KING EDWARD THE SIXTH.
Between the death of Edward the Fifth and the coronation of another
boy-king, Edward the Sixth, Westminster Abbey saw momentous changes. Its
fabric and its constitution were alike altered by the stupendous
transformation through which England passed in those seventy years.
Henry the Seventh's reign marks a great break in English History. It is
the close of the Middle Ages. And the Abbey tells the story of this
break in a strangely vivid and emphatic fashion. As we walk up the wide
flight of steps beyond the Confessor's Chapel at the extreme east end of
the Abbey, we find ourselves in a new world. The grave, stately,
mediaeval church is left behind. And, entering Henry the Seventh's
matchless chapel, a sense of fervor and richness in the architecture
seizes on us. Our eyes feast on the bayed windows with their innumerable
little diamond panes; the traceries and mouldings on the walls--not a
foot left unwrought--the niches with figures of saint and martyr; the
grand bronze gates with their Tudor arms--the rose and portcullis, the
falcon and fetterlock--the rich dark wood carving of the stalls, with
the banners of the Knights of the Bath hanging motionless above each;
and then the roof, that marvelous stone cobweb, with its bosses,
carvings and coats of arms, its vaultings springing from the slenderest
pillars imaginable like graceful palm stems, and spreading out into the
exquisite fan-tracery that covers the whole--a network of stone lace. As
Washington Irving says in his unrivalled description of Westminster,
Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have
been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft as if
by magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful
minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OF HENRY THE SEVENTH.]
Those prodigious pendants of stone, richly carved over their whole
surface, which hang poised aloft in airy splendor, may well fill the
mind with wonder almost akin to terror. How do they hold together? How
has the cunning of man been able to counteract the force of gravity?
What keeps them from falling on us as we stand gazing up at the stone
miracle, and grinding us to powder? Not only we, but many wise
architects have marvelled at that "prodigy of art,"--at the "daring
hardihood" which keyed that roof together, every block depending on the
next, and the whole structure cohering by the perfection of each
minutest part. The very richness of the work, the seemingly lavish
tracery, the perforated ornaments behind the spring of the main arches,
all help to weld it into one abiding whole. It is a fit type of the
noble strength of perfect unity. For, so say the masons, if one stone
were to give away, if one pendant were to fall, the whole roof would
collapse.
Nothing gives one a just idea of the awful weight of stone in that roof
until one has climbed above it. Would that I could take you, my readers,
as I have taken more than one American child, for a wander about the
roofs of the Abbey. It is a world within a world. Do not fancy it is
all dark and dirty and terrific. Not at all. I know few more charming
excursions. A little door in the corner of the north transept lets us
into a turret staircase. Up and up it winds, round the solid smooth
shaft of stone, till we reach the Triforium. This is the row of double
trefoil-headed arches that runs all around the Abbey above the great
pier-arches. From below you think, how frightful to be up on that narrow
ledge, clinging to the wall. But when you get up to it you find it
anything but a narrow ledge. It is a grand gallery twenty feet wide,
large enough to drive a coach and four along it, and lighted at many
points by rose-windows in the outer walls. The double arches and slender
pillars which look so beautiful from the ground, are just as interesting
when seen close. Hardly two of them are alike; the builders of those
days did their work in no grudging spirit: but lavished fresh designs
upon every yard.
It is a strange sensation up aloft in this wide gallery, looking down a
sheer sixty feet into the Abbey, peeping at the stalls of the choir
peering down the pipes of the organ, watching the people wandering like
flies over the pavement below us. But the strangest experience of all is
an excursion such as I am describing at night. One such wandering is
specially impressed on my memory. Some American friends were with us;
and lighted by one little lantern we threaded our way through the
darkness, through the solemn stillness of the wonderful building, and
came out into the Triforium. Then suddenly three or four clear rich
voices, one of which is well-known to all who frequent the services at
Westminster, came floating up from the gulf of gloom beneath us,
singing,
Lift thine eyes, oh! lift thine eyes to the mountains,
whence cometh help.
I do not think any one of us will ever forget the startling,
overpowering effect; or listen again to Mendelssohn's trio without a
thrill.
But we must go on. In only one place is the way perilous--just under the
great window in the north transept; for there the passage does narrow to
a ledge; and the Clerk of the Works, who always accompanies these
wanderings in high places, bids the untried hands be careful. Once past
the window all is plain sailing again. We make our way round, above the
Confessor's Chapel, and see his coffin lying in his shrine. We pass
great rooms where all sorts of _debris_ from the building are kept--old
oaken chairs, bits of stone carving, paraphernalia for the coronation or
for any great ceremony. We walk under the painted glass windows that we
have watched, shining like jewels at the end of the apse, when we are at
service in the choir. Then comes another door, another narrow stair, and
we find ourselves in the strangest place of all. We are on the roof of
Henry the Seventh's chapel. Overhead the great rafters are piled,
supporting the outer roof; and as we advance a whirr and a rush of wings
startle our nerves which are perhaps a little on edge by this time.
