For one hundred and fifty years England was under foreign kings. And although the Norman Conquerors were crowned in Edward the Saxon's Abbey Church at Westminster, not one of them was laid within its walls. But with the fall of the Norman and Angevin kings, better days dawned for England. The Barons at Runnymede had forced King John, the last English Duke of Normandy and Anjou, to grant them the Great Charter—the glory and pride of all English-speaking people. And at John's death his son Henry the Third came to the throne in 1216 as the first English king of a free English people.
The young king prided himself upon his Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He was descended from King Alfred through "the good Matilda," Henry the First's wife. He called his sons by Anglo-Saxon names. His interests, and those of his descendants, were to be concentrated in the island which was now their sole kingdom. He therefore determined to desert the city of Winchester, which his Norman predecessors had made their headquarters, and "to take up his abode in Westminster beside the Confessor's tomb."[6]
During the Norman occupation an irresistible instinct had been drawing the conquerors towards their English subjects, "and therefore towards the dust of the last Saxon king." In Henry the Second's reign Edward the Confessor had been canonized. Many English anniversaries were celebrated yearly in the Abbey. Good Queen Matilda was buried close to her kinsman Edward and Edith the Swanneck, "the first royal personage so interred since the troubles of the conquest."[7]
It was to Henry the Third, however, that the thought came of making the Shrine of the Confessor the centre of a burial place for his race. In addition to his love for all things pertaining to his Saxon ancestry, Henry was passionately devoted to all sacred observances. "Even St. Louis," says Dean Stanley, "seemed to him but a lukewarm Rationalist." He possessed in a very high degree what we nowadays call the artistic sense. Art in all its forms was a complete passion with him; and with his Provençal wife Eleanor a swarm of foreign artists, painters, sculptors, poets, troubadours, found their way to England. Louis the Ninth was re-building and re-embellishing the Abbey of St. Denys as a place of sepulture for the French kings. Henry had also seen the splendid churches of Amiens, Beauvais, and Reims, in his journeys through France. His English, his religious, and his artistic instincts therefore, all combined to fire his imagination with the idea of making the most glorious shrine for the English king and saint that the world could see.
Henry's work at Westminster began with his reign. He dedicated the newly built Lady Chapel at the back of the High Altar, the day before his coronation; and "the first offering laid upon its altar were the spurs worn by the King in that ceremony." Then Edward's Abbey, "consecrated by recollections of the Confessor and the Conqueror," was swept away. Little remains of it now save the bases of those pillars of which I have spoken above—the substructures of the Dormitory—and the heavy low-browed passage leading from the Great Cloister into Little Dean's Yard and the Little Cloisters. The famous "Chapel of the Pyx," close to the Chapter House, is still in good preservation. But as it can only be opened by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, with seven huge keys, it is impossible to gain entrance to it—the ancient Treasury of England. It is now only opened by these officers once in five years for the "Trial of the Pyx," the Standard Trial Pieces of gold and silver, used for determining the just weight of the coin of the realm issued at the Mint.
But now upon the old foundations rose the Abbey we all know and love. In every smallest detail the new church was to be incomparable in beauty. Foreign painters and sculptors expended on it all their cunning. Peter of Rome set to work on the Confessor's Shrine, where you may still read his name, and made it glow with gold, mosaics and enamels, the like of which could not be found in England. And when the wondrous building—"the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom"[8]—was finished, the Confessor's body was translated on October 13, 1269, from its tomb in front of the High Altar to the splendid shrine prepared for it. The king, now growing old, had gathered his family about him for the last time. Edward, his eldest son, was just on the eve of departure with his wife Eleanor for Palestine to join St. Louis in the Crusades. He, his brother Edmund, and his uncle Richard, king of Germany, "supported the coffin of the Confessor, and laid him in the spot where (with the exception of one short interval) he has remained ever since."[9] The King himself carried from St. Paul's the sacred relics which the Knights Templars had given him twenty years before, and deposited them behind the shrine, where Henry the Fifth's Chantry now stands.
Dear as the Abbey was to King Henry as a monument of his own piety and taste, and as the shrine of his sainted kinsman, yet he must have loved it even more tenderly for being the resting-place of a little child. The Confessor's Church as you will remember was consecrated on Childermas, the Holy Innocents' Day. And it seems to me not without significance, that the first interment of importance in Henry the Third's new building was that of a child of five years old—his beautiful little daughter Catherine. In 1257, during an insurrection of the Welsh which laid waste the Border, and which the King strove in vain to quell—the kingdom desolated with famine—the Barons mutinous and defiant—Henry's cup of trouble was filled by the death of his little child.
SHRINE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.—AT LEFT, TOMB OF HENRY THE THIRD.