"Lowly upon his bier
The royal Conqueror lay,
Baron and chief stood near,
Silent in war's array.
Down the long minster's aisle
Crowds mutely gazing stream'd,
Altar and tomb the while
Through mists of incense gleamed.
"They lowered him with the sound
Of requiems to repose."
These stanzas on the Burial of William the Conqueror lead us naturally to others from the pen of the same gifted authoress on "Coeur de Lion at the Bier of his Father."
"Torches were blazing clear,
Hymns pealing deep and slow,
Where a king lay stately on his bier,
In the Church of Fontevraud.
* * * * *
"The marble floor was swept
By many a long dark stole
As the kneeling priests, round him that slept,
Sang mass for the parted soul.
And solemn were the strains they pour'd
Through the stillness of the night,
With the cross above, and the crown and sword,
And the silent king in sight."
We forgive the ignorance of the gentle poetess with regard to the Mass, for the beauty and solemnity of the verse, which is quite in keeping with the nature of the subject.
We read, again, of tapers being lit at the tomb of Henry V., the noble and chivalrous Henry of Monmouth, for one hundred years after his death. The Reformation extinguished that gentle flame with many another holy fire, both in England and throughout Christendom.
We shall now pass on to another period—a far different and most troublous one of English history, that of the Reformation.
In the Church of St. Lawrence at Iswich is an entry of an offering made to "pray for the souls of Robert Wolsey and his wife Joan, the father and mother of the Dean of Lincoln," thereafter to be Cardinal and Chancellor of the Kingdom. An argument urged to show the Protestantism of Collet, one of the ante-Reformation worthies, is that he "did not make a Popish will, having left no monies for Masses for his soul; which shows that he did not believe in Purgatory." The dying prayer of Sir Thomas More concludes with these words: "Give me a longing to be with Thee; not for avoiding the calamities of this wicked world, nor so much the pains of Purgatory or of hell; nor so much for the attaining of the choice of heaven, in respect of mine own commodity, as even for a very love of Thee." The unfortunate Anne Boleyn, who during her imprisonment had repented and received the last sacraments from the hands of Father Thirlwall, begs on the scaffold that the people may pray for her. In her address to her ladies before leaving the Tower, she concludes it by begging them to forget her not after death. "In your prayers to the Lord Jesus forget not to pray for my soul." In the account of the death of another of King Henry's wives, the Lady Jane Seymour, who died, as Miss Strickland says, after having all the rites of the Catholic Church administered to her, we read that Sir Richard Gresham thus writes to Lord Cromwell: