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‘The Repository of our English Kings’: The Henry VII Chapel as Royal Mausoleum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
I have left the Repository of our English kings for the contemplation of another Day, when I shall find my Mind disposed for so serious an amusement. (Addison)
The Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey is one of the best-known buildings in the country, but, except for the construction of its vault, it has been surprisingly little studied. Few have recognized that it retains, alongside King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, one of the most complete pre-Reformation interiors of any church in England. This survival is due not to good fortune but to the use of the chapel for the first three centuries of its existence as a royal mausoleum and, from 1725, as the spiritual home of the revived order of the Bath. These noble connexions have proved of enduring benefit.
- Type
- Section 6: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Churches and Chapels
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001
References
Notes
1 Spectator, No. 26, published 30 March 1711: see Bond, A. T., The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), p. 111 Google Scholar.
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3 A startling example of this candour is the publication in Philosophical Transactions, 52 (1761-62) of two engravings of George II’s heart in an article written soon after the king’s death by his physician, Frank Nicholas. I owe this reference to the article by da Costa, Palmira Fontes, ‘In Quest of Monsters’, in Darwin College Magazine, 12 (1997), pp. 75–76 Google Scholar.
4 Colvm et al, op. cit., 1, pp. 479-86.
5 Neale, J. & Brayley, E. W., The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, 1 (1818), p. 18 Google Scholar (of the section on the Henry VII Chapel).
6 Stanley, A. P., Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 5th edn (1882), p. 524 Google Scholar.
7 Other factors influenced this element of the design, in particular the preceding early thirteenth-century Lady Chapel, evidence of which survives at basement level.
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9 Colvin et al., op. cit., III, pp. 320-21.
10 Stanley, op. cit., pp. 514-17 & 520.
11 Similar tensions as to what would be the appropriate ceremonial and liturgical arrangements delayed Edward VI’s funeral.
12 Designs exist for tombs to Mary II and, jointly, to her and William III, which appear to have been intended to stand approximately over the later Stuart vault at the east end of the south aisle, but they remained on paper. The only royal memorial actually erected by the later Stuarts was the tablet to the Princes in the Tower (Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York), placed in 1678 by Charles II at the east end of the north aisle. It is noteworthy both that the Princes’ tablet (and their remains) were laid at Westminster, not with their father Edward IV at Windsor, and that they were sited by the little princesses’ tombs, suggesting a thematic grouping of the memorials in the Chapel. See Bolton, A. T. & Hendry, H. D. (eds), Wren Society, V (Oxford, 1928), p. 13 Google Scholar.
13 There is some evidence that vaults intended for royal burials were excavated in the north-eastern part of the Chapel, c. 1728, since the Stuart vaults were known to be full; but these continued the small-scale and haphazard arrangement of the past. See Stanley, op. cit., p. 505.
14 Ibid., p. 525 n. 2: sermon by Bishop Turner at the coronation ofjames II.
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18 Dean Stanley discovered by painstaking investigations that James’s body was not buried next to his wife’s in a vault to the north of Henry VII’s tomb, though ample space remained, but was placed next to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York: op. cit., pp. 522-25.
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23 Walpole, , Reminiscences, ed. Toynbee, P. (Oxford, 1924), pp. 46–47 Google Scholar.
24 The coronation of James II and Mary of Modena in 1685 had to be curtailed because of the monarchs’ Roman Catholic allegiance.
25 Anonymous, Verses at Westminster School (1761), p. 8.
26 Cocke, op. cit. (at n. 19 above), p. 48.
27 Ibid., pp. 127-28.
28 The opening of the late Stuart vault in 1977 confirmed that the coffins were tightly spaced within the vault, with no provision for access around them: see unpublished report by Peter Foster in the Abbey Library.
29 PRO Works 4/7: minute of meeting of Board ofWorks, 23 November 1737.
30 Perkins noted that the variation in the pattern of the central part of the marble pavement of 1699 was presumably caused by its removal to create the vault: see Perkins, J., Westminster Abbey: its Worship and Ornaments (Alcuin Club Collections, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVIII, 1938-52), 11, p. 186 Google Scholar. The provision of a permanent stair into the vault obviated the need to take up the floor again at any but the grandest funerals.
31 PRO Works 4/7: minute of meeting of Board of Works, 1 December 1737.
32 Tanner, L. E., Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (1969), p. 178 Google Scholar: Tanner also described the ‘immense and rather fine black sarcophagus and bronze handles rather like a mediaeval cope chest’ and the ‘magnificent’ and well-preserved coffins of the other burials in the vault.
33 PRO Works 4/7: minute of meeting of Board of Works, 29 November 1737: Stanley (op. cit., p. 167) recorded that in 1871 the adjoining sides of the coffin were seen to have indeed been removed at the king’s burial so that the royal couple would rest together.
34 Neale & Brayley, op. cit. (at n. 5 above), p. 18.
35 PRO Works 21-5/2.
36 Smollett, T., History of England, V (1800), p. 372 Google Scholar.