arrangement, as peculiar to the thirteenth century as the numerous theological doctrines which then first assumed consistency and shape. But, in order to leave standing the Lady Chapel, which the King had already built in his youth, the high altar was moved westward to its present central position. A mound of earth, the last funeral tumulus' in England, was erected between this and the Lady Chapel, and on its summit was raised the tomb in which the body of the Confessor was to be laid. On each side, standing on the two twisted pillars which now support the western end of the Shrine, were statues of the Confessor and St. John as the mysterious pilgrim. Round the Choir was hung arras, representing on one side the thief and Hugolin, on the other the royal coronations.2 The top of the Shrine was doubtless adorned with a splendid tabernacle, instead of the present woodwork. The lower part was rich with gilding and colours. The inscription, now detected only at intervals, ran completely round it, ascribing the workmanship to Peter of Rome, and celebrating the Confessor's virtues. The arches underneath were ready for the patients, who came to ensconce themselves there for the sake of receiving from the sacred corpse within the deliverance from the King's Evil,' which the living sovereign was believed to communicate by his touch. An altar stood at its western end, of which all trace has disappeared, but for which a substitute has ever since existed, at the time of the Coronations, in a wooden movable table. At the eastern end of the Shrine two steps still remain, deeply hollowed out by the knees of the successive pairs of pilgrims who knelt at that spot.5

The second

transla

That corpse was now to be 'translated' from the coffin in which Henry II. had laid it, with a pomp which was tion, Oct. 13, probably suggested to the King by the recollection of the grandest ceremony of the kind that England had ever seen, at which he in his early boyhood had assisted—

1269.

1 Originally the Shrine was probably visible all down the church. Not till the time of Henry VI. was raised the screen which now conceals it. On the summit of the screen stood a vast crucifix, with the usual accompanying figures, and those of the two Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul. See Gleanings, plates xx. and xxvii.

2 Till 1644. Weever, p. 45. This was the one remark made on the Shrine by Addison-' We were

then shown Edward the Confessor's tomb, upon which Sir Roger ac'quainted us that he was the first who touched for the Evil.' (Spectator, 321.)

Dart, i. 54.

5 A fragment of the Shrine, found in repairing the walls of Westminster school in 1868. was replaced in its original position, after a separation of three centuries.

the translation of the remains of St. Thomas of Canterbury.' It was on the same day of the month that had witnessed the former removal on the occasion of Edward's canonisation. The King had lived to see the completion of the whole Choir and east end of the church. He was growing old. His family were all gathered round him, as round a Christmas hearth,2 for the last time together-Richard his brother, Edward and Edmund, his two sons, Edward with Eleanor just starting for Palestine: As near a way to heaven,' she said, 'from Syria. as from England or Spain.' They supported the coffin of the Confessor, and laid him in the spot where (with the exception of one short interval) he has remained ever since. The day was commemorated by its selection as the usual time when the King held his Courts and Parliaments.

Relics, 1247.

Behind the Shrine, where now stands the Chantry of Henry V., were deposited the sacred relics, presented to the King twenty years before by his favourite Order the Templars. Amongst them may be noticed the tooth of St. Athanasius, the stone which was believed to show the footprint of the ascending Saviour, and (most highly prized of all) a phial containing some drops of the Holy Blood. This was carried in state by the King himself from St. Paul's to the Abbey; and it was on the occasion of its presentation, and of Prince Edward's knighthood, that Matthew Paris, the monk of St. Albans, was present (much as a modern photographer or artist attends a state ceremony at royal command), to give an exact account of what he saw, and to be rewarded afterwards by a dinner in the newly-finished refectory."

With the Templars, who gave these precious offerings, it had been the King's original intention to have been buried in the Temple Church. But his interest in the Abbey grew during the fifty years that he had seen it in progress, and his determination became fixed that it should be the sepulchre of himself and of the whole Plantagenet race. The short, stout, ungainly old man, with the blinking left eye, and the curious craft with which he wound himself out of the many difficulties of his long and troublesome reign, such as made his contem

poraries regard him on both accounts as the lynx foretold by Merlin,' was at last drawing to his end. 'Quiet King Henry 'III., our English Nestor (not for depth of brains but for length of life), who reigned fifty-six years, in which time he 'buried all his contemporary princes in Christendom twice over. All the months in the year may be in a manner carved ' out of an April day: hot, cold, dry, moist, fair, foul weather —just the character of this King's life-certain only in uncer'tainty; sorrowful, successful, in plenty, in penury, in wealth, ' in want, conquered, conqueror.'

6

Death of Henry III. Nov. 16, buried Nov. 20, 1272.

92

Domestic calamities crowded upon him: the absence of his son Edward, the murder of his nephew Henry at Viterbo, the death of his brother Richard. He died at the Abbey of St. Edmund at Bury, on the festival of the recently canonised St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury (Nov. 16), and was buried on the festival of St. Edmund the Anglo-Saxon martyr (Nov. 20), in the Abbey of Westminster, the Templars acknowledging their former connection by supplying the funeral.3 The body was laid, not where it now rests, but in the coffin, before the high altar, vacated by the removal of the Confessor's bones, and still, as Henry might suppose, sanctified by their odour. As the corpse sank into the grave, the Earl of Gloucester, in obedience to the King's dying commands, put his bare hand upon it, and swore fealty to the heir-apparent, absent in Palestine. Edward, in his homeward journey, was not unmindful of his father's tomb. He had heard of the death of his son Henry, but his grief for him was swallowed up in his grief for Henry his father. God may give me more sons, but not another father.' 6 From the East, Building of or from France, he brought the precious marbles, the 1281. slabs of porphyry, with which, ten years afterwards, the tomb was built up, as we now see it, on the north side of the Confessor's Shrine; and an Italian artist, Torel,' carved the effigy which lies upon it. Yet ten more years passed, and into the finished tomb was removed the body of the King. interment. Henry had in his earlier years, when at his ancestral burial-place in Anjou, promised that his heart should be

