ion which once adorned the whole of the tomb of Henry III. Thanks
to their grilles, the silver-gilt effigies of Henry and his
daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Castile, were secure from the despoiler's
hand, and remain as examples of the skill of an English artist, one
William Torel. The exceedingly interesting iron grille which guards
Eleanor's image is also by an English hand, that of Master Thomas of
Lewes, a {74} Sussex smith, and we inform our friends that Sussex was in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, probably till much later, an
iron-smelting county--a fact which is recalled by the hammer ponds at the
present day. Beneath our feet, protected by the linoleum, are fragments
of the ancient pavement, and north and south of the shrine lie two Saxon
queens whose bodies were removed here from the Confessor's church, when
it was pulled down by Henry III. Both were called by the old English
name of Editha. The elder is connected with the first historic
foundation of the Abbey, for she, the Confessor's wife, was present at
the consecration (Innocents' Day, 1066) of the choir and transepts, when
her husband lay helpless on his deathbed. Her niece changed the Saxon
name of Editha for the Norman Matilda or Maud when, by her marriage with
Henry I., the two rival races were united in one family. It is pleasant
here to turn to the foreigners amongst us and remind them that while we
speak of English sovereigns who were continually at war with their
ancestors, yet the discord was more apparent than real. For these very
men, the sworn enemies of France and of Spain for many a long generation,
were the husbands or {75} the sons of French, Spanish, and other foreign
princesses. Not only were they blood relations, but the language of
their courts and of their legal documents was French, and when they
wasted the fair lands of France, or fought against Spain, Flanders, and
Holland, they believed themselves to be striving to regain their lost
heritages and the dowries brought them by their brides. Long after
England and France were completely severed, Mary Tudor, herself the
daughter of a Spanish mother, and the wife of a Spanish king, clung so
fiercely to the last link which gave the English kings a claim to the
fleurs-de-lis in their quarterings that her heart broke when Calais fell.
We have already referred to the central tomb on the north of the shrine,
which contains the body of our second founder, Henry III., himself by th