Westminster abbey: A palimpsest of destruction and resurrection

“ If to one who follows the windings of Avon the recurrent suggestion of its scenery be that of permanence, here fitly, at his journey’s end, he finds that permanence embodied monumentally in stone. No building that I know in England—not Westminster Abbey, with all its sleeping generations—conveys the impression of durability in the same degree as does this Norman tower, which, for eight centuries, has stood foursquare to the storms of heaven and the frenzy of men. ”

“ The abbey-church of Westminster may be safely pronounced the most interesting ecclesiastical structure in this kingdom. Considered as a building, its architecture, rich in the varieties of successive ages, and marked by some of the most prominent beauties and peculiarities of the pointed style, affords an extensive field of gratification to the artist and the antiquary. Rising in solemn magnificence amidst the palaces and dignified structures connected with the seat of imperial government, it forms a distinguishing feature in the metropolis of England. ”

“ So much for Westminster Abbey, the crowning-place of kings and the burial-place of kings and great men.
St. Paul's Cathedral cannot claim the coronation of the kings, but it is a splendid building, with its great dome overlooking London far and wide. We can climb up through the belfry to the gallery which encircles the dome, and, looking down upon the street below, see the people crawling about like ants. Around us the pigeons flash their wings in the sun, and beyond the houses we can catch a glimpse of the gray river flowing down to the sea. ”

“ Much of the old magnificence has vanished; time has wrought its work, but more deadly than time have been the ravages of covetous men who longed to possess its treasure, or violent men who believed it to be little better than an idol set up in their midst.
Yet it has a mellow beauty of its own, a dignity enhanced rather than lessened by the traces everywhere apparent of its former glory, and we see in it not only an exquisite piece of work, but also that shrine which, like a magnet, drew so many of England's kings and queens to rest beneath its shadow. ”

“ Men are slow to conceive what might have been—nay, what almost was—in their national history; it seems difficult to our generation to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has Sheen—to mention the great river houses alone: Westminster alone survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors. ”

“ The relics, no doubt, were taken at the suppression of the monastery. The silver head and armour of Henry V. were stolen in the reign of Henry VIII., after the monks, those careful custodians of the Abbey, had been dispersed. The silver cradle on the tomb of Edward IV.'s little daughter vanished later. We look around and see the empty places on Henry III.'s tomb whence the mosaics and jewels have been picked out; the arms of Richard II. and his queen are missing; that once wonderful work of art, Philippa's monument, so well described by Sir Gilbert Scott, is a ruin. ”

“ As we look at this royal couple, that fateful day of Anne's funeral is recalled to our memory, when her bereaved husband in a fit of ungovernable rage struck one of the powerful {83} nobles, who came late for the ceremony, such a fierce blow that for the second time in Richard's unfortunate reign the pavement was stained with blood. On the first occasion a knight, who had taken sanctuary here, was slain by John of Gaunt's servants. And in each case the Abbey was placed under an interdict for a time, till by priest and bell the church was cleansed from pollution. ”

“ How far the soldiers were allowed to desecrate its walls and its altars it is difficult to clearly ascertain, and we may fairly believe that the story of how they pulled down the organ, pawned the pipes for ale, and played boisterous games up and down the church "to show their Christian liberty," is a great exaggeration, even if any such thing took place at all. Certainly the altar in Henry VII.'s chapel, under which lay buried Edward VI., was destroyed, the copes and vestments were sold, and many windows and monuments supposed to teach lessons of superstition and idolatry were demolished. ”

“ That was an age when the glories of medieval architecture appear to have lost all their charm in men's eyes, when the love of beautiful things was at its lowest ebb. The Westminster boys played their games in the chapels, and were allowed to skip from tomb to tomb in the Confessor's shrine; hideous monuments were erected and crowded together, nothing old was reverenced, and we can only be thankful that more was not destroyed or hopelessly ruined. ”

“ It is in the golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as those possess of language and of life. ”

“ By a strange irony of fate, the royal chapel of the Tudors was destined to be, at least for awhile, the burying-place of many Parliamentary leaders, and perhaps stranger still it is to realise how Roundhead and Cavalier, disgraced minister and triumphant reformer, came at last to the old Abbey, which opened its arms to receive them, condemning no man, but committing all unto the care of Him who judgeth with righteous judgment. ”

“ From here we see the effigy and tomb of Queen Philippa, the latter stripped bare of all its original splendour, including the alabaster angels and gilt statuettes of mourners.
Standing on the south side we are now directly above the tomb of that masterful Countess of Buckingham, mother of Charles the First's favourite, whose own pompous monument will be found in Henry VII.'s Chapel. In the vault {86} beneath lay for more than a century the withered mummy of a French princess, the coquettish Kate, whom Henry V. courts so ardently in Shakespeare's play. ”

