Some of History's Greatest.. Just Below Your Feet?

Westminster Abbey
Originally uploaded by awolice89

So this is a very long over-due blog post, but nonetheless I wanted to still write it.. I've more or less discovered that Westminster Abbey has become one of my absolute favorite places thus far in London. I realized that, when spending an extended period of time in Europe, you tend to have lots of opportunities to visit similar-looking Churches, and more or less it gets pretty mundane.. BUT, whatever the reason, I didn't have that experience with the abbey... perhaps it was because I had a free tour instead of a 3-hour in-class lecture but nevertheless, I LOVED it there..

Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take any photographs inside the abbey itself (the photo to the right is from a nave off to the side beyond the Church itself). I'm not sure if it's for preservation reasons or out of respect, but nevertheless there's about 120 less photos on my facebook account than there would have been...

That being said, there's just something so humbling about taking a few steps and realizing you have accidentally stepped onto the grave of Charles Dickens, or one of the Kings or Isaac Newton (although I don't believe you could physically step on Newton's grave). I realize by now - assuming that the British didn't carry out there favorite tradition of digging up corpses and placing them elsewhere - there's not much left in the graves themselves, to put it frankly. Nevertheless, I was in absolute awe. How different would world politics, scientific understanding and literature be without a quarter of those people buried in and around the abbey (I think someone blurted out a number somewhere in the low thousands, but many of those bodies are people that simply had the money to buy graves in the abbey)..

I'm not sure I completely appreciated our tour guide's remark about how "(The British) have THE tomb of the unknown soldier. It's ashame all the other countries have copied us..." I get what she meant, and one thing I've learned quickly here is the British (particularly their professional tour guides, oddly enough) like to speak with uncensored mouths. Nevertheless, the tomb of the unknown soldier has always been one of my absolute favorite places to visit in the DC area, so I'll let her remark roll off my back for now.

On the flip-side to my experiences with seeing some of the graves of those who have accomplished and contributed so much, there's the story of the grave of Queen Mary I (she's actually buried underneath Queen Elizabeth I) which kind of just proves that ANY monarch was buried in the abbey. I find it ironic to Britain that someone who burned nearly 300 Catholics at the stake would be buried in a glorious and extremely valuable grave cite in the nation's most revered Church, but I suppose they've given up their pasttime of relocating people.

To explain myself further, one of the (many) creepy stories our tourguide told us was about Oliver Cromwell, who nearly dissolved the monarchy and ruled more-or-less as the closest thing England's had to a President (save for the modern Prime Minister). Anyway, the story goes that he died in 1658 but when King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Parliament decided that Cromwell's body was ordered to be dug up from the Abbey because of his role in diminishing of the monarchy. They then beheaded his corpse and to further convey the message of what happens when you "mess with the monarch," they irrespectively stuck his head outside of Parliament where it stood on a post for nearly a year. Then, or so the story goes, the wind or some other force of nature knocked the head off the post, and someone from a travelling circus-type group stole the head from Parliament and began travelling throughout London requiring people to pay money to see the head in their little street-side performances. Over time, someone ELSE stole the head (keeping in mind, this IS a human head you're talking about) and attempted to find the best price they could receive for it. After contacting as many of Cromwell's surviving relatives/descendants as they could find, they discovered that no one was willing to pay for the head. It wasn't until 1960 that someone had successfully convinced the school at which Cromwell studied (Sidney Sussex College) to purchase the head. They then buried it, supposedly in their Church somewhere, but there are no labels because they fear that someone will dig it up again as a prank.

Absolutely crazy.

As for my other amusing story from the Abbey (also not quite as poetic and romanticized as my experiences at the famous grave sites) was seeing the coronation chair. Now, it is absolutely amazing to see King Edward's Chair, which all monarchs have sat in during their coronation since 1308. BUT, what's even more impressive (and leaves me in absolute childish envy) is the amount of names scratched into the chair by devilish little Westminster schoolboys who in the 1950s snuck into the church to write messages like "Timmy WUZ HERE" all over one of the most supreme and time-honored symbols of the British monarchy.

Amazing.