into Harold's ear that the aged King was doting. The others carefully caught his words; and the courtly poet of the next century rejoiced to trace in the three acres' the reigns 1066. of the three illegitimate kings who followed; and in the resuscitation of the parent tree,' the marriage of the First Henry with the Saxon Maud, and their ultimate issue in the Third Henry. Then followed a calm, and on the fifth day afterwards, with words variously reported, respecting the Queen, the succession, and the hope that he was passing Death 'from the land of the dead to the land of the living,' of the he breathed his last; and St. Peter, his friend, Jan. 5. 'opened the gate of Paradise, and St. John, his own dear one, 'led him before the Divine Majesty.' Confessor, A horror, it is described, of great darkness filled the whole island. With him, the last lineal descendant of Cerdic, it seemed as if the happiness, the strength, the liberty of the English people had vanished away.3 So gloomy were the forebodings, so urgent the dangers which seemed to press, His burial, that on the very next day (Friday, the Festival of Jan. 6. the Epiphany), took place at once his own funeral and the coronation of his successor. We must reserve the other event of that memorable day— the coronation of Harold-for the next chapter, and follow the Confessor to his grave. The body, as it lay in the palace, seemed for a moment to recover its lifelike expression. The unearthly smile played once more over the rosy cheeks, the white beard beneath seemed whiter, and the thin stretched-out fingers paler and more transparent than ever. As usual in the funerals of all our earlier sovereigns, he was attired in his royal habiliments: his crown upon his head; a crucifix of gold, with a golden chain round his neck; the pilgrim's ring on his hand. Crowds flocked from all the neighbouring villages. The prelates and magnates assisted, and the body was laid before the high altar. Thrice at least it has since been identified: once when, in the curiosity to know whether it still remained uncorrupt, the grave was opened by order of Henry I., in the presence of Bishop Gundulf, who plucked out a 1 Cambridge Life, 3714-85. 2 Ibid. 3934. See Chapter III. Ailred, c. 402. Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 1066. The usual date of his death is January 5. In Fabian, Robert of 6 1098. 1163. 1269. 1 hair from the long white beard; again when, on its trans'lation' by Henry II., the ring was withdrawn ; and again at its final removal to its present position by Henry III. It must probably also have been seen both during its disturbance by Henry VIII., and its replacement by Mary; and for a moment the interior of the coffin was disclosed, when a rafter broke in upon it after the coronation of James II. The crucifix and ring were given to the King. 1538. 1557. 1685. In the centre of Westminster Abbey thus lies its Founder, and such is the story of its foundation. Even apart from the Effects of his character on the Foun dation. legendary elements in which it is involved, it is impossible not to be struck by the fantastic character of all its circumstances. We seem to be in a world of poetry. Edward is four centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine; but the origin of Canterbury is commonplace and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster. We can hardly imagine a figure more incongruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward Prince whose chief characteristics have been just described. His titles of Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom, but to the most transitory feelings of the agethe savage struggles between Saxon and Dane, the worldly policy of Norman rulers, the lingering regrets of Saxon subjects. His opinions, his prevailing motives, were such as in no part of modern Europe would now be shared by any educated Ailred, c. 408. 2 Shortly after the coronation of James II., in removing the scaffold, the coffin in which it was enclosed was 'found to be broke,' and Charles Taylor, Gent,' 'put his hand into the hole, and turning the bones, which he felt there, drew from underneath the 'shoulder-bones' a crucifix and gold chain, which he showed to Sancroft, Dugdale, and finally to the King, who took possession of it, and had the coffin closed. It was remarked as an omen that the relics were discovered on June 11, the day of Monmouth's landing, and given to the King on July 6, the day of his victory at Sedgmoor. (Taylor's Narrative, p. 16.) The story is doubted by Gough (Sepulchral Monuments, ii. 7), but is strongly confirmed by the positive assertion of James II. to Evelyn (Memoirs, iii. 177, and to Pepys (Letters in Camden Society, No. lxxxviii. p. 211), and of Patrick, who was Prebendary of Westminster at the time. The workmen,' he says, 'chanced 'to have a look at the tomb of Edward 'the Confessor, so that they could see the shroud in which his body was 'wrapped, which was a mixed coloured 'silk very frail.' In the original MS. of Patrick's autobiography, a small piece of stuff less than an inch square, answering this description, is pinned to the paper, evidently as a specimen of the shroud. 'It appears to be a woven 'fabric of black and yellow silk.' (Patrick, ix. 560.) The gold crucifix and ring are said to have been on James's person when he was rifled by the Faversham fishermen in 1688, and to have been then taken from him. (Thoresby's Diary.) teacher or ruler. But in spite of these irreconcilable differences, there was a solid ground for the charm which he exercised over his contemporaries. His childish and eccentric fancies have passed away; but his innocent faith and his sympathy with his people are qualities which, even in our altered times, may still retain their place in the economy of the world. Westminster Abbey, so we hear it said, sometimes with a cynical sneer, sometimes with a timorous scruple, has admitted within its walls many who have been great without being good, noble with a nobleness of the earth earthy, worldly with the wisdom of this world. But it is a counterbalancing reflection, that the central tomb, round which all those famous names have clustered, contains the ashes of one who, weak and erring as he was, rests his claims of interment here not on any act of power or fame, but only on his artless piety and simple goodness. He towards whose dust was attracted the fierce Norman, and the proud Plantagenet, and the grasping Tudor, and the fickle Stuart, even