WESTMINSTER ABBEY.—FRONT.

THE CHILDREN OF
WESTMINSTER ABBEY

STUDIES IN ENGLISH HISTORY

BY

ROSE G. KINGSLEY

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.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

(From rare old Prints and Photographs.)

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?

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 mediæval 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 Provençal 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.

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.

CHAPTER II.

THE CONQUEST OF WALES—PRINCE ALPHONZO.

In our first stroll about Westminster Abbey, we saw its gray walls towering up in the midst of noisy, hurrying London. We stood in the Sacrarium and looked at the foundations of Edward the Confessor's great Norman Church. We learned how Henry the Third built the new and noble Abbey which is standing at this day. We saw how he crowned his long and troubled reign by the translation of the Confessor's body to the gorgeous shrine he had prepared for it. Let us now, standing for a moment beside this shrine, talk of a little boy whose memory is closely bound up with an important event in the history of Great Britain.

Yet first, for the sake of those who have not been to Westminster, I will try to explain the general plan of the eastern end of the Abbey. Imagine a narrow horseshoe of which the points are straight instead of being bent inwards. The space inside the horseshoe represents Edward the Confessor's Chapel; the shoe itself the ambulatory, a wide passage where the monks used to walk, and processions passed round to the shrine; and outside this passage are built, on the south the chapels of St. Edmund, and St. Nicholas; on the north the chapels of St. Paul and St. John the Baptist; while on the east of the horseshoe curve are the steps up to Henry the Seventh's Chapel. These chapels all lie behind the grand screen that runs right across the choir at the back of the altar, and are not used for service any longer, with the exception of Henry the Seventh's. All the congregation sit in the choir in front of the altar rails, and in the north and south transepts, which spread out right and left from the choir like two broad arms of a cross.

I know few more overpowering sights than the vast Sunday congregation of between three and four thousand people. The Sacrarium black with men. The wide altar steps closely packed with people who have often been waiting for more than an hour outside the doors to secure a good place. Men and women and children wedged together in the densely crowded transepts, standing willingly throughout the long service because there is not a seat left. The privileged few coming in by the comparatively empty nave from the cloisters, and taking their places in the stalls or in the seats of those connected with the Abbey; well-known faces there are among them—princes and statesmen, men of letters and foreigners of note. Then the hush as the clock strikes three in Poets' Corner, and a faint harmonious "amen" is sung in the distant Baptistery by the choir, at the end of the prayer which is always said before they come in to service. The organ plays softly, so softly that you hear the echoing tramp of the long procession now winding up the nave. Six or eight pensioners, old soldiers in quaint blue cloth gowns and silver badges, enter and take their places. And as the white-surpliced boys appear in the black shadow of the gateway under the organ screen, the whole three thousand people rise quietly to their feet and stand. First come the boys of Westminster School with their masters, and take their places right and left. Then the little chorister boys, walking two and two, the smallest in front—little mites who look as if they would hardly know their letters, but who march gravely to their seats, and sing the long service like sweet-voiced little birds. Then the "singing gentlemen of Westminster Abbey," as the men in the choir are called—many of them well-known professionals, whose names are seen during the week at the best concerts in England. Then come the clergy. The minor Canons first who intone the service. Next to them the Canon in residence, who, during his two months at Westminster, is present at every service week-day and Sunday. And last of all the Dean.

After the Dean has gone into his stall on the right of the entrance, the service begins. The monotone of the prayers breaks into rich harmonies now and again at the responses—the organ re-echoes through the arches and pillars with thundering of the pedals, and wild, pathetic reed-notes. The splendid voices of the choir fill the building from end to end in the Psalms and canticles; or a boy's voice, singing a solo verse, floats up quivering and throbbing like a nightingale's song in a still wood at evening. And then—but I am speaking of "the days that are no more"—a small figure—unutterably dignified, with a pale, refined, determined face—in his white robes, his scarlet Doctor of Divinity's hood, and the crimson ribbon of the Order of the Bath with its golden jewel round his neck—followed the black-robed verger who carried a silver mace, up from the stalls, through the two walls of human beings, to the marble pulpit just outside the altar rails. And every face turned with eager expectation towards the bowed head, and hung breathless on the eloquent words that rang like a clarion through the great church; for it was Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, who was preaching.

But we are lingering in the choir, full, to us who know and love it, of such keen present interest. I must take you back into the Confessor's Chapel and the remote past.

We go through the iron gates that shut off the chapels from the choir, and climb the steps out of the ambulatory, for the Confessor's Chapel is raised several feet above the pavement of the Abbey. It lies, as I have said, directly behind the altar, only divided from it by the splendid screen which was erected early in the fifteenth century. This screen on the western side has been beautified and restored, and forms the reredos to the altar. But in the Chapel its eastern face is untouched; and, if you have patience to trace out the quaint carvings along the top, you will find they are a history of some of the miraculous and wonderful events of Edward the Confessor's life; the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; St. John giving the ring to the Pilgrims; the quarrel between Tosti and Harold, Earl Godwin's sons, when the king predicted the calamities they would bring in after years upon England; and many more scenes of like nature.

Below the screen, which is wrought with exquisite carving into niches and canopies, stands a curious old chair. This is the Coronation Chair, in which all English sovereigns have sat at their coronations since it was made in Edward the First's reign. But more curious than the chair is the rough block of stone which it incases. That block is the mysterious stone of Fate which Edward the First captured at Scone in Scotland—the stone on which every Scotch king had been crowned from the days of Fergus the First—the stone on which every English king or queen has been crowned since. And legends carry the history of that stone back into the remotest past. They say that it was the stone pillow on which Jacob slept at Bethel; that it was carried by the Jews into Egypt; that the son of Cecrops, King of Athens, carried it off to Sicily or Spain; that from Spain it was taken by Simon Brech, the son of Milo the Scot, to Ireland, where after many marvelous adventures it was set up on the sacred Hill of Tara as the "Lia Fail" or Stone of Destiny; and that Fergus, the founder of the Scottish monarchy, bore it at length across the sea to Dunstaffnage.

DEAN STANLEY.

Whether we believe the whole history of the Stone of Destiny or not, the chapel in which it stands is a wonderful place. In the centre rises the Confessor's shrine, the remains of the mosaics with which it was encrusted showing what its splendor must have been. The mosaic pavement of 1260 is under our feet. Henry the Fifth's shield and helmet hang aloft on a bar above his chantry. All round us are the splendid monuments of the kings. Richard the Second, Edward the Third and Queen Phillipa, Henry the Fifth under his beautiful chantry, Henry the Third in his gorgeous tomb inlaid with marbles and mosaic, Good Queen Eleanor, and her husband Edward the First—they all are there! "The greatest of the Plantagenets," as he has been called, lies beneath an enormous monument of solid gray stone, absolutely plain, without carving, brass or mosaic. Only his gigantic two-handed sword lies upon it, and along it runs this inscription:

"Edwardus Primus Scotorum malleus hic est, 1308. Pactum Serva."[15]

It is of Edward the First's reign we are to talk. For besides being the Hammer of the Scots, he conquered the last stronghold of the British race, and made their land forever a part of England.

