We have spoken of Queen Elizabeth’s having established the Abbey as a Collegiate Church, and those who are interested in Westminster may like to know that the first Deans of her time are buried in St. Benedict’s Chapel. These were Dean William Bill and Dean Gabriel Goodman. It was under their rule that the Abbey services were arranged much in their present form.
We have now recalled the chief memories of the Tudor days, so far as that great chapter in English history is recorded in the Abbey.
CHAPTER VII
THE HOUSE OF STUART AND THE COMMONWEALTH
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
Tennyson (The Passing of Arthur).
From the Tudors and the great people of their reigns we pass on to the House of Stuart, to the troubles of the great Civil War, and to the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1661.
The Abbey history at this time helps us to realise that it was an age of struggle between liberty and despotism, an age when the people were determined to become more and more self-governing. The Tudors had been clever enough and strong enough to rule without making their people discontented. The Stuarts were not wise enough to see that the English spirit of independence would not bear any tyrannical form of government, and as the Stuarts found it difficult to understand this, they ended by losing their kingdom altogether. We shall see how all these things left their mark upon the Abbey itself.
As this chapter has to do with a long and eventful time in English history, it will be divided into three parts. The first part will be about the earlier Stuarts; the second, about the Commonwealth; and the third, about the Stuart Restoration and the most famous men of the Stuart and Commonwealth times.