THE VICTORIA TOWER.
Where one has so noble an edifice, it seems ungracious to repine; yet the loss of the older building was a misfortune for which nothing can compensate. It was nearly the only remaining portion of the Palace of Westminster originally founded by Edward the Confessor, and retained by our kings until Henry VIII. removed his palace to Whitehall. St. Stephen’s Chapel, the Cloisters, the Painted Chamber, the Star Chamber, the Armada hangings—all these were destroyed by the great conflagration arising from the overheating of a stove in which some official had been too assiduously burning the tally-sticks whereon the Exchequer accounts were kept until the latter part of last century. The House of Commons sat within the walls of St. Stephen’s Chapel, rebuilt in the reign of Edward III., and converted to the use of the national representatives in that of Edward VI. Either at that or some later period, the external walls were wainscoted; a new floor was laid above the level of the old pavement, and a new ceiling shut out the fine timber roof. The chapel, therefore, still remained, but it was almost completely hidden from view. In 1800, however, previously to the addition of the Irish members to those of England and Scotland, it was found necessary to enlarge the chamber, and, on the wainscoting being taken down, the walls erected by Edward III. shone out in all their splendour of architecture, sculpture, painting, and gilding; the whole looking as brilliant and vivid as if it had just left the hands of the workers. The alterations involved the destruction of these beautiful specimens of mediæval art; but drawings were made of most. Still, a good deal of the original palace and chapel was left, though sadly defaced by modern perversions, often in the most execrable taste. The fire carried still further what other influences had begun; and, at the present day, all that is preserved of the palatial structure which successive kings re-edified and adorned are Westminster Hall and the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel.
With its Hall and its Abbey, Westminster can never cease to be interesting, attractive, and picturesque. Here, if anywhere, we are in the very heart of English history, and can, at our bidding, summon a long procession of sovereigns, prelates, statesmen, soldiers, wits, and scholars. Standing before the Abbey, with the river close at hand, we think of those ancient days when all the adjacent ground was a marsh, so environed with water, and beset with brambles, as to acquire the name of Thorney Island: a wild, bleak, barren spot, almost at the very gates of London, yet apart from it; inhabited only by poor and outcast people, or perchance by banditti, who levied contributions on the rich nobles and merchants, and then escaped to their fastnesses among the thickets of the fenny isle. Then—somewhere about 616—came Sebert, King of the East Saxons, who, according to tradition, founded the Benedictine monastery of which the Abbey is a noble relic. West Minster—the Minster west of St. Paul’s, originally called East Minster, according to some accounts—took its rise from that time, and speedily became a place of great importance. The brambles disappeared; the land was drained; the creeks and ditches of the Thames were made to retire into their natural channel; walls and pinnacles arose out of the wet and dreary soil; and the chant of the Benedictines was heard along the river-banks, and in the neighbouring fields. After a while, houses grew up around the monastery, and population was attracted to a spot which the Monarchy and the Church were beginning to favour. The religious foundation was enlarged by King Edgar, and afterwards by Edward the Confessor; and from the time of the latter to that of Queen Victoria, all our kings and queens have been crowned within the walls of the Abbey. Many, also, are buried in the same building, which gives occasion to moralising Jeremy Taylor to observe:—“In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery, where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more; and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire’s head to take his crown.” Whether for kings or humble men, there is no place better adapted to this vein of thought than Westminster Abbey.
The Abbey-church was dedicated to St. Peter, who, according to the mediæval tradition, appeared to a fisherman on the opposite bank of the Thames, and requested him to ferry him over to Thorney Island, where, with his own hands, he performed the ceremony of consecration. An atmosphere of legend and romance surrounds the earlier history of Westminster Abbey, and continues even as late as the days of Edward the Confessor. It is related in old chronicles that that monarch, having omitted to make a pilgrimage to Rome, which he had promised on condition that he should be restored to his throne, from which the Danes had expelled him, was enjoined by the Pope, as the necessary price of absolution, that he should expend the funds set apart for his journey on the foundation or repair of some religious house dedicated to St. Peter. The particular house was not indicated; but, just at that time, a monk of Westminster, named Wulsine, dreamed that the Apostle appeared to him, and bade him acquaint the King that he should restore the church on Thorney Island. “There is,” he is reported to have said, “a place of mine in the west part of London, which I chose, and love, and which I formerly consecrated with my own hands, honoured with my presence, and made illustrious by my miracles. The name of the place is Thorney; which, having, for the sins of the people, been given to the power of the barbarians, from rich has become poor, from stately low, and from honourable is made despicable. This let the King, by my command, restore and amply endow: it shall be no less than the house of God and the gates of Heaven.” This, according to the old belief, was the way in which the later Abbey arose. At any rate, Edward rebuilt the monastery and church on a larger and more sumptuous scale; and, from that time forth, Westminster Abbey became the grandest, and on the whole the most august, building in London. It was then, likewise, that the edifice first took a distinct and historical place in the annals of the English people. Until then, it is difficult to trace its history, which, indeed, is little more than a series of ecclesiastical myths. From the days of Edward the Confessor, the story of the Abbey is clear in every respect; but, in such an edifice, history itself assumes a romantic, almost a marvellous, colour. We are in the presence of eight centuries of the national life; for, although no portion of Edward the Confessor’s work remains at the present day, the Abbey is so associated with the saintly monarch that it is impossible to detach his memory from the structure begun by Henry III., continued by Edward II., Edward III., and Richard II., and from time to time enlarged by later sovereigns. The building we now behold is the legacy of successive ages, which have left upon the stone itself the imprint of their thoughts, their aspirations, their struggles, and their hopes. In passing from chapel to chapel, from cloister to cloister, from aisle to aisle, we seem to pass through the centuries which gave them birth, and which have strewn over all the dust of their extinguished fires. But Westminster Abbey is not merely an embalmed corpse, preserving the semblance of a life which has long since vanished, It is still the shrine of England’s greatest men—still the embodiment of ideas yet living in the national heart.
THE ABBEY, FROM LAMBETH BRIDGE.