This here's the cap of General Monk! Sir, please put summut in.-Barham, Ingoldsby Legends. This kind of exhibition was found so profitable to the Minor Canons and Lay Vicars, that they manufactured effigies (such as those of the great Earl of Chatham and Lord Nelson) to add to the popularity of their series. Another time he [Dr. Barrow] preached at the Abbey on a holiday. Here I must inform the reader that it is a custom for the servants of the church upon all Holidays, Sundays excepted, betwixt the Sermon and Evening Prayers, to show the Tombs and Effigies of the Kings and Queens in Wax, to the meaner sort of people, who then flock thither from all the corners of the town, and pay their twopence to see The Play of the Dead Volks, as I have heard a Devonshire Clown most improperly call it. These perceiving Dr. Barrow in the pulpit after the hour was past, and fearing to lose that time in hearing which they thought they could more profitably employ in receiving—these, I say, became impatient, and caused the organ to be struck up against him, and would not give over playing till they had blow'd him down.-Dr. Pope's Life of Seth Ward, 12mo, 1697, p. 147. Many of the effigies, for the most part very dilapidated, are preserved in the wainscot presses over the Islip Chapel, and only shown by special permission. Now leave the interior of the Abbey, for the purpose of visiting the Cloisters, walking through St. Margaret's churchyard, and entering Dean's Yard, where, on the left, next the west front of the Abbey, is the Jerusalem Chamber, in which King Henry IV. died. King Henry. Doth any name particular belong Unto the lodging where I first did swoon? Warwick. 'Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord. King Henry. Laud be to God!—even there my life must end. It hath been prophesied to me many years, I should not die but in Jerusalem; Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land :— But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie ; In that Jerusalem shall Harry die. Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry IV. It was of old the Abbot's private withdrawing room, with doors leading to the refectory and the garden. After the dissolution of the Abbey and the appropriation of the Chapter House to national purposes, the Jerusalem Chamber became the place where the Dean and Chapter met to discuss their business matters. Occasionally it was used for the reception of distinguished guests and for holiday festivals. Conferences were held in it, and in it met the famous Assembly of Divines. Out of these walls came the Directory, the Longer and Shorter Catechism, and that famous Confession of Faith which, alone within these Islands, was imposed by law on the whole kingdom; and which alone of all Protestant Confessions, still, in spite of its sternness and narrowness, retains a hold in the minds of its adherents, to which its fervour and its logical coherence in some measure entitle it.—Stanley, P. 467. Here were held conferences and convocations of bishops and clergy, here met the commissioners for the revision of the Liturgy, and here the Prayer Book received its final form, and here in our own day have sat that band of learned theologians and philologists who were occupied in the grave task of revising the received translation of the Old and New Testaments. Convocation has met here since its renewal in 1854. Another purpose to which the Jerusalem Chamber was formerly applied, and which has invested it with associations very different to those just mentioned, was that of being the occasional depository of the bodies of eminent persons about to be buried in the Abbey. Here lay in solemn state the famous anti-puritan pulpit wit Robert South; Sir Isaac Newton; and for the days before the torchlight procession at dead of night to the grave in Henry VII.'s chapel, Joseph Addison. The South Cloister may be entered from a door in the south aisle of the nave, or from Dean's Yard. The cloisters were the cemetery of the abbots, the centre or open space that of the monks. In the south cloister are effigies of several of the early abbots. A large blue stone, uninscribed, marks the grave, it is said, of Long Meg of Westminster, a noted virago of the reign of Henry VIII. Note the quaint epitaph in verse, in north cloister, to William Lawrence, by Thomas Randolph. Monument, in east cloister, to Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, murdered in the reign of Charles II. In the east cloister is a tablet to the mother of Addison. Monument, in east cloister, to Lieutenant-General Withers, with epitaph by Pope. Monument, in west cloister, to George Vertue, the antiquary and engraver. Medallion monument to Bonnell Thornton, editor of the Connoisseur-inscription by Joseph Warton. In the west cloister is a monument by T. Banks, R.A., to William Woollett, the engraver (buried at St. Pancras). Tablet to Dr. Buchan (west cloister), author of a work on Domestic Medicine (d. 1805). "Under a