Members of the British royal household comply with behind the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II as it’s carried out of Westminster Abbey after her state funeral. Gareth Cattermole/Pool Photo by way of AP
The royal funeral for Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on Sept. 19, 2022, was a public ceremony on a really world scale. In the times earlier than, lengthy snaking queues of mourners waited to file previous her coffin because it lay in state in Westminster Hall. Hundreds of the world’s leaders descended upon London for the occasion whereas worldwide media coated the pageantry with seemingly limitless curiosity.
After the funeral at Westminster, the late queen’s physique was taken to Windsor Castle for burial. Yet Elizabeth’s demise added a outstanding new chapter to the lengthy relationship between English sovereigns and the advanced of buildings at Westminster that kind the seat of the fashionable British state.
The sight of scores of sailors pulling the queen’s coffin on a gun carriage and the distinctly Tudor-style crimson uniforms of the Yeomen of the Guard have been among the many many particulars of the royal funeral that evoked highly effective ties to Britain’s imperial previous. However, many facets – together with the sailors – are under no circumstances historical. Despite their emphasis upon custom, royal ceremonies have at all times been considerably fluid and reflective of the politics of their day.
As a historian early trendy England, I’m aware that the general public rituals of monarchy within the sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries sought to undertaking reassuring parts of continuity amid dramatic modifications. Modern royal weddings and funerals at Westminster Abbey have been equally tailored to up to date wants, and are largely merchandise of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Westminster Palace, dominating the skyline with Big Ben and the Victoria Tower, is of an identical classic. Built to switch the ramshackle previous medieval and Tudor Westminster Palace which burned down in 1834, the present Westminster Palace advanced was designed to supply a suitably historic-looking new dwelling for the Houses of Parliament.
However, close by Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall, the most important surviving part of the previous construction, hark again to England’s medieval previous. They provide genuinely historical settings for the fashionable rituals of monarchy, usually televised for a worldwide viewers.
Projecting energy
Westminster Abbey grew to become a church of royal significance within the 1040s, when Edward the Confessor, one of many final Anglo-Saxon kings of England, changed an older monastery devoted with a brand new building of suitably royal proportions. The undertaking was so vital that Edward and his new royal abbey have been featured within the well-known, 70 meter-long Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066 after Edward’s demise.
Edward himself was buried inside the Abbey, and canonized as a saint a century later, turning his tomb right into a royal shrine. Westminster additionally served because the venue for the coronation of Edward’s eventual successor on the throne, William the Conqueror. William’s crowning started a convention of coronations within the abbey that can presumably proceed with Charles III a while in 2023.
Edward the Confessor on his throne, in a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry.
Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Hulton Archive by way of Getty Images
Edward’s Westminster Abbey was changed within the mid-1200s with the modern-day constructing, though the 2 nice towers that now loom above the abbey weren’t added till the early 18th century. This rebuilding was carried out through the lengthy and tumultuous reign of Henry III, whose father King John had famously been pressured to comply with the Magna Carta, which put limits on the monarch’s energy.
Henry endeavored to rebuild authority in response to royals’ troubles throughout his father’s reign, to not point out his personal. Part of this plan concerned attempting to convey Westminster Abbey even higher fame, particularly since he regarded Edward the Confessor as his patron saint. Henry offered its monks with a crystalline vial of what was supposedly Christ’s personal blood, introduced from Jerusalem by Crusaders. Matthew Paris, a monk and chronicler within the thirteenth century, describes how the king himself carried the doubtful relic on foot from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to Westminster Abbey on the feast day of St. Edward the Confessor in 1247.
A extra enduring addition by Henry III was the so-called Cosmati Pavement, a mosaic put in by craftsmen from Rome in 1268 to 1269. Laid in entrance of the abbey’s excessive altar, the pavement ensured that subsequent kings of England wouldn’t solely be topped whereas seated upon the throne of Edward the Confessor, but in addition inside a 24-foot sq. paintings which symbolically represents the cosmos and represented the brand new sovereign because the motivating pressure of the universe.
King, queens and poets
Westminster Abbey has additionally been a frequent venue for royal funerals and burials. Since the early nineteenth century, nearly all British sovereigns have been buried at Windsor Castle, together with Elizabeth II. However, most earlier kings and queens have been interred in tombs and vaults at Westminster.
Perhaps probably the most spectacular contribution to this custom was the brand new chapel on the japanese finish of the abbey, which was constructed within the early 1500s by Henry VII. The first of the Tudor sovereigns, he had a tenuous dynastic declare on the throne and, by the tip of his life, a heavy burden of tyranny and illegality – and the chapel was a solution to atone. It grew to become the ultimate resting place for a lot of the Tudors, arguably England’s most well-known and glamorous royal dynasty.
Westminster Abbey was by no means solely a burial place for monarchs and their households, nevertheless. For centuries, aristocrats and favored commoners have additionally been interred there. One a part of the abbey is called Poets’ Corner, the place a number of illustrious literary figures have been buried, starting with Geoffrey Chaucer, creator of “The Canterbury Tales,” in 1400. In 1599, he was joined by Edmund Spenser, whose allegorical poem “The Faerie Queene” included elaborate reward for Elizabeth I. Spenser’s coffin was accompanied to his grave by the main poets of Elizabethan London, together with William Shakespeare.
When Shakespeare himself died in 1616, he was buried at his hometown church in Stratford-upon-Avon, however a memorial in his honor was put in at Westminster Abbey in 1740. Other illustrious people interred there embrace scientists Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking.
The Shakespeare statue in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Prisma by Dukas/Universal Images Group by way of Getty Images
Over the centuries, Westminster Abbey has endured a wide range of risks: all the things from Seventeenth-century Puritans attempting to destroy spiritual pictures inside, which they thought of idolatrous, to a home made nail bomb planted by a suffragette in 1914, to the bombs dropped by the German Luftwaffe through the Second World War.
Westminster has carried out greater than get well; the church has successfully grow to be a sort of nationwide cathedral. It provides a deep sense of historic continuity, which reassuringly obscures the relative modernity of many public rituals of monarchy – the identical ones thousands and thousands of individuals all over the world have watched play out this week.
Paul Hammer has acquired funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.