It was in this vaulted chapel of the Tudor kings that Oliver Cromwell was buried with regal magnificence, his effigy robed in purple, surrounded by a sceptre, a sword, and an imperial crown, being also placed in the Abbey. Many of his friends and followers—Pym, the hero of his early days; Ireton, his son-in-law; Bradshaw, the President of the Court which had tried and condemned the King in Westminster Hall close by—were already by his desire buried in the Abbey, as were most of his immediate family; his old mother, who had always said "she cared nothing for her son’s grandeur, and was always afraid when she heard a musket lest he should be shot, and his best loved daughter, Betty, Elizabeth Claypole. The latter was such an attractive girl, and "played the part of princess so naturally, and obliging all persons by her civility," that Cromwell feared lest her very charms should be a snare to her, leading her thoughts from God. His letters to her show all the tenderest side of his strong nature. "I watch thy growth as a Seeker after truth," he once wrote to her. "To be a Seeker is to be of the best sect, next to a Finder. And such a one shall every happy Seeker be at the end." [Illustration: OLIVER CROMWELL.] Oliver Cromwell was ever a son of strife, and two years after his death, on the anniversary of the king’s execution, his body was dragged from the grave by order of the Restoration Parliament and publicly hung, a similar revenge being meted out to Bradshaw and Ireton, and the "pure-souled patriot John Pym." So to-day we do not even know where he is buried, and only a plate in the floor of Henry VII.’s chapel, put there by Dean Stanley, shows us where once the great man lay. For great he surely was, even though narrow, relentless, arbitrary, and overbearing; great, that is to say, if high aims, honest ambitions, dogged courage, and unswerving obedience to what he held to be the Divine voice, count for ought in the standard we require of our public men. *CHAPTER XIV* *CHAUCER* Geoffrey Chaucer was the first English poet or writer to be buried within the Abbey, and just as the Confessor’s tomb drew kings and queens to lie around it, so Chaucer’s grave, in a way undreamed of at the time, consecrated one part of Westminster as the Poets’ Corner. And what more fitting than that he who has been so justly named the "poet of the dawn, the finder of our fair language, the father of English poetry," should rest, when his life’s work was ended, near to those others with whose names our early history is studded?