Westminster Abbey

Location: Dean’s Yard, London SW1P 3PA
Opening times: General admission to the abbey 9.30am to 3.30pm. Other areas such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries and St. Margaret’s Church have different times, and times can fluctuate for all areas, so it is always worth checking the abbey’s website.
Entry: Adults £31.00, children (6 – 17) £14.00, children (0 – 5) free, students and seniors £28.00.
Getting there: multiple bus routes (11, 24, 88, 148, 211, etc); nearest underground stations St. James’s Park and Westminster; nearest train stations Victoria and Waterloo.

Westminster Abbey, or the Collegiate Church of St. Peter at Westminster to give it its formal title, is one of London’s oldest buildings, so old that the seething metropolis surrounding it today would be as unfathomably alien to its founders as Thorney Island, the tiny eyot surrounded by marshland upon which they built it, would be to us today. This is a building that truly transcends the centuries.

The abbey was founded by Bishop Dunstan in 960 during the reign of King Edgar, possibly on the site of a seventh century church, but the beginnings of today’s abbey really began 100 years later, when King Edward built his palace on Thorney Island, and financed the building of a major stone monastic church to match. As a monastic church is often referred to a ‘minster’ and as this was built to the west of the original St. Paul’s Cathedral, established in 604CE, it quickly became known as the ‘west minster’.

The great west face of Westminster Abbey. Above the door are the statues of the ten Modern Martyrs of the 20th Century, unveiled in 1998 and including Maximilian Kolbe, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero.

Edward’s abbey was completed in 1060 but not consecrated until late December 1065, a mere week before his death on 5 January 1066. A week after that, Edward became the first of thirteen kings to be buried in the abbey (four reigning queens, eleven queen consorts, and two other queens are also interred there). Various claimants then duked it out for the throne, and on Christmas Day 1066 the victor, William the Conqueror, become the first known monarch to be crowned at the abbey (Harold Godwinson is likely to have been crowned there immediately after Edward’s death, but no evidence of this survives). Perhaps appropriately, the only extant image of Edward’s abbey is in the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Norman Conquest of England.

Edward’s body was found to be uncorrupted when his tomb was reopened in 1103, which, along with the money and land he gave the church, was considered proof of the man’s saintliness. He was canonised in 1161, becoming St. Edward the Confessor, and his body was moved to a new shrine two years later. Westminster was now a major pilgrimage site.

*At night, the west face at first just ghostly* *turns a whiter shade of pale (apologies to Keith Reid).*

Westminster Abbey as we know it today began taking shape when Henry III decided to rebuild the whole abbey as a shrine to Edward the Confessor, one that matched the magnificence of any of Europe’s great cathedrals. Construction began in 1245, and continued through the centuries, with Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VII all contributing to the building costs. It could have all come crashing down during the Reformation but survived presumably because so many of Henry VIII’s predecessors had invested in it, and it was now the final resting place of them all.

The last monarch to be buried in the abbey was George II, in 1760, and the last member of the royal family was a Prince Henry in 1790 (St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle is the favoured royal resting place now). However, so many other prominent people in British history are buried Westminster Abbey that the English textile designer, artist, and poet William Morris described it as “a national Valhalla”.

Enough yakking. Let’s have a look around.

The quire (foreground) and the nave (background). The choir consists of about twelve lay vicars and twenty-two boys, the latter of which are educated at the Westminster Abbey Choir School which covers their general education as well as their singing duties.

The Lady Chapel at the eastern end of the abbey, so named because it is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is also known as King Henry VII’s Chapel, as it was he who ordered its construction in 1503. The chapel was dedicated in 1512, three years after Henry’s death. The detailed fan vaulted ceiling is not just a design masterpiece but also a construction marvel, being built of interlocking pieces slotted together like a giant and exceedingly heavy jigsaw puzzle.

Regular readers of these pages will know that, quite by accident, I fell into the habit of following Mary Queen of Scots around. This has grown into a genuine interest in her life and times, so for me her tomb is one of the highlights of Westminster. She was originally buried at Peterborough Cathedral after her execution in 1587, but when her successor James VI of Scotland also succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603 to become James I of England, he had his mother’s remains moved to Westminster Abbey and had this elaborate tomb constructed.

James VI & I also had this striking tomb made for Elizabeth I, who was responsible for signing his mother’s death warrant. The fact that Mary Queen of Scots’ tomb is larger and more flamboyant than Elizabeth’s might seem like a nice touch, but it might equally be the sign of a troubled conscience, as James did nothing to help his mother during her nineteen years of captivity in England.

