in the Tory interest as member for Scarborough, and in 1809 became judge-advocate-general in the ministry of Spencer Perceval. He retained this position until June 1817, when he was elected speaker in succession to Charles Abbot, created Baron Colchester, refusing to exchange this office in 1827 for that of home secretary. In 1832 he abandoned Scarborough and was returned to parliament as one of the members for the university of Cambridge. Before the general election of 1832 Manners-Sutton had intimated his desire to retire from the position of speaker and had been voted an annuity of £4000 a year. The ministry of Earl Grey, however, reluctant to meet the reformed House of Commons with a new and inexperienced occupant of the chair, persuaded him to retain his office, and in 1833 he was elected speaker for the seventh time. Some feeling had been shown against him on this occasion owing to his Tory proclivities, and the Whigs frequently complained that outside the House he was a decided partisan. The result was that when a new parliament met in February 1835 a sharp contest ensued for the speakership, and Manners-Sutton was defeated by James Abercromby, afterwards Lord Dunfermline. In March 1835 the retiring speaker was raised to the peerage as Baron Bottesford and Viscount Canterbury. In 1835 he was appointed high commissioner for Canada, but owing to domestic reasons he never undertook the appointment. He died in London on the 21st of July 1845 and was buried at Addington. His first wife was Lucy (d. 1815), daughter of John Denison of Ossington, by whom he had two sons and a daughter. Both his sons, Charles John (1812–1869), and John Henry Thomas (1814–1877), succeeded in turn to the viscounty. By his second wife, