3. Importance of the Royal Deaths. the steep heights of St. Michael and of the Superga. The early Kings of Ireland reposed in the now deserted mounds of Clonmacnoise,' by the lonely windings of the Shannon, as the early Kings of Scotland on the distant and sea-girt rock of Iona. The Kings of France not only were not crowned at St. Denys, but they never lived there-never came there. The town was a city of convents. Louis XIV. chose Versailles for his residence, because from the terrace at St. Germains he could still see the hated towers of the Abbey where he would be laid. But the Kings of England never seem to have feared the sight of death. The Anglo-Saxon Kings had for the most part been buried at Winchester, where they were crowned, and where they lived. English Kings, as soon as they became truly English, were crowned, and lived, and died, for many generations, at Westminster; and, even since they have been interred elsewhere, it is still under the shadow of their grandest royal residence, in St. George's Chapel, or in the precincts of Windsor Castle. Their graves, like their thrones, were in the midst of their own life and of the life of their people.2 The There is also a peculiar concentration of interest attached to the deaths and funerals of Kings, in those days of our history with which we are here chiefly concerned. If the coronations of sovereigns were then far more important than they are now, so were their funeral pageants. The King 'never dies' is a constitutional maxim of which, except in very rare instances, the truth is at once recognised in all constitutional and in most modern monarchies. But in the Middle Ages, as has been truly remarked, the very reverse was the case. 'When the King died, the State seemed to die 1 How impressive the living splen'dour of the national mausoleum of England on the banks of the Thames, as compared with the neglected grave- 'Ireland on the banks of the Shannon.' Petrie's remarks on Clonmacnoise, quoted in his Life by Dr. Stokes (p. 33). 2 See Chapter IV. also. The functions of government were suspended. Felons 'were let loose from prison; for an offence against the law 'was also an offence against the King's person, which might 'die with him, or be wiped out in the contrite promises of his 'last agony. The spell of the King's peace became powerless. 'The nobles rushed to avenge their private quarrels in private 'warfare. On the royal forests, with their unpopular game, 'a universal attack was made. The highroads of commerce 'became perilous passes, or were obstructed; and a hundred ' vague schemes of ambition were concocted every day during 'which one could look on an empty throne and powerless 'tribunals.' In short, the funeral of the sovereign was the eclipse of the monarchy. Twice only, perhaps, in modern times has this feeling in any degree been reproduced, and then not in the case of the actual sovereign: once on the death of the queenlike Princess, Charlotte, and again on the death of the kinglike Prince, Albert. In those early times of England, there was another mean- 4. Publicity of the ing of more sinister import attached to the royal funerals. Funerals. They furnished the security to the successor that the predecessor was really dead. Till the time of Henry VII. the royal corpses lay in state, and were carried exposed on biers, to satisfy this popular demand. More than once the body of a King, who had died under doubtful circumstances, was laid out in St. Paul's or the Abbey, with the face exposed, or bare from the waist upwards, that the suspicion of violence might be dispelled.2 1 So William I.: 'Sicut opto salvari et per misericordiam Dei a meis rea'tibus absolvi, sic omnes mox carceres jubeo aperiri.' (Ordericus Vit.) Henry II.'s widow, for the sake of the soul of her Lord Henry,' had offenders of all kinds discharged from prison in every county in England. (Hoveden.) I owe these references, as well as the passage itself, to an unpub- 2 Richard II., Henry VI., Edward 5. Connexion of with the Services of the Church. There was yet beyond this a general sentiment, intensithe Burials fied by the religious feeling of the Middle Ages, which brought the funerals and tombs of princes more directly into connexion with the buildings where they were interred. The natural grief of a sovereign, or of a people, for the death of a beloved predecessor vents itself in the grandeur of the monuments which it raises over their graves. The sumptuous shrine on the coast of Caria, which Artemisia built for her husband Mausolus, and which has given its name to all similar structures-the magnificent Taj at Agra-the splendid memorials which commemorate the loss of the lamented Prince of our own day-are examples of the universality of this feeling, when it has the opportunity of indulging itself, under every form of creed and climate. But in the Middle Ages this received an additional impulse, from the desire on the part