jewels, blazes above the altar of carved cedar from Lebanon. Against the
stalls on the opposite side hangs the famous picture of King Richard the
Second. Beside us rise the gray stone canopies of the magnificent tombs
of Aymer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback--two of the finest specimens
of mediaeval art in England. The great groups of pillars round the choir
carry the eye upwards to the arcades of the Triforium, to the delicate
tracery of the great clerestory windows, to the wonderful misty roof.
But it is not overhead that I would have you look. Beneath your feet is
the mosaic pavement that Abbot Ware brought from Rome in 1267, when he
journeyed thither to be consecrated Abbot of Westminster by the Pope.
Our guide stoops down, touches a secret spring, and lifts up a square
block of the pavement. You look into a space some few feet deep. It is
almost filled with a mass of rudely chiselled stone--the base and part
of the shaft of a huge round pillar.
Look on that pillar with reverence. It has seen strange sights.
Under the arches it once supported, Edward the Confessor was buried.
Under them William the Norman was crowned king of England.
It was on the twenty-eighth of December, in the year of grace 1065, that
the Collegiate Church of St. Peter was consecrated. For fifteen years
Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king, who built it "to the honor of
God and St. Peter and all God's saints," had lavished time and money and
pious thought on the grandest building England had yet seen. It had
cost one tenth of the property of the kingdom. Its vast size, covering
as it did almost the same ground as the present Abbey, its great round
arches, its massive pillars, its deep foundations, its windows filled
with stained glass, its richly sculptured stones, its roof covered with
lead, its five big bells--all these wonders filled the minds of men
accustomed to the rude wooden rafters and beams of the common Saxon
churches, with amazement and awe. Then too a mysterious interest had
always attached to the site. Besides the old legend of the first
consecration by St. Peter, the belief in many mysteries and miracles
connected with the Confessor had grown up with the growth of his Abbey
Church.
The saintly king, with his pink cheeks, his long white beard, his wavy
hair and his delicate hands that healed the diseases of his people by
their magical touch, would startle his courtiers with a strange laugh
now and again, and then recount some vision which had come to him while
they thought he slept. "He had seen the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus
suddenly turn from their right sides to their left, and recognized in
this omen the sign of war, famine, and pestilence for the coming seventy
years, during which the sleepers were to lie in their new position."[4]
He had given a precious ring, "large, royal and beautiful," off his
finger, to a beggar who implored alms of him in the name of St. John.
The beggar vanished. And the ring was brought back to him from Syria by
two English pilgrims, to whom an aged man had confided it, telling them
that he was St. John the Evangelist, "with the warning that in six
months the king should be with him in Paradise."
The six months have ended.
The Abbey Church of St. Peter is finished, while hard by, in his palace
of Westminster, Edward, the last Saxon king, lies dying. On Wednesday,
the Feast of the Holy Innocents, or Childermas, the dying king rouses
himself sufficiently to sign the Charter of the foundation: but Edith
his queen has to represent him at the consecration. And the first
ceremony after the consecration of the glorious minster he loved so
well, is the Confessor's own burial. In his royal robes, a crown of gold
upon his head, a crucifix of gold on his breast, a golden chain about
his neck, and the pilgrim's ring on his hand, he lies before the High
Altar with an unearthly smile upon his lips.
A great horror and terror had fallen upon the people of England--and
well it might. Well might the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus turn uneasily in
their slumber--for within a year William the Norman was standing before
that same High Altar--standing on the very gravestone of King Edward,
"trembling from head to foot"[5] for the first time in his life amid
clamor and tumult, as Aldred, the Saxon Archbishop of York, put the
crown of England on his head, and made him swear to protect his Saxon
subjects, while the fierce Norman cavalry were trampling those Saxon
subjects under their horses' hoofs outside the Abbey gates.
For one hundred and fifty years England was under foreign kings. And
although the Norman Conquerors were crowned in Edward the Saxon's Abbey
Church at Westminster, not one of them was laid within its walls. But
with the fall of the Norman and Angevin kings, better days dawned for
England. The Barons at Runnymede had forced King John, the last English
Duke of Normandy and Anjou, to grant them the Great Charter--the glory
and pride of all English-speaking people. And at John's death his son
Henry the Third came to the throne in 1216 as the first English king of
a free English people.
