My schooldays in a place of splendour
Harry Mount regrets that he once took Westminster Abbey entirely for granted
It is 8am on a Tuesday morning, and the greatest church in the country is empty. Except in one place – the holiest, most royal spot in Westminster Abbey. Half a dozen worshippers are taking Holy Communion in the tiny Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, hidden behind the altar. The congregation is outnumbered by dead kings and queens, ranged in a tight semi-circle around them: Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, Henry III and Henry V.
The altar used for the service is the tomb of Edward the Confessor, who oversaw the consecration of Westminster Abbey in 1065, days before his death. Tomorrow, the Abbey celebrates the 950th anniversary of that consecration.
As I stand by Edward the Confessor’s shrine, I can’t help but feel a tremendous wave of guilt. Three times a week, from 1984 until 1988, I came to 9am services in the Abbey, as a boy at Westminster School. Except when I bunked off and tried to dodge the brilliant maths master, Tristram Jones-Parry, aka TJP, who patrolled Dean’s Yard in search of truants.
I completely took it for granted that my schooldays were spent on the ancient, hallowed ground of the Anglo-Saxon church that features in the Bayeux Tapestry as Edward the Confessor’s burial place. Less than a year after Edward’s death, William the Conqueror was crowned in the Abbey, on Christmas Day, 1066.
What a privilege to have one of the finest churches in the world as your school chapel. What monstrous narcissism not to realise it at the time.
At the end of the school day, we blithely had tea and buns in the 14thcentury Abbot’s Hall of the Abbey. On Mondays, we had Latin prayers on the site of the monks’ 11th century dormitory. Naughtier boys than me used to smoke in the Little Cloister, by the old infirmary chapel. On the mornings I deigned to go to the abbey, I strolled past Britain’s oldest door, built in the 1050s. And none of it seemed at all strange or special.
Thirty years on, with an empty abbey to myself, I am overwhelmed by its splendours. The abbey is a unique collision of religion, royalty, politics, art and architecture.
All those forces feed off each other. On the evening of the day I visit, Handel’s Messiah is to be played. As I walk through Poets’ Corner, I come across Roubiliac’s monument to Handel, who’s buried in the abbey. The monument shows the composer holding a quill over a page of sheet music for – what else? – the Messiah.
When Edward the Confessor built his new church and monastery, he also built himself a palace next door. Thus the Palace of Westminster – still the official name for the Houses of Parliament, which you keep glimpsing through the windows of the abbey.
Simon de Montfort’s Parliament – which celebrated its 750th anniversary this year – first met in the Palace of Westminster.
The abbey is the ultimate place for a history lesson. I shake with a secondary pulse of guilt at the memory of my O-level project on Richard III. I wrote it yards from the tomb of Henry VII and the bones of the Princes in the Tower. And yet I never visited their remains once. The same goes for the tombs of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.
The history of the Reformation is writ large, too. The building only survived Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries because so many of his ancestors, not least his father, were buried here. The Henry VII Chapel is the greatest piece of Tudor Gothic work in the country, with its flamboyant fan vaults.
As I dashed from unseen treasure to unseen treasure, I felt a variant of Stendhal syndrome. That was the malady suffered by the French writer in 1817 in Santa Croce in Florence. He felt palpitations and a kind of ecstasy at the sublime beauty of the church, combined with the presence of the tombs of Galileo, Machiavelli and Michelangelo.
In the abbey, I felt all those things: the ecstasy and the palpitations, plus an extra sensation – of childhood guilt soothed by the adult appreciation of religion and history, carved in stone.
‘We blithely had tea buns in the 14thand century Abbot’s Hall’
To visit Wesminster Abbey, go to tickets. westminster-abbey.org