03.10. London - Gray's Country Church Yard

Chapter 10 Westminster Abbey.

-- The Chapels and Tombs -- Westminster Hall -- The Tower of London -- The White Tower -- The Place of Execution -- The Graves of Anne Boleyn and Catharine -- The Beheading Axe and Block -- A Visit to Gray’s "Country Churchyard."

One of the first places a person desires to visit when in London is Westminster Abbey. The age of the building, its historical associations, its architectural excellence, and, above all, its being the receptacle of royal dust, and the dust of the great, and wise, and good of past generations and centuries make it to exercise a profound influence over the mind. The great columns of stone, rising to the loftiness of palm trees, and then branching out in ribs of granite over the ceiling, and interlacing, like the boughs of forest trees, is the first thing that strikes the eye. This is what is called groined vaulting. The idea was taken from the sight of an avenue of lime trees, with smooth, lofty trunks and with arching boughs, knit together at the top. I have been in a number of cathedrals, and I discover that this conception is in them all -- an avenue of granite trunks and limbs overhead. When these great columns line the transepts as well, crossing the nave at right angles, the feeling, as you walk amid their shadows, is not altogether unlike the sensation of wandering through mighty avenues of trees.

All along the inner walls of these cathedrals, and approaching the nave or center aisle twenty or thirty feet, are chapels fenced in and hedged off, so to speak, from the main body in various architectural ways, and by works of art and monuments of different kinds. Here are the places, or in the crypts below, in which the mighty in deed and noble in blood slumber their long sleep. As I was entering one to see the tomb of Queen Elizabeth, my eye happened to rest upon the stone floor, when suddenly I saw blossoming under my feet the name of Addison! I was walking over his ashes, as thousands do daily. It looks like sacrilege; but it seems a custom here, and nothing is thought of it. In these old cathedrals you literally walk upon the dead. Think of walking down the aisle over the tombstones and ashes of twenty individuals and families before sitting down in your pew to hear the gospel! From the tomb of Elizabeth I went into another chapel were sleeps the body of Mary Queen of Scotts. She was beheaded and buried in another part of England, but her son, James the First, had her brought here after he came upon the throne. Her tomb is fully as rich as that of Elizabeth. In this same chapel I saw all in a row together, on marble slabs in the floor, the names of Charles the Second, William, and Mary, and Anne. Four sovereigns in a line, and no monument over their ashes save the slabs that cover their bodies! Again and again I was forced to pause or sit down by weight of meditation.

They all sleep well. And they get along better now than they did in life. The world was hardly large enough to satisfy some whose names I read here in stone; but a very small place now is sufficient to keep them. The oppressor and the oppressed, the murderer and the murdered, are here close together, lying under the same roof, and their ashes shaken by the deep-toned roll of the same organ, whose music crashes down from amid the granite pillars above, and fills the vaults below.

James the First has several children buried in one of the chapels. I was much touched with a verse that was carved on the headstone of one of them. I copied it with my pencil: "She tasted of the cup of life, Too bitter ’twas to drain; She put it meekly from her lips, And went to sleep again."

I saw the empty tomb of Cromwell. After the Restoration his body was removed and burned, I think, while his head was fastened on a spike on Westminster Hall near by, and kept there for years. As I was looking at the tomb, several ladies drew near, of a rough pattern, and one, with strong Hibernian accent, cried out in regard to Cromwell: "And was he buried here? -- the writch!" Well for the great that they do not hear all that is said about them. How thankful all people ought to be that we cannot hear over a few yards, and that when we are dead we cannot hear at all! In the chapel of Edward the Confessor I saw the chair in which the kings and queens of England are crowned. Underneath the seat, and plain to view, is the celebrated stone of Scone, upon which the Scottish sovereigns sat during their coronation. If any would like to know concerning the architecture of this same chair, I can briefly, but truly, describe it. If you have a closet at home four or five feet high, and two feet deep, just nail a broad plank inside at the proper sitting distance, and you have got the coronation chair of England. In close proximity to Westminster Abbey is the House of Parliament, stretched in colossal proportions upon the banks of the Thames. Comparatively a new building, I was not so much interested in it; but was far more engrossed with a building in the rear, and now constituting a kind of ante-room for the parliamentary building. It is called Westminster Hall, and is replete with historic facts and thrilling events. It was for a long time the abode of royalty, and in it also Parliament sat for generations. In it Wallace was condemned to death, and so was Guy Fawkes. It was on one of its gable ends that the head of Cromwell was exposed. In front of it Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded. You may be sure that it was an interested gaze that was cast upon the ordinary-looking and yet remarkable structure.

Another place I visited with profound interest was the Tower of London. This is fully three miles from Westminster Abbey, down the river. It is called the Tower, when really it is a cluster of towers. The central building, however, is the one that has given name and character to the place.

