Westminster Abbey: Marrying, burying place

On Friday, April 29, 2011, the heir to the British Crown, son of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales KG FRS, will marry Catherine Middleton.

The marriage will take place at The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, which is almost always referred to popularly and informally as Westminster Abbey.

According to a tradition first reported by Sulcard in about 1080, the Abbey was first founded in the time of Mellitus (d. 624), Bishop of London, on the present site, then known as Thorn Ey (Thorn Island); based on a late tradition that a fisherman called Aldrich on the River Thames saw a vision of Saint Peter near the site.

The proven origins are that in the 960s or early 970s, Saint Dunstan, assisted by King Edgar, installed a community of Benedictine monks here. A stone abbey was built around 1045–1050 by King Edward the Confessor as part of his palace there and was consecrated on 28 December 1065, only a week before the Confessor’s death and subsequent funeral and burial. It was the site of the last coronation prior to the Norman conquest of England, that of his successor Harold II. From 1245 it was rebuilt by Henry III who had selected the site for his burial.

The Abbey became the coronation site of Norman kings, but none were buried there until Henry III, intensely devoted to the cult of the Confessor, rebuilt the Abbey in Anglo-French Gothic style as a shrine to honor Saint Edward the Confessor and as a suitably regal setting for Henry’s own tomb, under the highest Gothic nave in England.

The Confessor’s shrine subsequently played a great part in his canonization. The work continued between 1245 and 1517 and was largely finished by the architect Henry Yevele in the reign of Richard II. Henry VII added a Perpendicular style chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1503 (known as the Henry VII Chapel). Much of the stone came from Caen, in France (Caen stone), the Isle of Portland (Portland stone) and the Loire Valley region of France (tuffeau limestone).

Henry VIII had assumed direct royal control in 1539 and granted the Abbey cathedral status by charter in 1540, simultaneously issuing letters patent establishing the Diocese of Westminster. By granting the Abbey cathedral status Henry VIII gained an excuse to spare it from the destruction or dissolution which he inflicted on most English abbeys during this period of Protestant Reformation.

Westminster was a cathedral only until 1550. The expression “robbing Peter to pay Paul” may arise from this period when money meant for the Abbey, which is dedicated to Saint Peter, was diverted to the treasury of St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Abbey was restored to the Benedictines under the Roman Catholic Mary I of England, but they were again ejected under Elizabeth I in 1559. It suffered damage during the turbulent 1640s, when it was attacked by Puritan iconoclasts, but was again protected by its close ties to the state during the Commonwealth period. Oliver Cromwell was given an elaborate funeral there in 1658, only to be disinterred in January 1661 and posthumously hanged from a nearby gibbet.

Since the coronations in 1066 of both King Harold and William the Conqueror, coronations of English and British monarchs were held in the Abbey. Westminster Abbey has a long tradition as venue for royal weddings although there were no royal weddings for more than five centuries between 1382 (Richard II to Anne of Bohemia) and 1919. There were only two weddings by reigning monarchs (Henry I and Richard II).

Recent Royal Weddings at the Abbey

April 26, 1923: The Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), second son of King George V was married to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later to become The Queen Mother). The movie The King’s Speech was about King George VI.

November, 20, 1947: The Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II), elder daughter of King George VI was married to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN (later Duke of Edinburgh).

November 14, 1973: The Princess Anne, only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II was married to Captain Mark Phillips

July 23, 1986: The Prince Andrew, Duke of York, second son of Queen Elizabeth II, was married to Miss Sarah Ferguson.

Prince William’s parents were married at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Burials and memorials at the Abbey

Henry III rebuilt the Abbey in honor of the Royal Saint Edward the Confessor whose relics were placed in a shrine in the sanctuary and now lie in a burial vault beneath the 1268 Cosmati mosaic pavement, in front of the High Altar. Henry III himself was interred nearby in a superb chest tomb with effigial monument, as were many of the Plantagenet kings of England, their wives and other relatives. Subsequently, most Kings and Queens of England were buried here, although Henry VIII and Charles I are buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, as are most monarchs and royals after George II (Queen Victoria and some other members of the Royal Family are buried at Frogmore to the east of Windsor Castle).

Poets, writers and scientists

Aristocrats were buried inside chapels and monks and people associated with the Abbey were buried in the Cloisters and other areas. One of these was Geoffrey Chaucer, who was buried here as he had apartments in the Abbey where he was employed as master of the King’s Works. Other poets and also prose writers were buried or memorialized around Chaucer in what became known as Poets’ Corner. These include: William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Gray, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, the Brontë sisters, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, John Milton, Laurence Olivier, Alexander Pope, Nicholas Rowe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen, Thomas Shadwell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas and William Wordsworth. Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and among the men of science buried at the Abbey.

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