blue marble stone, against the first pillar in the east ambulatory," Aphra Behn was buried, April 20, 1689, and alongside of her, in fitting companionship, the scurrilous wit Tom Brown. Under stones no longer carrying inscriptions, are buried Henry Lawes, "one who called Milton friend;" Betterton, the great actor; Mrs. Bracegirdle, the beautiful actress; and Samuel Foote, the famous comedian. At the south-east corner of the cloister are remains of the Confessor's buildings, including the Chapel of the Pyx, an interesting specimen of the earliest AngloNorman architecture; it was of old a treasury office, and still permission to enter the building can only be obtained through the Lords of the Treasury. A small wooden door, in the south cloister, leads to Ashburnham House, and the richly ornamented doorway in the east cloister to the Chapter House. This is open to the public, and should by all means be visited. [See Ashburnham House; Chapter House; Sanctuary.] The hours of Divine Service are: Sundays, 8 A.M., IO A.M., and 3 P.M., also at certain seasons 7 P.M. (in choir or nave); Week-days, 8.30 A.M., 9 A.M. (Westminster School Service), 10 A.M., and 3 P.M. The chapels are open free on Mondays and Tuesdays. Westminster Bridge, the second stone bridge in point of time over the Thames at London. When we read in our old writers-and the allusions are common enough—of Ivy Bridge, Strand Bridge, Whitehall Bridge, Westminster Bridge, and Lambeth Bridge, landing piers alone are meant. Ralph Morice, Archbishop Cranmer's secretary, "went over" from Lambeth "unto Westminster Bridge with a sculler, where he entered into a wherry that went to London, wherein were four of the Gard, who meant to land at Paules Wharfe, and to passe by the King's highnesse, who then was in his barge, with a great number of barges and boates about him, then baiting of beares in the water over against the bank."-Fox, Mart. ed. 1597, p. 1081. Latimer in preaching to Edward VI., April 12, 1549, on Christ's words to Peter, says, "I dar saye there is never a wherriman at Westminster Bridge but he can answere to thys;" and the Order of Crowning of James I. and Anne of Denmark opens with, "The King and Queen came from Westminster Bridge to the West door of the Minster Church." Great opposition was made by the citizens of London to a second bridge over the Thames, at or even near London; and in 1671, when a bill for building a bridge over the Thames at Putney was read, a curious debate took place, recorded by Grey (vol. i. p. 415). was rejected, fifty-four voting for it and sixty-seven against it. The Bill The Act for constructing a bridge from Old Palace Yard, Westminster, to the opposite shore in Surrey was passed in 1736. The architect employed to construct it was Charles Labelye, a native of Switzerland, naturalised in England. The first stone was laid January 29, 1738-1739, and the bridge first opened for foot-passengers, horses, etc., November 18, 1750. It was 1223 feet long and 44 feet wide, and consisted of thirteen semicircular arches, the centre being 76 feet span, as well as a small one at each end. The piers were built on caissons or rafts of timber, which were floated to the spot destined for them. It was originally surmounted by a lofty parapet, which M. Grosley, a French traveller, has gravely asserted was placed there in order to prevent the English propensity to suicide. It was on this bridge that Wordsworth wrote his famous sonnet COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER Bridge, Earth has not anything to show more fair : Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still. When Gibbon lost his place at the Board of Trade, and again set out for Lausanne to finish the Decline and Fall, he says, VOL. III "As my 2 I post-chaise moved over Westminster Bridge, I bade a long farewell to the fumum et opes strepitumque Roma." Crabbe, the night after he left his letter at Burke's door, "walked Westminster Bridge backwards and forwards until daylight." Burke's reply saved him from suicide. The soil was deepened or washed away after London Bridge was removed, and in consequence ten piers settled down. In 1846, it was found necessary to close the bridge entirely, until it could be lightened of much superincumbent material and fitted to serve as a temporary structure. During six and thirty years upwards of £200,000 are said to have been spent on its maintenance and repairs. After many delays a new bridge was commenced, May 1854, from the designs of Mr. Thomas Page, C.E. As it was to be of unusual width, the engineer conceived the bold plan of constructing in the first instance one half the bridge (about 40 feet in width) from end to end, and opening it for traffic while the other was being built. Owing to obstructions and a temporary suspension of the works, the first half was not opened for traffic till March 1860. The second half was completed and formally opened at four o'clock in the morning of May 24, 1862, "that being the day