Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is only opened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted room supported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and a stone altar—the earliest in the Abbey.
After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister to the left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay a small fee to the verger in the Poets’ Corner, you can see any day in the week the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals. Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of the old monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer’s day, for in the winter-time it is dreary and your thoughts tend to turn to the smug ingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,—for she once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originally the bell tower of the church.
Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into the Deanery Yard.
It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the Jerusalem Chamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to be absent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique stories which I will not steal his thunder by repeating.
You go through the sixteenth-century Jericho Room first, and it too is interesting, with its linenfold deal panelling. It is the ante-room to the Jerusalem Chamber, and is now used as a sort of vestry room for the cathedral. In the Jerusalem Chamber, as every schoolboy knows, King Henry IV. died in 1413. I refuse to quote Shakespeare on this occasion. It is a fine fourteenth-century cedar-panelled room, and the light through fragments of very ancient glass in the windows shines on early seventeenth-century tapestries and a very old mediæval portrait of Richard II. It is a gracious place, but when the authors of the Revised Version of the Bible worked here in 1870, it failed to inspire them with the same sense of the beauty of words that made their predecessors produce the finest literature in the world.
Many famous men have lain in state in the Jerusalem Room before their interment in the Abbey—Congreve and Addison were both honoured in this way, and that seventeenth-century poet-diplomatist, Matthew Prior, who was so esteemed by Louis XIV. that he sent him a bust by the great Coysevox. With one of those piquant inconsistencies that enliven history, Nance Oldfield, Mrs. Bracegirdle’s rival, also lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber before she was buried in the Abbey. Mrs. Bracegirdle lies in front of the entrance to the Chapter House, but Nance Oldfield was the only actress honoured by burial within the Abbey walls.
The Jerusalem Chamber was originally the drawing-room of the Abbot of Westminster, and in James the First’s day a banquet was given here to the French Ambassadors who came over to arrange the marriage of Prince Charles and the daughter of Henri IV.
Ashburnham House
“If ever princess put all princes down,
For temperance, prowess, prudence, equity;
This, this was she, that, in despite of death,
Lives still admired, adored, Elizabeth!”
Anon.
Coming out of Dean’s Court and passing through the gateway in the east side of Dean’s Yard, you find another enticing and little-known corner in Westminster School in Little Dean’s Yard.