In the year of grace 1121, Henry I. was reigning in England. On the sudden death of his brother, William Rufus, he had seized the crown, which devolved by right on the next elder brother, Robert of Normandy, Robert being just then absent in the Holy Land, where, by military exploits of high renown and sweet courtesy of manner, he was winning the hearts of his soldiers and of Christendom. Hearing how things were going in England, he set sail in haste for Normandy; and there calling a fleet together, he steered towards Dover, where the usurper, apprised of his arrival, stood with an army drawn up upon the shore awaiting him. For three days and nights the brothers stood at bay, like two tigers ready to fly at one another's throats, but neither daring to strike the first blow in their fratricidal war. Presently we see gliding high up along the cliffs a venerable figure, clad in priestly garb, and bearing an olive branch in his hand. His name is Anselm. He has been roughly handled by Rufus, and has little kindness to expect from his successor. But Anselm heeds not his own interest or his life; he goes boldly forward, and with outstretched hand entreats the brothers to desist from their bloody intent, to exchange the kiss of peace, and settle their quarrel as became men and Christians. They hearkened to the voice of the saintly primate. This was his first service to Henry, and it was quickly followed by others so numerous and so important that the scholarly king, moved partly by gratitude, and partly by a desire to atone for certain of his own and his predecessor's misdemeanors towards the church, resolved, in 1121, to build a monastery which should be one of the glories of his reign, and bear witness to the end of time to his devout allegiance to the faith. With this view he built the Benedictine Abbey of Reading. It was on so royal a scale, both of magnitude and architectural splendor, that even now, in their utter dilapidation, the fragments of the cyclopean ruins give us no inadequate idea of what it must have been in the days of its strength and glory. The gigantic skeleton walls, as they stand out gaunt and ragged against the sky, resemble rather rocks than the remains of the work of puny human hands. The style was in the massive and lofty Norman Gothic of the period, as may be seen from the few bold arches that have withstood alike the ravages of time, the artillery of Cromwell, and modern depredations. The abbey was one of the wealthiest in the kingdom, and the mitred abbot was counted among the notable authorities of the land. He not only took rank with the highest nobles, but he enjoyed, likewise, many of the supreme prerogatives of royalty; he was privileged to coin money, and to confer the honor of knighthood. He exercised hospitality to kings and princes, and that right royally. King Henry, the founder, was a frequent guest at the monastery with his court, who were entertained there for weeks at a time with regal magnificence. The king was extremely fond of the abbey and the monks, and made it his custom to spend Holy Week there every year. After performing his Paschal duties in company with his family and his court, and passing the solemn week in fasting and prayer, he celebrated the joyful Easter dawn with a festive merriment, in which all the town was invited to join. Bonfires blazed on every surrounding hill, ale ran in the gutters, the poor were clad and fed, and all within reach of the royal bounty felt the joy of the Paschal alleluia. Queen Adeliza shared her husband's partiality for this lordly monastic retreat, and at various festivals through the year repaired to it, sometimes with her son, sometimes only with her women-in-waiting. When Henry died of overindulgence in his favorite dish of lampreys, at Rouen, he directed that his heart should remain there, but that his body should rest under the roof of his beloved Benedictine abbey. After his demise, it still continued to be a royal residence, and was often frequented by Henry II., who held a parliament there for the first time in 1184—an example which was followed repeatedly in the course of the succeeding reigns; the calm of the cloister offering a fitter atmosphere for grave deliberation to the law-makers than the hall of Westminster, disturbed as it was by courtly intrigues and political agitations. In 1452, Parliament was adjourned to Reading Abbey from Westminster, on account of the sudden outbreak of the plague, and later, in 1466, for the same reason. It was the scene of other meetings not devoid of historical importance. Here the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, visited Henry II., and presented him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and the royal banners of the city, in hopes of luring him to undertake another crusade for the deliverance of the holy places.