There is nothing to alarm us however, for it is we who have startled
some of the flock of pigeons who live up in the roofs of the Abbey.
Hundreds of them congregate here, and get their living down in the great
restless city below, especially in Palace Yard. The cabmen on the
cabstand there, waiting for the members to come out of the House of
Parliament, are greatly attached to the Abbey pigeons. I have often
watched a rough, gruff "cabby" fetch a pailful of water and set it down
near his hansom for the pretty birds, who flutter fearlessly, bridling
and cooing, on to the edge, and dip their pink bills in the cool water,
and then hop down and peck up the oats the cab-horse has dropped from
his nose-bag. One would think that nowhere could birds be safer than in
the sanctuary of Westminster. But alas! they have enemies who respect
sanctuary far less than King Richard the Third. The vast roofs of the
Abbey are infested by a breed of fierce half-wild cats. They have lived
up there for years, and cannot be exterminated; and not only are they a
perfect pest and plague to all dwellers in the cloisters, but they get
their living by preying on the poor dear Abbey pigeons.
[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OF HENRY THE SEVENTH.]
However, we did not climb all this height to talk of cats and pigeons;
and if you once find yourselves in this strange place you will give them
but little thought. For under our feet is a great stone sea--vast
circular pits and troughs of solid stone--a very maelstrom of rock. Each
of those great wells narrowing towards the bottom represents one of the
gigantic pendants below. And here one's wonder is I think increased
sevenfold, and we ask how was it possible to poise this prodigious
weight on those slender walls. If we want an answer to our question we
must look outside the chapel, and observe the graceful Flying
Buttresses, which hold roof and walls together, springing from the
upper part of the windows, and ending in tall turrets which run down
and bury themselves in the ground. The buttresses are so light, and so
richly carved, and the turrets look so completely ornamental, with their
crockets, and the delicate canopies over the niches--empty alas! and
their string-course formed of the Tudor arms, that one thinks of them
merely as a lovely part of a lovely whole. So they are. But they are one
of the chief means of binding that splendid roof together--of keeping
the walls from being pulled inward by the mass of stone they have to
support. They act like the guy-ropes which keep a flagstaff upright.
Thus far we have seen how by Edward the Sixth's time the mediaeval
architecture has given place to the Tudor, the feudal Gothic to the more
domestic Perpendicular. But in the constitution of the Abbey a far more
momentous change had taken place. In Henry the Eighth's reign the
Reformation shook the life of England to its very foundation. It is not
my intention to enter upon that vast and deeply important subject. I
only wish to show you some of its effects on Westminster Abbey. The
Abbey and Monastery of Westminster shared in the general Dissolution of
Monasteries in 1539. The last Abbot of Westminster was converted into a
Dean, and "the Monks were succeeded by twelve Prebendaries, each to be
present daily in the Choir, and to preach once a quarter."[43] The
"Abbot's Place" was to be known henceforth as the "Deanery." And for us,
who have known that Deanery in the brilliant days of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, what memories does the name awake. But more. All the relics in
the Abbey that had been given, as we have seen, by successive kings, and
with them Llewellyn's golden crown, and the banners and statues around
the shrine of St. Edward, all these were swept away as worthless or
worse than worthless. Even the bones of the Confessor were not
respected; but were moved and buried apart, until Queen Mary brought
them back and laid them once more in the shrine where they had reposed
so long, and where they rest to this day. Then robbers broke into the
Abbey and carried off, among other treasures, the silver head from Henry
the Fifth's monument. And in Edward the Sixth's reign, when the spirit
of iconoclasm was at its height, the Protector Somerset even talked of
demolishing the Abbey Church, and was only deterred from such an act of
vandalism by the rising, some say, of the inhabitants of Westminster,
or, by the sacrifice of seventeen manors belonging to the Chapter for
the needs of the protectorate.
