Tales from Westminster Abbey Told to Children

by Mrs. Frewen Lord; Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

CHAPTER V.

We now come to the kings and queens who are buried in Westminster Abbey, and this will be the last chapter of my book.

You remember my telling you how Henry III. built a new shrine for Edward the Confessor. Three years after this Chapel of Edward the Confessor (as it is called) was finished, King Henry III.,[31] who had reigned for fifty-six years, died, and was buried in the Abbey which he had loved so long. His son Edward, who now became Edward I., was just starting home from the Holy Land with his wife, Queen Eleanor, who always went with him on all his journeys, when his father died, and he brought with him from the East the marble for the tomb.

I expect you will all remember having heard of this Queen Eleanor, the wife of Edward I. She was so brave and so fond of him that she would go with him when he went on his crusade to the Holy Land; and when people told her that it was dangerous, and that she might be killed, and tried to persuade her to stay at home, her only answer was, “The way to heaven is as near from Palestine as from England.”

She was not killed, or even hurt; but there is a story told of how, while they were in the Holy Land, Edward was wounded by one of his enemies, who stabbed him in the arm with a poisoned dagger. This would certainly have killed him, if Eleanor had not at once sucked the poison out of the wound, and so saved his life.

Edward I.—Edward Longshanks, as he was called, for he was more than six feet high—and Queen Eleanor were crowned King and Queen of England in Westminster Abbey when they came back from the Holy Land. After the coronation a great banquet was given, to which Edward and his brother Edmund and all their nobles and attendants came—five hundred of them, riding on five hundred magnificent horses. When they dismounted, the horses were let loose in the crowd, and anybody who succeeded in catching one was allowed to keep it.

When, after having been Queen of England eighteen years, Eleanor[32] died at Hardby, in Nottinghamshire, her body was brought to Westminster, to be buried in the Abbey. From Nottinghamshire to London was a long journey in those days, and it had to be done by stages. Wherever the funeral procession stopped, Edward ordered a cross to be put up in memory of the queen. They were called the “Eleanor Crosses,” and there were altogether twelve of them. The last was in London, at Charing Cross, which was the final halting-place before the procession reached the Abbey.

Edward I. was a great soldier, and gradually he “filled the Confessor’s Chapel with trophies of war.” One of these trophies you must specially notice when you go over the Abbey. At the west end of the Confessor’s Chapel stand two chairs. One is a plain, very old-looking wooden chair, much scratched and battered, and underneath it is a rough-looking bit of stone. This old stone is called the “Stone of Scone,” and on it all the Kings of Scotland had been crowned at Scone, which was the capital of Scotland up to the time when Edward I. became King of England. Edward I. and Alexander III., King of Scotland, were always at war; and when the English at last conquered the Scotch, Edward took away this ancient treasure, the “Stone of Scone,” and brought it to Westminster Abbey, that our kings might be crowned upon it, as Kings of England and Scotland. The wooden chair was made by his orders, and the stone put underneath it, and there it has been ever since, for nearly six hundred years.

The other chair was made long afterwards for the coronation of William III. and Mary. Between the two are the sword and shield of Edward III., which he is said to have used in all his many wars against France. The sword is seven feet long, and weighs eighteen pounds.

Edward I.,[33] “the greatest of the Plantagenets,” was buried close by Queen Eleanor, but his tomb is quite plain. There is no figure on it, and no carving, as there is on the tombs of the other kings and queens. Dean Stanley explained, when he showed us the Abbey as children, that, for many years after Edward I. died, there was a kind of belief that, although the king was dead, yet, if another war broke out with Scotland, he would once again lead his army against the enemy, as he had so often done before. And so from time to time they would come and lift off the great marble slab which covered his tomb, and which was easily moved, and look in to see if the king was still there.