Part 5

Upon our right is the so-called "historical" side of the transept, where are collected the monuments of many distinguished literary men, not historians only, whose names are more familiar to us than {42} the majority of poetasters who were honoured with tributes in Poets' Corner proper. The busts of Grote and Thirlwall were placed here by Dean Stanley, in close proximity to other classical scholars. These two friends each compiled a history of Greece without the other's knowledge, till the publication of Thirlwall's surprised Grote, but made no change in their friendship. They are buried in the same grave, near Macaulay. We tread now upon the tombstone of Dean Ireland; with him rests the companion of his youth and the friend of his maturity, William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review at the time when its biting reviews cut many a rising poet, including Keats, to the heart. Ireland's name must ever be held dear by all visitors to the Abbey, for under his orders the nave and transepts, formerly accessible only on payment of a fee, were opened free to the general public. The quaint half-figure of William Camden claims our attention next. We see the famous antiquary and historian "in habit as he lived," with his hand upon his great work, the Britannia. Camden belongs to Westminster in every sense: as a boy he was a protege of Goodman's, as a young man he became usher, and he ultimately rose to be headmaster of the school. {43} Later on he gave up teaching in order to devote himself to antiquarian research, encouraged by the approval of the Queen, and supported by the salary he received as Herald. He continued to dwell in Dean's Yard, and loved to wander in the Abbey, meditating amongst the tombs; the fruit of his solitary hours here was the first attempt at a guide-book, a list of the monuments, which was, however, written in Latin, and therefore of no use to the ordinary tourist. His own monument was sadly knocked about twenty-three years (1643) after his death by some rough fellows, probably Cavaliers, who broke into the Abbey one night, and on their way to deface Lord Essex's hearse took the nose off poor Camden; the damage they did was repaired in the eighteenth century at the expense of Oxford University. Next to Camden, upon a plain mural monument, is inscribed the name of Isaac Casaubon. We know him by repute only as a celebrated French scholar, who was tempted from his native land by King James I. with the offer of a fat canonry at Canterbury, but who only lived to enjoy the sinecure post--he was a layman--four years. Surely there must be fishermen amongst us: to them the initials I. W. scratched upon Casaubon's memorial may recall the great angler, Isaac [Transcriber's note: "Izaak" in Index] Walton, {44} even though we have no means of proving that these were actually his handiwork; but as a friend of Casaubon's son, and a namesake and admirer of the father, there is no incongruity in associating the two names.

The "burlesque" statue of the famous actor, David Garrick, with "a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense inscribed below," must ever be associated with Charles Lamb, who thus appropriately described it. With Garrick himself is indissolubly connected the memory of his lifelong friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose familiar form, with its brown coat and tie wig, was conspicuous at the funeral, standing close to Shakespeare's monument, tears coursing down his cheeks for the loss of his dear Davy. Five years later, Mrs. Garrick herself, once a brilliant, graceful dancer, now a little shrivelled old woman, stood by the doctor's open grave in this same transept, bowed with age and overcome with grief.

In this transept there are monuments to another actor and an actress, celebrated in their own day. Barton Booth, a Westminster scholar under Dr. Busby, rose to a high place in his profession; his wife, once like Mrs. Garrick a popular dancer, put up the tablet. His memory still survives in two {45} Westminster streets, called Barton Street and Cowley Street, after his name and the place where he was buried. Mrs. Pritchard was honoured by a memorial near Shakespeare's statue, upon which the poet-laureate of the day wrote a florid inscription. She began her professional career after Booth's death, but lived long enough to tread the same boards as Garrick, whose grave is just below; she predeceased the younger actor by ten years. Only one actress, Ann Oldfield, who belonged to an earlier generation (she flourished in the beginning of the eighteenth century), was buried actually within the Abbey; a woman of no character but of some talent, she lies near the Deanery door in the nave. We must not forget, when we reach St. Andrew's Chapel, to point out the colossal statues of Mrs. Siddons and her brother, John Kemble, upon whose shoulders fell the mantles of Mrs. Barry and Garrick, and who carried on the old traditions at Drury Lane and Covent Garden during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

