Some of the stone was soft and white. This, according to tradition, was
that brought from Caen by Queen Mary. The industrious costermongers
discovered this, and cut it into blocks to sell as hearthstones. A fire
about 1777 had thrown down much of the hospital, so that the old level was
fifteen or twenty feet deeper. The vaults and subterranean passages were
unexplored. The wells were filled up. The workmen then pulled down the
German chapel, which stood next Somerset House, and the red-brick house in
the Savoy Square that was used for barracks. “The entrance,” says a writer
of 1816, “to the Strand or Waterloo Bridge will be spacious, and the
houses in the Strand now only stop the opening.”[210]
The Chapel of St. Mary, Savoy, is a late and plain Perpendicular
structure, with a fine coloured ceiling. This small, quiet chapel holds a
silent congregation of illustrious dead.
[Illustration: THE SAVOY CHAPEL.]
Here are interred Sir Robert and Lady Douglas (temp. James I.); the
Countess of Dalhousie, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the
Tower, and sister to that admirable wife, Mrs. Hutchinson, who died in
1663; William Chaworth, who died in 1582, a member of that Nottinghamshire
family, one of whom, Lord Byron’s predecessor, killed in a tavern duel;
and Mrs. Anne Killigrew, who died in 1685, the paintress and poetess on
whom Dryden wrote an extravagant but glorious ode, beginning--
“That youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest.”[211]
This accomplished young lady was daughter of Dr. Henry Killigrew, and
niece of Thomas Killigrew the wit, of whom Denham, the poet, bitterly
said--
“Had Cowley ne’er spoke, Killigrew ne’er writ,
Combined in one they’d made a matchless wit.”
The father of Mistress Killigrew was author of a tragedy called _The
Conspiracy_, which both Ben Jonson and Lord Falkland eulogised. Even old
Anthony Wood says, in his own quaint way, that this lady “was a Grace for
beauty, and a Muse for wit.”[212]
We must add to this list Sir Richard and Lady Rokeby, who died in 1523,
and Gawin Douglas, that good Bishop of Dunkeld who first translated Virgil
into Lowland Scotch. He was pensioned by Henry VIII., was a friend of
Polydore Virgil, and died of the plague in London in 1521. The brass is on
the floor, about three feet south of the stove in the centre of the
chapel.[213]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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