ebodings at the event. Crowds flocked to see
the body as it lay in the palace, with an unearthly smile on its rosy
cheeks, and with the long thin fingers interlaced across the bosom.

Then, attired in royal robes, and bedecked with crown, crucifix, and
golden chain, they laid the remains before the High Altar of the Abbey.
His wife Edith was afterwards laid beside him. After the Conquest, royal
personages for a time were buried in Normandy, till "the good Queen
Maud," the wife of Henry I. and niece of Edgar Atheling, was laid
beside the Confessor. In rebuilding the Abbey, Henry III. provided a new
shrine, to which the remains of the now canonised Edward were removed,
and in which (except for a short time) they have since remained.

Behind the shrine the king placed some holy relics, including a tooth of
St. Athanasius, and a stone said to show a footprint of our Lord. For
fifty years Henry watched his new Abbey growing to completion, and
determined it should be the burying-place of himself and the Plantagenet
line. He was laid temporarily in the place from which the Confessor's
bones had been taken. His son Edward I., returning from the Holy Land,
brought home porphyry, slates, and precious marbles to build the tomb to
which Henry's body was transferred about twenty years after his death.
The Abbess of Fontevrault was then in London, and the late king's heart
was delivered into her hands to be deposited in the foreign home of the
Plantagenets.

[Illustration: DAISY AND DOLLY. (_See p._ 176.)]

Henceforward many royal personages were brought to be buried near the
Confessor's shrine; but I shall only mention the more prominent. When
Queen Eleanor died in 1291, the course of the funeral _cortege_ from
Lincoln to London was marked by twelve memorial crosses, and the Abbots
of Westminster were bound to have a hundred wax lights burning round her
grave for ever on the anniversary of her death. In 1307, after having
placed in the Confessor's Chapel the golden crown of the last Welsh
Prince, Llewellyn, and the Stone of Fate from Scotland, Edward I. was
himself brought here to lie beneath the rough monument, from which it
was hoped that, in accordance with his dying wish, his bones might at
some time be taken and carried through Scotland at the head of a
conquering army.

In 1394, Richard II. buried here his beloved Queen Anne, the friend of
the followers of Wickliffe. The palace of Sheen in which she died was
destroyed by