of in the halo which
surrounded the memory of the Saxon king, and it was to the English
royal saint rather than to the Hebrew apostle that the Abbey owed its
peculiar sanctity. From the first it was a royal foundation, a
building consecrated to the memory of a king, yet none of {5} these
considerations were weighed in the balance when the West Minster shared
in the general downfall of the English monasteries. The sovereign
himself laid violent hands upon the treasures presented by his pious
forefathers in honour of St. Edward, and the saint's body must surely
have turned in its coffin when, to save it from indignity, the monks
were obliged to lift it from the feretory and hide it beneath the
ground. The shrine which had been the pride of each king since the
days of Henry III., and honoured no less by the first Tudor sovereign,
was stripped of its glories: the shining golden top, which used to be
seen from end to end of the church, was melted down; the jewels, which
had been offered by royal worshipper and humble pilgrim alike, even the
precious images of sainted king and saintly evangelist, were ruthlessly
transferred to the palace treasury. None of these survive to-day, but
the mosaic pillars and the basement were concealed by the brethren
before they fled from the monastery, and the lower part of the shrine
was reconstructed by the daughter of the sovereign to whom the
devastation was due; to her also we owe the wooden top, which replaced
the glorious golden feretory. The monastic community, who were
restored to their home by the same {6} Queen, the "bloody" Mary of
Protestant history, survived a few years longer into the days of
Elizabeth, and the former intimate connection between the Crown and the
convent, severed with the final dismissal of the Abbot and monks, found
a pale reflection in the friendship which Elizabeth always showed to
the Dean of her new foundation. But the Maiden Queen was in very deed
the last royal person to whom Westminster Abbey owed substantial
benefits. She refounded the collegiate church, which finally took the
place of the monastery, and established Westminster School; before her
reign the only boys taught within the precincts were the few scholars
collected in the cloisters by the monks. She is, in fact, the
foundress of St. Peter's College, which thus owes its status as a royal
foundation to Queen Elizabeth.

Very rarely, however, in modern days has the church or the college bee