By Acts passed in the early part of the nineteenth century, part of Long Ditch, Bridge Street, Little George Street, and King Street were cleared away, also Broad and Little Sanctuary, Thieving Lane, and many small courts, and on the space thus obtained public seats were placed, flower-beds planted, and statues erected.
The statues on the quadrangular piece of ground in the centre are of Peel and Beaconsfield, north and south; Palmerston and Derby on the east. The statue of George Canning is in the western enclosure. Union Street ran due eastward to New Palace Yard, and must have cut very near the place where the statue of Palmerston now stands. The drinking fountain at the corner of Great George Street was put up by Charles Buxton in 1865 in memory of the abolition of the slave trade.
Westminster Abbey, Palace, and City stood formerly upon a small island called Thorney, the Isle of Bramble, a low-lying islet covered with brambles, nowhere more than three or four feet above the level of high-tide formed by the fall of the little river, the Tye, into the Thames. Part of this stream ran down Gardener's Lane; part of it diverged and ran south, forming a narrow moat or ditch called Long Lane, turned eastward at College Street, and so fell into the Thames. The island is mentioned in a charter of 785 by Offa, King of Mercia, as "Tornica, Locus terribilis"—i.e., sacred. It was about 1,410 feet long and 1,100 feet broad. It was almost entirely, save for a narrow piece of land on the north, occupied by the King's House and the Abbey. Both Palace and Abbey were surrounded by walls, one wall being common to both.
The Palace Precinct had three gates: one on the north, one on the east—leading to the Bridge, i.e., the jetty where the state barges and the boats lay—and a postern leading into the Abbey. Westminster was at first a large rural manor belonging to the Abbey before the erection of the Palace.
A large part of Thorney Island is still only slightly above the level of high-tide. King Street was 5 feet 6 inches only above high-water mark. This was the foundation of Westminster. It was a busy place long before London Bridge was built—a place of throng and moil as far back as the centuries before the coming of the Romans. A church was built in the most crowded part of it; monks in leathern jerkins lived beside the church, which lay in ruins for two hundred years, while the pagan Saxon passed every day beside it across the double ford. During the two hundred years of war and conquest by the Saxons, Westminster, quite forgotten and deserted, lay with its brambles growing over the Roman ruins, and the weather and ivy pulling down the old walls of villa and stationary camp piecemeal. Perhaps—rather probably—there had been a church upon the island in the third or fourth century. Soon after the conversion of the Saxons another church was erected here with a monastic house. Then there was another destruction and another rebuilding, for this place was deserted by the monks; perhaps they were murdered during the Danish troubles. It was King Edgar who restored the Abbey, to which Dunstan brought twelve monks from Glastonbury.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
(Mrs. A. Murray Smith.)
On the sacred island the last great Prince of the Saxon race, Edward, son of Ethelred the Unready, found Dunstan's little brotherhood of Benedictine monks, who were living in mud huts round a small stone chapel. Out of this insignificant beginning grew a mighty monastery, the West Minster, dowered with royal gifts and ruled over by mitred Abbots, who owned no ecclesiastical authority save that of the Pope, bowed to no secular arm save that of the Sovereign himself. The full title of the Abbey, which is seldom used nowadays, is the Collegiate Church of St. Peter's.
King Edward had vowed, during his long exile in Normandy, that if he ever sat on the throne of his fathers he would go on a pilgrimage to St. Peter's shrine at Rome. But after his accession the unsettled state of the kingdom made it impossible to keep this vow, and he was absolved from it by the Pope on the condition that he should found or re-endow a monastic church dedicated to St. Peter. This, therefore, was the origin of the great West Minster, and in afterdays the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor within its walls attracted pilgrims here, and made the building a peculiarly sacred one. Here the Sovereigns of England were always crowned, often married, and until the time of George III. usually buried.
The earliest coronation of which there is historic certainty was that of Edward's friend and former protector, the Conqueror, William I. As the last Saxon King of the race of Ethelred was the first Sovereign who was buried at Westminster, so the head of the Norman line of English Kings was the first who was hallowed to the service of God and of his people on this historic spot. No trace is left of Edward's Norman monastery, save the foundations of some of the pillars and a round arch in the cloisters; but we know that his church was nearly on the same place as the present Abbey, and that the old Norman nave stood for many hundred years joined on to the choir and transepts of the new Early English building, and was pulled down bit by bit as the later church grew. For the beautiful Abbey which we see before us now, in the heart of a busy thoroughfare, is the work, not of one generation, but of five hundred years. The central part was built in the thirteenth century. The Confessor had been canonized by the Pope in 1163, and a century later Henry III., who was a fervent admirer of the saint, caused a splendid shrine to be made by Italian workmen, which was to replace the old one of Henry II.'s time. The new style of pointed architecture was just coming in, and the Abbot of Westminster, Humez, had added a Lady Chapel to the old Norman church when Henry III. was a boy. As the King grew to manhood he saw the contrast between the two styles of architecture, and while the Italian shrine was still only half finished he caused the central part of the Confessor's Norman church to be demolished, and in its place an Early English choir and transepts were gradually constructed during the last twenty-seven years of Henry's reign, with a series of little chapels round the principal one where the shrine was to be placed. In 1269 the new church was ready for service, and the chapel was prepared for the shrine.
The shrine, and within it the Confessor's coffin, still stands in the centre of this royal chapel of St. Edward—a battered wreck, yet bearing traces of its former beauty—and round it is a circle of royal tombs, drawn as by a magnet to the proximity of the royal saint. Henry III., the second founder, is here himself. At his head is his warlike son Edward I., the Hammer of the Scots, with his faithful wife, Eleanor of Castile, at his feet. On the other side are the tombs of another Plantagenet, Edward III., the "mighty victor, mighty lord," and his good Queen, the Flemish Philippa. In a line with them is their handsome, unfortunate grandson Richard II., whose picture hangs beside the altar. Here also is the Coronation Chair, which encloses the Stone of Scone, and upon this "Seat of Majesty," ever since the time of Edward I., who reft the ancient stone from the Scots, all our Sovereigns have been seated at the moment of their coronation. On the west of the royal chapel a screen depicts the legends of the Confessor's life; on the east is the mutilated tomb of Henry V., the victor of Agincourt; above it the Chantry Chapel, where, after centuries of neglect, rest the remains of his wife, the French Catherine, ancestress of the great Tudor line.