Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wander’d all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.”
As the colony of Virginia was first founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, his name will always remind us of the beginning of our great Colonial Empire. In St. Margaret’s Church there is a very fine window to Raleigh’s memory. This was given by some citizens of America, and the scenes in the window commemorate the founding of the New World.
One of the chief and earliest promoters of the Virginia Company was the brave soldier, Sir John Ogle, who fought in the Netherlands under Sir Francis Vere, and is buried in the Abbey. No inscription marks his grave.
Somewhere in the Abbey is buried another promoter of the South Virginia Company, Richard Hakluyt, author of a book of Voyages and Travels. Hakluyt was a Westminster scholar. He became a clergyman, and was Prebendary and Archdeacon of Westminster. In the first volume of his Voyages and Travels is a description of the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Two more Elizabethan monuments may be mentioned before we leave the Tudor times altogether. One is the monument to William Camden, the famous antiquary, who was Head-Master of Westminster School in Queen Elizabeth’s time. He is buried in the South Transept, and his monument stands against its western wall. Camden, like Shakspeare, lived on into the Stuart time, but he seems to belong more especially to Elizabethan days.
The other monument is perhaps more curious than actually interesting. It is that of Elizabeth Russell, goddaughter of Queen Elizabeth, and daughter of a Lord Russell who is buried in the Chapel of St. Nicholas. Elizabeth Russell was born in the Abbey precincts, where her mother had taken refuge from the plague. She had a very grand christening in the Abbey, and the Earl of Leicester stood as godfather. She died young, and was buried in St. Edmund’s Chapel, where her monument represents her sitting in an osier chair. This is the first sitting figure in the Abbey. A curious old story says that Elizabeth Russell died from the prick of a needle, and people added to the story by saying that she had been working on Sunday! Most likely the idea arose because her finger points to a skull at her feet.