For four hundred years Wales had been a thorn in the sides of the Saxon kings, a thorn in the sides of the Norman Conquerors and their descendants. The Britons, driven westward by the all-conquering Anglo-Saxons, had taken refuge in the fastnesses of that wild and mountainous region. There they had lived, "a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by the milk of the cattle they tended, faithless, greedy, and revengeful."[16] Every fresh earldom which the English had wrested from them, often with barbarous injustice and cruelty, had been the signal for some equally barbarous reprisal. The history of the border countries is one perpetual record of raids and fightings, of lands laid waste with fire and sword, flocks and herds driven off, women and children carried into captivity.

But in Henry the Second's reign, just as the British race seemed sinking deeper and deeper into barbarism, a strange revival of patriotism took place. The Bards of Britain, for centuries silent, suddenly burst into song again. The praise of every British hero, the glory of every fight, was sung throughout the land; and the sound of the harp heard in every house. These singers of freedom chanted of joy in battle, of their country's liberty, of hatred of the Saxon oppressor. And they sang of their great prince, Llewellyn, "towering above the rest of men with his long red lance, his red helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf; tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious." Wales, stirred by their trumpet calls, had soon burst aflame to drive the Saxon from the land.

With a succession of victories for the Welsh prince, Llewellyn—the Lord of Snowdon—the hopes of his people had risen high. The dissensions of Henry the Third's reign had strengthened their hands. Llewellyn the younger, no longer calling himself Lord of Snowdon, but "Prince of Wales," had made himself sovereign of all the Welsh chieftains, and had also allied himself with Simon de Montfort during the great earl's revolt against the king.

But now in the very moment of Llewellyn's triumph, the accession of Edward the First to the English throne revived all the old questions of homage to the sovereign. Llewellyn and the King of Scotland were both summoned as vassals of the crown to Edward's coronation—the first that took place in Westminster Abbey as we know it. The King of Scotland came. But the "Prince of Wales" was absent. He did not dispute Edward's right to claim his homage: but excused himself on account of the dangers he would run on a journey to London, by reason of the enmity that existed between him and some of the lords marchers. Six times in two years was he summoned. And to none of these appeals did he vouchsafe the slightest attention.

Edward was a wise and politic prince; he saw of course from the very beginning that the union of England and Wales would be a boon to both countries, and that it must inevitably come about sooner or later. But though some historians have accused him in this matter of grasping ambition, and greedy haste to seize on the principality, the records seem to show that he exercised most uncommon patience with his turbulent and troublesome neighbor, wishing rather to make him his loyal vassal and friend than to wrest his territory from him.

In 1276, in reply to the sixth summons Llewellyn sent letters demanding his bride, Eleanor de Montfort, Earl Simon's daughter, and cousin of the king, who had been taken prisoner the year before on her way from France to join Llewellyn to whom she had been married by proxy. He further said that he would do homage at Oswestry or Montgomery, "provided a safe conduct were sent him guaranteed by the archbishop and the archdeacon, by the Bishop of Winchester, and by the earls of Warrenne and Gloucester, Lincoln and Norfolk"—thereby implying that the king's word was not sufficient.

CHAPEL OF HENRY THE FIFTH.

This insolence raised a universal feeling of anger. The king's patience was exhausted. "The Parliament at once declared Llewellyn contumacious," and the "military tenants" of the crown were ordered to assemble in the following midsummer at Worcester, to march into Wales. Six months seem in these days rather a long pause after declaring war. But this gives one a notion of the slowness of communication, and the difficulties of travel and transport in the Middle Ages. It now takes but three weeks or so to equip a whole army, and send it overseas in transports that can be had at a moment's notice. But in the thirteenth century it was all that Edward, one of the first generals and greatest politicians of his age, could do, to prepare a little fleet at the Cinque Ports, and to gather his land forces by the appointed time. When once, however, he found himself face to face with the enemy, "the fabric of Welsh greatness fell at a blow." The southern chiefs speedily submitted. Llewellyn's brothers, David and Roderick, joined the king, and were honorably received by him. The fleet attacked Anglesea by sea, and the "Prince of Wales," finding himself hemmed in on every side in the wilds of Snowdon, threw himself upon the royal mercy.

Edward now gave full proof of his natural generosity and clemency. A treaty was signed in which Llewellyn consented to pay the king a tribute of one thousand marks a year for the Isle of Anglesea; to pay fifty thousand pounds for the cost of the war; and to give ten hostages for the fulfilment of these engagements. The very next day, Edward, who had made peace the moment the Welsh Prince desired it, remitted the fine of fifty thousand pounds and soon after gave up the tribute for Anglesea and restored the hostages. He then invited Llewellyn to spend Christmas at Westminster; and in the following summer prepared a princely wedding at Worcester for him and Eleanor de Montfort.

For four years the Welsh troubles seemed at an end. All was apparently peace and content. But "a prophecy of Merlin had announced that when English money became round, the Prince of Wales should be crowned at London, and a new coinage of copper money, coupled with the prohibition to break the silver penny into halves and quarters, as had been usual, was supposed to have fulfilled the prediction."[17] Upon such slight matters do the fate of nations hang. The hopes of the misguided Welsh were again excited; and in 1282, Llewellyn's brother David—who had been heaped with favors by Edward, given an English earldom, and married to the Earl of Derby's daughter—suddenly broke into open rebellion. On Palm Sunday he surprised the garrison of Hawarden Castle—now well known as the residence of Mr. Gladstone, the English Premier. He hurried Lord Roger de Clifford the governor, wounded and in chains, over the mountains, while he himself and Llewellyn, who never before agreed, were now reconciled, and together overran the marches with fire and sword.

Even now Edward strove to come to terms before taking up arms. He allowed the archbishop to go to Llewellyn as a mediator. It was of no use. So in the summer of 1283 he collected his forces and once more entered Wales.

In the campaign which followed, the sufferings of the English were terrible. Llewellyn held out in Snowdon with the determination of despair. An English detachment was cut to pieces at the Menai Straits; and the war was prolonged into the winter. The undaunted king, however, rejected all proposals of retreat; and gave orders for the formation of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment. This proved needless. Llewellyn, fearing probably to be shut up and starved out in his fastness, left Snowdon and passed into Radnorshire. Here he fell in with a party of English under the command of Edward Mortimer and John Gifford; and in a skirmish at Builth on the banks of the Wye he was killed by Adam Frankton, an English soldier, who did not even know who he was. But the body of the dead man, lying in the little hollow among the broom beside the spring, was recognized by some of the leaders. His head was cut off and sent to the king. Then, crowned with ivy, it was set up over the gate of the tower of London. Thus was Merlin's prophecy fulfilled. The "Prince of Wales" was indeed crowned at London.

