Dear as the Abbey was to King Henry as a monument of his own piety and taste, and as the shrine of his sainted kinsman, yet he must have loved it even more tenderly for being the resting-place of a little child. The Confessor's Church as you will remember was consecrated on Childermas, the Holy Innocents' Day. And it seems to me not without significance, that the first interment of importance in Henry the Third's new building was that of a child of five years old--his beautiful little daughter Catherine. In 1257, during an insurrection of the Welsh which laid waste the Border, and which the King strove in vain to quell--the kingdom desolated with famine--the Barons mutinous and defiant--Henry's cup of trouble was filled by the death of his little child.
[Illustration: SHRINE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.--AT LEFT, TOMB OF HENRY THE THIRD.]
"She was dumb, and fit for nothing," says old Matthew Paris rather cruelly, "though possessing great beauty." The poor queen fell ill and nearly died of grief at the loss of her little deaf and dumb girl, loved all the more dearly no doubt, by reason of her affliction. And her illness, his own want of success against the Welsh, and the little princess's death, so overwhelmed the king with grief as to bring on "a tertian fever, which detained him for a long time at London, whilst at the same time the queen was confined to her bed at Windsor by an attack of pleurisy."[10]
The little Catherine was buried with great pomp in the ambulatory just outside the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel to the south of the Confessor's Shrine, and close to the grand tomb of her uncle, the king's half brother, William de Valence. Her father raised a splendid monument to her memory. It was rich with mosaic and polished slabs of serpentine, in much the same style as his own magnificent tomb on the north of the Confessor's Chapel. A silver image of St. Catherine was placed upon it, for which William de Gloucester, the king's goldsmith, was paid seventy marks. The image of course has vanished, like many other precious things. Most of the mosaic has been picked out. But enough of it and of the polished marbles exist to show the elaborate design of the upper slab, while on the wall above it, under a graceful trefoil-headed arch, are traces of gilding and coloring, which are supposed to be remains of a painting of the Princess Catherine and two brothers who died in their infancy.