While speaking of this time in English history, we must not forget one man who did a very great and important work in the world, and who was very closely connected with the Abbey, although he is not actually buried there. This was William Caxton, the first English printer. Caxton belongs almost entirely to the Lancastrian and Yorkist times, as he was born in 1410, during the reign of Henry IV, and died in 1491, in the reign of Henry VII. About the year 1471 (the year in which Henry VI died) Caxton came to live in Westminster. He set up his printing-press in a house quite close to the Abbey, and there he worked for the last twenty years of his life. It seems that the Abbot of Westminster was greatly interested in Caxton and his work, and one of his great friends and patrons was the Lady Margaret, mother of King Henry VII. Caxton printed several books for her. Caxton is buried quite near the Abbey, in St. Margaret’s Churchyard. There is a fine stained-glass window to his memory in St. Margaret’s Church. Caxton stood on the threshhold of the modern world, and, as we realise the great changes brought about in human life by the art of printing, we may think of that window in St. Margaret’s, where Caxton is represented holding his motto: “Fiat Lux” (let there be light), while below are Tennyson’s beautiful lines: “Thy prayer was Light, more Light while time shall last, Thou sawest the glories growing on the night; But not the shadow which that light would cast Till shadows vanish in the Light of light.” With this thought in our minds we will turn to the next period of English history. CHAPTER VI THE HOUSE OF TUDOR “_Fair is our lot—O goodly is our heritage! (Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!) For the Lord our God Most High He hath made the deep as dry, He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth._” RUDYARD KIPLING (_The Seven Seas_). The famous House of Tudor, in which the Plantagenet lines of York and Lancaster were united, is in many ways very closely connected with the Abbey. All the Tudor sovereigns, except one, are buried in the Abbey. But this is not all, for the Abbey and the School owe their present establishment to Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, as we shall find later on. It was in the Tudor times that modern England really began, and most of the great changes that took place in the Church and the nation at that time are faithfully reflected in the Abbey history. We can read them there, just as we can read the story of the Norman Conquest, of the Conquest of Scotland, or of the French Wars.