St. Edmund's Chapel, showing the Tomb of the Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Jane Grey's mother
ST. EDMUND'S CHAPEL, SHOWING THE TOMB
OF THE DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, LADY
JANE GREY'S MOTHER
This chapel is dedicated to St. Edmund, the martyred King of East Anglia. The illustration shows part of the Duchess of Suffolk's altar tomb with her recumbent effigy, while beyond, Prince John of Eltham's monument is partly visible against the screen; above the screen are the canopies over the tombs of Richard II. and his Queen, and Edward III. The red velvet pall over the shrine of Edward the Confessor shows between the canopy and tomb of Edward III.
Our friends from the States will certainly pause before the monument of that ill-fated young British officer, Major André, for upon it is a small figure of General Washington. André, caught within the American lines during our war with the colonies, dressed as a civilian, and with suspicious papers in his boots, was hanged as a spy and buried beneath the gallows. We see André here vainly petitioning Washington for a soldier's death, while in the background all is prepared for his ignominious fate. The heads of both these statuettes were constantly stolen by tourists in old days, as far back in fact as the time of Lamb, and a fresh supply was always kept in stock by the Clerk of the Works. Andre's bones, brought back to his native country, forty-one years after his death, by a royal prince, were buried near the monument, which was erected earlier at the expense of George III.
Beyond the gate, to our left, another pictorial monument appeals to Londoner and countryman alike, for here is represented the assassination of Tom of the Ten Thousand, a younger member of that well-known Dorset family the Thynnes, Marquesses of Bath. His murderers were hired by a notorious foreign count who desired to gain Thynne's rich young bride for his own wife, but failed to persuade the lady to recognise his claims. The cockney gazes in wonder at Pall Mall as it appeared in 1682, when it was a lonely road between meadows, where highwaymen were apt to demand your money or your life. The Welshman, if one be here, is pleased to recognise a countryman in the coachman, whose descendants long boasted that their ancestor was to be seen in the Abbey, on the box of Squire Thynne's carriage. A little further is the recumbent tomb of one of the same family, William Thynne, who was Receiver of the Marches for many years under the Tudor sovereigns. As yet we have been unable to single out one of the many sailors whose memorials surround us in the nave, but now we are brought up short, so to speak, by a monstrous figure with a huge periwig and lolling on cushions, which, we are almost ashamed to explain, is meant for one of our most noted eighteenth-century admirals, Sir Cloudesley Shovel to wit.
It is better to distract attention to the bas-relief of the wreck below, and relate the story of Shovel's youthful valour, when he swam from ship to ship under fire carrying despatches in his mouth, for all the world like a Newfoundland dog. The strange and tragic history of his end must also be retold, when the flagship was wrecked on the treacherous Scilly rocks, and the Admiral's unconscious body received the coup de grâce from a callous fishwife, who stole his signet ring, and after concealing it for thirty years, confessed her crime and returned the ring to Shovel's representatives on her deathbed. No less wanting in taste is the monument above to Sir Godfrey Kneller, the painter of simpering beauties at the Courts of five sovereigns, from Charles II. to George I., and the only memorial to an artist, with the exception of Ruskin, in the whole Abbey. Kneller swore a mighty oath that he would not be buried at Westminster, "They do bury fools there," he grumbled, but he himself designed his most inartistic cenotaph, while his friend Pope wrote the epitaph, which begins with the extravagant line: "Kneller by Heaven and not a master taught."