The Abbey dean who ate the heart of a king
The rationalist credentials of the Panthéon in Paris (originally the church of St Genevieve) are sometimes linked to the experiment there by Léon Foucault on March 31 1851. A 220ft wire with a bob at the end was suspended from the dome and set in motion. The pendulum kept to its path while the Earth rotated.
In the same year, to mark the Great Exhibition, a Foucault pendulum was rigged up in the nave of Westminster Abbey. The idea was that of the Dean, William Buckland.
Buckland is most famous for having eaten the heart of King Louis XIV. Shown a shrivelled thing in a silver casket, the Dean exclaimed: “‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.”
That account comes from Augustus Hare, who is just about the least reliable travel writer of the 19th century, which is saying something. But Buckland was a remarkable man.
He did eat strange things, and said mole was the least pleasant, after bluebottle, but he was a real scientist (pictured in his glacierexploring gear), the first Reader in Geology at Oxford. He married a naturalist and fossil hunter.
It was a surprise when in 1845 Buckland, aged 61, was made Dean of Westminster. A whirlwind of activity, he was on the go from seven in the morning until two the next morning. There was a lot to do, for Westminster Abbey was at a low ebb.
An entertaining picture of Buckland’s life as Dean is given in the latest edition of that excellent periodical, the Westminster Abbey Review.
The rambling Deanery, which became something of a menagerie in Buckland’s day, boasted 16 staircases, and like the whole Abbey complex was much decayed.
One day a timber fell from the roof of the passageway leading to the Abbot’s Pew (a private lookout over the nave built in the early 16th century by John Islip). The heavy lump went straight through the floor into a room below that no one had known was there. One of the Dean’s sons, first dangling a candle to test the air, lowered himself down on a rope and discovered a worm-eaten bedstead and table. It was decided that the room had been used as a hiding-place by Francis Atterbury, Dean from 1713, who was sent to the Tower and later banished for his Jacobite sympathies.
One day a parcel came for Buckland from the United States. It held two marble heads that a visitor had broken from the Abbey monument to Major John André (executed as a spy by the Americans in 1780). The culprit had repented of the theft on his deathbed. As a geologist, Buckland set to reattaching them himself. The joins are still visible.
Among Buckland’s reforms was to build sewers in place of cesspits, which had included a ditch for the outflow from the dormitory of Westminster School, where boys cooked and lived, only disturbed once a year by the floor being cleaned.
He also restored the decrepit Abbey fire-engine. It was just as well, for in the Deanery’s medieval Jericho parlour a fire blazed all year round to repel the eternal chill and allow the airing of linen surplices.
Buckland’s reign lasted only four years before he was incapacitated with a sort of dementia. This his naturalist son Frank attributed to vertebrae compressed when a coach overturned. He had five vertebrae from his father’s neck mounted on a brass stand, now in the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum. In fact, they show only signs of ageing, but science does, after all, proceed by successive jumps in hypotheses.