A boy king was once more head of the English nation. When Henry the
Eighth died in January, 1547, Prince Edward was not quite ten years old,
his sister Elizabeth nearly fourteen, while Mary, the elder sister, was
thirty-one. In less than a month after his father's death, Edward was
crowned at Westminster, and very curious the accounts are of the
ceremony. As was usual, the prince spent the few days before his
coronation at the Tower; and the procession from thence to Westminster
was of extreme magnificence. The little boy was delighted by an
Arragonese sailor who "capered on a tight-rope down from the battlements
of St. Paul's to a window at the Dean's Gate."[44]
An old man in a chair, with crown and sceptre, represented
the state of King Edward the Confessor. St. George would
have spoken, but that His Grace made such speed for lack of
time he could not.[45]
The service at which Archbishop Cranmer, the king's godfather,
officiated, was still that of the Church of Rome: but it was greatly
shortened,
partly "for the tedious length of the same," and "the tender
age" of the King--partly for "that many points of the same
were such as, by the laws of the nation, were not
allowable."[46]
And there were various other differences in matters of detail, into
which we have no space to enter, which showed that a radical change had
taken place in England since Henry the Eighth's coronation. Even
shortened as it was, the service was so long and exhausting that the
poor little king was carried out fainting before it was over.
[Illustration: EDWARD THE SIXTH.--_From a Painting by Holbein._]
A "marvellous boy," "_monstrificus peullus_" as an Italian physician
described him, must King Edward have been. When other boys have their
heads full of bats and balls, of bird'snesting and fishing, this little
lad was writing a diary of political events, the history year by year of
his own reign--a strange document when one thinks of the author's youth.
In it he gravely set down all manner of questions which usually trouble
only old heads. And King Edward's journal is still one of the most
valuable records of the time. Although it does not exhibit any very
original views, this diary shows a strangely impartial spirit. It shows
too a good deal of the coldness of the Tudor nature; for one is
unpleasantly impressed at finding the young king recording the
executions of his two uncles--Somerset and Seymour--with the most
stoical indifference; and setting aside the right of his sisters Mary
and Elizabeth to the crown, with a hard cold remark that they are "unto
us but of the half-blood."
Edward held very strong and decided opinions on all points connected
with the Reformed Church of England.
He was the first sovereign to whom the Bible had been presented at his
coronation,
an act which may perhaps have suggested to the young King
the substitution, which he had all but effected, of the
Bible for St. George in the insignia of the Order of the
Garter.
By the time he was fourteen his precocious mind became aware of the
manner in which his uncle Somerset, had abused his power and taken
advantage of his childhood. He saw how the exchequer had been emptied by
the rash wars with France and Scotland into which the Protector's
ambition had dragged England. How the coinage was debased. How crown
lands worth five million of English money of the present day, had been
granted away to the Protector's friends. All this the boy-king saw. He
felt the shame of his debts; and although he could do little to stop
such scandals, he did what he could. According to a schedule he devised,
we find him diminishing the garrisons of the forts and the Irish army;
ordering greater economy in his household; cutting down the wardrobe
charges, and disallowing various claims for fees.
Edward now took part regularly in public business, and began to inquire
into the daily transactions of the Council. "He required notice
beforehand of the business with which the council was to be occupied,
and an account was given in to him each Saturday of the proceedings of
the week." There is a rough draft of his will, dictated to Sir William
Petre the year before his death, which shows how his mind had dwelt
silently on the events of his boyhood. "Should his successor like
himself, be a minor, his executors, unlike his father's, should meddle
with no wars unless the country was invaded." But of all the writings he
left, the most interesting and important is an unfinished fragment on
the condition of England. Although it was written three hundred years
ago by a boy of fifteen, some of it is such fine and wholesome reading
for us nowadays, that I must quote part of Mr. Froude's account of it.
"A king who at fifteen could sketch the work which was before him so
distinctly, would in a few years have demanded a sharp account of the
Stewardship of the Duke of Northumberland."
Looking at England, ... as England was, the young king saw
"all things out of order." "Farming gentlemen and clerking
knights" neglecting their duties as overseers of the
people, "were exercising the gain of living." ... Artificers
and clothiers no longer worked honestly; the necessaries of
life had risen in price, and the labourers had raised their
wages, "whereby to recompense the loss of things they
bought." The country swarmed with vagabonds; and those who
broke the laws escaped punishment by bribery or through
foolish pity. The lawyers and even the judges were corrupt.
