“_This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue If England to itself do rest but true._” SHAKSPEARE (_King John_). A little more than two hundred years passed between the burial of the Confessor in the Abbey and the burial of the next English King who rests there, namely, Henry III. William the Conqueror is buried in the church which he founded at Caen, in Normandy, and William Rufus, the “Red King,” lies at Winchester, close to the New Forest, where he was shot by Walter Tyrrell. Henry I was buried at Reading, and King Stephen at Faversham. Henry II, the first King of the Plantagenet line, was buried in the great Abbey of Fontevrault in Anjou, the ancestral home of the Plantagenets. His eldest son, Henry, “the young King,” who rebelled against him, is buried at Rouen, where the heart of Richard Cœur-de-Lion also rests. Richard’s body is buried at Fontevrault, at his father’s feet. The heart of King John was taken to Fontevrault in a golden cup, but his body lies in Worcester Cathedral, between two Saxon saints, Wulfstan and Oswald. And now we come to the Plantagenets who are buried in the Abbey. Henry III, as we have already seen, had a great love and reverence for the memory of Edward the Confessor, and began the rebuilding of the Abbey Church in his honour. It was no wonder, then, that he wished his tomb to be close to the Confessor’s shrine. Only three of our Kings have been married in the Abbey, and of these Henry III was the first. He married Eleanor of Provence, one of four sisters who all made remarkable marriages. Eleanor’s sister Margaret married King Louis IX of France; her sister Sancha married Richard Earl of Cornwall, and her sister Beatrice married Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France, and afterwards King of Naples and Sicily. We are reminded of this close connection between the royal houses of France and England when we see on the Abbey walls the shield of Eleanor’s father, Raymond Berengar, Count of Provence. When Henry III died in 1272 he was buried, not where his tomb now is, but in front of the high altar, in the grave where the Confessor’s body had first rested. The beautiful tomb in the Confessor’s Chapel was not finished until 1291, Edward I having brought from France the precious marbles and porphyry slabs for its decoration. The tomb, like the Confessor’s, is of Italian design, but the fine effigy is the work of an Englishman, William Torel.