Reading Stained Glass: Corpus Christi and the Pelican

‘A wonderful bird is the pelican …’* Anyone who only knew about pelicans from this celebrated limerick might be forgiven for smiling at the mere thought of these rather bizarre birds. But the pelican, along with the dove and the eagle, is one of the most important symbols in Christian iconography. I believe his earliest appearance in stained glass - though from now on I must say ‘her’, not ‘his’ – is in Chartres Cathedral (fig.ii) in the 13^th century ‘Redemption window’ where a pelican, with wings outstretched, pecks at her breast to allow her chicks to feed on her blood. The seated king, looking on, is David, and in his hand he holds a long scroll with the inscription ‘Similis factus sum pellicamo’ (from Psalm 102: ‘I am become like the pelican in the wilderness’). So this one image both looks back to the Old Testament, foreshadowing of the loneliness of Jesus in the wilderness, and forward to the crucifixion and the redemptive shedding of Christ’s own blood. The pelican becomes established as the symbol of Corpus Christi, the body [and blood] of Christ. The feast of

Corpus Christi is always observed on the second Thursday after Whit Sunday. In the later middle ages, this was an important public holiday, celebrated with processions, pageants and mystery plays performed by members of the different Guilds. All long gone, now, but the pelican remains.

 

From then until now, the elements of the symbol – the bird, the blood, the chicks and the nest –

hardly change. They appear throughout Europe not only in stained glass but in stone and wood carving too, for instance on a 15^th century misericord in Cartmel Priory (Cumberland; fig. iii).

 

Oxford and Cambridge each have a Corpus Christi College, and an heraldic pelican appears on the arms of both. At Cambridge the college was founded in 1352 jointly by the Guild of Corpus Christi and the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, hence the shield is quartered between the pelican and the lilies that are the symbol of Mary. At Oxford, Corpus Christi was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, whose own crest was a golden pelican. There is a splendid 16^th century sundial in the College quad, surmounted by a pelican in her piety.

 

The pelican is one of the very few pre-Reformation religious symbols to have survived the upheavals in English church life during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Later, indeed, she enjoyed a dramatic revival in stained glass during the 19^th century. A remarkable image in an early (1864) window by  Morris & Co at Bradford Cathedral depicts the pelican in graphic, almost comical, close-up (fig.iv:) staring – or glaring? –  down her beak at the first rubber-necked chick, she struggles to steer a glob of blood towards his gaping mouth while the other two wait eagerly for their turn. 

 

The range of textures and patterns in this image is worth our attention. At the base flowers and grass reach up around the neatly woven wicker basket of a nest in which the downy chicks appear half submerged in hay. The dark blue background is an intricate pattern of tiny quatrefoils created out of a lattice work of black lines and dashes, all painted on by hand. Looking carefully, you can see one or two places where the design goes wrong. At the top the wavy grey-green clouds are actually the only indication that this is a religious symbol at all: clouds represented like this, though rather less freehand than here, always denoted in medieval glass the clouds of heaven and William Morris was careful to follow that precedent. The artist who designed this window was Morris’s close friend, Philip Webb.  

 

At Much Marcle in Herefordshire she appears above the Crucifixion scene in the church’s East

window (fig.v), designed in 1877 for Charles Eamer Kempe by Wyndham Hope Hughes. This design clearly shows Kempe’s debt to the Chartres pelican, but with the rather neat added touch that the nest is drawn as the cup of an acorn and the bird perches on a branch of oak leaves.  

 

No artist in the 19^th century paid more attention to the pelican than Kempe, for whom the bird had a special significance. That Kempe often signed his windows with a wheatsheaf – one of the elements of his family’s coat of arms – is well known; much less well known is that the crest on top of the Kempe shield depicts a pelican pecking at a wheatsheaf. For Kempe, this image had a key symbolic significance. He had originally hoped to be ordained as an Anglican priest, but a severe stammer prevented this and after leaving university he decided to develop a career in church decoration and stained glass. Throughout his career he believed that he had a special vocation to teach and indeed to preach through his windows. What he could not say from the pulpit because of his stammer, he could express though stained glass.  It is no surprise that the poet George Herbert meant a great deal to him:

 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

            When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

            Doth vanish like a flaring thing …. (‘The Windows’)

 

He came indeed to see the wheatsheaf and the pelican, his personal crest, (fig.vi) as an endorsement of his vocation, for together they are emblematic of the Eucharist – the wheatsheaf representing the bread and the pelican, the wine. No other stained glass designer invested the pelican with greater presence, nor saw the bird so clearly as the embodiment of Christ. Whenever you see a pelican in a window, look also for the text accompanying it. If this reads ‘Ihesus pelicanus noster’ (Jesus our Pelican; fig.i - see above) the window is by Kempe.

