James Russell Lowell memorial window (London, 1893), Westminster Abbey Chapter House

The Westminster Abbey Chapter House was completed in 1255 as part of Henry III’s rebuilding of the abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the Benedictine monks left; until 1863 this ornate building was used as a meeting place for the King’s Great Council and the Commons, and then a State archive, before being restored to its glory by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the early 1870s.

In 1893, a commemorative tablet and memorial window for James Russell Lowell – the New England poet and American Ambassador in Britain (1880-1888) - was put up in the House. After Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had written one of the most famous Mayflower poems of the 19^th century (The Courtship of Myles Standish), Lowell was only the second American to be memorialised in the Abbey – a bust of the former had been placed in Poet’s Corner some years earlier.

Lowell’s window consisted of two stained glass panels: one consisting of an angel bearing a shield below the arms of the United States, the figure of St Botolph, and the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers from the Mayflower (about whom Lowell had sometimes written); and another of Sir Launfal (of Arthurian legend), an angel bear a shield below the arms of the United Kingdom, a figure of St Ambrose, a symbolic representation of the emancipation of the slaves, and a medallion portrait of Lowell.

The great and the good assembled to see the unveiling of the window – from lords and MPS to ambassadors from all over the world. When the Dean of Westminster (George Granville Bradley) did the honours, he told the crowd that he ‘did not know what the future of Great Britain and America might be’ but ‘hoped that in the future their children, looking at the memorial, would be reminded of the bonds uniting their common associations to the great memories of a race speaking one tongue.’ In the 1890s, a decade that saw renewed interest in the Pilgrim Fathers, the return of Governor Bradford’s original manuscript history of the colony to the USA, and the beginnings of a real rapprochement between the two nations, the Mayflower was a powerful symbol.

https://www.westminster-abbey.org/about-the-abbey/history/chapter-house

‘James Russell Lowell’, Toronto Daily Mail (29^th November 1893), 1.