David of Snowdon held out in the wilds of the mountains for a few months, and at last was arrested and sentenced to a traitor's death.

With Llewellyn's death Wales became and has remained ever since, part of the kingdom of England. English laws were established, and the barbarous Welsh laws abolished. The country was divided into shires and hundreds on the English model. Strong castles were built at Conway and Caernarvon; and at the latter in 1284, Queen Eleanor gave birth to "the Prince of Wales, who could not speak a word of English," as his father said when he presented the future Edward the Second to the Welsh chieftains. A tradition has existed that Edward completed the pacification of Wales by a massacre of the Bards. In spite of that very familiar quotation from Gray's Ode,

Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!

one is thankful to know that modern historians have proved this terrible accusation to be a mere fable; besides it is a fact that from the time of Edward to that of Elizabeth, the productions of the bards were so numerous as to fill more than sixty volumes in quarto.

Meantime the Abbey had been yearly growing in beauty. Edward the First added to his father's building. On his return from the crusades he brought from France the slabs of porphyry, the precious marbles, which still help to make his father's tomb one of the most gorgeous monuments in the Abbey. He filled the Confessor's Chapel with trophies of his wars—the dagger with which he was wounded at Acre—the Black Rood of St. Margaret and the Stone of Fate from Scotland. But these were all given in later years. What we have to do with were certain trophies of the Conquest of Wales.

While the king was still engaged in quieting down his new principality, his eldest son Prince Alfonzo, named after his grandfather Alfonzo of Castile, came journeying back to London. He brought with him Llewellyn's golden crown, said by tradition to have belonged to King Arthur, also jewels and ornaments, and possibly the precious Crocis Gneyth (or Cross of St. Neot) which certainly was brought to the Abbey from Wales during Edward the First's reign.

The little lad who was twelve years old, came with these treasures to Westminster; and he offered up Llewellyn's crown and the jewels in the Confessor's Chapel, where "they were all applied to adorn the tomb of the blessed King Edward."[18] We can fancy the boy, dressed after the fashion of those days in chain armour from head to foot with a long flowing cloak, accompanied by a great train of knights and nobles, wending his way up the solemn Abbey with his offerings, and gravely hanging up the crown in the Sanctuary of the English Kings.

There is indeed something to touch one's imagination in this act—the hand of the innocent boy putting the finishing stroke to the great struggle between the British and Anglo-Saxon races. Henceforth they were to be one. The proudest title of the heir to the English throne was to be "Prince of Wales." The Plantagenets were to reign over Arthur's mysterious realm, till two hundred years later Arthur and Llewellyn's descendants, the Tudors, should sit on the throne of England.

But Alfonzo's short life was nearly at an end. Matthew of Westminster goes on to say: "This Alfonzo died this year, being about twelve years of age—dying on the nineteenth of August, on the day of St. Magnus the king, and his body was honorably buried in the Church of Westminster, near the tomb of St. Edward, where it is placed between his brothers and sisters, who were buried before him in the same place."

The exact spot where Alfonzo lies is uncertain. Bur Mr. Burges, writing in Sir Gilbert Scott's Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, makes a happy suggestion, which I like to think is a correct one. When all England was mourning for Henry the Fifth, a chantry where daily masses were said for the repose of his soul, was built over his tomb at the extreme east end of the Confessor's Chapel. The heavy stone step on which his tomb rests was laid upon, and nearly covered, a flat monumental slab in the mosaic pavement. The part of the slab which projects beyond the step is worn down by hard usage into a mere mass of gray stone. But Sir Gilbert Scott thought that if a bit of the superincumbent stone was raised, some portion of the more ancient monument might exist beneath. He therefore cut a square block out of the step, and underneath it, sure enough, found the remains of a fine Purbeck slab. It was inlaid with a brass cross, brass letters ran around the edge, and what heralds call "the field" was filled with glass mosaic. Four letters of the inscription remain on each side—most likely part of the words "pries pur l'ame."[19] This monument is generally said to commemorate the infant son of William de Valence. Mr. Burges however suggests that it is just as likely to be the tomb of Alfonzo; and as it would exactly correspond with the position in which Matthew of Westminster says he was buried, I think we may safely conclude that the young prince lies there.

Near by in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist there is a very beautiful monument to a little nephew and niece of Prince Alfonzo—Hugh and Mary de Bohun. They were children of his sister Elizabeth and of the powerful and resolute Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, who more than once opposed Edward the First in measures which he thought hurtful to the kingdom.

"This gentleman and his sister," as one of the Abbey historians calls the children, died about 1300; and their tomb stood at first in the Confessor's Chapel. It was removed from thence by Richard the Second to make room for his own monument, and placed in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, where it is half buried in the wall.

Young Alfonzo, the bearer of the trophies of the conquest, sleeps peacefully enough here at our feet, while we tell his part in the growth of England. But what memorial remains in the nineteenth century of the last hero of the Britons—the "Eagle of men"—the "Devastator of England." The Golden Crown that Alfonzo hung up disappeared from the Abbey at the Reformation, when sacrilegious robbers broke in and carried off the silver head from Henry the Fifth's monument, and many another treasure. At Builth a modern house is built over the "Lord of Snowdon's" grave. While at the "Llewellyn Arms," a little inn close to the spot where he fell, some local artist has made a rough copy of the well-known picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps do duty on the signboard as a portrait of Llewellyn ap Gruffyd.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots, is here. Keep the Pact.

[16] "Green's Short History of the English People," p. 155.

[17] Green, p. 162.

[18] "Matthew of Westminster."

[19] Gleanings. p. 138.

CHAPTER III.

JOHN OF ELTHAM.

Just within the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel lies the figure of a young knight in full armor. His hands, in their jointed gloves, are folded in prayer. His head, with the front of his helmet open to show the face, is gracefully turned to one side. His feet are crossed against a lion—a creature full of life, who looks round watching his young lord's placid face.

Who is this fair young knight, deemed worthy of a place in what Dean Stanley loved to call "the half-royal chapel, full of kings' wives and brothers"?

He is Prince John of Eltham, son of Edward the Second, created Earl of Cornwall by his brother, Edward the Third, who lies in state on the other side of the ambulatory.

