On July 24, 1700, the Duke of Gloucester was eleven years old. The next day Bishop Burnet tells that he complained a little: but every one thought he was tired with his birthday festivities. The day after he grew rapidly worse. A malignant fever declared itself, and he "died on the fourth day of his illness, to the great grief of all who were concerned with him." He was buried quite quietly, in the same vault as his great-uncle Henry, Duke of Gloucester, beside their common ancestress, Mary, Queen of Scots.
The death of this little boy was an event of enormous importance to England. The Stuart line was at an end, and the eyes of England now turned to George Lewis, the Elector of Hanover, grandson of that unfortunate Queen of Bohemia, who we know best as Princess Elizabeth, the favorite sister and playfellow of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. And with the death of "the last hope of the race—thus withered, as it must have seemed, by the doom of Providence"[118]—our history of the children of Westminster draws to a close. Besides those whose lives and stories we have studied together, there are several of whom little is known but the facts of their death and burial in our stately Abbey. The year before little William, Duke of Gloucester, was born, two "holy innocents" were laid to rest at Westminster; one, Nicholas Bagnall, an "infant of two months old, by his nurse unfortunately overlaid," is commemorated by a white marble urn in the Chapel of St. Nicholas, among the Percys and the Cecils. And in the Cloisters there is a touchingly simple tablet which Dean Stanley delighted to point out to every one, bearing these words:
"Jane Lister, dear child, died October 7, 1688."
A WESTMINSTER BOY.
In 1711, three years before Queen Anne's death, a young Westminster Scholar, Carteret by name, aged nineteen, was buried in the North Aisle of the Choir, "with the chiefs of his house." This is, I think, the only instance of a Westminster boy being buried in the Abbey. And young Carteret, the Westminster Scholar, leads me to an institution at Westminster which I have too long neglected. I mean Westminster School.
From the earliest days of the Abbey, from Edith and Edward the Confessor's time, a school for the training of the novices was attached to Westminster as to other great monasteries. When the constitution of the Abbey was changed by the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539-40, Henry the Eighth founded a school in connection with the reformed Abbey. But the school was refounded and enlarged by Queen Elizabeth in the year of the Armada, and to her we owe its prosperity and fame. The great tables of chestnut wood in the black-beamed College Dining Hall, are said by tradition to have been given by the queen from the wrecks of the Spanish Armada. From this time forth Westminster School took its place among the most famous public schools in England. The names of many of the greatest of England's worthies are inscribed on the walls of the old schoolroom. In Elizabeth's reign the famous Camden was its head master. And a few years later we find young George Herbert being commended to the Dean for Westminster School, where "the beauties of his pretty behavior and wit shined and became so eminent and lovely in this his tender age, that he seemed marked out for piety and to have the care of heaven, and of a particular good angel to guard and guide him."[119]
Westminster School was always loyal, and during the Protectorate the boys were ardent partisans of the king, whose scholars they said they were and would always remain. "It will never be well with the nation until Westminster School is suppressed," said the Puritan Dean of Christ Church, John Owen.
However, the "King's School" remained vehemently loyal in spite of all the efforts of the Presbyterian and Independent preachers in the Abbey; and it was not suppressed.
In Queen Anne's reign the School buildings took their present form. The old Dormitory, which had been in the Middle Ages the Granary of the Convent, stood on the west side of Dean's Yard.