Days 23

On Day 23 (Sunday) I finally got inside Westminster Abbey, but they took their pound of flesh by requiring twelve pounds to get inside the Abbey, even with the student discount applied. I'm starting to think I should ask if I can get twice the discount applied for being both a student and disabled, although somehow I think that wouldn't go over quite so well.

Anyway, I hate to say it, but the Abbey was disappointing, and they refuse to allow pictures, so my sarcasm-laden descriptions will have to do. It's not so much that the building or the graves are bad, because they're truly not, but because when you go in you are immediately prevented from communing with the building or the history because all you can hear is the lowing of the tourists milling, cattle-like, around the Abbey holding audio tours up to their ears and telling their children,

"That's a king buried there," and "Is it Newton that discovered evolution?" when Charles Darwin's grave is right there and you're walking on it right now-

Excuse me.

I feel that the experience of Westminster could be fixed by instituting an hourly quota on the amount of people allowed in, so you're not constantly buffeted about by irritating tourists who insist on racing through the entire thing as though they'll get a medal for fastest completion at the end.

Anyway, Westminster Abbey has had a church on its property since 1080, when Edward the Confessor decided that an Abbey was needed. His patronage of the building (which is huge by any measure you care to name) is the justification for him being named a saint. He's buried inside the Abbey in his own shrine behind the high altar, but tourists aren't allowed to enter it due to the fragility of the shrine. He's surrounded by an incredible amount of monarchs, at least five: Richard II (who was deposed and subsequently murdered), Henry III, Henry II, and so on and so forth. You proceed past it into the Lady Chapel, which houses the Tudors. Mary I and Elizabeth I share the same casket, although I have to admit I don't think either one of them would be pleased with lying next to each other for all eternity. Someone had left flowers on the casket. I was pleased that a small memorial to the victims of conscience who died for their beliefs in both Mary and Elizabeth's reigns was present.

Poet's Corner was a marvel, though. Tennyson is buried there, and Chaucer, and T.S. Eliot, and Keats, and Milton, and Coleridge, and it's pretty much what every English major dreams of. After Poet's Corner, I drifted out into the cloister, where the oldest door in England is located. It was installed in the Abbey in 1080. I touched it for a bit, and for a moment I felt that sort of historical communion I'd been looking for and had been denied by the bleating crowds. That sounds awfully metaphysical and touchy-feely, I know, but I'm the author and what I say goes. After the door, I ducked into the Westminster Abbey Museum, which had that dusty smell peculiar to museums without many visitors: one of my favorite smells in the world. The centerpiece of their exhibit was, for me, a Roman sarcophagus which had been dug up and reused for a second Christian burial of another person in Anglo-Saxon times. Even in the first millennium people were re-purposing antiques. They also had a mannequin of Horatio Nelson, said by his wife to be a tremendous likeness, dressed in Nelson's original clothes. I was unimpressed by Nelson's appearance and his height. They also had the oldest altarpiece in England, which miraculously survived the various persecutions and Cromwell's destruction of the churches. The details of Saint Peter's hands were incredibly lifelike, and for a moment it was a shock to think that someone nine centuries ago had done something so beautiful. We tend to view the people of the past, especially of the pre-medieval Dark Ages, as primitive or alien in some ways- less intelligent or artistic- when that's not the case at all, and it's funny the things that bring home just how much like us they were. I shouldn't even use 'like us'; they were us.

After mooching around in the Museum, I went back out to the cloister, and had to stop and goggle at a memorial to the British Civil Servants of India that said that they sacrificed mightily for king and country and empire, and they did such great works, and their name liveth forevermore, and stop me I am going to hurl. All I could think was that no one had apparently asked the Indians what they thought of memorializing their oppressors. This is a fairly recent memorial, too, unveiled during the current Queen's reign, so it's not as if they haven't had time to come to grips with their colonial legacy. Or not, in this case. Proceeding onward, I entered the front of the church.

In the center a slab of black Belgian marble reflected the light of a hundred candles and multiplied them into innumerable golden stars. Velvet ropes surrounded it, encasing the wreaths of red poppies that edged the Tomb: the only stone in the Abbey on which you are forbidden to walk. This was the Unknown Warrior, brought from the fields of France in state aboard the HMS Verdun, buried in a casket of oak from Hampton Court, a sword of the Royal Armory bound to the top.

The devastation of the First World War can perhaps be expressed in no better way than this. At the Unknown Warrior's internment, his honor guard were a hundred women. All had lost their husbands and all their sons in the war.

As for the Unknown Warrior, I feel like there's nothing I can say about him, or the people he represents, that can better his epitaph:

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD
HIS HOUSE

In silence, I left the Abbey and walked past the Cenotaph, past the blind stare of Douglas Haig's statue gazing towards Westminster and the accusing silence of the Tomb.