Prince John was born on Ascension Day, 1315, at Eltham in Kent, "where our English kings had sometime a seat." The second son of Edward the Second and his wicked wife Isabella of France, the poor baby came into the world in sorely troubled times. The year before his birth his weak and worthless father had been hopelessly defeated by the Scots under Robert Bruce at Bannockburn. And during the young prince's short life England was a prey to war without, intrigue and revolution within. The whole of Edward the Second's reign is a confused record of public and private strife. A horrible succession of famines laid waste the land. A fresh campaign against Scotland ended in a humiliating truce for thirteen years. The Queen, Prince John's mother, on pretence of concluding a treaty between her husband and her brother, King Charles the Fourth, carried off Prince Edward, a child twelve years of age, to France. There she was joined by her vile favorite Mortimer; and neither threats nor entreaties could persuade her to return until she landed at Orwell in 1326 with a great following of exiled nobles, and proclaimed her son Edward "guardian of the realm." Deserted by all, her wretched husband was at last captured in Wales and carried to Kenilworth, where he was deposed by the Queen and Parliament in 1327. He died a few months later, murdered by Mortimer's orders at Berkeley Castle.

EFFIGY OF JOHN OF ELTHAM.

His downfall was the sign for a new outbreak in Scotland. Bruce broke the thirteen years' truce; and the boy-king, Edward the Third, marched against him only to meet with fresh disaster. The tide of fortune however was turning. Isabella and her favorite were fast becoming odious to the nation; and in 1330 Edward, the future conqueror of Cressy, with his own hands arrested Mortimer at Nottingham, whence he was hurried to execution. The Queen-mother went into lifelong seclusion at Castle Rising in Norfolk; and the young king assumed the control of the affairs of the kingdom.

In 1328, the year after his brother Edward's accession to the crown, John of Eltham was created Earl of Cornwall in a parliament at Salisbury. The next year Edward journeyed to France to do homage for his lands there; and Prince John was made "Custos of the kingdom and King's Lieutenant while he went beyond the seas." It seems an extraordinary responsibility for a boy of fourteen. But those Plantagenets were a strong and precocious race. Edward the Third was only eighteen when he took the reins of government into his own hands in 1330—the year that his eldest son, the famous Black Prince, was born. And the Black Prince won his spurs in the glorious fight of Cressy when he was barely sixteen. So there was nothing very unusual in the young Earl of Cornwall administering the government of the kingdom during his brother's absence in France, and again later on while the king was in Scotland.

TOMB OF JOHN OF ELTHAM, ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL.

In 1333, when he was seventeen, proposals of marriage were made between John of Eltham and Joan daughter of Ralph the Count of Eu; and in the next year with Mary daughter of the Count of Blois: but both negotiations fell through. Perhaps Prince John, full of the fighting instinct of his race, preferred to follow his brother to Scotland, where a fresh war had broken out. In 1334 a third proposal of marriage was made between the Prince and Mary, daughter of Ferdinand, King of Spain. The agreement was drawn up and all was settled. The wedding however was not to be. "For in the month following being in Scotland in St. John's Town (now Perth) he died in October, 1334, at his nineteenth year of age."

Prince John's body was brought from Scotland to Westminster, where he was solemnly interred in the Abbey. The funeral was one of extreme magnificence; the Westminster monks receiving as much as one hundred pounds for horses and armor offered as gifts at it. This practice of offering at funerals armor and horses which sometimes were afterwards redeemed for money, was by no means unusual in the Middle Ages. At Henry the Fifth's burial, his three chargers marched up the nave to the altar steps behind his funeral car. And every one who has been in the Abbey must remember how the saddle, the shield, and "the very casque that did affright the air at Agincourt—"[20] the helmet "which twice saved his life on that eventful day," and still shows the dents of the Duke of Alençon's ponderous sword—hang in the dusky light above his chantry.

King Edward seems to have been dissatisfied with the first place chosen for his young brother's tomb. There is a very interesting warrant written in curious old French among the archives of the Abbey, dated "Brussels, the twenty-third day of August, in the thirteenth year of our reign," while Edward was beseiging Tournay in 1340. In it he directs the abbot and monks to order and suffer, "que le corps de nostre trescher frere Johan jadis Counte de Cornewaill peusse estre remuez et translatez du lieu ou il gist jusques a autre plus covenable place entre les Roials. Faisant toutesfoitz reserver et garder les places plus honourables illoeques pour le gisir et la sepulture de nous et de noz heirs, selonc ce que reson le voudra droitement demander."[21]

St. Edmund's Chapel was therefore chosen as meeting all requirements. It lies on the south side of the Abbey, and is only separated from the Confessor's Shrine and the tombs of the kings by the ambulatory. Of all the tombs of that period in the Abbey, John of Eltham's is considered one of the most remarkable. He must have been the very pattern of a gallant young knight. His effigy of white alabaster impresses you at first with a sense of profound repose. Then when you look more closely you begin to see what a striking figure it is; and you picture to yourself the young Earl of Cornwall riding with his young brother, the king, at the head of their troops through the bleak north-country, over the wild wastes of the Border, up to fair Perth lying on the Tay, where the fishermen draw in nets full of silvery salmon, and the moors—covered with pink and brown heather and swarming with plump grouse—roll up to the mountains of the Highlands. We can see the very clothes he wore, for his effigy as a specimen of military costume is most interesting and valuable. He is clad in plate armor, and wears the cyclas, a curious garment cut much shorter in front than behind; "beneath it, the gambeson; then the coat of mail; and lastly the haqueton." The Prince's sword-handle, ornamented with lion's heads, is beautifully sculptured; and the shield has three splendid lions on it—the English royal arms—bordered with the French fleur-de-lis. Round his helmet is a coronet, which is remarkable as the first of the kind known. It is of the ducal form with greater and lesser trefoil leaves alternately, instead of the usual circlet.

The tomb is surrounded by small, finely executed alabaster statues representing mourning kings, queens, and relations of the dead prince. Terribly broken though they now are—some are destroyed altogether, and all are headless—enough of them remain to show that they were sculptured with wonderful grace and spirit.

ANCIENT CANOPY OF THE TOMB OF JOHN OF ELTHAM.

But the worst loss that the monument has sustained is in the exquisite Gothic canopy of carved stone which once surmounted it. It was highly colored and gilded, with an angel on a small spire crowning the centre.

In 1776 Elizabeth Percy, first duchess of Northumberland, whose name will always be remembered as the patroness of literature to whom we owe the Percy Reliques, was buried in the family vault of the Percys in the Chapel of St. Nicholas. In spite of her repeated desire that the funeral should be "as private as her rank would permit" a vast crowd collected, so

that the officiating clergy and choir could scarcely make their way from the west door to the chapel. Just as the procession had passed St. Edmund's Chapel, the whole of the screen, including the canopy of John of Eltham's tomb, came down with a crash, which brought with it the men and boys who had clambered to the top of it to see the spectacle, and severely wounded many of those below. The uproar and confusion put a stop to the ceremony for two hours. The body was left in the ruined Chapel, and the Dean did not return till after midnight, when the funeral was completed, but still amidst cries of murder, raised by such of the sufferers as had not been removed.[22]

The broken canopy was never restored. The Dean of that day seems to have thought it not worth while to take the trouble of mending it; and by his order it was swept away. The fragments, it is said, found their way to Strawberry Hill, Walpole's famous villa, where, at some time in the end of the last century, they were put up for sale, having been used as a chimney piece. Their subsequent fate I have not been able to ascertain.

