"Love delights to bring her best,
And where Love is, that offering evermore is blest."
The "Angel Choir" in Lincoln Cathedral, built at the same time, is so nearly a twin with Bishop Northwold's Choir at Ely that to distinguish the two, if their photographs are placed side by side, requires some nicety of observation. Whether either was actually copied from the other we do not know, for in those days the torch of architectural inspiration quickly passed from hand to hand. This is the case in our own time with regard to inventions due to the increase of scientific knowledge; when no part of the civilised world remains long behind the rest, if light, locomotion, or medicine is concerned. Age after age man sets himself to make his own the best that can be obtained, and to say for himself, no less than for the world at large
"Let Knowledge grow from more to more."
CHAPTER XVII
Monuments.—West's Chapel.—Alcock's Chapel.—Northwold Cenotaph.—Basevi.—Shrine of Etheldreda.—Lady Chapel.—View from Tower.—Triforium.—Exterior of Minster.—Palace, "Duties" of Goodrich.—St. Mary's.—St. Cross.—Cromwell's House.—Cromwell at Ely.—St. John's Farm.—Theological College.—Waterworks.—Basket-making.
The monuments within the Ambulatory may now claim our attention. Starting at the southern entrance, let us look first at a canopy of coloured stone, the tomb of De Luda, Bishop of Ely from 1290 to 1298. The builder of Ely Chapel,[226] Holborn, he was eminent for learning, and was keen to enrich the See; as a man of note he was sent by Edward the First to France to settle terms of peace. Here we can study the details of Decorated work at its best. Close at hand is Bishop Barnett's tomb of grey marble, of a date somewhat later, robbed of the effigy in brass which was once part of it. Next we come to the cenotaph of Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who lived during the Wars of the Roses. He had travelled to Jerusalem, and had made his home in Italy, and was known as "The Pilgrim Scholar." A pioneer of Greek, then reviving in the schools of Western Europe as the result of the fall of Constantinople, he was also a patron of Caxton and his novel printing press. Under Edward the Fourth he tried his hand at governing Ireland, where his cruelty toward the Lancastrians gained for him the name of "the Butcher." He was beheaded in 1470, and appears here in marble lying between his two wives. Next note Bishop Hotham's tomb, of the Decorated period. His name is familiar to us as having promoted by every means in his power the work carried out by Alan of Walsingham.
So far the tombs we have noticed have stood in a line under three arches of the Presbytery, as the eastern part of the Choir is called: we now turn to the south aisle to look at that of Peter Gunning, Bishop of Ely under Charles the Second, who wrote (as we mentioned before) the prayer to which we owe the phrase "All sorts and conditions of men." The mitred bishop rests his head on one hand, in an attitude somewhat ungainly, and his monument is of little artistic merit. But the resolute, delicately-cut features deserve our study, and the epitaph is of interest as recording how he had vindicated the Church of England in the presence of Cromwell himself. Let us pause a few steps further east to look at the calm face of Canon Selwyn, a nineteenth century lover of the cathedral; and then, as we pass the tomb of Bishop Eustace, who built the western porch, let us go back in thought to the far-off troublous days of King John.
From the Retro-choir we enter Bishop West's chapel, rich with the ornament of Perpendicular architecture at its highest pitch of elaboration. Nicholas West was Bishop of Ely under Henry the Eighth, from 1515 to 1533; and little did he foresee that the sanctuary he was adorning with the devotion of a lover who offers of his best would be despoiled and defaced by his own immediate successor in the See.
He was no novice as an architect when he came to Ely; for while Dean of Windsor he had completed the vaulting of St. George's Chapel. This chantry abounds in work characteristic of the Renaissance, extremely rare in England. Again and again, always with arabesque ornament that recalls the designs of Raphael in the Loggie of the Vatican, is reproduced the bishop's favourite motto, Gratia Dei sum quod sum ("By the grace of God I am what I am"), alluding, it may be, to his own humble parentage; for, born the son of a baker in Putney, he rose to be Bishop of Ely, and to live "in the greatest splendour of any prelate of his time"; he kept a hundred servants; nor did he forget the poor, feeding two hundred of them daily at his gate; or it may be that the motto refers to his having in early life brought upon himself disgrace by his violent temper. He had been turned from these evil ways to become the friend and ally of the two saintliest men in England—Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher.