Royal Winchester: Wanderings in and about the Ancient Capital of EnglandL'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
History
Royal Winchester: Wanderings in and about the Ancient Capital of England
L'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
Winchester (England) -- Description and travel
“I remember well the house she built,” replied Mr. Hertford; “it stood
like a respectable old country house in its garden in Portman Square,
and has been enlarged into Lord Portman’s mansion. She covered her
drawing-room walls with feathers, as Cowper writes:--
“‘The birds put off their every hue
To dress a house for Montagu.’
What a gay May-day the sweeps had with their ribbons, flowers, and
feasting in the good lady’s time! We read on this tablet that she
had ‘the united advantages of beauty, wit, judgment, reputation, and
riches.’”
“What a happy woman!” exclaimed Miss Hertford. “I once heard a girl
asked which she would rather be--handsome, clever, or rich. The
questioner never imagined that any one could be all three.”
Higher up on the same side, near the stairs, is a memorial to Boles,
the Royalist “Collonell of a Ridgment of Foot who did _wounders_ at the
Battle of Edgehill.” No doubt he did, for when finally he was, with
eighty men, surrounded by five thousand rebels in the church at Alton,
he held out for six hours, and after killing six or seven with his own
sword was himself slain with sixty of his men.
“Winchester is rich in monuments,” I said. “It preceded Westminster as
the burial-place of the great and has, with that exception, more human
interest than any other sacred edifice in England.”
[Sidenote: Wykeham’s Chantry.]
On the opposite side of the Nave stands the Chantry of Wykeham, of
great height and beautiful elaboration.[75] It happens by design or
accident that if we supposed our Lord’s body to be lying on the cross
of the original Cathedral, the site of this monument would correspond
with the wound in His side. This was the favourite spot at which
Wykeham prayed when a boy, before an altar to the Virgin; and here he
built his tomb, on which his figure has reposed for nearly five hundred
years, and where it may remain for five hundred more. The good he did
was not destined to be “interred with his bones,” and the line on the
resting-place of Wren, whose truth impresses the reader, might without
impropriety have been also engraved here--
“Si monumentum quæras, circumspice.”
It is the rare privilege of Winchester to have here, face to face in the
Palace and Cathedral, two of the most important works of these great
master builders.
Higher up the nave is the Chantry of Bishop Edington, earlier and less
ornamental than that of Wykeham. He is the prelate who was offered the
Archbishopric of Canterbury and made the shrewd and sportive reply,
“If Canterbury is the higher rank, Winchester is the better manger.”
The date is placed in a fanciful way at the end of the inscription “M
thrice C with LXV and I.”
On the bishop’s vestment there is a curious emblem of a cruciform
shape, called a Fylfot or Suastika. It is stated to signify submission
to the will of God, and to have been a symbol prior to Christianity.
[Sidenote: Tomb of Rufus.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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