Conceive a deep moat, and a lofty wall surmounted by, or rather built into a number of strong towers, and enclosing a piece of ground of several acres in extent. Besides this, there is an inner wall. From the center of this enclosed ground rises a rectangular, four-story building, sixty or eighty yards square, with a turret at each corner, and with walls fifteen feet thick. This building is called the White Tower. It was at one time a palace for the crowned heads of England, but was finally vacated by them for brighter and pleasanter abodes. It then became a prison for people of consequence, while under its shadow two places of execution were established, where the very best blood of England and Scotland was made to flow. It was in this central building that Sir Walter Raleigh was confined. And it was underneath the steps of the southern stairway of this same building that the skeletons of the two young princes, murdered by Richard the Third, were found. A slab in the wall announces the fact. They were killed in what is called the Bloody Tower, but were buried by Richard, as described, in the White Tower. The place is now used as a garrison, while the apartments, and council chamber, and great banqueting-hall of a departed royalty, have been transformed into magazines, armories, and a museum containing antiquities, relics, and interesting objects of all kinds. Among the mournful and painful things to be seen, is the cloak on which Gen. Wolfe died in front of Quebec, a genuine thumb-screw, a model of the "rack," and the beheading axe and block upon which Lord Kilmarnock and others were executed. The axe has a blade eighteen inches broad, the headsman’s iron mask is near it, while the block is hollowed out in front and rear for the reception of the breast on one side, and the drooping of the face on the other. This hollowing reduces the top edge of the block to a narrow strip of three inches in width, on which the neck is laid. On that strip I observed, with a sick feeling at the heart, two deep gashes in the wood. They needed no explanation!

Between the central building and the western wall, in almost the center of the court yard, is the spot where condemned females were beheaded. A stone slab marks the spot. Here Anne Boleyn, and Catharine, and Lady Jane Gray were executed. I took a seat under a tree and gave myself up to reflection. I have walked amid so many sepulchres lately, and marked the spots signalizing so many cruelties and atrocities of men, that the soul was powerless to shake off a spirit of deep pensiveness. I conjured up the scene, as, one by one, at different periods, these lovely women stood there confronting the heartless crowd, the ghastly block and axe, the masked headsman, and the grave and eternity. How the innocence and helplessness of the woman appealed from the brutality and injustice of man to the merciful God! And how I feel He, in infinite pity drew near them at the trying hour! In a small chapel, thirty yards from where I sit, lie side by side, the bodies of the two murdered wives of Henry the Eighth. Verily, when this same Henry entered at death into perdition, Satan felt moved to resign and give him the throne! I firmly believe that there are some men who actually startle and horrify the devils. I foresee a revolution and strife in hell, before which the Miltonic angel war fades into insignificance.

I remarked that only females were executed in the walls of the tower. The men were beheaded on Tower Hill, fully one hundred yards outside the walls. Lady Jane Gray and her husband were beheaded the same day. They were, as you know, a devoted couple. He was confined in Beauchamps Tower, and she in an adjoining house. I was shown the window through which she was looking when she saw the lifeless body of her husband brought in from Tower Hill. As my eyes followed the pointed finger of the guide to the window, it seemed that I could feel, even then, after the long lapse of time, that gaze of unutterable agony. In a few minutes she was led to the block herself, and the husband and wife were reunited. Has this chapter been of rather a gloomy nature? Then will I conclude it with a brief description of a visit I paid to "The Country Churchyard," where Gray wrote his elegy, and where he lies buried. The spot is thirty miles northwest of London, and about six east of Windsor. I went out in the evening, as being an appropriate time. Leaving the train at a town called Slough, I hired a cab and rode two miles to the immortalized place. Over a country of a table-like level, through pleasant lanes bordered with fields of grain, and by meadows on which I noticed grazing "the lowing herd," we went quietly and musingly along. By and by the road became lined with beech trees; then it turned down a lane thickly bordered with firs, and, bending sharply again, ran several hundred yards through an avenue of elm trees of largest size, whose interlacing boughs cast a deep, cool shadow underneath. A little farther on, and the driver stopped at a closed gate in a hedge, over which I could see a meadow, some portions of a field, a clump of trees, and a church spire. The driver was not allowed to go farther, and informed me that I must pursue the rest of the way by myself. It was in perfect keeping with my feelings so to do. Taking the path, I walked over the meadow and stood by the gate, studying the features of the "country churchyard" before me. The enclosure is studded with trees, and is surrounded by them as well. A little to one side is the church building, a structure of dark stone, with Gothic roof, and with a large, square tower at its side, rising up, at least, fifteen feet above the edge of the roof. The tower is covered from top to bottom with ivy. It was from this ivy-mantled tower that the owl hooted to the moon in complaint. As I look, facing west, upon the scene, the church is a little to the right, while to the left hand, in the small yard, and but a few steps from the building, is the "yew tree" mentioned in the poem. The elms are more numerous.

"Beneath those rugged elms that yew tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap."

It is all just as he wrote. Under the wide, drooping boughs of the yew tree I noticed not less than fifty graves. It is worthy of note that there is but one yew tree in the church yard, and if the poem is examined, it will be noticed that but one is mentioned. This faithfulness to facts and correctness of description strikes the heart of the observer very gratefully. Turning your back upon the enclosure, and looking east, your eyes fall upon the scene that is described in the stanza beginning, "hard by you wood."

Looking in several directions you get views of open, grassy fields, over which the poet saw "the plowman plod," "the lowing herd wind its way," "the glimmering landscape fade," while his ear caught "the drowsy tinkling from the distant fold."

Certainly it is fitting that Thomas Gray should be buried in the midst of scenes whose quiet beauty he has made by his genius a priceless legacy to the world. He lies in a tomb by the side of his mother, near the church, between "the yew tree’s shade" and "the ivy-mantled tower."

I have never left a place with greater reluctance than this. The rooks were cawing on the tree-tops. The sun was going down in the west. It was at such an hour that Gray viewed the scene, and; walking about in the gloaming, moulded the lines of such unparalleled melody and beauty. I walked away, and lingered, turning often to take one other farewell look. And so I finally left the place; but in my soul I bore away the lovely scene with me as a precious possession forever.

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