The young king prided himself upon his Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He was
descended from King Alfred through "the good Matilda," Henry the First's
wife. He called his sons by Anglo-Saxon names. His interests, and those
of his descendants, were to be concentrated in the island which was now
their sole kingdom. He therefore determined to desert the city of
Winchester, which his Norman predecessors had made their headquarters,
and "to take up his abode in Westminster beside the Confessor's
tomb."[6]
During the Norman occupation an irresistible instinct had been drawing
the conquerors towards their English subjects, "and therefore towards
the dust of the last Saxon king." In Henry the Second's reign Edward the
Confessor had been canonized. Many English anniversaries were celebrated
yearly in the Abbey. Good Queen Matilda was buried close to her kinsman
Edward and Edith the Swanneck, "the first royal personage so interred
since the troubles of the conquest."[7]
It was to Henry the Third, however, that the thought came of making the
Shrine of the Confessor the centre of a burial place for his race. In
addition to his love for all things pertaining to his Saxon ancestry,
Henry was passionately devoted to all sacred observances. "Even St.
Louis," says Dean Stanley, "seemed to him but a lukewarm Rationalist."
He possessed in a very high degree what we nowadays call the artistic
sense. Art in all its forms was a complete passion with him; and with
his Provencal wife Eleanor a swarm of foreign artists, painters,
sculptors, poets, troubadours, found their way to England. Louis the
Ninth was re-building and re-embellishing the Abbey of St. Denys as a
place of sepulture for the French kings. Henry had also seen the
splendid churches of Amiens, Beauvais, and Reims, in his journeys
through France. His English, his religious, and his artistic instincts
therefore, all combined to fire his imagination with the idea of making
the most glorious shrine for the English king and saint that the world
could see.
Henry's work at Westminster began with his reign. He dedicated the newly
built Lady Chapel at the back of the High Altar, the day before his
coronation; and "the first offering laid upon its altar were the spurs
worn by the King in that ceremony." Then Edward's Abbey, "consecrated by
recollections of the Confessor and the Conqueror," was swept away.
Little remains of it now save the bases of those pillars of which I have
spoken above--the substructures of the Dormitory--and the heavy
low-browed passage leading from the Great Cloister into Little Dean's
Yard and the Little Cloisters. The famous "Chapel of the Pyx," close to
the Chapter House, is still in good preservation. But as it can only be
opened by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, with seven huge keys,
it is impossible to gain entrance to it--the ancient Treasury of
England. It is now only opened by these officers once in five years for
the "Trial of the Pyx," the Standard Trial Pieces of gold and silver,
used for determining the just weight of the coin of the realm issued at
the Mint.
But now upon the old foundations rose the Abbey we all know and love. In
every smallest detail the new church was to be incomparable in beauty.
Foreign painters and sculptors expended on it all their cunning. Peter
of Rome set to work on the Confessor's Shrine, where you may still read
his name, and made it glow with gold, mosaics and enamels, the like of
which could not be found in England. And when the wondrous
building--"the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom"[8]--was
finished, the Confessor's body was translated on October 13, 1269, from
its tomb in front of the High Altar to the splendid shrine prepared for
it. The king, now growing old, had gathered his family about him for
the last time. Edward, his eldest son, was just on the eve of departure
with his wife Eleanor for Palestine to join St. Louis in the Crusades.
He, his brother Edmund, and his uncle Richard, king of Germany,
"supported the coffin of the Confessor, and laid him in the spot where
(with the exception of one short interval) he has remained ever
since."[9] The King himself carried from St. Paul's the sacred relics
which the Knights Templars had given him twenty years before, and
deposited them behind the shrine, where Henry the Fifth's Chantry now
stands.
Dear as the Abbey was to King Henry as a monument of his own piety and
taste, and as the shrine of his sainted kinsman, yet he must have loved
it even more tenderly for being the resting-place of a little child. The
Confessor's Church as you will remember was consecrated on Childermas,
the Holy Innocents' Day. And it seems to me not without significance,
that the first interment of importance in Henry the Third's new building
was that of a child of five years old--his beautiful little daughter
Catherine. In 1257, during an insurrection of the Welsh which laid waste
the Border, and which the King strove in vain to quell--the kingdom
desolated with famine--the Barons mutinous and defiant--Henry's cup of
trouble was filled by the death of his little child.
[Illustration: SHRINE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.--AT LEFT, TOMB OF HENRY
THE THIRD.]