Peace and order were violated by religious dissensions and
universal neglect of the law. Offices of trust were bought
and sold; benefices impropriated, tillage-ground turned to
pasture, "not considering the sustaining of men." The poor
were robbed by the enclosures; and extravagance in dress and
idle luxury of living were eating like ulcers into the
State. These were the vices of the age; nor were they
likely, as Edward thought, to yield in any way to the most
correct formula of justification. The "medicines to cure
these sores" were to be looked for in good education, good
laws, and "just execution of the laws without respect of
persons, in the example of rulers, the punishment of
misdoers, and the encouragement of the good." Corrupt
magistrates should be deposed, seeing that those who were
themselves guilty would not enforce the laws against their
own faults; and all gentlemen and noblemen should be
compelled to reside on their estates, and fulfil the duties
of their place.[47]
Boys and girls in all countries are apt to say "as happy as a king." I
wonder if they ever think of the meaning of that phrase. Certainly a
less enviable position than that of this young king cannot well be
imagined. Holbein's portraits show him to us a delicate, precocious
looking boy, with fine features, small mouth, and odd narrow eyes which
glance with a keen penetration from under the sleepy lids. If he had
been the son of some country squire he would have been living out of
doors, making his frail little body strong and healthy, doing ordinary
lessons, riding and leaping and playing tennis like any other lad of his
age. But instead of this, we find him a mere tool in the hands of
unscrupulous advisers, who are filling their own pockets and ruining the
kingdom at his expense. He is pondering on matters of state when he
ought to have been playing at marbles. Sitting for long hours in the
council chamber, when he should have been riding about the forest with
his hawks and hounds. Galloping all the night through, from Hampton
Court to Windsor, when his uncle Somerset carried him off to serve his
own ends, and thereby did the king's delicate chest an injury which it
never recovered. And at length, after six years of a miserable,
troublous reign, dying at Greenwich before he was sixteen, with the
lords in council and the judges quarreling about his death bed. Poor
boy! surely no one would be tempted to envy his fate.
He was buried at Westminster in the splendid chapel that his grandfather
built and that his father finished under "the matchless altar" which
stood at the head of Henry the Seventh's tomb. This sumptuous
"touchstone altar, all of one piece," with its "excellent workmanship of
brass," was the work of Torregiano, the rival who broke Michael Angelo's
nose in the gardens of St. Mark at Florence. He came to England to
complete the adornment of Henry the Seventh's chapel, and lived for
twenty years in the precincts of the Abbey, where he kept up his
Florentine reputation by sundry fighting feats against the "bears of
Englishmen."
The Altar was "by the hot-brained zealots in 41 (1641) demolished; so
that not the least footsteps now remain;" and only a gray stone slab
marks the resting place of the last male heir of the Tudors. But when in
1868 Dean Stanley made the memorable search in the vaults of the Abbey
to discover where James the First was buried--a mystery unsolved till
then--a beautiful piece of a carved white marble frieze was found at the
entrance of Edward the Sixth's grave. This fragment, three feet eight
inches long, seven inches high, and six inches thick, is the only relic
which exists of Torregiano's altar. It is now restored as far as
possible to its original position, under the present altar in Henry the
Seventh's Chapel.
King Edward's funeral, like his coronation, was remarkable in many ways.
It was the first service of the Reformed Church of England ever used
over an English sovereign; and this concession was made by the King's
Roman Catholic sister, Queen Mary. She was not present; being at the
requiem sung in the Tower under the direction of Gardiner, her chief
adviser. Archbishop Cranmer conducted the service at Westminster. Thus
"the last and saddest function of his public ministry which he was
destined to perform," was the burial of his godson, this young king,
whom he had both baptized and crowned.
"The one admirable thing which the unhappy reign produced," must however
never be forgotten. While King Edward's uncle Somerset was ruining the
kingdom, and paying with his head for his ambition--while the Duke of
Northumberland was plotting to set aside Henry the Eighth's will, and to
place his own daughter-in-law, the hapless Lady Jane Grey, on the throne
of England--Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was working on quietly in
the midst of all the uproar of war and treason, plot and counter-plot,
at the English prayer book.
As the translation of the Bible bears upon it the imprint of
the mind of Tyndal, so, while the Church of England remains,
the image of Cranmer will be seen reflected on the calm
surface of the Liturgy. The most beautiful portions of it
are translations from the Breviary; yet the same prayers
translated by others would not be those which chime like
church-bells in the ears of the English child. The
translations, and the addresses which are original, have the
same silvery melody of language, and breathe the same
simplicity of spirit.
One other admirable memory has the reign of Edward left in England. If
you stand on Westminster Bridge near the houses of Parliament, and look
across the Thames, you see several huge piles of red brick and white
stone rising on the Lambeth shore. This is the modern St. Thomas's
Hospital, one of the finest in England, built on the foundation which
Edward made. Ridley in a sermon preached before the young king, urged
the rich to be merciful to the poor and to comfort and relieve them by
charitable works. The sermon so impressed the boy that he founded St.
Thomas's--St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in Smithfield, where a few years
later the martyrs were to suffer at the stake under his ruthless sister
Mary--and Christ's Hospital, which we all know as the "Bluecoat" school,
where Charles Lamb, and Coleridge, and Thackeray and many another
learned man spent their schooldays. But the boy-king did yet more. In
eighteen towns of England he founded the famous Grammar Schools which
"throw a lustre over the name of Edward," although he did not live to
see the fruit of his noble thought.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] Memorials, 464.
[44] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 81.
[45] Memorials. p. 81.
[46] Leland. p. 324.
[47] (Froude. Vol. V. p. 441.)