The Children of Westminster Abbey Part 1

The Children of Westminster Abbey.

by Rose G. Kingsley.

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 sh.o.r.es. 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 t.i.the 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 cuira.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed since "the Reverend Brother John Wratting, Prior of Westminster," saw twenty-four salmon offered as t.i.the 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?

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 b.u.t.tress 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 b.u.t.tresses 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 surpa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e. But within these walls we are still and peaceful--and, if we will, we may read in "bra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce inside the altar rails. The splendid reredos glittering with gold, mosaic, and jewels, blazes above the altar of carved cedar from Lebanon. Against the stalls on the opposite side hangs the famous picture of King Richard the Second. Beside us rise the gray stone canopies of the magnificent tombs of Aymer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback--two of the finest specimens of mediaeval art in England. The great groups of pillars round the choir carry the eye upwards to the arcades of the Triforium, to the delicate tracery of the great clerestory windows, to the wonderful misty roof.

But it is not overhead that I would have you look. Beneath your feet is the mosaic pavement that Abbot Ware brought from Rome in 1267, when he journeyed thither to be consecrated Abbot of Westminster by the Pope.

Our guide stoops down, touches a secret spring, and lifts up a square block of the pavement. You look into a s.p.a.ce some few feet deep. It is almost filled with a ma.s.s 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 G.o.d and St. Peter and all G.o.d'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 ma.s.sive pillars, its deep foundations, its windows filled with stained gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sion with him; and with his Provencal wife Eleanor a swarm of foreign artists, painters, sculptors, poets, troubadours, found their way to England. Louis the Ninth was re-building and re-embellishing the Abbey of St. Denys as a place of sepulture for the French kings. Henry had also seen the splendid churches of Amiens, Beauvais, and Reims, in his journeys through France. His English, his religious, and his artistic instincts therefore, all combined to fire his imagination with the idea of making the most glorious shrine for the English king and saint that the world could see.

Henry's work at Westminster began with his reign. He dedicated the newly built Lady Chapel at the back of the High Altar, the day before his coronation; and "the first offering laid upon its altar were the spurs worn by the King in that ceremony." Then Edward's Abbey, "consecrated by recollections of the Confessor and the Conqueror," was swept away.

Little remains of it now save the bases of those pillars of which I have spoken above--the substructures of the Dormitory--and the heavy low-browed pa.s.sage 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.s 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.