the Independent Oliver,' the Dutch William, and the Hanoverian George-was one whose humble graces are within the reach of every man, woman, and child of every time, if we rightly part the immortal substance from the perishable form. with the Secondly, the foundation of the Abbey and the character of its Founder, consciously or unconsciously, inaugurated the greatest change which, with one exception, the English Connection nation has witnessed from that time till this. Not Conquest. in vain had the slumbers of the Seven Sleepers been disturbed; nor in vain the ghosts of the two Norman monks haunted the Confessor's deathbed, with their dismal warnings; nor in vain the comet appeared above the Abbey, towards which, in the Bayeux Tapestry, every eye is strained, and every finger pointing. The Abbey itself-the chief work of the Confessor's life, the last relic of the Royal House of Cerdic-was the shadow cast before the coming event, the portent of the mighty future. When Harold stood by the side of his brother Gurth and his sister Edith on the day of the dedication, and signed (if so be) his name with theirs as witness to the Charter of the Abbey, he might have seen that he was sealing his own doom, and preparing for his own destruction. The solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge edifice, with triple tower and sculp Both Cromwell (see Marvell's poem on his funeral) and George II. (see Chapter III.) were compared to the tured stones and storied windows, that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches and wattled tenements of the Saxon period, might have warned the nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered, and that the avenging, civilising, stimulating hand of another and a mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their language, their manners, their church, and their commonwealth. The Abbey, so far exceeding the demands of the dull and stagnant minds of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith but in hope: in the hope that England had yet a glorious career to run: that the line of her sovereigns would not be broken even when the race of Alfred ceased to reign; that the troubles which the Confessor saw, in prophetic vision, darkening the whole horizon of Europe, would give way before a brighter day than he, or any living man, in the gloom of that disastrous winter and of that boisterous age, could venture to anticipate. The Norman church erected by the Saxon king the new future springing out of the dying pastthe institution, founded for a special and transitory purpose, expanding, till it was coextensive with the interests of the whole commonwealth through all its stages-are standing monuments of the continuity by which in England the new has been ever intertwined with the old; liberty thriving side by side with precedent, the days of the English Church and State 'linked' each to each by natural piety.' with the English Constitution. Again, it may be almost said that the Abbey has risen and fallen in proportion to the growth of the strong English instinct Connection of which, in spite of his Norman tendencies, Edward was the representative. The first miracle believed to have been wrought at his tomb exemplifies, as in a parable, the rooted characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon basis of the monarchy. When, after the revolution of the Norman Conquest, a French and foreign hierarchy was substituted crozier. for the native prelates, one Saxon bishop alone remained - Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. A Council was summoned to Westminster, over which the Norman king and the Norman primate presided, and Wulfstan was declared incapable of holding his office because he could not speak French.1 The old man, down to this moment compliant even to excess, was inspired with unusual energy. He walked from St. Miracle of 1 M. Paris, 20; Ann. Burt., A.D. 1211; Knyghton, c. 2368 (Thierry, ii. 224). 6 Catherine's Chapel' straight into the Abbey. The King and the prelates followed. He laid his pastoral staff on the Confessor's tomb before the high altar. First he spoke in Saxon to the dead King: Edward, thou gavest me the staff; to thee 'I return it.' Then, with the few Norman words that be could command, he turned to the living King: A better than thou 'gave it to me-take it if thou canst.' 2 It remained fixed in the solid stone,3 and Wulfstan was left at peace in his see. Long afterwards, King John, in arguing for the supremacy of the Crown of England in matters ecclesiastical, urged this story at length in answer to the claims of the Papal Legate. Pandulf answered, with a sneer, that John was more like the Conqueror than the Confessor. But, in fact, John had rightly discerned the principle at stake, and the legend expressed the deep-seated feeling of the English people, that in the English Crown and Law lies the true safeguard of the rights of the English clergy. Edward the Confessor's tomb thus, like the Abbey which incases it, contains an aspect of the complex union of Church and State of which all English history is a practical fulfilment. In the earliest and nearly the only representation which exists of the Confessor's building-that in the Bayeux Tapestry -there is the figure of a man on the roof, with one hand resting on the tower of the Palace of Westminster, and with the other grasping the weathercock of the Abbey. The probable intention of this figure is to indicate the close contiguity of the two buildings. If so, it is the natural architectural expression of a truth valuable everywhere, but especially dear to Englishmen. The close incorporation of the Palace and the Abbey from its earliest days is a likeness of the whole English Constitutiona combination of things sacred and things common-a union of the regal, legal, lay element of the nation with its religious, clerical, ecclesiastical tendencies, such as can be found hardly elsewhere in Christendom. The Abbey is secular because it is sacred, and sacred because it is secular. It is secular in the common English sense, because it is sæcular' in the far higher French and Latin sense: a 'sæcular' edifice, a 'sæcular' institution-an edifice and an institution which has grown with the growth of ages, which has been furrowed with the scars and cares of each succeeding century. 1 There, doubtless, the Council must have been held. See Chapter V. * Knyghton, c. 2368. Brompton, c. 976; M. Paris, 21; Vit. Alb. 3. Ann. Burt. A.D. 1211. |