It is difficult to believe that such an act of vandalism took place little more than a hundred years ago. The Deans of Westminster now are a very different race to the one who swept away John of Eltham's beautiful canopy. With the beginning of this century a spirit of love and veneration for Westminster Abbey seemed to revive. Dean Vincent appealed to Parliament and persuaded the nation to repair Henry the Seventh's chapel which was falling into decay. Under Dean Ireland free admission was given to the greater part of the Abbey. And Dean Buckland, the well-known geologist, carried on the good work by taking down some hideous screens which shut off the transepts from the choir. He was succeeded by Dean Trench, the present learned Archbishop of Dublin, who inaugurated the special services on Sunday evening in the nave—a grand movement in the right direction. And all this time public interest was growing more and more keen about the Abbey. New discoveries were being made by architects and antiquarians each year. But it was not until Dean Stanley succeeded the Archbishop of Dublin that the Abbey came quite to life. No one who has ever accompanied the late Dean in those memorable excursions which he delighted to make over the building can forget the enthusiasm with which his vivid descriptions inspired his listeners. Whether he was talking to the Emperor of Brazil, or a score of poor factory lads from some northern town, the brilliancy and humor of his speech held them spellbound. To him Westminster owes among many other things that unrivalled volume of Memorials—from which I have so often had occasion to quote—the most perfect handbook to any cathedral that I know, save his yet more perfect Memorials of Canterbury, written when he was canon of that cathedral. Dean Stanley's memory which must always be present in the minds of those who have known him at Westminster, is specially bound up with my recollections of St. Edmund's Chapel; it was one of his most favorite spots in the Abbey, and John of Eltham's tomb one of those he most delighted to show to all his visitors. And this brings us back from nineteenth century deans to fourteenth century princes, and to the old tombs in whose histories we can find such inexhaustible mines of interest.

In 1340, two more young "royals" were buried beside John of Eltham in St. Edmund's Chapel. These were his nephew and niece who died quite young—William of Windsor and Blanche de la Tour—children of Edward the Third. The boy was born at Windsor, which was fast becoming a rival to Westminster as a royal residence; and little Blanche was born at the Tower of London. The effigies in white alabaster are very small, only about twenty inches long: but they are in full costume of the time. The boy wears the short close-fitting jerkin, with a wide jewelled belt round the hips, and a flowing cloak fastened with a jewelled clasp falls to his feet. The little girl has on a full long petticoat with a tightly fitting bodice, to the square neck of which her mantle is fastened by a cordon with a rose and two studs. The hideous muffled chins of the last century had given place to a horned headdress (the horns are broken in little Blanche's effigy) and a close net of gold, each wide mesh, through which the hair shows, being fastened at the crossing with pearls or precious stones. Blanche's feet rest against a little lion: but her brother's have been broken off obliquely. The tomb altogether has been cruelly used, and no trace of the children's faces remain. Yet who can wonder, when we see the way in which John of Eltham's splendid monument has been mutilated.

TOMB OF WILLIAM OF WINDSOR AND HIS SISTER BLANCHE.

When these two little children were laid to rest in the Abbey, their father was just beginning his great wars with France—the wars that lasted for a hundred years and only ended in Henry the Sixth's reign with England's final loss of her French possessions. And six years after, in 1346, Cressy was fought and won by their brother, the Black Prince. With the battle of Cressy, England entered upon a career of military glory, which, though for a time it proved fatal to her higher interests, gave her a life and energy she had never known before, and laid the foundation of the Englishman's dogged love of fighting that is not quite dead yet, if we may judge by the way British soldiers and sailors fought at El Teb.

At Cressy, too, Feudalism received its death blow, when the English churl struck down the French noble, and the despised yeoman "proved more than a match in sheer hard fighting for the knight." Though the nobles rode into battle as of old at the head of their vassals and retainers, the body of the army consisted no longer of baronial levies, but of stout Englishmen serving willingly for pay, and armed like Chaucer's Yeoman on the pilgrimage to Canterbury:—

A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bare full thriftily.
Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows droopèd not with feathers low,
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.

If you would know how men fought in those days, read for yourselves in old Froissart's chronicle, and see how he exults in the charge of the cavalry bearing down the foe on their ponderous Flemish horses—in the solid ranks of the foot soldiers—in the flights of arrows that fall like hail from the tough bows of the archers. And when the fight is over how he glories in the tourneys and jousts—the song of troubadour and minstrel—the chase with hawk and hound.

In spite of abuses, in spite of all the miseries that these protracted wars, this lust of conquest and fighting entailed, there still is something inexpressibly attractive in the nobler aspects of chivalry. To rescue the captive, to free the oppressed, to journey away

into Walachy
To Prussia and to Tartary,
To Alexandria or Turkey,

doing deeds of valor for the mere reward of a silken scarf from his lady, or, noblest of all, for the love of right and truth—is there not something admirable in this? Is not the idea of true knight and lady—"a race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble as themselves"—[23] is not that a fair ideal, worthy of imitation by all of us?

The earlier phases of Chivalry with its elaborate rules, its laws written and unwritten, were past long before Cressy. The great mediæval companies of knights, which made it one of the greatest powers for good or evil in Europe, were broken up. The Crusades were over, and knights could no longer gain fame and honor by fighting against the Paynim under the banner of the Cross. But still it was in Edward the Third's reign that Chivalry entered upon a period of unequalled glory and magnificence. The Garter—the most illustrious order of English knighthood, was instituted by the king at Windsor; and he and his son were foremost to set examples of unsurpassed valor in many a deed of desperate daring. Although Chivalry was far from perfect, let us remember that Bayard "sans pure et sans reproche" was its ideal knight.—That many a gentle knight and squire was trying to do his best, to live worthy of his God, his King, and his Lady.—That

all dignity, courtesy, purity, self-restraint, devotion—such as they were understood in those rough days—centred themselves round the idea of the rider as the attributes of the man whose supposed duty, as well as his supposed right, was to govern his fellow men, by example as well as by law and force;—attributes which gathered themselves up into that one word—Chivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that mankind should ever forget, till it has become the possession—as it is the God-given right—of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot.[24]

And when we look on young John of Eltham's noble face, let us believe that had he grown to man's estate, "Mary, daughter of Ferdinand, King of Spain," might have said to him:

For trust ye well that your estate royál,
Nor vain delight, nor only worthiness
Of you in war or tourney martial,
Nor pomp, array, nobility, richés,
Of these none made me rue on your distress;
But moral virtue, grounded upon truth,
That was the cause I first had on you ruth.[25]

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Shakespeare King Henry the Fifth.