of the Kings, or their survivors, to establish through their monumental buildings and their funeral services, a hold, as it were, on the other world. The supposed date of the release of the soul of a Plantagenet King from Purgatory was recorded in the English chronicles with the same certainty as any event in his life. And to attain this endin proportion to the devotional sentiment, sometimes we must even say in proportion to the weaknesses and vices, of the King-services were multiplied and churches adorned at every stage of the funeral, and with a view to the remotest ages to which hope or fear could look forward. The desire to catch prayers by all means, at all times and places, for the departed soul, even led to the dismemberment of the royal corpse; that so, by a heart here, entrails there, and the remainder elsewhere, the chances of assistance beyond the grave might be doubled or trebled.2. Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, A.D. 1232 (in speaking of the vision of the release of Richard I. described by the Bishop of Rochester, in preaching at Sittingbourne). I owe the reference to Professor Vaughan. 2 Arch. xxix. 181. The sepulchral character of Westminster Abbey thus became the frame on which its very structure depended. In its successive adornments and enlargements, the minds of its royal patrons sought their permanent expression, because they regarded it as enshrining the supreme act of their lives. The arrangements of an ancient temple were, as has been well remarked, from its sacrificial purpose, those of a vast slaughter-house; the arrangements of a Dominican church or modern Nonconformist chapel are those of a vast preachinghouse; the arrangements of Westminster Abbey gradually became those of a vast tomb-house. Sebert and The first beginning of the Royal Burials at Westminster is uncertain. Sebert and Ethelgoda were believed to lie by the entrance of the Chapter House. A faint tradition speaks of the interment of Harold Harefoot in Westminster.2 But Harold Harefoot. his body was dug up by Hardicanute, decapitated, and afterwards cast into the adjacent marsh or into the Thames, and then buried by the Danes in their graveyard, where now stands the Church of St. Clement Danes. It was the grave of Edward Edward the Confessor which eventually drew the other royal fessor. sepulchres around it.3 Such a result of the burial of a royal saint or hero has been almost universal. But though his charters enumerate the royal sepultures as amongst the privileges of Westminster, the custom grew but slowly. In the first instance, it may have indicated no more than his personal desire to be interred in the edifice whose building he had watched with so much anxious care; and his Norman successors were 1 See Chapter I. 2 Saxon Chron. A.D. 1040; Widmore, p. 11. So the grave of St. Columba at Iona, and the grave of St. Margaret at. Dunfermline, became the centres of the sepultures of the Kings of Scotland: so the interment of William the Silent by the accidental scene of his murder at Delft drew round it the the Con William Richard I. John buried on the same principle, each in his own favourite sanctuary, unless some special cause intervened. The Conqueror was buried at Caen, in the abbey which he had dedicated to St. Stephen; William Rufus at Winchester,' from his sudden death in the neighbouring forest; Henry I. at Reading, in the abbey founded out of his father's treasure for his father's soul; Stephen in his abbey at Faversham; Henry II.2 in the great Angevin Abbey of Fontevrault (the foundation of Robert Arbrissel by the fountain of the robber Evrard'). His eldest son Henry was buried at Rouen. In that same city, because it was so hearty and cordial to him,3 was laid the large lion heart' of Richard; whilst his bowels, as his least honoured parts, lay among the Poitevins, whom he least honoured, at Chaluz, where he was killed. But his body rested at Fontevrault, at his father's feet--in token of sorrow for his unfilial conduct, to be, as it were, his father's footstool 5-in the robes which he had worn at his second coronation at Winchester.6 John's wife, Isabella, was interred at Fontevrault, and his own heart was placed there in a golden cup; but he himself was laid at Worcester, for a singularly characteristic reason. With that union of superstition and profaneness so common in the religious belief of the Middle Ages, he was anxious to elude after death the 1 Ord. Vit. (A.D. 1110), x. 14, by a confusion makes it Westminster. 2 Rishanger, p. 428; Hoveden, p. 654. 3 Fuller's Church History, A.D. 1189. ♦ Grossitudine præstans. See Arch. xxix. 210. In a work published at Angers in 1866 (L'Abbaye de Fontevrault, Notice Historique, p. 76), by Lieut. Malifaud, it is stated that the bones of Richard I., gathered together by an inhabitant of Fontevrault, on the spoliation of the tombs in 1793, were given to England, et reposent aujourd'hui dans |