We have digressed from our beaten path to follow after the lights of the theatrical profession, and shall afterwards find other well-known players in the cloisters. A glance round, as we stand in the western part of the transept, shows that we are {46} literally surrounded by familiar faces and much-loved authors. Of Addison we speak later, so may pass over his very inferior statue (by Westmacott), but just beyond we see the busts of Lord Macaulay and of Thackeray, and the medallion heads of Sir Walter Scott and of John Ruskin; below them is the grave of Charles Dickens. The lovers of music raise their eyes meantime to the unwieldy figure of Handel, whose personality remained essentially German although the greater part of his life was spent in England, at the Court of the first three Georges. Beneath his monument is the medallion of that gifted singer Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, placed there as a record of the many occasions when the Swedish nightingale interpreted Handel's beautiful music to the British public in a manner never excelled before or since. Close to us now is a reminder of the old monastic days--the door which leads into an ancient chapel used by the brethren as a vestry, and in the floor before it is the grave of Abbot Litlington, to whom we have alluded before and of whom we shall speak again. Near his is that of a humble monk, one Owen Tudor, who took sanctuary during the Wars of the Roses, and probably lived to see his nephew, Henry Tudor, on the English throne. Above the {47} door Oliver Goldsmith's name recalls the early days of the English novel, when the Vicar of Wakefield was one of the very few in existence. Many of us have enjoyed his inimitable comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, on the stage, as well as those popular plays, The Rivals and The School for Scandal, by the other eighteenth-century Irish dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose tombstone is beneath our feet. That great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is responsible for the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far more often noticed:--

Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once and now I know it.

A preposterous and affected statue to our left, with the immortal name of Shakespeare below it, has distracted the eyes of our friends, and comments are freely made when we tell them how nearly the bones of the sweet Swan of Avon were brought from Stratford to this burial-place of poets. The monument itself was erected by subscription more than a century after Shakespeare's {48} death, but the removal of the body had been averted long before by Ben Jonson's protest and the dramatist's posthumous curse. The Scotchmen with us, who have just gazed with much appreciation at Chantrey's bust of their national novelist, a replica of the one at Abbotsford, now look up to the heavy-featured face of Burns, their national poet. We pause to tell them that this memorial was placed here twenty-one years ago, and was paid for with shilling subscriptions, which were voluntarily contributed by all classes in Scotland, from the highest to the lowest. Southey and Coleridge are the next on the eastern wall, and we find their names familiar to all those who have toured in the Lake country, although few of their works are read now by the generality, save possibly Southey's Life of Nelson. Campbell's bust is at the angle where we turn into the original Poets' Corner, and several of those around us call to mind his still popular poems, notably "Hohenlinden" and the "Battle of the Baltic." A few steps further and we stand upon the vault of Edmund Spenser, that prince of poets, who was buried in close proximity to the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry. Within this vault moulder not only the dust of Spenser, {49} but the funeral odes and the pens wherewith they were writ, which his friends, the poets and literary men of the day, threw old Camden tells us upon his coffin. Elizabeth herself, according to a contemporary writer, mindful of the tribute paid to her in the Fairie Queen, ordered a monument to be erected in honour of her poet, but this was never done: she died three years later, and some said that a greedy courtier embezzled the money intended for this purpose. Whatever the truth, a literary Countess, Lady Dorset, repaired the omission twenty years afterwards, but by the following century her memorial had crumbled away, and was replaced by a copy, for which Gray's friend Mason collected a sum of money. After Spenser's burial this part of the transept was dedicated to the memory of poets, and amongst many forgotten names are others of undying fame. Before us, for instance, are Ben Jonson and Milton. Jonson, who knew Shakespeare and owed much to his friendship with Lord Bacon, died as did so many of his literary contemporaries, in poor circumstances: like Chaucer and Spenser, he ended his life in a house close to the Abbey, in King Street, which was recently demolished. His body was buried in the nave, {50} standing upright on its feet; the words "O rare Ben Jonson," which are repeated on the monument, were cut upon the stone at the charge of a certain Sir Jack Young, who happened to be passing when the mason was fixing the gravestone. The ancient inscription has been placed against the wall to preserve the lettering, and a modern paving stone marks the place of the vault. The buttons of the poet's coat, which are on the wrong side in his bust, gave rise to the couplet:--

O rare Ben Jonson, what a turncoat grown, Thou ne'er wast such till thou wast carved in stone.

While roystering Ben waited a hundred years before his literary distinction was recognised by this memorial in Poets' Corner, the strength of Royalist feeling kept Milton's name out of the Abbey altogether for the same period after his death. Thus, although both men died in the seventeenth century, their monuments date from the middle of the eighteenth. Milton's name was regarded as anathema by the loyal Chapter, and it was not till long after the Jacobite Atterbury's exile, that a Dean (Wilcocks) was broad-minded enough to acknowledge Milton's genius, and allow an admirer of his, one Benson, to put up a monument. The lyric muse above Gray's medallion {51} close by, points to the bust of that master of poetry and prose, to whom he and all the poets ever since Milton's time owe so much. Gray himself must always be remembered in the Abbey, for who can stand amongst the kings and look upon the "mighty conquerors, mighty lords," who made this island kingdom, without recalling the words of his historic ode?

