er Hall. The huge sword behind the chair, carried
before Edward III. on his warlike expeditions into France and Scotland,
was probably used on the memorable occasion when he entered Calais in
state after the siege, and his wife Philippa begged her stern lord for
the lives of the twelve burgesses who brought him the keys of the
captured town. We turn to the left round the shrine and approach the
despoiled tomb of that good Flemish lady, who endeared herself to the
hearts of her English subjects by her wise and kindly rule during
Edward's frequent absences abroad and in Scotland. The face, a portrait
this time, shows us a homely countenance with full cheeks and rather
prominent eyes, {80} but pleasant withal and full of character. The
design of the whole was by a Flemish artist, but English stone-masons
worked on the details, and a certain John Orchard, the artist of the
copper-gilt angels, which formerly adorned the canopy, and probably also
of the figures on the King's tomb, made the little alabaster figures of
Philippa's two children in St. Edmund's Chapel for the sum of twenty
shillings. The white stone canopy with the wrought-metal tabernacle work
and gilt angels was actually removed as insecure in the eighteenth
century. The thirty alabaster niches, each containing the statuette of a
royal mourner, and the alabaster angels with gilt wings have all gone,
except the fragments of one, which was put together by Sir Gilbert Scott,
and is in a safe but dark corner. No trace remains of the iron grille
which Edward bought for his queen from a bishop's monument in St. Paul's
Cathedral. The King's own tomb is next to that of his wife: he thus kept
the promise which he made to her as she lay dying, and lies beside her in
the "Cloister" at Westminster. Froissart tells a touching story of the
scene between the royal couple, when Philippa held the hand of the
husband who had so often been faithless to her, and asked this, her last
boon. {81} Near her bed stood Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester,
the only one of her fourteen children able to be present at his mother's
deathbed; he is buried close to her tomb. Thomas was murdered by order
of his nephew, Richard II.--who was himself destined to come to an
untimely end at the hands of a relative--and the grave of the victim is
not far from Richard's own monument. We saw in St. Edmund's Chapel the
fourteenth-century brass which marks the last resting-place of the Duke's