 

© Adrian Barlow

 

*A wonderful bird is the pelican: 

His bill can hold more than his belly can.

He can keep in his beak

Enough food for a week

But I’m blowed if I know how the hell he can!

              Dixon Lanier Merritt (1910)

 

You can read more about the significance of the pelican in my book, Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

 

Illustrations:

Fig. i:  Pelican in her Piety by John Carter for C.E. Kempe, in St Botolph’s Church, Cambridge, 1889

Fig. ii: King David and the Pelican in her Piety, Chartres Cathedral, 13^th century

Fig. iii: Pelican in her Piety, carved misericord seat in Cartmel Priory, 15^th century

Fig.iv: Pelican in her Piety (by Philip Webb, for Morris & Co.) Bradford Cathedral, 1864

Fig v: Pelican in her Piety, by Wyndham Hope Hughes for C.E. Kempe, St Bartholomew’s Church, Much Marcle, 1877

Fig.vi: Kempe’s Bookplate, depicting the Pelican and the Wheatsheaf

 

All photographs © the author.

 

 

 

Reading Stained Glass: Easter Day

These days most people, if they associate Coventry with stained glass at all, think of John Piper’s great Baptistry window. And rightly, for it was the first, and I believe remains the finest, modern abstract window in any British cathedral. 

But the city has a distinguished tradition of stained glass, going back to the 15^th century, when John Thornton was the pre-eminent English stained glass artist. He and his workshop created the enormous East window of York Minster, while at the same time continuing to fill the churches of Coventry with stained glass promoting the city as a place of culture, wealth and civic pride. Much of this celebrated glass adorned St Michael’s Church, the former Cathedral, until hurriedly taken out and stored as loose fragments in 1939 when war loomed. Unlike the Cathedral itself, most survived the war, but only recently has the scale and importance of this forgotten treasure begun to be appreciated again. 

Some of the glass has already been restored and a small amount is on display in the present Cathedral. Among the pieces, I was especially struck by a small panel depicting the moment of Christ’s Resurrection (fig.i). It’s worth a close look, even though I suspect this was not the work of John Thornton himself, nor even perhaps of his workshop: it lacks the assurance of his style, but is not without a rough vigour of its own. The window depicts the moment of the Resurrection – literally Christ’s emergence from the grave. The scene is loosely extrapolated from the account in Matthew’s gospel, where the soldiers, set by Pilate to guard the tomb, are paid hush money to say that someone had broken into the tomb and stolen the body while they were asleep. 

In this window, as usual in medieval stained glass, the tomb is shown not as a cave with a boulder rolled across the opening, but as a chest tomb with a great slab on top that has been moved or broken (by an earthquake, Matthew says). Christ appears, his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding a long staff with at the top a cross, from the crosspiece of which hangs a pennant displaying the red badge of salvation. Thus far the scene contains all the elements you’d expect to find; however, this artist also adds an unexpected touch of humour. As the startled soldiers wake up, Jesus, stepping back into the world, plants his foot inadvertently on the stomach of the one lying closest to the tomb. It is perhaps as well that the details of the soldier’s face have faded so we cannot see his winded/wounded reaction to this giant step for mankind. The other soldiers, too, look blearily unsure of what is going on.

