widow, Eleanor de Bohun, who retired to a nunnery after her husband's
tragic fate. We have looked at the tombs of Edward III. and of Richard
II. from the ambulatory side; both are of English workmanship. That of
the elder monarch is finer and more elaborate than the other, which
Richard raised in his own lifetime to receive the remains of his beloved
first wife, Anne of Bohemia, and destined for his own corpse. Edward's
effigy is purely a conventional one, but the long hair and beard have
often been pointed out as a mark of his neglected lonely deathbed. True
enough this once powerful King died alone save for the ministrations of
an old priest, saddened in his last hours by the loss of his heir, the
Black Prince. But his end was less tragic than that of his successor and
grandson {82} twenty years later, over the details of which a veil of
mystery still hangs. We only know that his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke,
Duke of Lancaster, usurped the throne, and that the deposed Richard died
in prison; his body was obscurely buried at King's Langley, and
re-interred here long afterwards, with the honour due to a king, by his
supplanter's own son, Henry V.

We see here the portrait effigy of the effeminate young King, whose hand
used to be clasped in that of his young foreign bride, but the arms are
both gone. The robes are stamped with Richard's badges, the rising sun
of Crecy and Poictiers, which was his father's favourite emblem, the
broomscods of the Plantagenets, the fleurs-de-lis of France, symbolic of
the constant claim of our sovereigns to the French crown, and many
others. Beneath the canopy are traces of the two-headed eagle, the arms
of Bohemia, and also of the imperial eagle, for Anne was a sister of
Wenceslaus, the good King of Bohemia, and a daughter of the Emperor
Charles IV.; at her feet is the Austrian leopard. As we look at this
royal couple, that fateful day of Anne's funeral is recalled to our
memory, when her bereaved husband in a fit of ungovernable rage struck
one of the powerful {83} nobles, who came late for the ceremony, such a
fierce blow that for the second time in Richard's unfortunate reign the
pavement was stained with blood. On the first occasion a knight, who had
taken sanctuary here, was slain by John of Gaunt's servants. And in each
case the Abbey was placed under an interdict for a time, till by priest
and bell the church was cleansed from pollution. There is another brass,
hidden b