97 CHAPTER III. THE ROYAL TOMBS. Tombs of THE burialplaces of Kings are always famous. The oldest and greatest buildings on the earth are Tombs of Kings-the Pyramids. The most wonderful revelation of the life of the ancient world is that which is painted in the Kings. rock-hewn catacombs of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes. The burial of the Kings of Judah was a kind of canonisation. In the vision of all the Kings of the nations, lying in glory, every one in his own house,' the ancient prophets saw the august image of the nether world. These burialplaces, however, according to the universal practice of antiquity, were mostly outside the precincts of the towns. The sepulchre of the race of David within the city of Jerusalem formed a solitary exception. The Roman Emperors were interred first in the mausoleum of Augustus, in the Campus Martius, beyond the walls-then in the mausoleum of Hadrian, on the farther side of the Tiber. The burial of Geta at the foot of the Palatine, and of Trajan at the base of his Column, in the Forum which bears his name, were the first indications that the sanctity of the city might be invaded by the presence of imperial graves. It was reserved for Constantine to give the earliest example of the interment of sovereigns, not only within the walls of a city, but within a sacred building, when he and his successors were laid in the Church of the Apostles at Constantinople. This precedent was from that time followed both in East and West, and every European nation has now its royal consecrated cemetery. But there are two peculiarities in Westminster which are hardly found elsewhere. The first is that it unites the Coronations with the Burials. The nearest approach to this is in Poland and Russia. In the cathedral of Cracow, by the shrine. H of St. Stanislaus, the Becket of the Sclavonic races, the Kings of Poland were crowned and buried from the thirteenth Peculiarities century to the dissolution of the kingdom. In the of the Royal Tombs in West minster. Kremlin at Moscow stand side by side the three cathedrals of the Assumption, of the Annunciation, and of the Archangel. In the first the Czars are crowned; in the second they are married; and in the third, till the accession of Peter, they were buried. Only three royal marriages have taken place in the Abbey-those of Henry III., of Richard II., 1. Com- and of Henry VII. But its first coronation, as we Coronations have seen,2 sprang out of its first royal grave. Its subsequent burials are the result of both. So Waller bination of with Burials. finely sang: That antique pile behold, Where royal heads receive the sacred gold: It gives them crowns, and does their ashes keep, These suns of empire, where they rise they set.3 So Jeremy Taylor preached: Where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change, from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men. . . . There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that, when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings', and our accounts easier, and our pains or our crowns shall be less. So, before Waller and Jeremy Taylor, had spoken Francis Beaumont: Here's an acre, sown indeed, "Though gods they were, as men they dy'd.' Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings. Here's a world of pomp and state, Buried in dust, once dead by fate. 6 2. Comthe Burials Royal The royal sepultures of Westminster were also remarkable from their connection not only with the coronation, but with the residence of the English Princes. The burialplaces which, in this respect, the Abbey most re- bination of sembles, were those of the Kings of Spain and the with the Kings of Scotland. In the Escurial, where the Palace. Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more.' ' The like may be said of Dunfermline and of Holyrood, where the sepulchral Abbey and the Royal Palace are as contiguous as at Westminster. There has, however, been a constant tendency to separate the two. The Escurial is now almost as desolate as the stony wilderness of which it forms a part. The vault of the House of Hapsburg, in the Capuchin Church at Vienna, is far removed from the Imperial Palace. The royal race of Savoy rests on the steep heights of St. Michael and of the Superga. The early Kings of Ireland reposed in the now deserted mounds of Clonmacnoise, by the lonely windings of the Shannon, as the early Kings of Scotland on the distant and sea-girt rock of Iona. The Kings of France not only were not crowned at St. Denys, but they never lived there never came Louis XIV. chose there. The town was a city of convents. 2 Versailles for his residence, because from the terrace at St. Germain's he could still see the hated Towers of the Abbey where he would be laid. But the Kings of England never seem to have feared the sight of death. Jeremy Taylor, Rules of Holy Dying, vol. iv. 344. 