Of the few attempts in stained glass to show the sepulchre as a tomb ‘hewn out of a rock’, perhaps the

oddest is at Fairford(fig. ii). Here, there is certainly a hole in a hillside, but you could be forgiven for thinking both cave and hillside look curiously man-made. And once again there is an empty chest tomb – a tomb within a tomb – the lid of which has been spun around. Christ’s winding sheet now hangs over the side like a discarded bath towel. It needs the angel addressing the three women to restore a sense of biblical authenticity.  The four gospel writers, it should be said, each tell the story differently: Matthew has one angel addressing two women, Mark has him addressing three (Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene and Salome) while Luke has two angels telling the two Marys and Joanna that Christ is risen. John mentions only Mary Magdalene, who finds the tomb empty – no angel for her there; but she soon encounters Jesus himself in the garden, only to mistake him for the gardener. Of these conflicting versions, Mark’s (one angel, three women) is the source for the Fairford window. Only one of the three women, presumably Mary Magdalene, has a halo; later artists, however, have tended to play safe by giving haloes to them all.

Two of my favourite 19^th century Resurrection windows are from the Kempe Studio. The first is a very early Kempe window (fig.iii; 1871) by Wyndham Hope Hughes at St John’s Church, Waterbeach, near Cambridge. 

The window is much faded, but I find the painting of the three women, lined up on the grass with their jars of embalming spices, curiously touching. It looks, too, as though the veil with its yellow stripe, worn by the youngest of the women, is as previously modelled by one of the Fairford mourners. Facing the women, who are lined up in front of what could be a vestigial trellis, sits the angel on a red chest tomb. The scene is reduced to its essentials, and its dominant colour scheme, red and green, offsets well the white and gold garments of the motionless women.

Finally, and in total contrast, I admire the same scene from a window in St. Bartholomew’s Church, Much Marcle (fig.iv; Herefordshire; 1889 – the artist was John Carter). Here the three women kneel before the Angel, with their backs to us – their haloes, therefore and most unusually, in front of their faces. 

The angel is perched on the edge of the tomb. His wings are spread, largely blocking from view the walled city of Jerusalem behind him. He gestures towards the women as he speaks: ‘Non est hic ecce locus ubi posuerunt eum’ (“He is not here: behold the place where they laid him”; Mark 16:6) The older women wait for what he will say next, but Mary Magdalene has already turned her head, opened her mouth and raised her arms distractedly. 

Kempe’s windows are sometimes criticised for being too static; but if we read them carefully, noting the cautioning hand on Mary’s elbow, we can sense the tension of the moment and can ourselves supply the question she is desperate to ask:

“Where is he then?”

Adrian Barlow

Text and illustrations © Adrian Barlow

Illustrations:

Fig. i:  Coventry Cathedral: The Resurrection (reconstructed fragment; 15^th century)

Fig.ii: Fairford Parish Church: The Women at the Tomb, detail; c. 1500)

Fig iii: Waterbeach Parish Church: The Women at the Tomb (W. window, 1871. This window has been cleaned and conserved since my photograph was taken)

Fig.iv: Much Marcle Parish Church: The Women at the Tomb (Kyrle Chapel, E window, 1889)

This is the third of three successive posts discussing stained glass windows relating to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day. The previous two posts can be accessed here:

Reading Stained Glass: Maundy Thursday

Reading Stained Glass: Good Friday

Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (Lutterworth Press, 2018)

Espying Heaven: the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (Lutterworth Press, 2019)

You can read about these two books on The Victorian Web. 

‘So Teach us to Number our Days’: diaries & diarists

At the year’s end it’s always a pleasure to read the latest excerpts from Alan Bennett’s dairy, published annually in the London Review of Books. There are things one always looks out for – name dropping, for instance. 2017 is a vintage year: Bennett begins with ‘Tony Snowden and Princess Margaret’ and ends with ‘the (much missed) Debo, Duchess of Devonshire’.  In between come Gielgud and Guinness, Derek Jarman and Patrick Garland, Cecil Beaton and Coral Browne – a veritable dramatis personae.

Bennett is surely the Eeyore of modern letters. He notes with equal resignation and pleasure that The Oldie has called him ‘trademark lugubrious’, but at the same time he can be endearingly funny. Reading in bed one night he contrives to fall asleep ‘with a very uncomfortable bunch of keys in my pyjama pocket’, the consequences of this left to the reader’s wincing imagination.