"She was dumb, and fit for nothing," says old Matthew Paris rather
cruelly, "though possessing great beauty." The poor queen fell ill and
nearly died of grief at the loss of her little deaf and dumb girl, loved
all the more dearly no doubt, by reason of her affliction. And her
illness, his own want of success against the Welsh, and the little
princess's death, so overwhelmed the king with grief as to bring on "a
tertian fever, which detained him for a long time at London, whilst at
the same time the queen was confined to her bed at Windsor by an attack
of pleurisy."[10]
The little Catherine was buried with great pomp in the ambulatory just
outside the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel to the south of the Confessor's
Shrine, and close to the grand tomb of her uncle, the king's half
brother, William de Valence. Her father raised a splendid monument to
her memory. It was rich with mosaic and polished slabs of serpentine, in
much the same style as his own magnificent tomb on the north of the
Confessor's Chapel. A silver image of St. Catherine was placed upon it,
for which William de Gloucester, the king's goldsmith, was paid seventy
marks. The image of course has vanished, like many other precious
things. Most of the mosaic has been picked out. But enough of it and of
the polished marbles exist to show the elaborate design of the upper
slab, while on the wall above it, under a graceful trefoil-headed arch,
are traces of gilding and coloring, which are supposed to be remains of
a painting of the Princess Catherine and two brothers who died in their
infancy.
Here then is the first memorial of the many "Holy Innocents" who lie in
the great Abbey--of the children who found a resting-place among
The princes and the worthies of all sorts;
and whose histories we are about to study together. But Princess
Catherine was not the only child whose early death helped to bring King
Henry's gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. Before the close of his reign
another young life was cut short by a crime so terrible as to win a
mention for Westminster from the lips of Dante himself.
In 1271, only two years after the translation of the Confessor, the
king's youthful nephew, Prince Henry, son of Richard king of Germany,
was returning from the crusade in which St. Louis had died. Charles of
Sicily granted a safe conduct to him and to his cousin Philip, son of
St. Louis, who was hurrying home to be crowned king of France. But at
Viterbo in Italy, while Henry was at mass in the Church of St.
Sylvester, he was stabbed during the Elevation of the Host by Guy and
Simon, sons of Simon de Montfort. It was a fearful revenge on Henry the
Third for the death of their father five years before at the battle of
Evesham--for their own banishment--for the seizure of their father's
lands and Earldom, which Henry bestowed on his own son Edmund. All
Europe was filled with horror at the dreadful deed, a crime almost
unheard of in its impiety. The young prince's bones were buried in the
monastery of Hayles which his father had founded; while his heart was
brought to Westminster, and placed in a golden chalice "in the hand of
a statue" near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. The old chronicler
Matthew of Westminster adds with deep satisfaction, "One of his
murderers, Simon, died this year in a certain castle near the city of
Sienna: who during the latter part of his life being, like Cain,
accursed of the Lord, was a vagabond and a fugitive on the face of the
earth."[11]
Apart, however, from all other interest, the terrible deed will be
forever memorable, as it drew from Dante "the one single notice of
Westminster Abbey in the _Divina Commedia_."[12]
In the _Inferno_, the centaur who was then guiding Dante and Virgil,
showed them a shade up to his chin in the river of blood--all alone in a
corner, shunned even by his fellow-murderers--and said,
Colui fesse in grembo a Dio
Lo cuor, che'n su'l Tamigi ancor si cola.
_Inferno, xii._, 119.
He in God's bosom smote the heart,
Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames.[13]
The citizens of Viterbo had a picture of the young prince's murder
painted on the wall in his memory; "and a certain poet beholding the
painting, spoke thus:
Henry, the illustrious offspring of great Richard,
Fair Allmaine's king, was treacherously slain,
As well this picture shows, while home returning
From Tripoli, by royal favour guided;
Slain in the service of the cross of Christ
By wicked hands. For scarcely mass was done,
When Leicester's offspring, Guy and Simon fierce,
Pierced his young heart with unrelenting swords.
Thus did God will; lest if those barons fierce
Returned, fair England should be quite undone.
This happened in the sad twelve hundredth year
And seventieth of grace, while Charles was king.
And in Viterbo was this brave prince slain.
I pray the Queen of Heaven to take his soul again."[14]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dean Stanley says in his "Memorials of Westminster," "The bones of
such an ox (Bos primicerius) were discovered under the foundations of
the Victoria Tower, and red deer, with very fine antlers, below the
River Terrace." I derive this from Professor Owen. Bones and antlers of
the elk and red deer were also found in 1868 in Broad Sanctuary in
making the Metropolitan Railway.
[2] "Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 21.
[3] Lectures delivered in America. Charles Kingsley.
[4] "Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 28.
[5] "Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 46.
[6] "Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 129.
[7] "Memorials of Westminster," Dean Stanley, p. 126.
[8] Street. Essay on Influence of Foreign Art on English Architecture
[9] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey," Dean Stanley, p. 136.
[10] Matthew Paris' Chronicle.
[11] Matthew of Westminster's Chronicle.
[12] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey," Dean Stanley, p. 140.
[13] Cary's Dante.
[14] Matthew of Westminster.