In the earliest and nearly the only representation which exists of the Confessor’s building—that in the Bayeux Tapestry—there is the figure of a man on the roof, with one hand resting on the tower of the Palace of Westminster, and with the other grasping the weathercock of the Abbey. The probable intention of this figure is to indicate the close contiguity of the two buildings. If so, it is the natural architectural expression of a truth valuable everywhere, but especially dear to Englishmen. The close incorporation of the Palace and the Abbey from its earliest days is a likeness of the whole English Constitution—a combination of things sacred and things common—a union of the regal, legal, lay element of the nation with its religious, clerical, ecclesiastical tendencies, such as can be found hardly elsewhere in Christendom. The Abbey is secular because it is sacred, and sacred because it is secular. It is secular in the common English sense, because it is “sæcular” in the far higher French and Latin sense: a “sæcular” edifice, a “sæcular” institution—an edifice and an institution which has grown with the growth of ages, which has been furrowed with the scars and cares of each succeeding century.
A million wrinkles carve its skin;
A thousand winters snow’d upon its breast,
From cheek, and throat, and chin.
The vast political pageants of which it has been the theatre, the dust of the most worldly laid side by side with the dust of the most saintly, the wrangles of divines or statesmen which have disturbed its sacred peace, the clash of arms which has pursued fugitive warriors and princes into the shades of its sanctuary—even the traces of Westminster boys who have played in its cloisters and inscribed their names on its walls—belong to the story of the Abbey no less than its venerable beauty, its solemn services, and its lofty aspirations....
The Chapel of Henry VII. is indeed well called by his name, for it breathes of himself through every part. It is the most signal example of the contrast between his closeness in life, and his “magnificence in the structures he had left to posterity”—King’s College Chapel, the Savoy, Westminster. Its very style was believed to have been a reminiscence of his exile, being “learned in France,” by himself and his companion Fox. His pride in its grandeur was commemorated by the ship, vast for those times, which he built, “of equal cost with his Chapel,” “which afterwards, in the reign of Queen Mary, sank in the sea and vanished in a moment.”
It was to be his chantry as well as his tomb, for he was determined not to be behind the Lancastrian princes in devotion; and this unusual anxiety for the sake of a soul not too heavenward in its affections expended itself in the immense apparatus of services which he provided. Almost a second Abbey was needed to contain the new establishment of monks, who were to sing in their stalls “as long as the world shall endure.” Almost a second Shrine, surrounded by its blazing tapers, and shining like gold with its glittering bronze, was to contain his remains.
To the Virgin Mary, to whom the chapel was dedicated he had a special devotion. Her “in all his necessities he had made his continual refuge;” and her figure, accordingly, looks down upon his grave from the east end, between the apostolic patrons of the Abbey, Peter and Paul, with “the holy company of heaven—that is to say, angels, archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confessors and virgins,” to “whose singular mediation and prayers he also trusted,” including the royal saints of Britain, St. Edward, St. Edmund, St. Oswald, St. Margaret of Scotland, who stand, as he directed, sculptured, tier above tier, on every side of the Chapel; some retained from the ancient Lady Chapel; the greater part the work of his own age. Around his tomb stand his “accustomed Avours or guardian saints” to whom “he calls and cries”—“St. Michael, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. George, St. Anthony, St. Edward, St. Vincent, St. Anne, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Barbara,” each with their peculiar emblems,—“so to aid, succour, and defend him, that the ancient and ghostly enemy, nor none other evil or damnable spirit, have no power to invade him, nor with their wickedness to annoy him, but with holy prayers to be intercessors to his Maker and Redeemer.” These were the adjurations of the last mediæval King, as the Chapel was the climax of the latest mediæval architecture. In the very urgency of the King’s anxiety for the perpetuity of these funeral ceremonies, we seem to discern an unconscious presentiment lest their days were numbered.
But, although in this sense the Chapel hangs on tenaciously to the skirts of the ancient Abbey and the ancient Church, yet that solemn architectural pause between the two—which arrests the most careless observer, and renders it a separate structure, a foundation “adjoining the Abbey” rather than forming part of it—corresponds with marvellous fidelity to the pause and break in English history of which Henry VII.’s reign is the expression. It is the close of the Middle Ages: the apple of Granada in its ornaments shows that the last Crusade was over; its flowing draperies and classical attitudes indicate that the Renaissance had already begun. It is the end of the Wars of the Roses, combining Henry’s right of conquest with his fragile claim of hereditary descent. On the one hand, it is the glorification of the victory of Bosworth. The angels, at the four corners of the tomb, held or hold the likeness of the crown which he won on that famous day. In the stained-glass we see the same crown hanging on the green bush in the fields of Leicestershire. On the other hand, like the Chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, it asserts everywhere the memory of the “holy Henry’s shade”; the Red Rose of Lancaster appears in every pane of glass: and in every corner is the Portcullis—the “Alters securitas,” as he termed it, with an allusion to its own meaning, and the double safeguard of his succession—which he derived through John of Gaunt from the Beaufort Castle in Anjou, inherited from Blanche of Navarre by Edmund Crouchback; whilst Edward IV. and Elizabeth of York are commemorated by intertwining these Lancastrian symbols with the Greyhound of Cecilia Neville, wife of Richard, Duke of York, with the Rose in the Sun, which scattered the mists at Barnet, and the Falcon on the Fetterlock, by which the first Duke of York expressed to his descendants that “he was locked up from the hope of the kingdom, but advising them to be quiet and silent, as God knoweth what may come to pass.”
It is also the revival of the ancient, Celtic, British element in the English monarchy, after centuries of eclipse. It is a strange and striking thought, as we mount the steps of Henry VII.’s Chapel, that we enter there a mausoleum of princes, whose boast it was to be descended, not from the Confessor or the Conqueror, but from Arthur and Llewellyn; and that round about the tomb, side by side with the emblems of the great English Houses, is to be seen the Red Dragon of the last British king, Cadwallader—“the dragon of the great Pendragonship” of Wales, thrust forward by the Tudor king in every direction, to supplant the hated White Boar of his departed enemy—the fulfilment, in another sense than the old Welsh bards had dreamt, of their prediction that the progeny of Cadwallader should reign again....