Besides this, we had the pleasure of grasping the solid silver crosier, given by Queen Catharine, widow of King Charles II. to her confessor, a staff of weight and value, seven feet in length, elegantly wrought in appropriate designs. We were also shown the official rings found in the forgotten tombs of archbishops, in repairing the church pavement, bearing their dates of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The antique chair in which the Saxon kings were crowned is here—a relic older than the cathedral itself; and as "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," uncomfortable must have been the seat of him that wore it also, if my few minutes' experience between its great arms is worth anything; but, still, it was something to have sat in the very chair in which the bloody Richard III. had been crowned,—for both he and James I. were crowned in this chair,—thinking at the time, while I mentally execrated the crooked tyrant's memory, of the words Shakespeare put into his mouth:—
"Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed?
Is the king dead? the empire unpossessed?
What heir of York is there alive but we?
And who is England's king but great York's heir?"
Here we were shown an old Bible, presented by King Charles II., the old communion plate, which is five hundred years old, the old vestment chest, of carved oak, of the time of Edward III., with the legend of St. George and the Dragon represented upon it, a Bible of 1671, presented by James I., and other interesting antiquities.
I concluded my visit to this glorious old minster by ascending the Central or Lantern Tower, as it is called, which rises to a height of two hundred and thirteen feet from the pavement, and from which I had a magnificent view of the city of York and the surrounding country.
Although forbearing an attempt to enter upon any detailed descriptions of numerous beautiful monuments in the cathedral, I cannot omit referring to the many modern memorials of British officers and soldiers who have perished in different parts of the world, fighting the battles of their sovereign. Here is one to six hundred officers and privates of the nineteenth regiment of foot, who fell in Russia, in 1854-5; another to three hundred officers and privates of the fifty-first, who fell at Burmah, in 1852-3; a monument to three hundred and seventy-three of the eighty-fourth, who perished during the mutiny and rebellion in India in 1857, '8 and '9; a memorial slab to six hundred officers and men of the thirty-third West York, or Wellington's Own, who lost their lives in the Russian campaign of 1854-6; a beautiful, elaborate monument to Colonel Moore and those of the Inniskillen Dragoons, who perished with him in a transport vessel at sea, &c.
There is not a church or cathedral, not in ruins, that the tourist visits in Great Britain, but that he reads the bloody catalogue of victims of England's glory recorded on mural tablets or costly monuments, a glory that seems built upon hecatombs of lives, showing that the very empire itself is held together by the cement of human blood,—blood, too, of the dearest and the bravest,—for I have read upon costly monuments, reared by titled parents, of noble young soldiers, of twenty-two and twenty years, and even younger, who have fallen "victims to Chinese treachery," "perished in a typhoon in the Indian Ocean," "been massacred in India," "lost at sea," "killed in the Crimea." They have fallen upon the burning sands of India, amid the snows of Russia, or in the depths of savage forests, or sunk beneath the pitiless wave, in upholding the blood-red banner of that nation. This fearful record that one encounters upon every side is a terrible and bloody reckoning of the cost of the great nation's glory and power.