Day Four-Westminster Abbey

So when I had planned to come to the conference, there was a glaring part of the afternoon and evening where there were no talks of interest.   So I had previously decided that this was my big day to go touring.  Based on conversation with my brother TD, I had decided that I should prioritize going inside Westminster Abbey over the Tower of London.  So I took the tube to Westminster, paid my L16 and took the tour of the abbey.  The Abbey is incredibly beautiful on the inside.  Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures.  

So all the pictures posted here come from the Abbey website . (And probably without AM’s camera, I couldn’t have captured it very well anyway.) 

From the V&A I had come to appreciate how good the British were with stained glass and the Abbey has extremely beautiful examples throughout.  The glass with the incredibly high gothic arches is really just incredibly beautiful.  Although I could see several electric lights, almost all the lighting came from natural sunlight. It was simply spectacular.

I also really like the choir section.  (There was no choir when I was there.  Before I ended up with enough time to take the tour, I had considered just going to EvenSong so I could at least go inside the Abbey.)

 

The Abbey is perhaps most famous as the place where Kings and Queens are crowned and buried, as well as notable people.   The High Alter shown is were these coronations and weddings take place. The actual coronation chair is kept in a room at the back of the nave, and is clearly very, very old.  The Stone of Scone is returned from Scotland and placed in the chair when coronations take place. The words on the back of the alter says "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ".  Since Henry VIII, of course, the King or Queen serves as the head of the Anglican Church, so I'm sure that Henry or one of his descendants is responsible for that quote.

 

The Abbey is the final resting place of literally hundreds of extremely famous people and then there are monuments to even more.  One thing for sure, there are lot people (baron, dukes, etc…) who have huge monuments who I think few remember or care about and then there are really important people who didn’t need someone to put up a million pounds to get them into the elite Westminster Abbey club and have much more modest tombstones or monuments.

Henry VII Lady's Chapel surrounded by seats for Knights of the Bath

Edward the Confessor tomb

 Of course the biggest monuments are for the royals: Edward the Confessor, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots (Lizzy's rival that Lizzy executed but her son restored to a prominent monument), Henry III, Charles the first (Longshanks), etc..  One effect of going through the Abbey is that after going through the Abbey, I found I actually cared to get to know much more about these people who I had longed ignored. So I picked up a little red book that gave an incredibly condensed version of the history of English royalty.  I found this quite interesting and suddenly a whole bunch more of history made sense.  The book gave a great summary of the slow evolution of democracy in Great Britain and changes in the power of the royalty in response to the various issues, challenges, and external threats the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland faced.

 Before becoming actually interested in the royalty, I was mostly focusing on those whose meritorious achievement gained them burial in Westminster. Some graves and monuments that I took particular note of:  Charles Darwin (early in the tour and slightly separated from all the other scientists...kind of like the Abbey wasn’t sure what to do with him...although in thinking about it now, he is not actually that separated, its more of how the tour goes thru that makes it seem that way.) Isaac Newton (who gets a huge monument as well on the outer section of the choir screen.) Lord Kelvin, Thomson (discover of the electron), Lyell, Maxwell (Maxwell equations relating the six quantum mechanical properties).

Scientist's Corner is on the left, near the Newton monument of the choir screen. Each black "tile" is a tombstone.

 In poet's corner, Geoffrey Chaucer, Handel (of Handel’s Messiah fame), Tennyson, Samuel Johnson, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling are buried here.  Others with memorials (they are buried elsewhere, usually their home village) include Milton, William Blake, W.H. Auden, Lewis Carroll (this triggered me to eventually buy a copy of Alice in Wonderland from the Tate Museum), T.S. Elliot and of course, an enormous one to Shakespeare (he is buried at Stratford).

 

A couple of other really moving places, the English equivalent to the Tomb of the Unknown solider at the far end of the Nave where an unknown solider from World War I and tons of soil from the battlefields of France were placed at the end of the   

 

Another place that was particularly moving was the RAF chapel. 

 

Interestingly, Oliver Cromwell was originally buried in this room of the abbey (for two years) until the Royalist and King Charles II came back to power and then they dug him up and post-humorously beheaded him. (The English certainly seem to have a lot of power issues.)

James Cook memorial is in together with Francis Drake and another explorer I had not heard of, kind of hard to see how he merited being with the other two.

I felt sorrow for those whose tomb stones have been stepped on so much that you can no longer read the names.  Some of these people have been there for 600-700 years.

I am not sure I can express very well how profoundly my tour through Westminster Abbey changed my view of the United Kingdom.  I had never really cared much for its continuing loyalty to royalty and thought of the rise of its Parliament as a simply a short transition to our far better constitutional government that they eventually have come to. Yet in walking through this living historical monument, and then in visiting other sites later in the evening, I became profoundly aware how much the history of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland is in fact the history of the United States and that we two nations are in fact simply cousins playing out the same historical background on two different continents.  So beyond just the pre-history, the shared heritage between what really are the modern worlds two oldest democracies became profoundly apparent.  It is no surprise that there is a large FDR memorial at the far end of Westminster Abbey.  In many ways, Roosevelt was as much an Englishman as Churchill.  A band of brothers.

I am now currently reading "The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and The Triumph of Anglo-America" by Kevin Phillips. His underlying thesis is that the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were simply continuations of an older power struggle of the English Civil War. Although some of his thesis makes sense, some seems harder to swallow, since French Catholicism was one of the main things Cromwell fought against, and clearly the American Revolutionary invited France into an alliance, the very thing the Cromwell and the Parliament had fHe also argues that it was the dynamic interaction of the old monarchical based government and the new populist based government that made it possible for both nations to end up dominating the modern world.