I enjoy spotting Bennett’s other trademark: his habit of ending sentences with an added, abbreviated, comment – abbreviated because the author has left out the verb one would expect to find there. Here are two examples from 2017:

(9^th June, about Theresa May): Notable that she keeps referring to ‘our country’ whereas an ordinary person as distinct from a politician would say ‘this country’ – ‘our’ paradoxically not an inclusive term.’

(29^th August, in Paris): ‘We go into a creperie opposite the St Germain covered market hoping for some tea, in the window a solitary piece of cake.’

What is missing from these examples is the active voice. I used to assume that this was just a form of diarist’s shorthand, thoughts and observations tagged on rather than incorporated into the sentence. But it crops up in different contexts too – in The History Boys (2004) for instance – where Hector is arguing with his VIth Form students about how to write an Oxbridge entrance essay on the Holocaust. ‘Why can’t you simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?’ he asks. Lockwood cockily replies:

‘No point, sir. Everybody will do that. That’s the stock answer, sir …  the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc.’

Here Lockwood uses the Bennett ellipsis quite appropriately, as if reeling off headings for an essay. But Hector replies:

‘No. Can’t you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation.’

‘Mere verbal abbreviation’ defines Bennett’s literary mannerism precisely, if inadvertently. But it’s when this ellipsis finds its way into the speech of other characters – albeit one such as Hector, in many ways a mouthpiece for Bennett himself – that I start to ask whether what began as diarist’s shorthand isn’t showing signs of repetitive strain. Might Hector’s denunciation not have been stronger if he’d actively condemned the Nazis for reducing the dead to an etcetera?

I have spent a lot of time with diaries recently. While writing my book on Charles Eamer Kempe* I have had access to the diary of Wyndham Hughes, a fine but forgotten artist, who was Kempe’s leading draughtsman during the 1870s. Hughes was a lifelong diarist, each volume prefaced with ‘The record of our days and years’ or ‘So teach us to number our days: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom’ (Psalm 90). For me, his diary has been invaluable, describing his friendship with Kempe, listing many of his key commissions (previously unidentified) and sometimes containing precious ephemera slipped between the pages – this 1876 letter, for instance:

My dear Hughes

Thanks for the drawing which I hope, (& think it aught) will pass the Royal Critic. I think I should take with me in the morning the former drawing (charcoal) to remind H.R.H. of the architect[ural] background &c – as well as to show the changes in the figure. The Child is very successful now. Could you bring me the old drawing by 9.15. I have to be at the Palace by 10.

 Yours, C.E.K

This never-before-seen letter refers to the most significant commission Hughes ever undertook for Kempe: a memorial window for Queen Victoria’s grandson.^‡ The window established a friendship between Kempe and the Royal Family, his reputation thereby greatly enhanced. To find such a letter, in such a diary, is one of a biographer’s rewards.

The other diary I’ve been reading recently is my grandfather’s. Edward Barlow, a Baptist minister, was not a diarist by habit; however, in 1917 he went to France as a YMCA padre and kept a diary of the two most remarkable years of his life. Working in a transit camp near Rouen, he met and recorded conversations with ordinary soldiers on their way to the Front. Here is one such encounter, from 100 years ago today: 1st January 1918:

A draft of men from the Camp for Base missed their train by 30 mins. & consequently had a long wait in our Hut. One spoke to me in great trouble about his home in a colliery village (Northumberland). He showed me a letter from his wife’s mother which he received last Friday saying that his wife was going out with another man & cared no more for him than she did for her. The children had for a time been with her mother but now they were taken off by a black woman. His wife had gone to the dogs & was a disgrace to them. She hadn’t got any money but wasted it on dressing herself like a fairy & going with the man in the evenings to picture houses and the theatre.

The man was greatly upset & said he would try to get home without anyone knowing it & catch his wife with the man. It would pay the man to keep out of his way & he would get his wife, who was in munitions, out of the town. She was 29.

My grandfather never revealed that he had kept this diary; my father found it among his papers after his death, and I have it now.

Adrian Barlow

* Kempe: the life, art and legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe will be published by Lutterworth Press in Summer 2018. Further details to follow in due course.