Henry III. passed more of his time at Reading Abbey than at any of his own palaces; here he convoked assemblies of the nobles, and received brother princes and European guests of distinction. It was in the west hall of the monastery that Edward IV. received his fair young queen, Elizabeth Widville. In this same hall Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, who had the regency in the absence of Richard Cœur de Lion in Palestine, was put upon his trial. Two other ecclesiastical councils were held here in the reign of John. When Richard II., through the intervention of John of Gaunt, was reconciled to his nobles, he chose Reading Abbey as the ground of meeting. So it continued, up to the reign of Henry VIII., the resort of kings, and nobles, and prelates, until that ruthless despoiler passed an act for the suppression of monasteries, and converted the sacred precincts into a palace for his own sole use. The monks were scattered, and their brave and loyal abbot, Hugh Farringdon, having dared to denounce the iniquitous edict and defy the king, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. With him closes the line of the Benedictine abbots. It is curious to see Henry VIII., after thus uprooting the church in his dominions, plundering her treasure, and persecuting her in every way, leaving a large sum of money in his will for "Masses to be said for the deliverance of his soul." He had made it high treason to hold the doctrine of purgatory, or to pray for the dead; and the act of saying Mass was punishable with death. He had overturned altars and banished priests; yet, when he came to die himself, he turned, in abject and cowardly fear, towards the church that he had so outraged, and besought her help in his extremity. Speaking of this act of Henry's, which throws such a sinister light on his fanatical hatred to Catholicism, and his violent enforcement of the "reformed religion," as it was styled, Hume, whose statements are as accurate as his views are false, remarks naïvely that it is a proof of the tenacity of superstition on the human mind, and says that it was one amongst so many of "the strange contrarieties of his conduct and temper," that he who had "destroyed those foundations made by his ancestors for the deliverance of their souls," should when it came to be the hour of death "take care to be on the safer side of the question himself." At the time of the dissolution, the revenues in money of this royal abbey did not exceed the small sum of £675 a year. Its wealth consisted not in accumulated riches, but in lands, and fisheries, and flocks, and herds. Many English sovereigns had bequeathed their dust to the consecrated shelter of Reading Abbey; amongst others, the Empress Matilda, wife of Henry I., and mother of Henry II., had been interred in its vaults. Their ashes found no mercy at the hands of the infuriated fanatics, who seemed bent on erasing from the face of the country every vestige of its ancient faith. The majestic pile, which had witnessed so many royal marriages, and echoed to the dirges of so many sovereigns, fell before the cannon of Cromwell, planted on Caversham hill. The beautiful church of S. Thomas à Becket, where the unfortunate Charles I., with a little band of his trusty cavaliers, had halted and knelt in prayer for protection against the mad soldiery before whom they fled, fared no better than the rest. The walls that still exist bear traces at every point of this savage act of vandalism. What the fury of the Roundheads left unfinished the more recent vandals have completed. The ruins have been plundered of every vestige of stone-facing; and those immense blocks that gave the old pile, even in its decay, such an air of imperishable strength and grandeur were, at great cost of labor and money, torn away and carried to Windsor, to serve in building the Poor Knights' Hospital. Some were condemned to the more ignoble use of erecting a bridge over the Wargrave Road. It is difficult to go beyond mere speculation in fixing the spots illustrated by so many memorable associations in the history of the old abbey. There can be no mistake, however, about the Chapter Hall, where the parliaments were held, and where kings and prelates feasted. There is a tradition that after the battle of Newbury, Charles I. and all his troops were daily fed for a considerable time in the refectory of the monks, one wall alone of which is now standing, but which quite justifies the supposition of this wholesale hospitality when we see the area formerly occupied by the apartment. The site of the church is also discernible, but the relative positions of the altars, transepts, and nave are but dimly suggested by the broken bases of the four enormous pillars that supported the towering dome. The present beautiful little Catholic church, with its adjoining presbytery, is built entirely from the ruins, so cruelly dismantled by successive goths. But all their efforts have failed to obliterate the royal aspect of the wreck, or to rob it of its air of immortality. The walls are built of sharp, small flint, imbedded in mortar that has now become as hard as iron—a circumstance which we may hope will put an end to any further devastation, as the tools of the workmen break like glass in the effort to penetrate it and dislodge the flint.
