Westminster Abbey | Page 3

and the lower part of the shrine was reconstructed by the daughter of the sovereign to whom the devastation was due; to her also we owe the wooden top, which replaced the glorious golden feretory. The monastic community, who were restored to their home by the same {6} Queen, the "bloody" Mary of Protestant history, survived a few years longer into the days of Elizabeth, and the former intimate connection between the Crown and the convent, severed with the final dismissal of the Abbot and monks, found a pale reflection in the friendship which Elizabeth always showed to the Dean of her new foundation. But the Maiden Queen was in very deed the last royal person to whom Westminster Abbey owed substantial benefits. She refounded the collegiate church, which finally took the place of the monastery, and established Westminster School; before her reign the only boys taught within the precincts were the few scholars collected in the cloisters by the monks. She is, in fact, the foundress of St. Peter's College, which thus owes its status as a royal foundation to Queen Elizabeth.
Very rarely, however, in modern days has the church or the college been honoured with a visit from the reigning sovereign in propria persona. At great functions, such as public funerals, the heir-apparent is occasionally present, but the Crown is usually represented by a Court official, and the Dean's stall, which is only vacated for the reigning king or queen, has been occupied on very rare occasions in the last hundred years. The Latin {7} play acted by the Westminster scholars every winter term, was formerly a gala occasion on which royalty used often to be present, but the old custom was gradually dropped. In the year 1903, for the first time within the memory of this generation, a royal person, H.R.H. the Duchess of Argyll, was present at the performance.
With the last of the Tudors there is no doubt that the strong and living bond between the palace and the Abbey was slackened, although it has never been altogether snapped, nor will it be as long as the coronation of our sovereigns continues to take place in Westminster Abbey. Then and then only does the king resume all his ancient rights, the collegiate body is practically deposed, and people realise that their national church is really a royal peculiar. For while the kings came less and less to St. Edward's shrine, their subjects in ever-increasing numbers, like the pilgrims in olden times, were and are drawn hither as by a magnet, till Westminster has become the sanctuary of a nation, and is no longer the sepulchre of the seed royal. A plain English squire, one of that "happy breed of men" to whom his native land--"this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea"--was dearer than the blood of kings, was destined to inaugurate a new epoch in the {8} annals of the Abbey. To this man, Oliver Cromwell, it is that we owe the first conception of this church as a fitting burial-place for our national worthies. From the State obsequies of Admiral Blake, which were held here by Cromwell's command, has germinated the seed which has borne fruit in the public funerals and in the monuments, ordered and paid for by Parliament, of statesmen, soldiers and sailors. The nineteenth century has closed, and there is little space available in the Abbey for the worthies of the twentieth, but the national feeling still turns instinctively to Westminster on the death of a great man. For a long time past memorial services have been substituted for the grave or cenotaph, so lavishly granted to practically the first comer only a hundred years ago. Yet although the material fabric of this ancient foundation can no longer receive her sons within her bosom, her spirit is perhaps more alive than it has ever been since her altars were demolished and the images of her saints torn from their high places. No longer do the smoke of innumerable candles and the fumes of incense blacken and obscure her arches, but the spiritual breath of supplication and of thanksgiving still as of yore ascends to heaven from this ancient church, consecrated by the prayers of so many {9} past generations. The old order has changed, and a Protestant form of worship has long taken the place of the florid mass; what further changes the future has in store no man can prophesy. But at present churchmen of all shades of religious feeling may worship in this church with no extreme ritual to disturb their minds, and at the same time with none of that irreverent and jarring carelessness in the ordering of the services which vexed the souls of many in the days long ago, before any of the