^‡Prince Friedrich (Frittie) von Hessen-Darmstadt (1870-1873) was the second son of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Alice, wife of the Grand Duke of Darmstadt and Hesse. A haemophiliac, Frittie was the first of Victoria’s grandchildren to die. He was buried in the Neues Mausoleum at Rosenhöhe, on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and it was for the window in the mausoleum that Kempe was commissioned to produce the stained glass designed by Wyndham Hughes. The commission was brokered by Alice’s brother, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and he is the ‘Royal Critic’ referred to by Kempe in his letter to Hughes.

Illustrations] (i) Alan Bennett (National Theatre); (ii) Window (1877), designed by Wyndham Hope Hughes for the Royal Mausoleum in Darmstadt. The image of the child is a likeness of Prince Friedrich. (iii) Edward Barlow’s Diary for 1918, while serving with the YMCA at No. 11 Convalescent Depot, Buchy (Nr. Rouen).   Photos (ii) and (iii) © author

Alan Bennett and Tennyson in Poets' Corner

Poets’ Corner seems to be popular this month. The Times Literary Supplement has just published a provocative item suggesting we have simply forgotten many of the writers commemorated there. ‘How many visitors to Poets’ Corner today,’ asks NB, the back-page columnist of the TLS, ‘recognise the name of Thomas Shadwell, whose monument was raised circa 1700?’ Well, as it happens, I do. Shadwell has a cameo appearance in Dyden’s Dunciad, and I memorised the following couplet for my finals, hoping it might come in useful—as at last it has done:

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

            But Sh——— never deviates into sense.

Meanwhile The London Review of Books has been publishing extracts from Alan Bennett’s diary of the past twelve months. Last September, we now learn, Bennett was recalling a conversation he had had in 1995 with the then Dean of Westminster Abbey, Michael Mayne. The Dean had asked Bennett (who at the time was making a documentary about the Abbey for the BBC) whether he thought Philip Larkin and J.B. Priestley deserved to be commemorated in Poets’ Corner. Bennett admits that while he considered Larkin ‘an obvious yes on the strength of Church Going, let alone the rest’, he’d been lukewarm about Priestley. Today Priestley still isn’t there, and no doubt has now missed his chance—about which Bennett confesses he is filled ‘with regret and self-reproach’.

Deciding Abbey business in an informal way that has irreversible consequences echoes a letter sent by an earlier Dean, George Granville Bradley, to Charles Eamer Kempe, the celebrated stained glass designer, in March 1894:

My dear Kempe

   You see I treat you as an old Rugbeian & dock you of the ‘Mr’!

   I am sure that I may privately ask your opinion on a matter in which I rather distrust my own judgment - & Somers Clark, whom I sometimes surreptitiously consult is away.

   We are laying down a gravestone over Tennyson.

   It is to be very simple  - black Irish marble.

   I thought a plain cross

                                   +  †

Then the name

      Alfred

Lord Tennyson

born August &c

died October &c

& just a wreath of laurels below.

  

   Lady T rather likes to have the laurel wreath on the +. but wd not that suggest to the ordinary mind the couronne d’epines [crown of thorns] rather than the laureate ship?

   I told her that I should take some good counsellor’s opinion.

   It will be of course in a much trodden part of Poets’ Corner i.e. the S transept close to Chaucer’s monument.

   I should much value a hint from you & I am sure that you will forgive me.

   Mr Pearson has been very ill – is better; but still poorly. I may see him on Wednesday & it wd be a comfort to have my own views strengthened by a better guide than myself.

   I shall not leave here till after post comes in on Wednesday morning – unless something unforeseen happens. I’ve no vehicle or wd. drive down.

   Forgive me.