A fact that added to Reading Abbey a higher kind of interest than any earthly privilege can convey was that it possessed the hand of S. James the Apostle—a relic which had been brought from Germany to France by the Empress Matilda, and given by her to her father, Henry I., who presented it to the Benedictine monks encased in a rich shrine of gold, where devout worshippers came from great distances to venerate it. When the dissolution of monastic orders was decreed, the sacred relics which each community possessed were secreted in secure places, and often defended from outrage at the peril and sacrifice of life; but no mention is anywhere to be found of similar precautions being employed in the case of the famous Benedictine treasure. The Roundheads desecrated the tombs of the kings, and threw to the winds the bones of the monks who slept in the vaults around them; but we find no trace of insult offered to the hand of S. James, nor is any notice taken of it in the local chronicles of Reading from this time forth. There was a vague rumor of its having been conveyed to a convent in Spain; but no evidence of the slightest description supports this notion. About seventy years ago, some workmen, employed in breaking down a portion of the walls, came upon a small wooden box containing a human hand; it was bought as a curiosity for a mere trifle by a physician of the town, and after a while, we know not how or wherefore, it found its way to the Museum of the Polytechnic, where it remained until that institution was broken up; then the hand was transferred to the Athenæum, in Friar Street. Meantime, the circumstance of the discovery had travelled far beyond Berks, and some devout persons, believing this could be none other than the lost relic of S. James, offered considerable sums for it; but, for some reason that we can neither discover nor surmise, these offers were declined, and the hand remained "amongst other nick-nacks" to which some interest, historical or otherwise, was attached. Finally, the vicissitudes of fortune carried it to a shop-window, where it was long to be seen under a glass case so insecurely guarded that any expert thief might easily have purloined it. A Scotch Catholic gentleman saw it here, and offered fifty pounds for it. It was sold to him for this sum, and he placed it in the care of Canon B——, the dean of the church which is built on the original resting-place of the real relic, and dedicated to S. James. It was with the understanding, however, that he would claim the hand as soon as he had a suitable place for it in his own house. Canon B—— himself was strongly inclined to disbelieve in the genuineness of the relic. In the first place, the box in which it was found bore no sign or symbol of its being a reliquary, and there was no mark or seal attached to the contents indicating their character; then, again, the hand was small and the fingers tapering, much more like the hand of a woman than of a rude-limbed fisherman like the Apostle of Spain. There was one way of ascertaining with certainty that it was not the real hand, and this was by learning whether the body of S. James, which is preserved in the Cathedral of Compostela, wanted one hand. If the two were there, there was an end of the controversy, and it would be clearly proved that the hand found at Reading Abbey had been, at some unknown date, returned to its place. If one hand was missing, and if that corresponded to the one in his possession, it was at least a strong argument on the side of its genuineness, which other steps should be thenceforth taken to prove. At the canon's request, Dr. Grant, the late saintly Bishop of Southwark, wrote to the Archbishop of Compostela, asking him to allow the shrine to be opened and the necessary inspection of the relics made; but the archbishop replied that he could on no pretext, however laudable, consent to such an act, which, in his eyes, appeared like a desecration of their venerated patron. The question fell back, therefore, into impenetrable doubt as before. The hand remained at Reading, until at last the purchaser arrived and claimed it. He was persuaded that it was the real hand of S. James, and as such claimed to have it in his possession and under his roof. Canon B—— gave it up at once; but it was remarked by a pious Catholic at the time that if it was the real relic, the act of purchasing it for private possession, and removing it from a church dedicated to the apostle to whom it was supposed to belong, to a private house, could bring no blessing on those connected with it. These warnings were laughed at as superstitious by the owner of the relic; but they were strangely and fearfully fulfilled before long. He and three clerical friends were one day seized at dinner with agonizing pains, and, after a few hours' suffering, expired. One of the dishes had, by some unaccountable accident, been poisoned by the cook, who had employed some venomous root in mistake for horse-radish. We do not attach for a moment any supernatural significance to the incident, but merely give it as a strange coincidence. After this violent and sudden death of its owner, the hand passed into the possession of a relative, to whom he bequeathed it. Perhaps this short record of its recent history may meet the eye of some one who may be induced to search out the missing limb, and clear away the mystery that still hangs over the supposed relic of the apostle who warned us so solemnly against the iniquity of idle words. Who knows? Perhaps we may yet live to see a Benedictine monastery rise on the site of the ancient one where his hand was so devoutly venerated; monks, wearing the dark cowl of the inspired author of the Regula Monachorum, may again tread the hallowed ground of the old abbey, where in bygone days their fathers lived grand and awful lives under the serene and solemn shadow of their mighty cloisters, adjusting the strife of nations and of kings, teaching Christendom, feeding the poor, and taking the kingdom of heaven by violence amidst long vigils, and fasting, and humiliation, and the heroic practice of Christian sanctity; the old stones may yet echo to the chant of psalms as in the days of our forefathers, and the song of praise resound again in the desert—the same words, with other voices; for God changes not, neither does his church; for, like her Founder, she is immutable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.