Nowadays, when by common consent Chaucer is regarded as the patriarch of English poets, visitors to this transept naturally consider that he was buried here on account of his literary reputation. But this was not the case. At one time a favourite of kings, Chaucer was also a connection by marriage with his powerful patron John of Gaunt, yet he seems to have died in comparative poverty. He was Clerk of the Works at the royal palace hard by, and a dweller beneath the shadow of the old Lady Chapel; his burial in the adjoining church followed as a matter of course, simply because he resided within the precincts. For nearly a hundred and fifty years the only record of his grave was a leaden plate, with a Latin inscription by an Italian poet, which hung upon the pillar near. At last one Brigham, himself with a turn for verse-making, procured an ancient marble {52} tomb, and got permission to put it up against this wall. It has been called by Chaucer's name ever since; but whether the poet's bones still lie in the original grave, where Dryden's coffin was afterwards placed, or were transferred here, is still a moot-point. The modern window above, the gift of an American admirer, contains portraits of Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower. Quite lately another painted glass window, dedicated to the Confessor, has been inserted beside it. John Dryden, whose reputation equalled Spenser's in his own day, died, like Chaucer (1400) and Spenser (1599), at the end of a century, in his case the eighteenth, and his burial in Chaucer's grave, near the entrance to St. Benedict's Chapel, was a mark of special honour. To reach his beautiful bust, a copy by Scheemakers of an earlier one, we must pass over the gravestones of two well-known modern poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning. On a pillar close by is Woolner's bust of Tennyson, which represents the laureate in middle life. The name of Abraham Cowley on a stone beside them conveys little to us now, but his contemporary reputation was very great, and Dryden owed much to Cowley, his immediate predecessor in the circle of poets. Before we move on there are two busts {53} which are artistically very inferior to Dryden's. I refer first to that of Longfellow, whose name is a household word on either side of the Atlantic, and of whom Americans are justly proud. On the other column is that of the Scotch Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Tait, placed here with intent, because in the vicinity lies another Primate also of Scotch birth, Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews, a favourite with King James I., and by his command historian of the Scottish Church.

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CHAUCER'S TOMB

Before us is the monument, put up one hundred and fifty years after his death, to Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English poetry, and we see upon the pavement wreaths which mark the graves of our two most distinguished modern poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning, and were placed there no doubt by some visitor to the Abbey, who desired thus to show honour to their memory. This spot is the very centre of the famous Poets' Corner, and close by is the vault where lie the bones of Spenser, and the pens and funeral odes of the poets who attended his funeral.

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Close together on the left are the monuments of three men, all of whom were old Westminsters, two of them headmasters of the school. Busby and Vincent were strict disciplinarians, whose belief in the efficacy of the rod was afterwards equalled if not excelled by Dr. Keate at Eton. Busby flogged impartially the boy with brains and the boy with none, but prided himself in later life on having schooled many a budding genius, including the future laureate, Dryden himself. Amongst those who smarted under his discipline was the eloquent preacher, Dr. South, who reclines in marble so peacefully by his side. For fifty-five years Busby ruled supreme at Westminster School; he remained a Loyalist to the core throughout the disturbing changes of the Commonwealth, and {54} continued faithful to the Stuarts even under the disquieting regime which followed the Restoration. South, who was a Prebendary, is remembered here for his refusal of the Deanery, a post which Dr. Vincent, whose medallion is between these monuments, accepted (1816) a century after South's death. So excessive was his use of the rod that Southey, a schoolboy at the time, raised an energetic protest against the headmaster's tyranny, and was forthwith expelled from Westminster. When he became Dean, however, Vincent turned his superfluous energy to more practical uses, and, as we have already said, carried out the restoration and preservation of Henry VII.'s Chapel, besides many useful repairs to the Abbey fabric.

