The Children of Westminster Abbey Part 4

G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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, G.o.d send you good keeping; let me kisse you yet once ere you go, for G.o.d 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 t.i.tle 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 compa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.sionate 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. n.o.ble 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 const.i.tution were alike altered by the stupendous transformation through which England pa.s.sed in those seventy years.

Henry the Seventh's reign marks a great break in English History. It is the close of the Middle Ages. And the Abbey tells the story of this break in a strangely vivid and emphatic fashion. As we walk up the wide flight of steps beyond the Confessor's Chapel at the extreme east end of the Abbey, we find ourselves in a new world. The grave, stately, mediaeval church is left behind. And, entering Henry the Seventh's matchless chapel, a sense of fervor and richness in the architecture seizes on us. Our eyes feast on the bayed windows with their innumerable little diamond panes; the traceries and mouldings on the walls--not a foot left unwrought--the niches with figures of saint and martyr; the grand bronze gates with their Tudor arms--the rose and portcullis, the falcon and fetterlock--the rich dark wood carving of the stalls, with the banners of the Knights of the Bath hanging motionless above each; and then the roof, that marvelous stone cobweb, with its bosses, carvings and coats of arms, its vaultings springing from the slenderest pillars imaginable like graceful palm stems, and spreading out into the exquisite fan-tracery that covers the whole--a network of stone lace. As Washington Irving says in his unrivalled description of Westminster,

Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft as if by magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 n.o.ble 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.