6

his Tomb,

His Re

his Heart to

of Fonte

deposited with the ashes of his kindred in the Abbey of Fontevrault. The Abbess,' one of the grandest of her rank in France, usually of the blood-royal, with the singular privilege of ruling both a monastery of men and a nunnery of women, Delivery of was in England at the time of the removal of Henry's the Abbess body to the new tomb, and claimed the promise. vrault, 1291. It was on this occasion that, under warrant from the King, in the presence of his brother Edmund, and the two prelates specially connected with the Westminster coronations, the Bishops of Durham and of Bath and Wells, the heart was delivered in the Abbey into her hands-the last relic of the lingering Plantagenet affection for their foreign home.2

Such was the beginning of the line of royal sepultures in the Abbey; and so completely was the whole work identified with Henry III., that when, in the reigns of Richard II. and Henry V., the Nave was completed, the earlier style-contrary to the almost universal custom of the medieval builders-was continued, as if by a process of antiquarian restoration; and this tribute to Henry's memory is visible even in the armorial bearings of the benefactors of the Abbey. To mark the date, and to connect it with the European history of the time, the Eagle of Frederick II., the heretical Emperor of Germany, the Lilies of Louis IX., the sainted King of France, the Lion of Alexander III., the doomed King of Scotland,3 had been fixed on the walls of the Choir, where they may still in part be seen. There, too, remains the only contemporary memorial which England possesses of Simon de Montfort, founder of the House of Commons. It was these and the like shields of nobles, coeval with the building of Henry III., not those of the later ages, that were still continued on the walls of the Nave when it was completed in the following centuries.

It would seem that, with the same domestic turn which appears in Louis Philippe's arrangement of the Orleans

'See the description of the convent in the Memoirs of Mdlle. de Montpensier, i. 49-52. The Abbess in her time was called Madame de Fontevrault,' and was a natural daughter of Louis XIII.

2 Dugdale's Monasticon, i. 312. This disappeared in 1829. Gules-a lion rampant-doubletailed-argent, in N. isle.

$ Sir Gilbert Scott has pointed this

out to me, particularly in the case of Valence Earl of Pembroke, and Ferrers Earl of Derby. Even the details of Henry III.'s architecture, though modified in the Nave, were continued in the Cloisters. The shield of the Confessor is the earliest of the kind, the martlets not having yet lost their legs. See the account of a MS. description of these shields in 1598, in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, Jan. 25, 1866.

cemetery at Dreux, Henry at Westminster had provided for the burial of his whole family in all his branches round him.'

1257, Princess Catherine, and other children of Henry III.

Twelve years before his own interment he had already laid, in a small richly-carved tomb by the entrance of St. Edmund's Chapel, his dumb and very beautiful little daughter, of five years old, Catherine.2 Mass was said daily for her in the Hermitage of Charing. Beside her were interred his two other children who died young, and whose figures were painted above her tomb-Richard and John.3 The heart of Henry, son of his brother Richard, Henry, 1271. who was killed in the cathedral at Viterbo by the sons of Simon de Montfort, was brought home and placed in a gold cup, by the Shrine of the Confessor. The widespread horror of the murder had procured, through this incident, the one single notice of the Abbey in the 'Divina Commedia' of Dante :

The heart

of Prince

William de Valence, 1296.

Lo cor che'n sul Tamigi ancor si cola.

The king's half-brother, William de Valence, lies close by, within the Chapel of St. Edmund, dedicated to the second great Anglo-Saxon saint. This chapel seems to have been regarded as of the next degree of sanctity to the Royal Chapel of St. Edward. William was the son of Isabel, widow of John, by her second marriage with the Earl of Marche and Poictiers, and the favour shown to him and his wild Poitevin kinsman by his brother was one cause of the King's embroilment with the English Barons. His whole tomb is French; its enamels from Limoges; his birthplace Valence on the Rhône, represented on his coat-of-arms. His son Aymer so called from the father of Isabel Aymer, Count of Angoulême-built the tomb; and also secured for himself a still more splendid resting-place on the north side of the sacrarium, Alfonso [and Eleanor?]. (See Crull, p.. 28.)

Gleanings, p. 146; Arch. xxix. 188; Annals, A.D. 1283.

2 Matt. Paris, p. 949. In the Liberate Roll, 41 Hen. III., is a payment for her funeral on May 16. It was made by a mason in Dorsetshire, Master Simeon de Well, probably Weal, near Corfe Castle, who also furnished the Purbeck marble for the tomb of John, eldest son of Edward L. (Pipe Rolls, Dorset, 41, H. iii.) I owe this to Mr. Bond of Tyneham.

3 The arch is said to have been constructed by Edward I., as a memorial to his four young children-John, Henry,

5

6

Dante's Inferno, xii. 115; Gleanings, p. 138. - Benvenuto of Imola, commenting on this line, says: 'In quodam monasterio monachorum vo'cato ibi Guamister.' (Robertson's History of the Church, iii. 463.)

5 Gleanings, pp. 155-157; Crull, p. 155. The tomb has been much injured since 1685. (Gleanings, p. 62.)

His two other children, John and Margaret, occupy the richly-enamelled spaces at the foot of the Shrine. (Crull, p. 156.) The name of their father is still visible upon the grave.