“ Edmund's Chapel for the sum of twenty shillings. The white stone canopy with the wrought-metal tabernacle work and gilt angels was actually removed as insecure in the eighteenth century. The thirty alabaster niches, each containing the statuette of a royal mourner, and the alabaster angels with gilt wings have all gone, except the fragments of one, which was put together by Sir Gilbert Scott, and is in a safe but dark corner. No trace remains of the iron grille which Edward bought for his queen from a bishop's monument in St. ”

“ Practically nothing is left of all this splendour, and the wooden chest which contained the body, for it was the custom to bury the dead above ground in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is stripped bare of ornament. On the other side of the entrance lies a royal Prince of English birth, John of Eltham, the second son of Edward II., and thus grandson to Henry III. To the student of armour the alabaster effigy is of special interest as a specimen of the military costume of the fourteenth century ”

“ Outside, the chapel is decorated with Islip's quaint device, a play upon his name Islip: an eye with a hand holding a slip or branch, and a man slipping from a tree. In the ambulatory, not far from his successor Islip, lies another Abbot, Esteney, to whom we have referred in connection with the completion of the nave. His altar tomb has been lowered, and the fine brass is now only slightly raised from the floor; it was originally in the adjacent chapel of St. John the Baptist, but was moved, and thus mutilated, in the eighteenth century to make way for the colossal monument of General Wolfe. ”

“ A meek and contrite heart feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection.
But Ruskin’s word chiefly concerns the more perfect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations there—worse than any in England—of riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious and offensive monument in [Pg 34] Westminster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. ”

“ Nothing of the hall is left save the ancient wall, but outside the door are remains of the niches which were used for towels; the lavatory itself was round the corner in the west cloister. The cloisters, and the monastic buildings which surround them, were built at different periods, chiefly by the generosity and energy of the Abbots. The Norman monastery remained intact long after Henry the Third's time, but the new cloister, which was begun by Abbot Byrcheston, was gradually built as the church progressed, and the north end of the eastern arm was practically part of the south transept. ”

“ As we walk along the green to the north front, we see the whole north side of the {15} nave, but before leaving the west end we may note that repairs have recently been carried out, as one or two of the crockets were showing signs of immediate ruin, and even the eighteenth-century towers required new faces. The north façade was completely restored and, in fact, practically rebuilt about twenty years ago: the portico from designs left by Sir Gilbert Scott, who was Surveyor of the fabric for some time, and the upper part by his successor, Mr. ”

“ Faith's Chapel at the extreme south end, and there also are the ruins of a little stone stair, which used to lead below the triforium level above the chapel into the monks' dormitory beyond. The large rose window, the tracery of which has been remodelled more than once since the thirteenth century, was refilled with painted glass two years ago in memory of the late Duke of Westminster. We look the other way, down the north transept, and see the statues of statesmen in the distance, which we shall examine later on. ”

“ Above our heads the fan tracery of the stone roof seems literally to hang from the sky, so delicate and light is the workmanship. The Cambridge graduate in our party, and those indefatigable sightseers our American friends, compare it with King's College Chapel, which was built about this period by the same King's munificence, and probably by the same architect. The windows were once all filled with painted glass, only a few fragments of which, notably the founder's figure at the east end, are left. ”

“ But the Maiden Queen was in very deed the last royal person to whom Westminster Abbey owed substantial benefits. She refounded the collegiate church, which finally took the place of the monastery, and established Westminster School; before her reign the only boys taught within the precincts were the few scholars collected in the cloisters by the monks. She is, in fact, the foundress of St. Peter's College, which thus owes its status as a royal foundation to Queen Elizabeth. ”

“ To this man, Oliver Cromwell, it is that we owe the first conception of this church as a fitting burial-place for our national worthies. From the State obsequies of Admiral Blake, which were held here by Cromwell's command, has germinated the seed which has borne fruit in the public funerals and in the monuments, ordered and paid for by Parliament, of statesmen, soldiers and sailors. The nineteenth century has closed, and there is little space available in the Abbey for the worthies of the twentieth, but the national feeling still turns instinctively to Westminster on the death of a great man. ”

“ In passing from chapel to chapel, from cloister to cloister, from aisle to aisle, we seem to pass through the centuries which gave them birth, and which have strewn over all the dust of their extinguished fires. But Westminster Abbey is not merely an embalmed corpse, preserving the semblance of a life which has long since vanished, It is still the shrine of England’s greatest men—still the embodiment of ideas yet living in the national heart. ”