[21] "Memorials of Westminster," p. 599. "That the body of our very dear brother John late Count of Cornwall should be removed and translated from the spot where it lies to another and more suitable place among the Royals. Always reserving and keeping the most honorable places for the rest and sepulture of us and our heirs, according to that which reason will justly demand."

[22] Memorials, p. 352.

[23] "Ancien Régime." C. Kingsley.

[24] "Ancien Régime." C. Kingsley.

[25] "Chaucer's Troilus and Cressid."

CHAPTER IV.

EDWARD THE FIFTH AND RICHARD.

Across the wide roadway that runs past Westminster Abbey from the Houses of Parliament, stands a low group of buildings, facing the north door. Part of these are the Westminster Police Courts; and about one o'clock, black-gowned and white-wigged lawyers may be seen rushing out of them to get their luncheon. The part which fronts the road is the National Society's Depot, from whence maps and books, slates and pencils go to furnish all the village schools in England. Hundreds of people go in and out of the door every day. Thousands pass it by. But very few, I imagine, reflect on the meaning of the blue plate on the corner, upon which is written in white letters: "Broad Sanctuary."

From its earliest foundation, Westminster Abbey shared with some thirty other English monasteries the right of "Sanctuary." Any man in danger of life or liberty, let the cause be what it might, was safe could he but once set foot within the precincts of the Sanctuary. No one could touch him. The monks would not violate this sacred privilege by giving him up. His foes dared not violate it by pursuing him and taking him by force. This right of Sanctuary, established in days when "law" meant the will of the strongest, was often useful in saving an innocent life that otherwise would have been sacrificed to some unjust tyrant. But as civilization developed, as the constitution of England encouraged the framing of wise and just laws for the protection of the good and punishment of the evil-doer, "Sanctuary" became a frightful abuse.

"The grim old Norman fortress"—the actual sanctuary—stood on the present site of the National Society's Depot. But the whole precinct of the Abbey shared the privilege; and the space now covered by St. Margaret's Church and churchyard was often occupied by a vast crowd of distressed or discontented citizens who desired, as they called it, to "take Westminster."

Sometimes, if they were of higher rank, they established their quarters in the great Northern Porch of the Abbey, with tents pitched, and guards watching round, for days and nights together.[26]

Thieves or malefactors would often break away from their captors, as they were being led by the winding "Thieven Lane" outside to their prison in the gatehouse, and darting into the consecrated ground would defy all attempts to lure them forth.

Rich men run thither with poor men's goods. There they build, there they spend and bid their creditors go whistle for them. Men's wives run thither with their husband's plate, and say they dare not abide with their husbands for beating. Thieves bring thither their stolen goods, and there live thereon. There devise they new robberies: nightly they steal out, they rob and reave, and kill, and come in again as though these places gave not only a safeguard for the harm they have done, but a license also to do more.[27]

The results of this state of things were felt long after the right of Sanctuary ceased to exist in James the First's reign. The district outside the precincts of Westminster has always been one of the very worst in London. The writer remembers some twenty years ago walking home with her relative, Mr. Froude, from Sunday afternoon service at the Abbey, through Great Peter street, and being told to take care of her purse as every house was a thieves' den. In many of them there was a dressed-up manikin hung with bells, on which little children were given lessons in stealing. If they picked the manikin's pockets without ringing the bells they were rewarded: but if a bell tinkled they were beaten. Happily this street and many others like it were swept away by the great new thoroughfare, Victoria street, and its branches; and noble men and women are working day and night to civilize and christianize the slums which lie to the south of the Abbey. But it will be many a year before that Augean stable is cleaned out, which originated with those who "took Westminster."

Only twice was Sanctuary broken at Westminster. On August 11, 1378, two knights named Hawle and Shackle, escaped from the Tower of London where they had been imprisoned by John of Gaunt, and fled to the Abbey. For greater security they took refuge in the Choir itself, during the celebration of High Mass. Alan Boxall, constable of the Tower, and Sir Ralph Ferrers with fifty armed men were close behind them, and burst in upon the service "regardless of time or place." Shackle escaped. But Hawle, chased round and round the Choir, at last fell dead in front of the Prior's Stall, pierced with twelve wounds. His servant and one of the monks who had tried to save him, were killed with him; and the stone on which he lay dead may be seen to this day with the effigy traced upon it. The Abbey—profaned by the horrible crime—was shut up for four months, and "Parliament was suspended, lest its assembly should be polluted by sitting within the desecrated precincts."[28]

The second outrage took place during Wat Tyler's rebellion, when, by his orders, one John Mangett, Marshal of the Marshalsea, was torn from one of the slender pillars of the Confessor's Shrine to which he clung for safety.

But to us, "Sanctuary" is specially interesting, as it is intimately connected with the short and tragic lives of Edward the Fifth and Richard, Duke of York, his brother.

In 1470, Edward the Fourth—betrayed by his brother Clarence, and by that terrible and splendid personage Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, "The Kingmaker"—fled over seas with a small following to the court of his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, in Flanders. His Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, was then living in the Tower, where Henry the Sixth, the deposed king, was imprisoned; and thus by a strange conjunction, the Yorkist Queen and the Lancastrian King were within that grim building at the same time. When Elizabeth heard that her husband had taken flight, and that Henry was to be restored to the throne, she came secretly by water from the Tower, and took Sanctuary at Westminster, with her three daughters and Lady Scroope "in greate penurie forsaken of all her friends." Here Thomas Millyng, the abbot, received her with kindness, sending her provisions—"half a loaf and two muttons"—daily. And here on the fourth of November was born her

faire son, called Edward, which was with small pompe like a poore man's child christened, the godfathers being the Abbot and the Prior of Westminster, and the godmother the Ladie Scroope.[29]

The Queen remained in Sanctuary until the spring of the next year, when her husband returned in triumph to the capital two days before the great battle of Barnet. There Warwick the Kingmaker, was slain, the Lancastrian forces were broken up, and Edward was once more king of England. The Queen has given in her own words an account of her joyful meeting at Westminster.

