In arranging for this lengthy epitaph, James could not fail to be reminded that Queen Mary, who lay in the same tomb as Elizabeth, was passed over in cold silence, so he added a simple sentence pathetic in its restraint, almost an appeal on behalf of the one whose life had been such a failure.
"Here rest we two sisters Elizabeth and Mary, fellows both in throne and grave, in the hope of one resurrection."
TOMB OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.
In life everything had tended to separate them, but in death they lay together at peace.
James erected another monument in this chapel, on the southern side, and this was to the memory of his mother, the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots. She had been buried at Peterborough, but her son, when he came into the inheritance which was his, through her, very rightly caused her to be buried among the kings and queens of England. Here again death reconciled two implacable foes, so that Mary Queen of Scots lies opposite to Elizabeth in this chapel of the Tudors. The marble figure, with its sweet, finely-cut face and its graceful draperies and its delicate lacework, is full of charm, and makes familiar to us one whose fascinating beauty was her own undoing.
And now we come to a new phase in the history of the Abbey; for though after the days of Queen Elizabeth several kings and queens of England were buried within its walls, to none of them was a monument raised, not so much even as an inscription was cut on the stones over their graves. With the Stuarts began a new race of kings, and under their rule there grew up a new set of relations between king and subjects. They preached the doctrine of the divine right of kings, declaring themselves to be above any laws which their people might desire to make through Parliament, so the battle had to be fought out between king and Parliament, a battle so fierce that it brought once more civil war to England, cost Charles the First his life, and caused James II. to flee to foreign lands. But from that struggle with its many errors there at last developed
"That sober freedom out of which there springs
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings,"
which holds together to-day the throne and the nation as never before in our island story.
So you will see how, as the people became more and more the ruling force in England, it was the representatives of the people—statesmen, soldiers, sailors, writers, musicians, travellers, thinkers, discoverers, and benefactors—who stepped into the foremost places, and who were thought worthy of a resting-place among the great kings of old in the Abbey, while, with a few exceptions, the sovereigns of England were buried at Windsor, now the most important of all the royal palaces.