He was no novice as an architect when he came to Ely; for while Dean of Windsor he had completed the vaulting of St. George's Chapel. This chantry abounds in work characteristic of the Renaissance, extremely rare in England. Again and again, always with arabesque ornament that recalls the designs of Raphael in the Loggie of the Vatican, is reproduced the bishop's favourite motto, _Gratia Dei sum quod sum_ ("By the grace of God I am what I am"), alluding, it may be, to his own humble parentage; for, born the son of a baker in Putney, he rose to be Bishop of Ely, and to live "in the greatest splendour of any prelate of his time"; he kept a hundred servants; nor did he forget the poor, feeding two hundred of them daily at his gate; or it may be that the motto refers to his having in early life brought upon himself disgrace by his violent temper. He had been turned from these evil ways to become the friend and ally of the two saintliest men in England--Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. Besides embellishing this chapel with this motto, he adorned it further with exquisite statuary. Here delicate canopies, upwards of two hundred in number, still overhang corresponding pedestals, on which there stood once, for a few short years, statuettes of workmanship equally delicate; but of these nothing is left beyond a few traces of their feet, which being carved out of the solid stone did not give way when the tiny statue of which they formed a part was broken off by the mandate of Bishop Goodrich. When the quarrel arose between Henry the Eighth and the Pope as to his repudiating Catharine of Aragon, Bishop West was true throughout to the cause of the injured Queen; but he died in 1533, just before the bursting of the storm in which his friends, More and Fisher, laid down their lives, and was buried in the chapel that bears his name.