When my lord and husband returned safe again and had the victory, then went I hence to welcome him home, and from hence I brought my babe the Prince unto his father, when he first took him in his arms.[30]

Edward was not ungrateful to Westminster for the refuge it had afforded his queen in her sore distress. Abbot Millyng became a favorite at court, and was made Bishop of Hereford. The king gave at different times "fourscore oaks and about two hundred and fifty pounds[31] in money towards the new building of the nave." The Queen gave one hundred and seventy pounds, and built the Chapel of St. Erasmus on part of the present site of Henry the Seventh's chapel, and endowed it with the manors of Cradeley and Hagley in Worcestershire. And the young prince during the last eight years of his father's life gave twenty marks yearly towards the completion of the nave, which work had been begun by Henry the Fifth.

But the poor Queen was destined to fly again to Sanctuary, in yet more sore distress. In April, 1483, Edward the Fourth died. Edward, Prince of Wales—the babe born in Westminster—was twelve and a half years old, and was living in some state at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. He had a council of his own, composed chiefly of his mother's relations and friends; foremost among whom was Earl Rivers, his mother's brother, and his own half brother Lord Grey (son of the Queen by her first marriage to Sir John Grey). Shortly before his death the king had drawn up ordinances for Prince Edward's daily conduct,

which prescribe his morning attendance at mass, his occupation "at his school," his meals, and his sports. No man is to sit at his board but such as earl Rivers shall allow; and at this hour of meat it is ordered "that there shall be read before him noble stories, as behoveth a prince to understand; and that the communication at all times, in his presence, be of virtue, honour, cunning (knowledge), wisdom, and deeds of worship, and of nothing that shall move him to vice."[32]

From this quiet, happy life the little boy was rudely awakened by his father's death. He was proclaimed King of England under the title of Edward the Fifth; and a fortnight later set out for London with his uncle Lord Rivers, Lord Grey, Sir Thomas Vaughan and a large retinue. All went well until they reached Stony Stratford, a little distance from Northampton. There the young king stayed for the night with his attendants, while Lord Rivers returned to Northampton to meet the late king's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was hurrying down from the Scotch marches—ostensibly to pay homage to his nephew.

A struggle had been long impending between two rival parties in the state. On one hand the Queen, with her relations, who had been raised to wealth and power by her marriage. On the other, Gloucester, with many of the old nobility, whose jealousy had been roused by the sudden advance of the Woodville family. The king's death and his successor's tender age would inevitably bring about a collision. It was now merely a question which faction could out-manœuvre the other. Richard of Gloucester struck the first blow. Rivers was arrested at his inn.

Gloucester and the duke of Buckingham then rode on to Stony Stratford, where they found the poor little king with his company "ready to leap on horseback, and depart forward." But it was too late. The dukes arrested Vaughan and Grey, and brought the frightened boy back to Northampton. "He wept, and was nothing content, but it booted not."[33] Richard himself took his nephew to London; and at the young king's public entry on the fourth of May he bore himself "in open sight most reverently to the prince, with all semblance of lowliness."[34] The peers also took the oath of fealty. But it was only "a semblance." Able and unscrupulous, Richard of Gloucester had long been meditating a scheme of daring ambition. The first step was accomplished. He had possession of his young nephew's person. Now he was appointed "Protector of England." And during poor little King Edward's short reign his signature was used as an instrument for the ruin of his mother's kindred and friends, and for the aggrandizement of his uncle Gloucester's party.

The Queen, meanwhile, saw only too clearly whither these events tended. Terrified at Richard's successful blow, seeing that her own faction was utterly undone, and fearing for the lives of herself and her children, she flew again to her well-known refuge. She left the Palace of Westminster at midnight with her youngest son, Richard Duke of York, and her five daughters, and lodged in the Abbot's Place.

It was in one of the great chambers of the house, probably the Dining-hall (now the College Hall) that she was received by Abbot Esteney.[35]

The Queen sate alow on the rushes all desolate and dismayed, and all about her much heaviness, rumble, haste and business; carriage and conveyance of her stuff into Sanctuary; chests, coffers, packers, fardels, trussed all on men's backs; no man unoccupied—some lading, some going, some discharging, some coming for more, some breaking down the walls to bring in the next (nearest) way.[36]

In the midst of all this dismay and confusion the Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotheram, Chancellor of England, brought the Queen the Great Seal, trying to comfort and encourage her with a message from the Lord Chamberlain Hastings, who thought matters were not so hopeless as she imagined. But she mistrusted Hastings as "one of those that laboreth to destroy me and my blood." The Archbishop left the Great Seal with her,

and departed home again, yet in the dawning of the day. By which time, he might in his chamber window (his palace was on the site of the present Whitehall) see all the Thames full of boats of the Duke of Gloucester's servants, watching that no man should go to Sanctuary; nor none could pass unsearched.

The Queen seems to have withdrawn into her old quarters in the fortress of the Sanctuary itself, where she had before found safety; and the Protector, determined to get possession of both his nephews, proposed at his council in the Star Chamber, that if she would not give up the Duke of York to keep his brother company he should be taken from thence by force. But this proposition only served to show in what respect the privilege of Sanctuary was held. The archbishops and spiritual lords promptly refused their consent to such a sacrilegious measure. Said the Archbishop of Canterbury,

God forbid that any man should for anything earthly, enterprise or break the immunity and liberty of the sacred Sanctuary, that hath been the safeguard of so many a good man's life.[37]

The Protector then tried to show that as the child was incapable of such crimes as needed sanctuary, so he was incapable of receiving it. This ingenious bit of casuistry convinced some of the listeners; and the archbishop and several lords went at once to Westminster to try to persuade the Queen to give up her boy. But she resisted "with all the force of a woman's art and a mother's love."[38]

In what place could I reckon him sure, if he be not sure in this Sanctuary, whereof was there never tyrant yet so devilish that durst presume to break.... If examples be sufficient to obtain privilege for my child I need not far to seek; for in this place in which we now be (and which is now in question whether my child may take benefit of it) mine other son, now King, was born and kept in his cradle, and preserved to a more prosperous fortune.... And I pray God that my son's palace may be as great a safeguard unto him now reigning, as this place was sometime unto the king's enemy.

Gallantly had the poor mother fought for her child's liberty; and at last wearied out she ended with a fierce and terrible denunciation of her persecutors:

I can no more, but whosoever he be that breaketh this holy sanctuary, I pray God shortly to send him need of sanctuary where he may not come to it. For taken out of sanctuary would I not my mortal enemy were.[39]

At length, pledging both "body and soul," the archbishop prevailed; and the Queen determined to deliver up Prince Richard as a sacred trust. Then turning to the child she took leave of him in those well-known and most pathetic words:

"Farewell mine owne sweete sonne, God send you good keeping; let me kisse you yet once ere you go, for God knoweth when we shall kisse togither againe." And therewith she kissed him and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way, leaving the child weeping as fast.[40]

Poor mother! Her fears were only too well founded. She never saw her sons again. When little Richard was taken into the Star Chamber, the Protector took him in his arms and kissed him saying, "Now welcome, my Lord, even with all my heart." The boy was then conveyed to the Bishop of London's palace, where his brother, the young king, met him with delight. This was in the beginning of June; and the two children were next removed to the Tower (under pretext of preparing for the coronation fixed for the twenty-second), "out of the which," says Sir Thomas More, "after that day they never came abroad."