Before we pass within the iron gate and thus approach the head of the cross, i.e. the apse with its surrounding chapels, we must stand awhile in the centre of the church beneath the lantern. On either side stretch the arms of the cross: the southern one we have just visited, the northern we leave for our return. From here we can observe the architectural features, and point out that the west aisle of the south cross is cut off by the eastern walk of the cloister, a singular arrangement, due probably to the fact that the ancient Norman {55} cloister, which stood long after the building of Henry the Third's church, was already in this position. Between the triforium and the roof of this cloister is a vaulted chamber, called the Muniment Room, where some of the Abbey documents are still kept, and the ancient chests contain archives, which are gradually being sorted and rearranged. Upon the wall the traces of Richard the Second's badge, the White Hart, can be seen from below on sunny mornings. We have already noticed the doorway of St. 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. The northern rose window was also restored several times in the eighteenth century, when it entirely lost its original character under Dean Atterbury's energetic supervision. We are told that he actually watched the workmen hewing {56} smooth the old sculptures. Before his exile the Dean chose the subjects for the painted glass, the colours of which, mellowed by time, compare favourably with the modern lights below. From where we stand we can see one of the few existing stone angels blowing trumpets, which formerly filled the spandrels of the arches, and were part of the angelic choir all round the church. The arcading immediately under the window still remains, but lower down the architecture is completely ruined by two monstrous naval monuments. The eastern aisle is cut off from the rest of the transept and divided into three small chapels. The western is partially severed from the main aisle by large cenotaphs.

We turn to the west and see the present choir, which stretches to the organ screen. The stalls are of no artistic merit, and were designed in part by Wyatt, early in the nineteenth century; later on they were added to by Blore, who was also responsible, in 1848, for the wooden casing of the ancient stone wall between choir and nave. Beneath the black-and-white pavement, his own gift, lie the remains of Dr. Busby.

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VIEW OF THE CHOIR AND NAVE, LOOKING WEST FROM THE HIGH ALTAR

From the high altar we look down to the west end, and see above the choir screen the painted glass of the west window which was inserted in the reign of George II. To our right is the tomb of Aymer de Valence, and the smaller contemporary monument of the first bride ever married in the Abbey, Aveline, Countess of Lancaster. In the foreground is the ancient mosaic pavement, which was laid in the thirteenth century, when this part of the church was built; and beyond the altar rails we see the comparatively modern stalls of the choir and the still more recent organ case. The pulpit marks the intersection of the sanctuary with the north transept.

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Facing east we look directly towards the Holy of Holies, the Sanctuary, where, raised high on a {57} mound of sacred earth, brought from Palestine, is the shrine of Edward the Confessor, girdled by a half circle of royal tombs. Between us and the saint's feretory is a fifteenth-century screen, which is faced on this side by a modern reredos, designed by Sir G. Scott. In front of this is the high altar. Some way below the level of the floor, on either side of the altar, are the bases of two pillars, which formed part of the original Norman church, and have helped the experts to fix the exact proportions of the Confessor's building.

Edward the Confessor was not canonised for nearly a hundred years after his death, in spite of the repeated appeals made to Rome by the Westminster abbots. In the meantime his coffin lay before this altar in a plain stone tomb, which was adorned by a rich pall, the gift of William the Conqueror. When at last our founder's name was added to the roll of saints, the body was transferred (October 13, 1163) to an elaborate shrine, in the presence of Henry II. and his then friend the Archbishop, Thomas a Becket. When this part of the old church was destroyed to make way for Henry the Third's new building, the old shrine was removed to a temporary chapel, while a new and more magnificent one, which we shall examine more {58} closely presently, was prepared by the same Italian workmen who were employed on the pavement, and afterwards to decorate the tombs of Henry III. and Queen Eleanor of Castile. The materials--the mosaic, the coloured marbles, and the porphyry--used for this beautiful pavement, which was put down in 1268, as well as for the royal tombs, were, like the designers and craftsmen themselves, brought from Rome by Abbot Ware, who, with his successor, Abbot Wenlock, lies beneath the mosaic work which Ware had supervised. The whole design, now partly covered by an ancient Persian carpet, represents the probable duration of the world according to the Ptolemaic system. To our left are three artistic tombs, which belong to a later date, the early fourteenth century, and are no doubt by the same unknown artist. In shape they resemble the hearses which used to stand in the church before and for a time after the burial of all distinguished persons. The recumbent figures take the place of the effigies of the deceased, which were usually made of wood, in the likeness of the dead person. These were first carried at the funeral, and afterwards laid upon the hearse. The little statuettes all round the sides are intended for the mourners, and above are represented the lighted {59} torches and wax tapers, which covered the hearse. In the small tomb nearest to us lies Aveline, wife of Edmund Crouchback, Henry the Third's second son, whose own far more elaborate sepulchre is nearest the altar. Edmund and Aveline were the first couple ever married in the present church. Their wedding, in fact, took place only a few months--in the spring of 1270--after the choir and transepts had been opened for service. But the north aisle of the choir was certainly completed before this marriage took place, for upon the wall are the arms of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester and King of the Barons, in close juxtaposition with the fleurs-de-lis of France. In 1263 a grand temporary reconciliation was patched up between Henry III. and the proud Earl, which was ratified at Boulogne in the presence of the French King, St. Louis the peacemaker. These shields must therefore have been carved here at about that time--in any case before Simon's fall; he was killed in 1265 at the battle of Evesham. The arms of Aveline's rich and powerful father, William de Fortibus, are in this same aisle. The heiress herself died young, leaving no children, and her husband inherited her vast wealth, with which he endowed the powerful house of Lancaster. Edmund took {60} a foreign bride after Aveline's death, and resided much with her in Provins, whence he brought the red roses which became the Lancastrian badge. His eldest son, Thomas, the second Earl of Lancaster, met his death on the scaffold through the machinations of Aymer de Valence--a tragic sequel to the friendship between their fathers, Edmund Crouchback and his uncle William de Valence, who were brothers at arms, and had often fought side by side in the Holy Land.

