4 May: Abbey Road
Took the tube to Westminster – the exit is right underneath Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, which gave one a bit of a goggle to come out into… Or would have, if one hadn’t been immediately swept up in a sea of gypsies selling paper flowers “for the children.” Before I knew what I was about, I was lighter by a fiver and clutching a pleated scrap of orange tissue paper. Believe it or not, I considered this a piece of luck.
Well, what can you say about Westminster Abbey that’s new and different? It’s, um, quite a pile. The mix of the incredibly famous with the incredibly nonfamous – usually an inverse ratio between fame and elaboration of tomb. I mean, there’s Edward the Confessor, and beside him George Helmsley of Spottiswode, Hants. Suddenly you’re shuffling past Elizabeth the First (snuggled in with sister Mary – one imagines lots of bickering about who gets most of the covers, and whose mummy was a whore), then behind the main altar, there’s a series of flat, plain stones – Charles I, Charles II, William, Mary (you know, WILLIAM AND MARY), the crowded tenement tomb of Mary Queen of Scots (including Arabella Stuart, the 18 pathetic dead babies of Queen Anne, and Elizabeth of Bohemia, among others). It was hard to take it all in – especially since we’re being herded through with such cold-blooded facility that one rather expects, at the end, a sharp blow behind the right ear and men to bear the carcasses off to refrigerated trucks. Lady! Get your big butt off Chaucer’s Tomb! Poet’s Corner disappointing because it was not always clear whose bones are actually moldering on the premises and who is only being “memorialized” there. A placard doesn’t do it – I want actual corpses.
And I was getting agitated about finding Aphra Behn’s tomb – by way of being the whole reason for coming to England. It may be silly or pretentious, but I wanted to drop flowers on Aphra’s grave, as Virginia Woolf recommends we do in A Room of One’s Own, “for earning us the right to speak our minds.”
Aphra Behn was the first woman in Europe to make her living writing. She died in 1689, after living a rich and varied life – she’d lived in French Guyana as a teenager, and been a spy in the service of Charles II in Holland, then became one of the most fabulously successful playwrights of her age. She had lots of boyfriends and perhaps a girlfriend or two, wrote poems about premature ejaculation (vide, “The Disappointment”), was thrown into jail for political commentary in some of her plays, and wrote prose narratives which can be argued are some of the first novels in English literature. She also wrote the first popular piece of anti-abolitionist prose, Oroonoko, based on her own experiences in Guyana. One of her particularly troublesome boyfriends wrote her epitaph – “Here lies a proof that Wit can never be/Defense enough against mortality.” I scoured every inch of Poet’s Corner before asking a red-robed verger. Turns out they have her stowed out in the cloisters with the thespians – a fine and airy prospect, turn left at Anne Bracegirdle, and look for the black stone. I dropped my little orange gypsy flower. Mission accomplished.
The gift shop was pretty boring, however – none of the really good tombs were on the postcards. My favorite was the unknown fellow who memorialized himself and his wife by constructing a larger-than-life fireplace, out of which was popping Death (subtly and tastefully portrayed as a skeleton in a pouffy cape wielding a scythe like a five iron) with Mr. Smith and helpmate huddled together on the mantelpiece looking both alarmed and distressed – as well they might. Nobody let good taste stand in the way of making a really outstanding tomb. And because women often predeceased their spouses, the stones ended up interesting: “Here lies the mortal remains of Josephine Blow, dearly beloved wife of Joseph Blow, who inconsably erects this eternal monument to her memory. She was an excellent wife and mother, lamented by all who knew her, pious and mild and liberal to her servants. Oh yeah, Joe Blow is planted here, too.”
Had another terrific ice cream outside the Abbey, then trundled off across Lambeth Bridge (first view of the Thames!) to the Gardening Museum – a small but charming edifice, the former St. Mary’s Church of Lambeth. It was the prettiest square of earth I’ve seen so far, with many lovely things I recognize from my own garden – lots of mourning widow geraniums and columbines and jupiter’s beard. And smack in the center of it, Captain Bligh and the Tradescants.
The best item inside the museum proper was the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary – the legend was that it was half animal, half vegetable. It would grow up out of a stem, which tethered it to a certain area, eat all the grass it could reach, then die. It was actually a fern whose reproductive fronds do look like “legs” – especially when manipulated by 17th century native entrepreneurs. And damned if the thing doesn’t look like… a lamb on a stem!
Then I had half-an-hour to get to Somerset House for a costume lecture. I hopped a cab, which was a good thing because it gave me a critical few extra minutes to find the lecture hall once I got there. You had to go through a scary tribute in wax to the Gilbert of the Gilbert Collection, whose favorite color was Cartland pink and whose favorite musician was Liberace, then gingerly open a door that purported to be a fire exit, opening up into a hall which ended in the lecture theatre. The lecture was called “Fashionable Extravagance: Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria,” and the lecture hall was full.
Valerie Cummings was the presenter, briskly informing us that she going to put to rest all the badmouthing Anne and Henrietta have received, and while she was no feminist, it was clear that a double standard was in operation for foreign queens in the Jacobean courts. First slide, please. The famous portrait of Anne, James I’s queen (and a more thankless position you could not think up), where in her coiffure is lodged hundreds of objets – everything except a plumber’s wrench and the breastbone of a dodo. Cummings explained what each of these symbols mean – her hairdo communicated as much as a graffitied wall, if you had the cues. Next was a full length of Henrietta Marie, Henri IV’s favorite daughter and Charles the First’s queen – in the background on a table is her crown, just within fondling distance. Of course, what would be a lecture on 17th century fashion without Elizabeth of Bohemia (Anne and James’s daughter, the Winter’s Queen)? It was a lively and interesting lecture, but my head was nearly snapping off my shoulders from fatigue. It was time for some éclair therapy.