24 How impressive the living splendour of the national mausoleum of England on the banks of the Thames, as compared with the neglected grave The Anglo-Saxon yard which holds the best blood of Ireland on the banks of the Shannon.' Petrie's remarks on Clonmacnoise, quoted in his Life by Dr. Stokes (p. 33). Kings had for the most part been buried at Winchester, where they were crowned, and where they lived. The English Kings, as soon as they became truly English, were crowned, and lived, and died for many generations, at Westminster; and, even since they have been interred elsewhere, it is still under the shadow of their grandest royal residence, in St. George's Chapel, or in the precincts of Windsor Castle. Their graves, like their thrones, were in the midst of their own life and of the life of their people.' 3. Importance of the Royal 6 There is also a peculiar concentration of interest attached to the deaths and funerals of Kings in those days of our history with which we are here chiefly concerned. If the coronations of sovereigns were then far more imDeaths. portant than they are now, so were their funeral pageants. The King never dies' is a constitutional maxim of which, except in very rare instances, the truth is at once recognised in all constitutional and in most modern monarchies. But in the Middle Ages, as has been truly remarked, the very reverse was the case. 'When the King died, the State seemed to die also. The functions of government were suspended. Felons were let loose from prison; for an offence against the law was also an offence against the King's person, which 'might die with him, or be wiped out in the contrite promises of his last agony. The spell of the King's peace became 'powerless. The nobles rushed to avenge their private quarrels in private warfare. On the royal forests, with their unpopular game, a universal attack was made. The highroads of commerce became perilous passes, or were obstructed; and a hundred vague schemes of ambition were concocted every day during which one could look on an empty throne and power'less tribunals.' In short, the funeral of the sovereign was the eclipse of the monarchy. Twice only, perhaps, in modern times has this feeling in any degree been reproduced, and then not in the case of the actual sovereign: once on the death of the queenlike Princess, Charlotte, and again on the death of the kinglike Prince, Albert. 6 2 2 So William I.: Sicut opto salvari et per misericordiam Dei a meis rea'tibus absolvi, sic omnes mox car'ceres jubeo aperiri.' (Ordericus Vit.) Henry II.'s widow, for the sake of the soul of her Lord Henry,' had offenders of all kinds discharged from prison in every county in England. (Hoveden.) I owe these references, as well as the passage itself, to an unpublished lecture of Professor Vaughan. Compare the description of Rome after a pope's decease in Mr. Cartwright's Papal Conclaves, p. 42. of the In those early times of England, there was another meaning of more sinister import attached to the royal funerals. They furnished the security to the successor that the pre- 4. Publicity decessor was really dead. Till the time of Henry VII. Funerals. the royal corpses lay in state, and were carried exposed on biers, to satisfy this popular demand. More than once the body of a King, who had died under doubtful circumstances, was laid out in St. Paul's or the Abbey, with the face exposed, or bare from the waist upwards, that the suspicion of violence might be dispelled.1 nection of the Burials with the Services of the There was yet beyond this a general sentiment, intensified by the religious feeling of the Middle Ages, which brought the funerals and tombs of princes more directly into con- 5. Connection with the buildings where they were interred. The natural grief of a sovereign, or of a people, for the death of a beloved predecessor vents itself in the Church. grandeur of the monuments which it raises over their graves. The sumptuous shrine on the coast of Caria, which Artemisia built for her husband Mausolus, and which has given its name to all similar structures-the magnificent Taj at Agra-the splendid memorials which commemorate the loss of the lamented Prince of our own day—are examples of the universality of this feeling, when it has the opportunity of indulging itself, under every form of creed and climate. But in the Middle Ages this received an additional impulse, from the desire on the part of the Kings, or their survivors, to establish, through their monumental buildings and their funeral services, a hold, as it were, on the other world. The supposed date of the release of the soul of a Plantagenet King from Purgatory was recorded in the English chronicles with the same certainty as any event in his life. And to attain this end-in proportion to the devotional sentiment, sometimes we must even say in proportion to the weaknesses and vices, of the King-services were multiplied and churches adorned at every stage of the funeral, and with a view to the remotest ages to which hope or fear could look forward. The desire to catch prayers by all means, at all times and places, for the departed soul, even led to the dismemberment of the royal corpse; that so, by a heart here, 1 Richard II., Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III. (at Leicester). (Maskell, vol. iii. p. lxviii.) 2 Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, A.D. 1232 (in speaking of the |