   Very truly yours

   G G Bradley

Dean Bradley (1821-1903) was an interesting character. Like Kempe, he had been educated at Rugby, and had returned to teach there while Kempe was a pupil. He later became Headmaster of Marlborough, then Master of University College, Oxford, and was finally appointed Dean of Westminster in 1881. Up to that point he had been best known for his revised version of a school textbook on Latin Prose Composition, always referred to as ‘Bradley’s Arnold’. Hence, when his appointment was announced in the press, Punch published a caricature, showing Bradley as a butterfly rising above what looks like a church with a mortar board atop its steeple, but actually has the name Marlborough just legible on its roof. Bradley had a reputation as a progressive and reforming Headmaster, but on the ground lies a bundle of birch twigs wrapped around with a piece of cloth on which appears the word CHRYSALIS. The caption, punning both on his notoriety among schoolboys – his name a metonym for enforced translation of passages from English into Latin – and on his elevation to the deanery at Westminster, echoes Peter Quince’s astonishment at seeing Bottom the weaver transformed into an ass: ‘BLESS THEE! THOU ART TRANSLATED!’

Bradley and Tennyson had been a two-man mutual admiration society: when the poet sent his son Hallam to Marlborough, he declared that he had sent him ‘not to Marlborough but to Bradley’. Bradley for his part returned the compliment by naming his daughter Emily Tennyson Bradley. So it isn’t surprising that he took such a personal interest in designing an appropriate memorial to go over the resting place of Queen Victoria’s favourite poet.

His letter to Kempe is revealing. When he cheerfully admits that he sometimes consults the architect and Egyptologist Somers Clarke surreptitiously, he opens up a world of Cathedral intrigue recognizable to anyone who has read Trollope’s Barchester novels. The logical person to have advised the Dean was the Abbey’s Surveyor of the Fabric.  In 1894 this was John Loughborough Pearson, but he – as the letter explains – had been seriously ill. But even with Pearson indisposed and Somers Clarke away, Bradley might have consulted his friend, the architect George Frederick Bodley. After all, it was Bradley who had brought in Bodley at University College to build a new Master’s Lodging (1879); and when Pearson died three years later, it was Bodley whom Bradley appointed to succeed him. But perhaps it was from previous dealings with Bodley and Pearson that Bradley had discovered it was useful to have a second, discreet, architectural ear to bend when occasion required – as here, in the matter of Tennyson’s tomb. Perhaps, too, he was being cautious in case Bodley suggested a wholly different (and much more elaborate) design; he had already designed a fine memorial brass tombstone in the Abbey for the architect George Edmund Street, who had died in 1881. Whatever the reason, the opening and closing sentences of his letter suggest this was the first time Bradley had consulted Kempe confidentially on a question of religious symbolism.

Attached to the letter, in the Kempe Trust archives, is a small pencil sketch on a torn-off piece of Whatman’s fine wove Original Turkey Mill paper. The sketch is in Kempe’s own hand, and shows two ideas for an appropriate Poets’ Corner tombstone. While both develop the Dean’s original idea of a cross and a laurel wreath, neither incorporates the stricken widow’s wish for a wreath to be placed over the cross. How Kempe replied and whether he even sent any sketches to Westminster is not known; but in any case Tennyson’s memorial stone, as seen today, displays no cross, and no wreath, just name and dates. The final decision seems to have been a compromise of a peculiarly Anglican kind. Neither Dean nor widow got their way – and all were satisfied.

Adrian Barlow

[Notes:

·      For the discussion of Poets’ Corner, see J.C., NB, TLS 22.1.16, p.32

·      Alan Bennett recalls his conversation with the Dean in his diary for 2015, now published in the London Review of Books, vol.38, no. 1 (7 January 2016) p.6

·      Tennyson’s tombstone can be seen in an extract from Bennett’s documentary about Westminster Abbey here, on YouTube.

·      Tennyson’s comment about sending his son to Bradley not to Marlborough is quoted in Niall Hamilton, A History of the Chapel of St. Michael and All Angels, Marlborough College, Wiltshire, (1986), p.17

[illustrations: (i) The Punch cartoon (Vol. 81, 1 October 1881, p.154), drawn by Linley Sambourne; (ii) inside pages of Bradley’s letter to Kempe (31.3.1894); (iii) Kempe’s pencil sketches for Tennyson’s tombstone (1894). Illustrations (ii) and (iii) © Kempe Trust.

I first published a shorter version of this post, entitled ‘Kempe and the Case of Tennyson’s Tomb’, on the Kempe Trust website.

I have written about Westminster Abbey twice before:

World and time: pity about the Abbey

On Boadicea, William Cowper and Westminster Abbey