We gaze and gaze, and try to take in the wonder of stone before us. Then, through the bewildering noise of London streets, the rattle of cabs and carriages, the whistle and rumble of underground railways, the ceaseless tramp of hurrying feet on the pavement—"Big Ben" booms out eleven times solemnly and slowly from the Clock Tower. We pass the photograph and guide-book sellers, and push open the doors under the central archway of Solomon's Porch. In an instant the glare and noise and hurry are left behind. We find ourselves in a sweet mellow silence—in a dim tender light—in a vast airy stillness, such as you find at noontide in the depths of a beech forest. But here the boles of the beech-trees are huge pillars of stone—the branches are graceful pointed arches that spring from them, and vaultings and ribs that flash with gold through the blue mist that hangs forever about the roof a hundred feet overhead. Outside the Abbey surge the waves of the great city. We hear a faint murmur of the roar and turmoil of its restless life breaking like distant surf upon the shore. But within these walls we are still and peaceful—and, if we will, we may read in "brass and stony monument" the story not only of England's worthies, but of her religion, her politics, her art, and her literature for full eight hundred years. Yes! for eight hundred years. For although the present Abbey is but six centuries old, there are still remains to be seen of an earlier building.
Morning service is just over. The choir boys have slipped off their white surplices, and are setting the music books in order. The crowd of sight-seers is beginning to wander about the Abbey. The monotonous voices of the vergers are beginning their explanations of tomb and chapel to the eager strangers. Let us get my good friends Mr. Berrington or Mr. Deer who show the tombs, to come quietly with us in their black gowns. Let us stand within the Sacrarium—the wide space inside the altar rails. The splendid reredos glittering with gold, mosaic, and jewels, blazes above the altar of carved cedar from Lebanon. Against the stalls on the opposite side hangs the famous picture of King Richard the Second. Beside us rise the gray stone canopies of the magnificent tombs of Aymer de Valence and Edmund Crouchback—two of the finest specimens of mediæval art in England. The great groups of pillars round the choir carry the eye upwards to the arcades of the Triforium, to the delicate tracery of the great clerestory windows, to the wonderful misty roof. But it is not overhead that I would have you look. Beneath your feet is the mosaic pavement that Abbot Ware brought from Rome in 1267, when he journeyed thither to be consecrated Abbot of Westminster by the Pope. Our guide stoops down, touches a secret spring, and lifts up a square block of the pavement. You look into a space some few feet deep. It is almost filled with a mass of rudely chiselled stone—the base and part of the shaft of a huge round pillar.
Look on that pillar with reverence. It has seen strange sights.
Under the arches it once supported, Edward the Confessor was buried. Under them William the Norman was crowned king of England.
It was on the twenty-eighth of December, in the year of grace 1065, that the Collegiate Church of St. Peter was consecrated. For fifteen years Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king, who built it "to the honor of God and St. Peter and all God's saints," had lavished time and money and pious thought on the grandest building England had yet seen. It had cost one tenth of the property of the kingdom. Its vast size, covering as it did almost the same ground as the present Abbey, its great round arches, its massive pillars, its deep foundations, its windows filled with stained glass, its richly sculptured stones, its roof covered with lead, its five big bells—all these wonders filled the minds of men accustomed to the rude wooden rafters and beams of the common Saxon churches, with amazement and awe. Then too a mysterious interest had always attached to the site. Besides the old legend of the first consecration by St. Peter, the belief in many mysteries and miracles connected with the Confessor had grown up with the growth of his Abbey Church.
The saintly king, with his pink cheeks, his long white beard, his wavy hair and his delicate hands that healed the diseases of his people by their magical touch, would startle his courtiers with a strange laugh now and again, and then recount some vision which had come to him while they thought he slept. "He had seen the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus suddenly turn from their right sides to their left, and recognized in this omen the sign of war, famine, and pestilence for the coming seventy years, during which the sleepers were to lie in their new position."[4]
He had given a precious ring, "large, royal and beautiful," off his finger, to a beggar who implored alms of him in the name of St. John. The beggar vanished. And the ring was brought back to him from Syria by two English pilgrims, to whom an aged man had confided it, telling them that he was St. John the Evangelist, "with the warning that in six months the king should be with him in Paradise."
The six months have ended.
The Abbey Church of St. Peter is finished, while hard by, in his palace of Westminster, Edward, the last Saxon king, lies dying. On Wednesday, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, or Childermas, the dying king rouses himself sufficiently to sign the Charter of the foundation: but Edith his queen has to represent him at the consecration. And the first ceremony after the consecration of the glorious minster he loved so well, is the Confessor's own burial. In his royal robes, a crown of gold upon his head, a crucifix of gold on his breast, a golden chain about his neck, and the pilgrim's ring on his hand, he lies before the High Altar with an unearthly smile upon his lips.
A great horror and terror had fallen upon the people of England—and well it might. Well might the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus turn uneasily in their slumber—for within a year William the Norman was standing before that same High Altar—standing on the very gravestone of King Edward, "trembling from head to foot"[5] for the first time in his life amid clamor and tumult, as Aldred, the Saxon Archbishop of York, put the crown of England on his head, and made him swear to protect his Saxon subjects, while the fierce Norman cavalry were trampling those Saxon subjects under their horses' hoofs outside the Abbey gates.