Canterbury

by William Danks

The great window in the south transept, on our right, belongs to the fifteenth century, but is filled with magnificent glass brought from the choir clerestory, and 200 years older than the mullions which frame it. The corresponding north transept window was filled with splendid glass by Edward IV; the ecclesiastical figures in the topmost tracery, some borders, and the panels representing the King with his two sons who perished in the Tower, and his Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, with her daughters, still remain. The eldest girl is Elizabeth of York, who married Henry VII, and so ended the feud of York and Lancaster. The rest of the glass, which illustrated the life of the Virgin, and the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury, was smashed by the pike of the Puritan miscreant Culmer, who gloried in having "rattled down Becket's glassy bones". It is strange that he spared three of the unique thirteenth-century Becket windows in the Trinity Chapel. It is said that, as he was at work on his ladder, a townsman below enquired what he was doing. "The work of the Lord," was the reply. "Then if it please the Lord I will help you," and an adroit boulder was flung at his head. This may have cooled his zeal; but, alas! there is room for misgiving that he ducked his head in time. So the happiest hopes of history have sometimes miscarried.

FORDWICH [(Page 29)]

On our right, again, is the entrance from the south transept into St. Michael's, or the Warriors' Chapel, where the honoured grave of Langton, the Magna Charta archbishop, is half inside and half outside, the wall striding over him by an arch so that his head should lie under the altar. This chapel contains, and was probably enlarged to contain, the extremely fine monument of Lady Margaret Holland and her two husbands, which is a perfect study of the armour and dress of the early fifteenth century. The first husband was Earl of Somerset and half-brother of Henry IV, and the second was, curiously, nephew of the first and brother of Henry V. The lady outlived them both and placed their effigies here with her own between them. She was the stepdaughter of the Black Prince.

On our left again, in the north transept, is the far-famed Martyrdom, the spot where Becket died and became St. Thomas. Here is the ground on which the hunted prelate, powerful in body as in mind, caught up Tracy in his full armour and flung him on the pavement. Here is the door from the cloister through which Becket came for sanctuary, and which he refused to bar against his assailants come for murder—"The Church must not be turned into a Castle." Here is the place where the slain Archbishop lay, his head "four feet from the wall", where afterwards was erected to his memory the Altar of the Sword's Point.

From hence he was carried to the tomb in the crypt, where he lay for fifty years until the Translation to the Shrine in Trinity Chapel in 1220. It is not for me in this brief sketch to tell what has been told so dramatically by Stanley in his Memorials, and with such historical insight by Green in his History. It was a duel between the Civil and the Ecclesiastical sovereignties, represented respectively by Henry II and his Archbishop; both of them, for all their genius, too haughty, violent, and headstrong to bring a difficult controversy to a close, or even to a lasting truce.

Before we leave the Martyrdom we must notice the oldest effigy in the Cathedral, that of Peckham, Edward I's Archbishop, who died in 1292, and beside it that of Wareham, the last archbishop before the Reformation, who half yielded to Henry VIII and repented of yielding, and in a few months died, partly perhaps of the sore perplexity and trouble of the time. A comparison of the two canopies will mark for us the advance in decorative art between the thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The door into the cloister has its brighter as well as its dark memory. For here, at the entrance of what was then deemed the most sacred enclosure in the land, was Edward I, that great, stern, tender-hearted King, married to Margaret of Anjou, nine years after he had lost the wife of whom he wrote: "I loved her tenderly in her life; I do not cease to love her now she is dead".

The pilgrims were usually conducted from the altar in the Martyrdom to the "Tumba" or first resting place of the "holy blissful martyr", which was in the crypt. The whole of the crypt was dedicated to the Virgin, and the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft, though now dark and deserted, is still enclosed by the lovely stone tracery placed round it by the Black Prince as a memorial of his marriage. When Erasmus was here he said it was "so loaded with riches" as to be "a more than royal spectacle", and he added: "It is shown but to noblemen and particular friends". Doubtless though the treasures were hidden from the common pilgrim, the altar was always accessible to his devotion. Cardinal Morton desired to be buried near the image of Our Lady of the Undercroft, and his tomb is close by. He may be remembered as the minister of Henry VII and author of Morton's Fork. It was an eminently successful method of finance, which may remind us of a modern Budget. Its principle was that those who spend much can obviously afford to pay, and those who spend little can well afford the taxation of their savings.

Under the south choir transept is another memorial of the Black Prince. It is the double chantry exacted by the Pope as the price of a dispensation to marry his cousin. The Prince came to Canterbury himself, met the prior and the mason, and gave orders for the work, which perhaps included the sculptured face of his beautiful wife in one of the bosses of the roof. The chantry, with its two apses for the mass priests, is now the Chapel of the French Protestants, who have had services here since the royal permission in 1575. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the refugees are said to have numbered three thousand, and to have gained for Canterbury a large trade in silk-weaving and paper-making. Their descendants are now merged into the English population, but their names and the weekly French service still survive.