We wandered over to another part of the Abbey, and came to a place where the pavement was being repaired. Every paving stone has an inscription on it and covers a grave. Mr. Wright continued:
“Now, you are standing on William Pitt’s grave--you can read the name, though it is a good deal worn--and you, sir, are standing on the grave of Charles James Fox. I found a very good place here the other day--nobody suspected it--been curiously overlooked, somehow--but--it is a very nice place indeed, and very comfortable” (holding his bull’s eye to the pavement and searching around). “Ah, here it is--this is the stone--nothing under here--nothing at all--a very nice place indeed--and very comfortable.”
Mr. Wright spoke in a professional way, of course, and after the manner of a man who takes an interest in his business and is gratified at any piece of good luck that fortune favors him with; and yet with[with] all that silence and gloom and solemnity about me, there was something about his idea of a nice, comfortable place that made the cold chills creep up my back. Presently we began to come upon little chamberlike chapels, with solemn figures ranged around the sides, lying apparently asleep, in sumptuous marble beds, with their hands placed together above their breasts--the figures and all their surroundings black with age. Some were dukes and earls, some where kings and queens, some were ancient abbots whose effigies had lain there so many centuries and suffered such disfigurement that their faces were almost as smooth and featureless as the stony pillows their heads reposed upon. At one time while I stood looking at a distant part of the pavement, admiring the delicate tracery which the now flooding moonlight was casting upon it through a lofty window, the party moved on and I lost them. The first step I made in the dark, holding my hands before me, as one does under such circumstances, I touched a cold object, and stopped to feel its shape. I made out a thumb, and then delicate fingers. It was the clasped, appealing hands of one of those reposing images--a lady, a queen. I touched the face--by accident, not design--and shuddered inwardly, if not outwardly; and then something rubbed against my leg, and I shuddered outwardly and inwardly both. It was the cat. The friendly creature meant well, but, as the English say, she gave me “such a turn.” I took her in my arms for company and wandered among the grim sleepers till I caught the glimmer of the lantern again. Presently, in a little chapel, we were looking at the sarcophagus, let into the wall, which contains the bones of the infant princes who were smothered in the Tower. Behind us was the stately monument of Queen Elizabeth, with her effigy dressed in the royal robes, lying as if at rest. When we turned around, the cat, with stupendous simplicity, was coiled up and sound asleep upon the feet of the Great Queen! Truly this was reaching far toward the millennium when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. The murderer of Mary and Essex, the conqueror of the Armada, the imperious ruler of a turbulent empire, become a couch, at last, for a tired kitten! It was the most eloquent sermon upon the vanity of human pride and human grandeur that inspired Westminster preached to us that night.
We would have turned puss out of the Abbey, but for the fact that her small body made light of railed gates and she would have come straight back again. We walked up a flight of half a dozen steps and, stopping upon a pavement laid down in 1260, stood in the core of English history, as it were--upon the holiest ground in the British Empire, if profusion of kingly bones and kingly names of old renown make holy ground. For here in this little space were the ashes, the monuments and gilded effigies, of ten of the most illustrious personages who have worn crowns and borne scepters in this realm. This royal dust was the slow accumulation of hundreds of years. The latest comer entered into his rest four hundred years ago, and since the earliest was sepulchered, more than eight centuries have drifted by. Edward the Confessor, Henry the Fifth, Edward the First, Edward the Third, Richard the Second, Henry the Third, Eleanor, Philippa, Margaret Woodville--it was like bringing the colossal[colossal] myths of history out of the forgotten ages and speaking to them face to face. The gilded effigies were scarcely marred--the faces were comely and majestic, old Edward the First looked the king--one had no impulse to be familiar with him. While we were contemplating the figure of Queen Eleanor lying in state, and calling to mind how like an ordinary human being the great king mourned for her six hundred years ago, we saw the vast illuminated clock face of the Parliament House tower glowering at us through a window of the Abbey and pointing with both hands to midnight. It was a derisive reminder that we were a part of this present sordid, plodding, commonplace time, and not august relics of a bygone age and the comrades of kings--and then the booming of the great bell tolled twelve, and with the last stroke the mocking clock face vanished in sudden darkness and left us with the past and its grandeurs again.
We descended, and entered the nave of the splendid Chapel of Henry VII. Mr. Wright said:
“Here is where the order of knighthood was conferred for centuries; the candidates sat in these seats; these brasses bear their coats of arms; these are their banners overhead, torn and dusty, poor old things, for they have hung there many and many a long year. In the floor you see inscriptions--kings and queens that lie in the vault below. When this vault was opened in our time they found them lying there in beautiful order--all quiet and comfortable--the red velvet on the coffins hardly faded any. And the bodies were sound--I saw them myself. They were embalmed, and looked natural, although they had been there such an awful time. Now in this place here, which is called the chantry, is a curious old group of statuary--the figures are mourning over George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was assassinated by Felton in Charles I’s time. Yonder, Cromwell and his family used to lie. Now we come to the south aisle and this is the grand monument to Mary Queen of Scots, and her effigy--you easily see they get all the portraits from this effigy. Here in the wall of the aisle is a bit of a curiosity pretty roughly carved:
Wm. WEST TOOME
SHOWER
1698
“William West, tomb shower, 1698. That fellow carved his name around in several places about the Abbey.”