ABSTRACT
It may seem surprising that the burial places of these English monarchs should have had no permanent marker, when many of their subjects had very grand tombs. Most people however did not yet have statues set up to them on public buildings and in city squares, whereas these kind of images and memorials of monarchs assumed greater importance, once the tradition of the sculpted royal tomb was discontinued. Starting in the seventeenth
4.1 Effigy of Charles II displayed in Westminster Abbey (watercolour, early eighteenth century)
4.2 Royal Funeral Effigies in Henry V's Chantry, Westminster Abbey (drawing by John Carter, 1786)
century, the chief focus of public commemoration and celebration of the monarchy shifted from sacred to secular settings, where, to some extent, they were seen to fulfil the same kind of function. At the time of the death of Queen Anne, the collector and connoisseur John Talman, who was working on a proposal for a number of statues of the queen for London, wrote 'Now yt. y Queen is dead, & yt. it is not y custom in Brittain (in particular) to erect
tombs to our Souvregns, what if this shou'd be so managed as to serve as a sort of a Honorary Monument or Mausoleum?'5