There is no fancy tomb for Oliver Cromwell, though, and as the dates attest, *England’s Lord Protector* didn’t lie in Westminster Abbey’s hallowed grounds for long. Because of his prominent role in the regicide of Charles I, Cromwell’s body was exhumed on 30 January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the king’s beheading, and was subjected to a mock execution. Cromwell’s head was cut off and displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall for over twenty years, while his body was hanged by chains at Tyburn before being, according to Wikipedia, “thrown in a pit”. The skull passed through several owners and was eventually buried at an undisclosed location at Sydney Sussex College Cambridge, a mere *299 years after it was exhumed*.

From some of the most important names in British history to a complete unknown. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior contains the body of a British serviceman who fell in the Great War that was removed from his original burial place on the Western Front and returned to Britain for reinternment in the abbey. Great care was taken to ensure that the name and rank was unknown to everyone involved in the selection, transportation, and reburial process, as this one casualty was chosen to symbolise all who died for Britain and the Empire during the war. The coffin is buried in soil selected from the main battlefields of World War One, and the script on the black Belgian marble was created using brass from melted-down ammunition. It is the only grave in Westminster Abbey upon which no one is allowed to walk.

Left: The ‘Padre’s Flag’. This Union Jack belonged to the Reverend David Railton, the military chaplain who conceived of the idea of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Railton used this flag throughout his service on the Western Front, sometimes as an alter cloth, sometimes a shroud for a fallen soldier, and it was used to cover the coffin of the Unknown Warrior on his journey back to England. Right: The ship’s bell of the HMS Verdun, which brought the Unknown Warrior’s body back to Britain.

The ancient and the new. On the left is a mediaeval portrait of Saint Christopher, and on the left, The Queen’s Window (2018) by David Hockney, commissioned to celebrate the reign of Elizabeth II.

One of the most distinctive features of Westminster Abbey is Poet’s Corner. The first writer buried here was Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343 – 1400), but he is here not because of his works but because he was a member of the royal household. A bit like buses, it took 200 years for another poet to come along, this being Edmund Spenser (1553 – 1599), although how deliberate his location is near Chaucer is debatable. Fast forward to the eighteenth century, and someone had the idea (a) to commemorate writers of national importance buried elsewhere, and (b) to place those memorials next to the abbey’s two resident poets (Chaucer now recognised more for The Canterbury Tales than being a Clerk of the King’s Works). Thus was born Poet’s Corner.

The above photograph shows the memorials to (anticlockwise from top left): Robert Southey, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, James Thomson, the Bronte sisters, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. James Thomson is kinda punching above his weight here, and is probably only remembered now for writing the words to that last Night at the Proms favourite ‘Rule Britannia’.

Some more literary giants recognised in the abbey. Left: Charles Dickens is here against his will, as he hoped to be buried without ceremony in Rochester Cathedral, but apparently Queen Victoria or the ‘nation’ knew better. To partly make up for ignoring his wishes entirely his funeral was a private affair with only twelve mourners. Right: Polite society would have had a hissy fit if Lord Byron or DH Lawrence had been proposed for Poets’ Corner in their lifetime.

*There is also a Scientists’ Corner at Westminster Abbey*. *Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are amongst those remembered, and Roger Bannister is acknowledged as a* ‘*Pioneering Neurologist’ first and a ‘World Champion Runner’ second. Stephen Hawking was the most recent internment, his ashes buried here in June 2018.*

The bright and airy Chapter House, where the daily business of the abbey would have been discussed. Apparently, the House of Commons even met here during the fourteenth century. Construction began on the Chapter House in 1250, although much of what we see today comes courtesy of a nineteenth century restoration.

Destination or Diversion?

Handy hint 1: Book in advance. Westminster Abbey is very busy all the time. The days of just paying on the day are long gone. Annie and I booked a 10.30 slot for the abbey and then a 2.30 slot for the Lift 109 at Battersea Power Station, thinking that four hours (minus travel time) at the abbey would be plenty. It wasn’t. We saw a lot, but we missed so much more. Westminster Abbey is a full day out, and most definitely a destination.

Handy hint 2: If you want to visit the shrine of Edward the Confessor, not to mention the tombs of several mediaeval monarchs which are not normally open to the public, then you will need to buy into a guided tour of the abbey. These are conducted by abbey vergers, last about 90 minutes, and cost an additional £10.00. Spaces on each tour are limited to 20 people. Annie and I booked one upon our arrival at the abbey and would highly recommend it. We learned so much that we would have missed if left to our own devices.

Destination or Diversion?

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