A defaced painting on the ambulatory side of Edmund's tomb once showed the figures of ten Crusaders; amongst them may have been portraits of the uncle and his nephew; they died (1296) within a week of one another, on an ill-fated expedition to Gascony, which ended in defeat and disaster to the English force. All these three monuments--Aymer's is between those of the Earl and Countess of Lancaster--repay a close study, but we can only glance at them now. Notice the noble and dignified recumbent effigy on Aveline's tomb, which is dressed in the simple costume of a grand dame of the thirteenth century; it was formerly painted and gilt; some traces of the red and white paint, also the green vine leaves, still remain beneath the canopy. At the feet two dogs are snapping at {61} one another in play. The two warriors are depicted in life and in death: above each is an armed equestrian figure with visor up, while below lie their quiet images in the sleep of death. The royal prince has a finer monument with a triple canopy, otherwise there is little difference between the two. The picture of Richard II. in his brilliant youth hangs opposite his relatives. The King, whose destiny seemed so fair, but whose tragic fate must move our pity, is here represented in the coronation robes holding the orb and sceptre, and seated in St. Edward's chair upon the ancient stone of Scone, which his ancestor, Edward I., wrested from the Scots. Behind the portrait a piece of tapestry, which used to be in the great schoolroom, recalls the fact that the whole sanctuary was hung with arras and also wainscoted in Queen Anne's time. The remains of the sedilia south of the altar date from Edward the First's time, and were for long believed to form the canopy of an ancient Saxon tomb, which the monks moved here from the Norman Chapter House and called by the name of King Sebert, their traditional founder. We can see this better from the ambulatory, also the curious skull and cross-bone ornament which is all that is left of the tomb of Anne of Cleves, Henry {62} the Eighth's repudiated wife, the only one of all his wives who was buried in the Abbey. She was interred here with a pompous funeral service by order of her friend and step-daughter Queen Mary.

Let us return now to the iron gate which divides the south ambulatory from the transept. Just inside is a small chapel, called after St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictines, to which order the Westminster monks belonged, and where his head was long kept. The chapel is not open, but easily seen from outside. Within is the fine altar tomb of Simon Langham, first Abbot of Westminster, then Archbishop of Canterbury, through whose munificent bequest his energetic successor, Litlington, was able to add to the monastic buildings and cloisters. Other burials of interest took place in this chapel. The tomb which usurps the place of the altar is that of Frances, Countess of Hertford, daughter-in-law to the Protector Somerset, by whose orders these altars were destroyed, and sister to that famous Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, whose fleet drove the Spanish Armada from our shores. A well-preserved seventeenth-century brass, raised a few inches above the floor, gives us the portrait of Dr. Bill, the first Dean after Elizabeth reconstituted the {63} collegiate body, which had been originally founded by her father, Henry VIII., but was suppressed by her sister Mary. Bill lived only a year at the Deanery, but during that short period he drafted the statutes, the nucleus of which remains unaltered to the present day, although the details have been considerably changed. His successor, Gabriel Goodman, whose kneeling statue is against the south wall, was in office throughout nearly the whole long reign of Queen Elizabeth, dying only two years before his friend and patroness. We must not linger in this little chapel, for voices from the past are calling us to hasten onwards toward the burial-place of kings.

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