A few hundred yards from his place of rest, in a vault beneath the Church of St. Dunstan, is the head of Sir Thomas More (the body being in St. Peter's, at the Tower of London), who in his youth had been a member of Morton's ecclesiastical household, and whose greatness that prelate had foreseen and prophesied. Did no shadow of the scaffold ever fall across the statesman's thoughts, as he looked upon that handsome, manly boy, and thought of the troublous times that were raging about them? Morton, aged ninety, died in 1500; More, aged fifty-five, in 1535. Strange fate, indeed, was that, and as inscrutable as mournful, which gave to those who in life had been like father and son such a ghastly association in death!† They show you the place where Becket was murdered, and the stone steps, worn hollow by the thousands upon thousands of devout pilgrims who, in the days before the Reformation, crept up to weep and pray at the costly, resplendent shrine of St. Thomas. The bones of Becket, as all the world knows, were, by command of Henry the Eighth, burnt, and scattered to the winds, while his shrine was pillaged and destroyed. Neither tomb nor scutcheon commemorates him here,—but the cathedral itself is his monument.
† St. Dunstan's church was connected with the Convent of St. Gregory. The Roper family, in the time of Henry the Fourth, founded a chapel in it, in which are two marble tombs, commemorative of them, and underneath which is their burial vault. Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More's daughter, obtained her father's head, after his execution, and buried it here. The vault was opened in 1835,—when a new pavement was laid in the chancel of this church,—and persons descending into it saw the head, in a leaden box shaped like a beehive, open in front, set in a niche in the wall, behind an iron grill.
There it stands, with its grand columns and glorious arches, its towers of enormous size and its long vistas of distance, so mysterious and awful, its gloomy crypt where once the silver lamps sparkled and the smoking censers were swung, its tombs of mighty warriors and statesmen, its frayed and crumbling banners, and the eternal, majestic silence with which it broods over the love, ambition, glory, defeat, and anguish of a thousand years, dissolved now and ended in a little dust! As the organ music died away I looked upward and saw where a bird was wildly flying to and fro, through the vast spaces beneath its lofty roof, in the vain effort to find some outlet of escape. Fit emblem, truly, of the human mind which strives to comprehend and to utter the meaning of this marvellous fabric!
