holy company of heaven-that is to say, angels, archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confes'sors, and virgins,' to whose singular mediation and prayers 'he also trusted,' including the royal saints of Britain, St. Edward, St. Edmund, St. Oswald, St. Margaret of Scotland, who stand, as he directed, sculptured, tier above tier, on every side of the Chapel; some retained from the ancient Lady Chapel; the greater part the work of his own age. Round his tomb stand his nine accustomed Avours or 'guardian saints,' to whom he calls and cries'- 'St. 'Michael, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, 'St. George, St. Anthony, St. Edward, St. Vincent, St. Anne, 1 St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Barbara,' each with their peculiar emblems, so to aid, succour, and defend him, 'that the ancient and ghostly enemy, nor none other evil or damnable spirit, have no power to invade him, nor with ' their wickedness to annoy him, but with holy prayers to 'be intercessors for him to his Maker and Redeemer.' 2 These were the adjurations of the last mediæval King, as the Chapel was the climax of the latest mediæval architecture. In the very urgency of the King's anxiety for the perpetuity of those funeral ceremonies, we seem to discern an unconscious presentiment of terror lest their days were numbered. But, although in this sense the Chapel hangs on tenaciously to the skirts of the ancient Abbey and the ancient Church, yet that solemn architectural pause between the two-which arrests the most careless observer, and renders it a separate structure, a foundation adjoining the Abbey,' rather than forming part of it --corresponds with marvellous fidelity to the pause and break in English history of which Henry VII.'s reign is the expression. It is the close of the Middle Ages: 1 For the enumeration of these see Neale, ii. 39. 2 Will of Henry VII. (Neale, ii. 6, 7). Neale, i. 18. For the Bulls relating to the Chapel, see Dugdale, i. 316-320. The close of the classical Middle already Ages. of the Civil the apple of Granada in its ornaments shows that the last Crusade was over; its flowing draperies and attitudes indicate that the Renaissance had begun. It is the end of the Wars of the Roses, com- The close bining Henry's right of conquest with his fragile claim of Wars. hereditary descent. On the one hand, it is the glorification of the victory of Bosworth. The angels, at the four corners of the tomb, held or hold the likeness of the crown which he won on that famous day. In the stained-glass we see the same crown hanging on the green bush in the fields of Leicestershire. On the other hand, like the Chapel of King's College at Cambridge, it asserts everywhere the memory of the holy Henry's shade;' the Red Rose of Lancaster appears in every pane of glass: and in every corner is the Portcullis the Altera securitas,'1 as he termed it, with an allusion to its own meaning, and the double safeguard of his successionwhich he derived through John of Gaunt from the Beaufort Castle in Anjou, inherited from Blanche of Navarre by Edmund Crouchback ;2 whilst Edward IV. and Elizabeth of York are commemorated by intertwining these Lancastrian symbols with the Greyhound of Cecilia Neville, wife of Richard Duke of York, with the Rose in the Sun, which scattered the mists at Barnet, and the Falcon on the Fetter-lock,3 by which the first Duke of York expressed to his descendants that ‘he 'was locked up from the hope of the kingdom, but advising 'them to be quiet and silent, as God knoweth what may 6 come to pass.' of the It is also the revival of the ancient, Celtic, British element The revival in the English monarchy, after centuries of eclipse. It is Celtic a strange and striking thought, as we mount the steps of races. 'Neale (part ii.), i. 28; Biog. Brit. ii. 669; Roberts, ii. 257. 2 Stow, p. 11. He built his castle in the form of a fetterlock, and gave to his sons, who asked the Latin for fetterlock,' the The beginning of modern Henry VII.'s Chapel, that we enter there a mausoleum of princes, whose boast it was to be descended, not from the Confessor or the Conqueror, but from Arthur and Llewellyn ;' and that round about the tomb, side by side with the emblems of the great English Houses, is to be seen the Red Dragon' of the last British king, Cadwallader- the dragon of the 'great Pendragonship' of Wales, thrust forward by the Tudor king in every direction, to supplant the hated White Boar3 of his departed enemy-the fulfilment, in another sense than the old Welsh bards had dreamt, of their prediction that the progeny of Cadwallader should reign again : Visions of glory, spare my aching sight— Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul— No more our long-lost Arthur we bewail: All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue hail ! These noble lines well introduce us to the great Chapel which, as far as the Royal Tombs of the Abbey are concerned, England. contains within itself the whole future history of England. Jan. 24, 1503. Building of the Chapel. The Tudor sovereigns, uniting the quick understanding and fiery temper of their ancient Celtic lineage with the iron will of the Plantagenets, were the fit inaugurators of the new birth of England at that critical season for guiding and stimulating the Church and nation to the performance of new duties, the fulfilment of new hopes, the apprehension of new truths. In the eighteenth year of his reign, on the 24th day of January, at a quarter of an hour before three of the clock, at ' afternoon of the same day," the first stone of the new Chapel was laid by Abbot Islip, Sir Reginald Bray the architect, and Owen Tudor, the brother of Edmund, who was a monk in the Abbey, was buried in the Chapel of St. Blaize. (Crull, p. 233.) 2 Grafton, ii. 158.-The banner of the Red Dragon of Cadwallader, on white and green silk, was carried at Bosworth. Hence the Rouge Dragon Herald. Roberts's York and Lancaster, ii. 461, 463. Neale, ii. 6; Holinshed, iii. 529. |