Westminster Abbey | Page 2

. . . . . . . . . 66
12. The West End of the Confessor's Shrine, with the Modern
Altar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

13. The Tomb of Henry III. from St. Edward's Chapel . . . . . 76
14. St. Edward's Shrine and the Chantry Chapel of Henry
V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
15. The Tomb of Queen Philippa and the Chantry Chapel of Henry V.
from the South Ambulatory . . . . . . . . . . 88
16. The Chapel of Henry VII., looking East . . . . . . . . . . 90
17. The Coronation Chair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
18. The North Ambulatory, showing the Steps which lead up to Henry
VII.'s Chapel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
19. Interior of the North Transept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
20. The South Transept and Chapter House from Dean's
Yard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
21. The Abbot's Courtyard and the Entrance to the Jerusalem
Chamber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

The illustrations in this volume were engraved in England by The
Hentschel Colourtype Process.

{3}
INTRODUCTION
"Kings are thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers."
From the reign of Edward the Confessor, the last sovereign of the royal
Saxon race, till the death of Elizabeth, the last Tudor queen, these
words of the old Hebrew prophet were literally applicable to the great
West Minster. When Edward knelt within the Benedictine chapel on
Thorneye, which had so miraculously withstood the ravages of the

Danes, and vowed to dedicate a new church on the same spot to the
glory of God and in the name of St. Peter, even his prophetic soul
cannot have foretold the high destiny of his beloved foundation. As the
building slowly grew during the last years of his reign, he conceived
the idea of its use as a sepulchre for himself and his successors. In his
visions he may even have foreseen the coronations of the English
sovereigns within its walls, his own canonisation, and the long
connection {4} between the throne and the monastery. All that the
words above imply would have appealed to the pious founder, but what
of his feelings could he have looked on through the centuries? He
would have seen much to vex, yet we venture to think he would have
found consolation, even in these latter days when the monks are no
longer here and the Roman Church has ceased to be the Church of his
country. Three hundred years after Edward's death came the destruction
of his church in the name of piety, but for this there was ample
compensation in the beautiful and stately buildings which were raised
upon the ruins of the old, and in the devotion to the first founder's
memory shown by Henry III. and his descendants. During the ages of
faith, when the Pope held sway over England, king after king gave
liberally to the fabric, while their queens may also be counted amongst
the benefactors to the West Minster. St. Peter, the patron saint to whom
the church was dedicated, was practically lost sight of in the halo which
surrounded the memory of the Saxon king, and it was to the English
royal saint rather than to the Hebrew apostle that the Abbey owed its
peculiar sanctity. From the first it was a royal foundation, a building
consecrated to the memory of a king, yet none of {5} these
considerations were weighed in the balance when the West Minster
shared in the general downfall of the English monasteries. The
sovereign himself laid violent hands upon the treasures presented by his
pious forefathers in honour of St. Edward, and the saint's body must
surely have turned in its coffin when, to save it from indignity, the
monks were obliged to lift it from the feretory and hide it beneath the
ground. The shrine which had been the pride of each king since the
days of Henry III., and honoured no less by the first Tudor sovereign,
was stripped of its glories: