Among the monuments of his contemporaries in the chapel of Henry VII. that must have awakened a sensation of disgust in the mind of the Puritan poet, was that of the Duke of Buckingham, whose barbaric splendour of attire has already been noted, and who was murdered in 1628. Near by his huge and ostentatious tomb, so characteristic of the man whom it commemorates, lie under the pavement the graves of his king, James I., and his consort.
We may be sure that the graves which most interested Milton here were those of Oliver Cromwell, his mother and sister, and his daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, his son-in-law, Ireton, and Bradshaw, who was president of the tribunal which condemned Charles I. The Genoese envoy of the time thus described Cromwell's death and burial in his despatch to the Council of Genoa: "He left the world with unimaginable valour, prudence, and charity, and more like a priest or monk than a man who had fashioned and worked so mighty an engine so few years.... His body was opened and embalmed, and little trace of disease found therein; which was not the cause of his death, but rather the continual fever which came upon him from sorrow and melancholy at Madame Claypole's death." Cromwell's body lay in state at Somerset House, and was thence escorted to the tomb by an immense throng of mourners, which included the city companies. "The effigy or statue of the dead, made most lifelike in royal robes, crown on head, in one hand the sceptre and in the other the globe, was laid out on a bier richly adorned and borne hither in a coach made for the purpose, open on every side, and adorned with many plumes and banners." It is said that Cromwell especially loved the Abbey, and instituted the custom of commemorating English worthies within its walls. Admiral Blake was the first to receive this honour in 1657. "Cromwell caused him to be brought up by land to London in all the state that could be; and to encourage his officers to adventure their lives that they might be pompously buried, he was with all solemnity possible interred in the Chapel of Henry VII., among the monuments of the kings." Who can doubt that Milton stood in sightless grief beside these tombs, before the desecration of "Oliver's Vault?" Only the body of Cromwell's daughter was left in peace, and still remains. His mother and sister were reburied in the green, and the reader already knows what was the vile treatment of the other bodies. It is said that to the royalist dean of Westminster, Thomas Sprat, we owe the refusal of interment in the Abbey to the "regicide" John Milton. Had he been buried later where Cromwell's body had lain, he too might have been thrust forth. It was this dean who esteemed Cowley as a superior poet to Milton, and called the former the "Pindar, Horace, and Virgil of England." In the south aisle lie General George Monck and Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, eldest daughter of James I., whose marriage we have seen was celebrated by a merry masque within the Temple grounds. This was the English princess for whom a part of Heidelberg Castle was built; she was mother of Prince Rupert, whose strenuous efforts to save the fortunes of his uncle, Charles I., did not endear him to Milton and his friends. In this chapel lies a wretched victim of her cousin, James I. This is the Lady Arabella Stuart, whose marriage so displeased the king that he immured her in the Tower, where, bereft of reason by her miseries, she died when Milton was a boy.