ABSTRACT
In a gloomy corner of St Edmund’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey stands the monument of Elizabeth Russell who died in 1600 at the untimely age of 25 (Figure 11.1). The first seated effigy of its type to be erected in an English church, Russell’s stony doppelganger adopts what one eighteenth-century commentator described as a ‘very melancholy posture’.1 A simple yet poignant epitaph garnishes the monument’s grand columned base with the words ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’. Countless visitors file passed this arresting figure on a daily basis, stopping perhaps to admire the quality of the carving or the richness of the age-colored marble, entirely unaware that it remains at the heart of an enduring mystery.
