Monuments: The Royal Peculiar

The 18th century English essayist Joseph Addison called it a “great magazine of mortality.” For the British people, London’s Westminster Abbey is also a monument of national immortality. Next week its bells will ring out to celebrate its 900th birthday. Built by Edward the Confessor on a filled-in island of thorn in the Thames River, it has over the centuries become a pantheon, the sacred environs where an enlightened empire crowns its kings and queens, and where common folk can pray. With its crowded multitude of funeral statuary, the Abbey is a kind of spiritual attic containing mementos of whatever is forever England.

A relic of the monasteries that Henry VIII abolished in 1540, the Abbey is now called the Collegiate Church of St. Peter in Westminster. Serving also as a school, the Abbey has an adjacent cloister, a museum and a deanery. From its schoolchildren—including Dryden, Milne, John Gielgud and Peter Ustinov—have come seven Prime Ministers, ten archbishops and at least four convicted murderers.

Balconies for Viewing. Most of all, Westminster Abbey has taught more than 30 generations what England is. Now, at a cost of $1,120,000 and ten years’ labor, the Perpendicular Gothic pillars and spires stand renewed, the vaults and tombs are freshly polychromed (see color pages). The Abbey is actually under the jurisdiction of the Crown, that is, the English people, rather than under the sole rule of the church. When Elizabeth II comes next week to her “Royal Peculiar,” she will come for the plain song and preaching more as just another communicant than as head of church and state.

As a church, Westminster Abbey has its macabre shadows. Legend holds that the skins of marauding Danes were tacked to its ancient doors. Although nobody has been murdered within, Richard II once struck down the Earl of Salisbury during a funeral service for Richard’s first wife. So in love with her was he that every noble in the land was ordered to attend. When the earl stooped from fatigue, the King bludgeoned him to the floor. As a work of architecture, the church boasts a 103-ft.-tall nave that is the loftiest example of Gothic architecture in Great Britain. More French by inspiration than any other English Gothic church, the Abbey has one feature that is missing in France’s cathedrals—a wide viewing-gallery atop its first level. One reason: the Abbey is a royal church; extra room for viewing of royal ceremonies has always been at a premium.

Undertakers’ Upholstery. As a pantheon, the Abbey is an incredible clutter. After a shrine was built to honor Edward the Confessor in the Abbey, British nobility rushed to be buried there. As a result, visitors today bump into tombs at every turn. William Morris called the funereal sculptures (see overleaf) “pieces of undertakers’ upholstery.” Ruskin labeled them “ignoble, incoherent fillings of the aisles.”

Charles Dickens sniped at such obsequies when he wrote of “the full-length engraving of the sublime Snigworth, snorting at a Corinthian column, with an enormous roll of paper at his feet, and a heavy curtain going to tumble down on his head; those accessories being understood to represent the noble lord in the act of saving his country.” Dickens himself lies in circumstances of the kind that he once mocked.

“Victory or Westminster Abbey!” cried Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797. He knew that in the monumental heap of well-chiseled stone and marble lay the heroes of his nation. An Unknown Soldier from World War I lies beneath the Abbey’s roof. In the rear of Henry VII’s centuries-old chapel glows a brilliant, stained-glass window reflecting the Royal Air Force’s stand during the Battle of Britain. But to the enduring honor of England, more than military pomp and glory is recognized. The Abbey is also a national grave for the composer Purcell, the scientists Newton, Darwin and Kelvin. In Poets’ Corner lie a score more than Keats, Tennyson and Browning. There is even a modern Epstein bust of Blake.

On occasions when the Abbey is not crowded, it is a tranquil haven. At other times, it is an album of remembrance littered with memorabilia in stone, a storehouse of history. The historian Macaulay called the Abbey a “temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of a thousand years lie buried.” It is Valhalla, Arlington Cemetery, the tombs on Red Square, a combination of Paris’ Pantheon and the Montparnasse Cemetery. After nine centuries, it remains a silent place full of lost hope and renewed energy.