The Children's Story of Westminster Abbey

by G. E. Troutbeck

Henry III, as we have already seen, had a great love and reverence for the memory of Edward the Confessor, and began the rebuilding of the Abbey Church in his honour. It was no wonder, then, that he wished his tomb to be close to the Confessor’s shrine.

Only three of our Kings have been married in the Abbey, and of these Henry III was the first. He married Eleanor of Provence, one of four sisters who all made remarkable marriages. Eleanor’s sister Margaret married King Louis IX of France; her sister Sancha married Richard Earl of Cornwall, and her sister Beatrice married Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, and afterwards King of Naples and Sicily. We are reminded of this close connection between the royal houses of France and England when we see on the Abbey walls the shield of Eleanor’s father, Raymond Berengar, Count of Provence. When Henry III died in 1272 he was buried, not where his tomb now is, but in front of the high altar, in the grave where the Confessor’s body had first rested. The beautiful tomb in the Confessor’s Chapel was not finished until 1291, Edward I having brought from France the precious marbles and porphyry slabs for its decoration. The tomb, like the Confessor’s, is of Italian design, but the fine effigy is the work of an Englishman, William Torel.

When Henry’s body was at last placed there, his heart, according to an old promise, was given in a golden cup to the Abbess of Fontevrault, who was present at the ceremony. Like the heart of his father, King John, it was to be taken back to the old Plantagenet home.

Thus began the circle of stately tombs which stand round the Confessor’s shrine in that tall, silent, shadowy chapel, now often called the Chapel of the Kings.

One thing to be remembered about the tombs of the Plantagenets is that they actually hold the body of the sovereign, and are not just monuments over a grave. In later days it became the fashion to bury in vaults.

Some years before Henry III’s death his beautiful little dumb daughter, Katherine, was buried in a small tomb in the South Ambulatory, close to St. Edmund’s Chapel. With her are buried two of her brothers who died young, and four young children of King Edward I.

We have already heard about the heart of another Plantagenet, Prince Henry d’Almayne, whose body, like that of his father, Richard Earl of Cornwall, is buried at Hayles, in Gloucestershire.

On either side of Henry III are buried Edward I, and his wife, Eleanor of Castile, daughter of Ferdinand III, King of Castile and Leon. Every one remembers how Queen Eleanor went out with her husband to the Crusades, and how she is said to have saved his life by sucking the poison from his wound. Eleanor, the “Queen of good memory,” died in Lincolnshire in 1290, and of the famous crosses which were put up at each place where her body rested, three still remain, at Northampton, Geddington, and Waltham. Queen Eleanor’s tomb is very beautiful, and so is her effigy, which was made by the same English artist who made the effigy of her father-in-law, King Henry III. The lower part of the tomb is decorated with shields, and one of them is the shield of Castile and Leon, with the castle and the lion upon it.

Edward I, the greatest soldier and lawgiver of all the Plantagenet kings, died in 1307 at the little village of Burgh-on-the-Sands, on the coast of Cumberland, when he was on his way to Scotland to try and crush the rising of the Scots under Robert Bruce.

He is buried in a very plain, rough-looking tomb, and it is thought that the tomb may have been left in an almost unfinished state in order that it might be easily opened, for, as we know, Edward I wished his bones to be carried at the head of the English army until Scotland was quite conquered. He also desired that his heart should be sent to Holy Land, where he had fought when he was young. But Edward II did not keep any of the promises he made to his father, and was very unworthy of his great name.