St. Edmund's Chapel, showing the Tomb of the Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Jane Grey's mother
ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL, SHOWING THE TOMB
OF THE DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, LADY
JANE GREY'S MOTHER
This chapel is dedicated to St. Edmund, the martyred King of East Anglia. The illustration shows part of the Duchess of Suffolk's altar tomb with her recumbent effigy, while beyond, Prince John of Eltham's monument is partly visible against the screen; above the screen are the canopies over the tombs of Richard II. and his Queen, and Edward III. The red velvet pall over the shrine of Edward the Confessor shows between the canopy and tomb of Edward III.
Our friends from the States will certainly pause before the monument of that ill-fated young British officer, Major André, for upon it is a small figure of General Washington. André, caught within the American lines during our war with the colonies, dressed as a civilian, and with suspicious papers in his boots, was hanged as a spy and buried beneath the gallows. We see André here vainly petitioning Washington for a soldier's death, while in the background all is prepared for his ignominious fate. The heads of both these statuettes were constantly stolen by tourists in old days, as far back in fact as the time of Lamb, and a fresh supply was always kept in stock by the Clerk of the Works. Andre's bones, brought back to his native country, forty-one years after his death, by a royal prince, were buried near the monument, which was erected earlier at the expense of George III.
Beyond the gate, to our left, another pictorial monument appeals to Londoner and countryman alike, for here is represented the assassination of Tom of the Ten Thousand, a younger member of that well-known Dorset family the Thynnes, Marquesses of Bath. His murderers were hired by a notorious foreign count who desired to gain Thynne's rich young bride for his own wife, but failed to persuade the lady to recognise his claims. The cockney gazes in wonder at Pall Mall as it appeared in 1682, when it was a lonely road between meadows, where highwaymen were apt to demand your money or your life. The Welshman, if one be here, is pleased to recognise a countryman in the coachman, whose descendants long boasted that their ancestor was to be seen in the Abbey, on the box of Squire Thynne's carriage. A little further is the recumbent tomb of one of the same family, William Thynne, who was Receiver of the Marches for many years under the Tudor sovereigns. As yet we have been unable to single out one of the many sailors whose memorials surround us in the nave, but now we are brought up short, so to speak, by a monstrous figure with a huge periwig and lolling on cushions, which, we are almost ashamed to explain, is meant for one of our most noted eighteenth-century admirals, Sir Cloudesley Shovel to wit.
It is better to distract attention to the bas-relief of the wreck below, and relate the story of Shovel's youthful valour, when he swam from ship to ship under fire carrying despatches in his mouth, for all the world like a Newfoundland dog. The strange and tragic history of his end must also be retold, when the flagship was wrecked on the treacherous Scilly rocks, and the Admiral's unconscious body received the coup de grâce from a callous fishwife, who stole his signet ring, and after concealing it for thirty years, confessed her crime and returned the ring to Shovel's representatives on her deathbed. No less wanting in taste is the monument above to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter of simpering beauties at the Courts of five sovereigns, from Charles II. to George I., and the only memorial to an artist, with the exception of Ruskin, in the whole Abbey. Kneller swore a mighty oath that he would not be buried at Westminster, "They do bury fools there," he grumbled, but he himself designed his most inartistic cenotaph, while his friend Pope wrote the epitaph, which begins with the extravagant line: "Kneller by Heaven and not a master taught."
While most of our party are attracted towards the last two conspicuous monuments, the Non-conformists, should any be amongst us, are sure to linger by the mural tablet, with medallion portrait heads, which Dean Stanley allowed the Wesleyans to put here in memory of the brothers John and Charles Wesley. Upon it are the appropriate words: "I look upon all the world as my parish," which John Wesley literally interpreted. Near by was already the memorial to Dr. Isaac Watts, the great dissenting minister of an earlier generation, whose hymns are still popular in church and chapel alike, as are to a greater degree those of Charles Wesley.
To a Frenchman or Italian a humbler tablet on the opposite side with a long inscription is of more interest, for it commemorates Pasquale de Paoli, the champion of Corsican independence, who took refuge in England, the home of liberty, and died here in 1807. The ladies, leaving the men to their study of the seamen and soldiers, with whose names the walls are covered, ask for information about the bust of a young woman, just beyond Paoli. Grace Gethin, although the only authoress in the Abbey who has a monument to herself,—for the learned Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, shares her husband's tomb in the north transept,—has no real claim to this distinction. Her immortal work, which she bequeathed to an admiring circle of blue-stockings, proved to be a mere book of extracts culled from popular writers. The playwright, Congreve, whose own medallion is below the Abbot's Pew in the nave, showed his want of literary cultivation by not only composing a poem in praise of the young writer, but allowing it to be published as a preface to the book, which went through several editions before the fraud was discovered. The annual sermon, which was long preached in the Abbey in memory of the youthful heiress (she was only twenty-one) who left a bequest for the purpose in her will, has become a thing of the past.
While the artistic persons with us have been bewailing the ruthless destruction of the wall arcading and will have cause to lament still louder in the transepts, the student of heraldry is attracted to some defaced shields which repay a closer attention, and have helped antiquaries to fix the dates of the choir and nave. The Confessor's, with the familiar five birds, and Henry the Third's arms with three lions are easily identified in this aisle, and the learned in such matters point out many others, chiefly the coats of Henry's relations, such as his father-in-law, Raymond de Beranger, Count of Provence, and his brother Richard, King of the Romans, one of the royal princes selected to carry St. Edward's coffin from the palace to the new shrine.
We have now reached the crossing, and should all our party desire to make an exhaustive circuit of the church to-day, the south transept is our next goal. When time presses it is wisest for the guide to pause here, merely point out the Statesmen's Aisle and the Poets' Corner, and then pass on at once through the iron gates to the royal chapels.
