![\"Westminster](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/08\/Westminster-Abbey.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, our tour is at an end, and some of our number have already headed off.\u00a0 All good things must pass.\u00a0 (In this world, anyway.)<\/p>\n
We did just two stops today, but they were both fairly lengthy, and both focused on extraordinarily important religious sites.\u00a0 (In response to no discernible demand from the general public, I\u2019ll probably post a narrative summary of the overall tour in a day or two or three.\u00a0 After all, this blog serves as a kind of journal for me.)<\/p>\n
First, we were dropped off at Westminster Abbey, which I\u2019ve always enjoyed.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been working for years on cleaning its exterior, and it really shines these days.\u00a0 It looks better now than I\u2019ve seen it before \u2014 white or cream-colored, instead of the sooty black to which I\u2019ve been accustomed by photographs and numerous previous visits.\u00a0 We walked over to Westminster Park and took a look at Westminster Palace, the seat of Parliament.\u00a0 Elizabeth Tower \u2014 the familiar tower of the houses of Parliament that houses Big Ben \u2014 was covered, as I recall, with plastic and scaffolding when we were last here.\u00a0 Now, it too looks clean.<\/p>\n
Then, of course, we entered into the Abbey itself.\u00a0 I love the building, but what always blows me away is the people who are buried there.\u00a0 More than 3,3oo of them.\u00a0 Which is why William Morris termed the Abbey a \u201cnational Valhalla.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ll start with a few of the royals:<\/p>\n
- \n
- St. Edward the Confessor<\/a>, Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex who died, fatefully, in 1066<\/li>\n
- Henry III, <\/a>died 1272; King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine<\/li>\n
- Edward I<\/a>, King of England, in 1307<\/li>\n
- Edward III<\/a>, King of England, in 1377<\/li>\n
- Anne of Bohemia<\/a>, Queen consort of England, in 1394; wife of Richard II<\/li>\n
- Richard II<\/a>, King of England, in 1413<\/li>\n
- Henry V<\/a>, King of England, in 1422 (not to be confused with Kenneth Branagh, who played him)<\/li>\n
- Catherine of Valois<\/a>, Queen consort of England; wife of Henry V (played by Emma Thompson)<\/li>\n
- Anne Neville<\/a>, Queen consort of England, in 1485; wife of\u00a0Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Richard III<\/a><\/li>\n
- Elizabeth of York<\/a>, Queen consort of England, in 1503; wife of Henry VII<\/li>\n
- Henry VII<\/a>, King of England, in 1509<\/li>\n
- Edward VI<\/a>, King of England, in 1553 (son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour)<\/li>\n
- Anne of Cleves<\/a>, Queen consort of England, in 1557; fourth wife of\u00a0Henry VIII<\/a><\/li>\n
- Mary I<\/a>, Queen of England, in 1558 (aka \u201cBloody Mary\u201d)<\/li>\n
- Mary<\/a>, Queen of Scotland and Queen dowager of France, in 1612; \u201cMary, Queen of Scots,\u201d mother of James VI and I<\/a><\/li>\n
- Elizabeth I<\/a>, Queen of England, in 1603 (who gave her name to the \u201cElizabethan Age\u201d)<\/sup><\/li>\n
- James VI and I<\/a>, King of England and Scotland, in 1625 (patron of the Authorised or King James Bible)<\/sup><\/li>\n
- Charles II<\/a>, King of England and Scotland, in 1685<\/li>\n
- Mary II<\/a>, Queen of England and Scotland, in 1695<\/li>\n
- William III<\/a>, King of England and Scotland, in 1702<\/li>\n
- Anne<\/a>, Queen of Great Britain, in 1714<\/li>\n
- George II<\/a>, King of Great Britain, in 1760<\/li>\n
- Possibly<\/em> the famous Princes in the Tower<\/a>\u00a0(Edward V<\/a>, King of England, and his younger brother,\u00a0Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York<\/a>),<\/sup> the sons of Edward IV<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Elizabeth Woodville<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Quite a list.\u00a0 Though they are often most familiar to me, at least, as characters in Shakespeare\u2019s historical plays.<\/p>\n
And there many stunning non-royal<\/em> political names, as well:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Field Marshal\u00a0Edmund Allenby <\/a>(famed for his efforts in the Middle East and his connection with Lawrence of Arabia)<\/li>\n
- John Andr\u00e9<\/a><\/li>\n
- Clement Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee<\/a><\/li>\n
- Neville Chamberlain<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Pitt the Elder<\/a><\/li>\n
