It wasn’t the scale of the place—the vast, vaulted nave thronging with tourists—or even, strictly speaking, its age. It was the history that announced itself everywhere you looked. It was, Thomas thought, impressive to the point of being oppressive. In this building every monarch of England had been crowned since William the Conqueror in 1066. The core of the building was actually older, a tenth-century Benedictine abbey for which King—later, Saint—Edward the Confessor had built a magnificent church. Edward’s remains still lay here, as did the bodies of countless other monarchs including the giants of Shakespeare’s day, Elizabeth I and James I. All this and a good deal more Thomas could learn from his guidebook, but the wealth of information—of history—made the abbey walls crowd in, so that visitors with an ounce of sensitivity to such things started to feel like the slender columns on which rested the tons of stone above. It was too much to take in. Every inch of the place seemed to memorialize some long-dead dignitary or statesman, so that even the tombs of such colossi as Richard II and Henry V—both known to Thomas almost exclusively through Shakespeare’s depictions of them—could produce little more than muted shock.
