(with the exception of one short interval) he has remained ever
since."[9] The King himself carried from St. Paul's the sacred relics
which the Knights Templars had given him twenty years before, and
deposited them behind the shrine, where Henry the Fifth's Chantry now
stands.

Dear as the Abbey was to King Henry as a monument of his own piety and
taste, and as the shrine of his sainted kinsman, yet he must have loved
it even more tenderly for being the resting-place of a little child. The
Confessor's Church as you will remember was consecrated on Childermas,
the Holy Innocents' Day. And it seems to me not without significance,
that the first interment of importance in Henry the Third's new building
was that of a child of five years old--his beautiful little daughter
Catherine. In 1257, during an insurrection of the Welsh which laid waste
the Border, and which the King strove in vain to quell--the kingdom
desolated with famine--the Barons mutinous and defiant--Henry's cup of
trouble was filled by the death of his little child.

[Illustration: SHRINE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.--AT LEFT, TOMB OF HENRY
THE THIRD.]

"She was dumb, and fit for nothing," says old Matthew Paris rather
cruelly, "though possessing great beauty." The poor queen fell ill and
nearly died of grief at the loss of her little deaf and dumb girl, loved
all the more dearly no doubt, by reason of her affliction. And her
illness, his own want of success against the Welsh, and the little
princess's death, so overwhelmed the king with grief as to bring on "a
tertian fever, which detained him for a long time at London, whilst at
the same time the queen was confined to her bed at Windsor by an attack
of pleurisy."[10]

The little Catherine was buried with great pomp in the ambulatory just
outside the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel to the south of the Confessor's
Shrine, and close to the grand tomb of her uncle, the king's half
brother, William de Valence. Her father raised a splendid monument to
her memory. It was rich with mosaic and polished slabs of serpentine, in
much the same style as his own magnificent tomb on the north of the
Confessor's Chapel. A silver image of St. Catherine was placed upon it,
for which William de Gloucester, the king's goldsmith, was paid seventy
marks. The image of course has vanished, like many other precious
things. Most of the mosaic has been picked out. But enough of it and of
the polished marbles exist to show the elaborate