and hour on which her Majesty was born" in 1819. The present bridge is 1160 feet long and 85 feet wide, and so nearly level that the rise in the centre is little over 5 feet. It consists of seven low segmental wrought and cast iron arches - the central arch 120 feet in span, and the shore arches 95 feet-borne on granite piers. The foundations of each pier are formed by 145 bearing piles driven through the gravel to an average depth of nearly 30 feet into the London clay, and around them 44 cast-iron cylinder piles and as many sheeting plates, forming a sort of permanent coffer-dam, the intermediate spaces and area up to low water level being filled with a concrete of hydraulic lime. A base course of blocks of granite was laid on this, and then the pier carried up, the core of brick, the casing granite. The total cost of the bridge did not exceed £250,000. From Westminster Bridge is obtained the best view of the Houses of Parliament; their towers, mingling with those of Westminster Abbey, stand out grandly as the bridge is crossed from the Surrey side. The river front of the Houses on the one hand and St. Thomas's Hospital and Lambeth Palace on the other, are well seen from the south side of the bridge. Westminster Bridge Road extends from Westminster Bridge to the Obelisk, Blackfriars Road. In this road, on the south side, is the entrance to St. Thomas's Hospital, Sanger's Amphitheatre (late Astley's), Canterbury Theatre of Varieties (late Canterbury Hall), and Christ Church, the handsome successor of Rowland Hill's Surrey Chapel. On the north side are some houses, on one of which (No. 266) is a stone inscribed "Coade's Row, 1798." The name was given from its neighbourhood to Coade's manufactory of artificial stone, situated in Narrow Wall (now Belvedere Road), and at one time an establishment of much merit. Westminster Hall, the old hall of the palace of our kings at Westminster, incorporated by Sir Charles Barry into the new Houses of Parliament, to serve as their vestibule. It was originally built in the reign of William Rufus, and is supposed to have been a nave and aisles divided by timber ports; and during the refacing of the outer walls, a Norman arcade of the time of Rufus was uncovered, but destroyed. Rufus's Hall was intended as the commencement of a new Westminster Palace to supersede that of Edward the Confessor. The present hall was formed 1397-1399 (in the last three years of Richard II.), when the walls were carried up 2 feet higher, the windows altered, and a stately porch and new roof constructed according to the design of Master Henry de Yeveley, master mason. The stone moulding or string-course that runs round the hall preserves the white hart couchant, the favourite device of Richard II. The roof, with its hammer beams (carved with angels), is of oak, and the finest of its kind in this country. Fuller speaks of its "cobwebless beams," alluding to the vulgar belief that it was built of a particular kind of wood (Irish oak) in which spiders cannot live.1 The early Parliaments, and the still earlier Grand Councils, were often held in this hall. The Law Courts of England were of old held in the open hall; the Exchequer Court at the entrance end, and the Courts of Chancery and Kings at the opposite end; and here, in certain courts built by Sir John Soane, on the west of the hall, they continued to be held until the opening of the New Law Courts in 1882. These courts were the Court of Chancery, in which the Lord Chancellor sat; the Court of Queen's Bench, in which the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench 2 sat; the Court of Common Pleas, presided over by a Lord Chief Justice, and called by Coke "the pillow whereon the attorney doth rest his head"; and the Court of Exchequer, presided over by a Lord Chief Baron. The name Westminster Hall was not unfrequently used for the law itself. Whatever Bishops do otherwise than the Law permits, Westminster Hall can control or send them to absolve.-Selden's Table Talk. When Peter the Great was taken into Westminster Hall, he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He was answered they are lawyers. "Lawyers!" said he, with a face of astonishment: "why, I have but two in my whole dominions, and I believe I shall hang one of them the moment I get home." "3 It is reported that John Whiddon, a Justice of the Court of King's Bench in I Mariæ, was the first of the Judges who rode to Westminster Hall on a Horse or Gelding; for before that time they rode on mules.—Dugdale's Orig. Jur. ed. 1680, p. 38. Manly. I hate this place [Westminster Hall] worse than a man that has inherited a Chancery suit: I wish I were well out on't again. Freeman. Why, you need not be afraid of this place; for a man without money 1 Ned Ward's London Spy, part viii. 2 Sir Edward Coke was the last Lord Chief Justice of England. His successor was Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. 3 Fog's Journal, quoted in Gentleman's Magazine, 1737, p. 293. |