- Charles James Fox<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Ewart Gladstone<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Pitt the Younger<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Wilberforce<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n\nBut I\u2019m really<\/em> in awe of the intellectual and cultural history that is represented by the burials in Westminster Abbey:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
- \n
- Robert Browning<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Camden<\/a><\/li>\n
- Geoffrey Chaucer<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Congreve<\/a><\/li>\n
- Charles Dickens<\/a><\/li>\n
- George Frideric Handel<\/a><\/li>\n
- Thomas Hardy<\/a><\/li>\n
- Samuel Johnson<\/a><\/li>\n
- Rudyard Kipling<\/a><\/li>\n
- Thomas Babington Macaulay<\/a><\/li>\n
- John Masefield<\/a><\/li>\n
- Laurence Olivier, Baron Olivier<\/a><\/li>\n
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan<\/a><\/li>\n
- Edmund Spenser<\/a><\/li>\n
- Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson<\/a><\/li>\n
- Charles Darwin<\/a><\/li>\n
- Stephen Hawking<\/a><\/li>\n
- Benjamin \u201cBen\u201d Jonson<\/a><\/li>\n
- David Livingstone<\/a><\/li>\n
- Sir Charles Lyell<\/a><\/li>\n
- Sir\u00a0Isaac Newton<\/a><\/li>\n
- Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin<\/a><\/li>\n
- Henry Purcell<\/a><\/li>\n
- Ralph Vaughan Williams<\/a><\/li>\n
- Joseph Addison<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It is an absolute pantheon<\/em> of great names.\u00a0 And I haven\u2019t even mentioned the people who are honored by memorials in the Abbey but who are not buried there \u2014 people such as Charles Wesley, John Wesley, William Shakespeare, Siegfried Sasson, Sir Adrian Boult, W. H. Auden, Jane Austen, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Paul Dirac, Winston Churchill, Sir John Gielgud, Wilfred Owen, and C. S. Lewis.<\/p>\n
What a glorious history is suggested by such names!\u00a0 Is it any wonder that I\u2019m an Anglophile?<\/p>\n
Incidentally, while browsing in a book in the Westminster Abbey gift shop (which, by the way, I now regret not having purchased), I ran across a brief portrayal of Ernest Rutherford, who is generally ranked among the greatest scientists of all time and whose ashes are buried in the Abbey.\u00a0 He was amused to have received the 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, since he considered himself a physicist.\u00a0 And, indeed, he was a pioneer in both atomic and nuclear physics \u2014 sometimes, according to Wikipedia, actually being considered \u201cthe father<\/em> of nuclear physics.\u201d\u00a0 (My emphasis.)\u00a0 He had, he commented, seen many rapid transformations in the world of radioactive particles, but none so rapid as his own transformation, by the Nobel Prize committee, from physicist into chemist.<\/p>\n
Our second stop was at St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral, the masterpiece (and the burial place) of Sir Christopher Wren.\u00a0 I\u2019ll probably have something to say about that<\/em> remarkable place tomorrow or the next day.<\/p>\n
I was happy to see both St. Paul\u2019s and Westminster Abbey still intact.\u00a0 Relatively recently, I re-watched London Has Fallen<\/em> while I was doing some relatively mindless filing.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to spoil the plot, but, well, I saw actual footage of a brutal terrorist attack that opened on the very steps of St. Paul\u2019s and that, among other things, involved the destruction of at least one of the towers of the Abbey.\u00a0 So I was happy to see not only the pristine condition of the Abbey but the absolutely perfect restoration of both Westminster and St. Paul\u2019s.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost as if the terrorist attacks never even occurred at all<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from London, England<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Well, our tour is at an end, and some of our number have already headed off.\u00a0 All good things must pass.\u00a0 (In this world, anyway.) We did just two stops today, but they were both fairly lengthy, and both focused on extraordinarily important religious sites.\u00a0 (In response to no discernible demand from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":36142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36263,9688,36266,31459,36269,36272],"class_list":["post-100544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ernest-rutherford","tag-london","tag-parliament","tag-westminster-abbey","tag-westminster-palace","tag-westminster-park"],"yoast_head":"\n
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- John Andr\u00e9<\/a><\/li>\n
- Henry III, <\/a>died 1272; King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine<\/li>\n