The only painter who has a monument in the Abbey belongs to Stuart times. This is Sir Godfrey Kneller, a celebrated portrait painter in the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne. He was a Westphalian by birth. He died in 1723, and was buried in the garden of his house at Whitton. Kneller did not want to be buried in the Abbey; for, he said: “they do bury fools there.”
Another interesting remembrance of these troubled Stuart days is the monument in the Cloisters to Sir Edmond Berry Godfrey. He was the Judge to whom Titus Oates professed to reveal the Popish plot of 1678. Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s death was rather mysterious, and it was supposed, though not on good foundation, that he had been murdered by some one connected with the plot.
We must mention one more grave in the Abbey itself. This is the grave of the wonderful old Thomas Parr,—“old Parr” as he used to be called. He died in 1635, and always claimed that he had been born in 1483. He is buried in the South Transept, and his epitaph says that “He lived in the reignes of ten princes, namely: King Edward IV, King Edward V, King Richard III, King Henry VII, King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, King Charles; aged 152 years, and was buried here, 1635.”
We have now mentioned most of the principal people of the Stuart and Commonwealth times who are in any way connected with the Abbey, and must pass on to the history of the House of Hanover.
[W. Rice, F.R.P.S.
MONUMENT OF GENERAL WOLFE.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HOUSE OF HANOVER AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
“We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need,