Richard Duke of Gloucester's policy had been developing fast since the day he took possession of the young king at Stony Stratford. The Queen's party were all in prison—many of them awaiting execution. Shakespeare has vividly described how Richard ridded himself of Lord Hastings,[41] the late king's favorite adviser, who was the only remaining check on his plans. After Hastings' execution the Protector declared that Edward the Fourth's marriage was invalid, and that his children could not therefore succeed to the crown. After a faint show of reluctance he allowed himself to be proclaimed king, under the title of Richard the Third, and was crowned at Westminster on the sixth of July.

Every one knows the tragic end to the story. While the little boys lived their uncle's throne was insecure. They were still in the Tower. Rivers their uncle was beheaded; so were their half-brother Grey and many more of their mother's kinsmen and friends. A mystery must always hang over this dreadful deed. Whether by Richard's direct order, or simply in accordance with his known but half-expressed wishes, the two children suddenly disappeared—murdered, as it was alleged, by their uncle. Sir James Tyrell, when tried for high treason in Henry the Seventh's reign, only eight years after, confessed to the murder. And it was commonly supposed that the boys were "buried in a great heap of rubbish near the footstairs of their lodging; where is now the raised terrace."[42] But the priest of the Tower having died shortly after, "left the world in dark as to the place."

For nearly two hundred years nothing more was known. In Charles the Second's reign, however, orders were given to rebuild some offices in the Tower. In taking away the stairs going from the King's Lodging into the Chapel of the White Tower, the workmen found a wooden chest buried ten feet deep in the ground, which contained the bones of two boys, about eleven and thirteen years of age. Charles the Second hearing of this discovery ordered the bones to be carefully collected and put in a marble urn, which he placed in Westminster Abbey, with an inscription in Latin of which the following is a translation:

Here lie
The Reliques
of Edward the Fifth King of England, and Richard, Duke
of York.
These brothers being confined in the Tower,
and there stifled with Pillows,
Were privately and meanly buried,
By order of
Their perfidious Uncle Richard the usurper;
Whose bones, long enquired after and wished for,
After two hundred and one years
In the Rubbish of the Stairs (i. e. those lately leading to
the Chapel
of the White Tower)
Were on the 17th day of July, 1674, by undoubted Proofs
discovered,
Being buried deep in that Place.
Charles the Second, a most compassionate Prince, pitying
their severe fate,
Ordered these unhappy Princes to be laid
Amongst the monuments of their Predecessors,
Anno Dom 1678, in the 30th year of his Reign.

The mean and ugly little urn, which was the only monument that "most compassionate Prince" could afford to the memory of these two children, stands at the end of the north aisle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel, close to Queen Elizabeth's tomb.

But let us turn from this dismal theme to something much more cheerful. While little Richard Duke of York was in Sanctuary with his mother, he must have often run across under the shadow of the great elms that stood before the Abbots House, to the Almonry, a small building near by. For to the Almonry eight years before a wise man had come with a strange new invention. He hung a red pole at the door for a sign; and soon all the learned men in the kingdom began to gather at the Almonry of Westminster, and talk to William Caxton, the printer of books. For he it was who had come from Bruges in Flanders, bringing with him the first printing press that had ever been seen in England. And at Westminster he worked away for fifteen years, translating and printing with ceaseless industry. It was a hard task that the industrious printer had undertaken, for the English language was in a state of transition. The tongue of each shire varied so as to be hardly intelligible to men of the next county; and Caxton says that the old-English Charters which the Abbot of Westminster fetched him as models seemed "more like to Dutch than to English." In his translations he had to choose between two schools—French affectation, and English pedantry. "Some honest and great clerks," he says, "have been with me and desired me to write the most curious terms I could find;" and others blamed him, saying that in his translations he "had over many curious terms which could not be understood of common people, and desired me to use old and homely terms." "Fain would I please every man," the good-tempered printer exclaims. But, happily for his successors, Caxton's excellent sense inclined him to good, plain English, "to the common terms that be daily used"—and he therefore left a far more lasting mark on English literature than can be gauged by the number and importance of the books he printed.

MEMORIAL URN IN HENRY THE SEVENTH'S CHAPEL.

The Almonry soon became a centre for all that was most cultivated in England. Lord Arundel pressed the printer to take courage when the length of the Golden Legend made him "half desperate to have accomplisht it," and ready to "lay it apart;" and promised him a yearly fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter if it were done. Noble ladies lent him their precious books. Churchmen brought him their translations. A mercer of London prayed him to undertake the "Royal Book" of Philip le Bel. The Queen's brother, the hapless Lord Rivers, chatted with him over his own translation of the "Sayings of the Philosophers." His "Tully" was printed under the patronage of Edward the Fourth. And among his chief supporters was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to whom his "Order of Chivalry" was dedicated.

It is therefore no mere flight of fancy, but a supposition founded on good evidence, that little Prince Richard may have beguiled some of the weary hours of his captivity by visits to the Almonry, watching the curious presses which struck off sheet after sheet of printing, and talking to the good-natured printer, who must, by all accounts, have been the cheeriest and busiest of men.

The Almonry is gone.

Bareheaded boys from Westminster School play foot-ball under the few remaining descendants of the old elms in Dean's Yard, and hurry in and out of the gateway with their school books under their arms. All that remains of the ancient Sanctuary is that blue plate with white letters. But within the great Abbey, the two little princes are in Sanctuary once more; never again to leave it while the fabric stands. And William Caxton sleeps in St. Margaret's Church close by, while his memory lives in every printed page of the English tongue.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 405. Dean Stanley.

[27] Speech of Duke of Buckingham in Sir T. More's "Life of Richard the Third."

[28] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 408. Dean Stanley.

[29] Holinshed's Chronicle. Vol. 3. p. 300.

[30] Sir Thomas More's History of Edward the Fifth, and Richard the Third.

[31] Equal to about £2500 in the present day.

[32] C. Knight's History of England. Vol. 2. p. 176.

[33] More.

[34] More.

[35] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey," Dean Stanley. p. 411.

[36] More's Life of Edward the Fifth. p. 40.

[37] More.

[38] "Memorials of Westminster Abbey." p. 412.

[39] More.

[40] More.

[41] "King Richard the Third." Act III., Scene IV.

[42] Dart. Vol. I. p. 170.

CHAPTER V.

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, mediæval 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.

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 débris 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.

EXTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OF HENRY THE SEVENTH.