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BURIAL OF CHARLES I.

127

pause was brief, and the state, if such it could be called, sudden and scanty.

A few glimmering torches were lighted; six of the king's faithful friends lifted the coffin on their shoulders; about a dozen gentlemen in mourning arranged themselves behind it, and the procession moved forward.

The spectators of the ceremony were few. Here and there a soldier of the parliament walked by the side of the corpse, and some muttered an exclamation of compassion, and some repeated a sentence from the Scriptures, which they applied to the fall of him whom they held to have been a scourge and a tyrant.

The inner gates of the castle creaked heavily on their massy hinges as the funeral procession passed; and here the guard was numerous. At intervals, a file of parliamentary troops was under arms; but such precautions seemed unnecessary. Few of the people were admitted within the ward; and no knell announced the melancholy business that was at hand.

The evening was lowering, and fitful gusts of wind echoed along the old and tenantless towers, the only requiem to the soul of the departed. At length the procession reached the western entrance of the chapel. It was here again met by a file of musketeers, but they exhibited no martial reverence to the remains of a king. No gorgeous tapers shed their lustre over the lofty columns and the fretted roof; no choral voices sang the sacred dirge which proclaims the hopes of immortality; no crowds of nobles came in their mantles of state to bear witness to the vanity of all earthly dignities.

It had been intended to have deposited the body in the tomb of Edward IV.; but from the difficulties which the labourers encountered there, the place of sepulture was changed to the vault of Henry VIII.

Here Bishop Juxon now stood. The bearers put down the corpse in solemn silence. Those who followed the king crowded round those remains which would soon pass for ever from their view, and the aged prelate opened his service-book. After a moment's interval, he began his duty in so tremulous a voice that it was scarcely audible.

“I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue."

Suddenly a loud knocking was heard at the outer door. The bishop paused for an instant, and then proceeded, while Colonel Whitchot entered the chapel.

"I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, while the ungodly is in my sight.""

The colonel strode up the choir.

"Silence, Master Juxon, silence!" he exclaimed in a peremptory tone. The mourners looked up trembling.

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May we not quietly pay the last sad duties to our beloved master?" said the bishop.

"It may not be, sir; it may not be. Know ye not that the parliamentary commissioners have forbidden all vain and Catholic and antiChristian ceremonies over the dead, which savour of the abominations of the great harlot? Soldiers," he added, "lower the body into the grave."

The stern mandate was quickly executed, the mourners lifting up their eyes to heaven, and waiting the issue of this unseemly violence. After the coffin had been lowered, the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Lindsey, the Duke of Rutland, Bishop Juxon, Herbert, and a few more anxious followers, went down into the vault, and there the bishop threw himself upon his knees-a motion which all present involuntarily imitated, and exclaimed:

"Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity; we give thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world; beseeching thee that it may please thee, of thy gracious goodness, shortly to accomplish the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy kingdom." "Amen!" answered all, with a firm voice. In the year 1813, this vault was examined. the opening of the coffin of Charles, George IV., the Duke of Cumberland, Count Munster, the Dean of Windsor, and Sir Henry Halford. The latter furnished a detail of the examination which took place, an extract from which we give :

There were present at

"The complexion of the face was dark and discoloured. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their muscular substance; the cartilage of the nose was gone; but the left eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full, though it vanished almost immediately; and the pointed beard, so characteristic of the reign of King Charles I., was perfect. The shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter between it and the cerecloth, was found entire. It was difficult at this moment to withhold a declaration, that, notwithstanding its disfigurement, the countenance did bear a strong resemblance to the coins, the busts, and especially to the pictures of King

BURIAL OF QUEEN ADELAIDE.

129

Charles I. by Vandyke, by which it had been made familiar to us. ...When the head had been entirely disengaged from the attachments which confined it, it was found to be loose, and without any difficulty was taken up and held to view."

When Lord Byron heard of this examination, he wrote a short but very ferocious piece, which he called "Windsor Poetics." "They are," as he says, "lines composed on the occasion of His Royal Highness the Prince Regent being seen standing between the coffins of Henry VIII. and Charles I. in the royal vault at Windsor."

"Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties,
By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies;
Between them stands another sceptred thing-
It moves, it reigns-in all but name a king.
Charles to his people, Henry to his wife,-
In him the double tyrant starts to life!
Justice and death have mix'd their dust in vain,

Each royal vampire wakes to life again.

Ah, what can tombs avail! since these disgorge

The blood and dust of both-to mould a George !"

The last of Britain's royal lineage who has been buried at Windsor was Queen Adelaide. The funeral took place on Thursday, the 13th of December 1849. Although the ceremony was shorn of the pageantry of state, such as had hitherto characterised the royal interments in England, it was rendered the more touching and interesting by its simplicity, and by the absence of what has been expressively termed "the pomp of death."

The coffin is placed by the side of her royal husband's; both of them resting on a long stone platform, erected in the middle of the floor of the vault. Beyond them, on this platform, the coffin of George IV. is placed; and beyond this, at the extremity of the mausoleum, on a stone shelf, lie the remains of George III. The crowns set upon the coffins indicate to the eye immediately that they contain the remains of those who once were monarchs. On the one side of George III. repose the bodies of Queen Charlotte and Prince Alfred; on the other side those of the Princess Amelia and Prince Octavius. On the left of William IV. and Queen Adelaide, by the wall, is the coffin of their infant child, the Princess Elizabeth; and hard by rest the Duke of York, the infant child of the Duke of Cumberland, the Duchess of Brunswick, the Princess Charlotte and her infant, the Duke of Kent, and the Princess Augusta.

CHAPTER VII.

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FORESTS OF EPPING AND HAINAULT.

ONCE very extensive Forest of Epping was formerly called the Forest of Essex, being the only forest in that county, the whole of which was anciently comprehended in it. By a charter of King John, confirmed by Edward IV., all that part of the forest which lay to the north of the highway from Stortford to Colchester (very distant from the present boundaries) was disafforested. The forest was further reduced by a perambulation made in the year 1640. The boundaries then settled include the whole of eleven parishes, and parts of ten other parishes. The extent of the

forest is estimated at 60,000 acres, of which 48,000 acres are calculated to be enclosed and private property; the remaining 12,000 acres are the unenclosed wastes and woods.

As the extent of the forest became abridged, it was at first called Waltham Forest; but as the distance between that town and its outskirts was gradually increased by the forest-felling hatchet, it borrowed a name from a town more immediately in its thick recesses, and called itself Epping.

As is common in ancient forests in the neighbourhood of man's wants, the trees in many parts of this forest are dwarfed in height by repeated loppings, and the boughs spring from the hollow gnarled boles of pollard oaks and beeches; the trunks, covered with mosses and whitening canker-stains, or wreaths of ivy, speak of remote an

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