A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

But Henry IV. was not the only man who looked death in the face in this room. Many years later, when Henry VIII. was just beginning that infamous career of divorcing and beheading wives, and burning Protestants as heretics, and hanging Romanists as traitors for saying that the Pope was superior to the King in matters of religion—a career which has made his name one of the most detestable in history—Sir Thomas More, the noblest Englishman of his time, was arrested for his refusal to swear that Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn was lawful, and on his way to the Tower of London was confined for four days in the Jerusalem Chamber. Shortly afterwards, under the act of Parliament which directed that every one who refused to give the King a title belonging to him was to be put to death as a traitor, Sir Thomas More was executed on Tower Hill because he could not honestly give Henry the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Other dead bodies, too, besides that of Henry IV. have lain in this room. The body of Dr. South, the witty and eloquent court preacher, lay in state here. It was South who, when reading from the seventeenth chapter of the Acts the accusation of the Thessalonian mob against Paul and Silas—"These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also"—remarked that it was well for the apostles to turn the world upside down, because the devil had turned it downside up.

Funeral of Joseph Addison.

From the Jerusalem Chamber the body of the illustrious essayist, Joseph Addison, after lying in state for four days, was carried forth in that memorable funeral procession at dead of night which was led by torchlight round the shrine of St. Edward and the graves of the Plantagenets to the chapel of Henry VII., the body being finally laid to rest opposite the Poet's Corner in the South Transept. "Such a mark of national respect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism." So wrote Lord Macaulay of Addison, reminding us, at the same time, how Addison "was accustomed to walk by himself in Westminster Abbey, and meditate on the condition of those who lay in it"; and now Macaulay himself lies there close to the grave of Addison.

Sir Isaac Newton.

But the most illustrious man whose body has ever lain in state in the Jerusalem Chamber is Sir Isaac Newton, the great philosopher, whom his friends called "the whitest soul they had ever known," and of whom Pope wrote the celebrated couplet:

"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said, Let Newton be, and all was light."

Such are some of the great names associated with the Jerusalem Chamber—Henry IV., Thomas More, Robert South, Joseph Addison, Isaac Newton—and to some of them the whole world is indebted, as to Sir Thomas More for his calm refusal to purchase his life at the cost of his convictions, and to Joseph Addison for all that he was as an author, a man, and a Christian, and to Sir Isaac Newton for his lofty character and his unparalleled services to the cause of human knowledge; but, after all, it may be doubted whether the world is more deeply indebted to any of them than to that body of thoroughgoing scholars and profound thinkers who in this room two centuries and a half ago formulated the statement that "effectual calling is the work of God's Spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel"—and one hundred and six other propositions concerning the most momentous interests of human existence, which for luminous condensation of truth have never been surpassed in all the history of the human expression of the doctrines of Scripture.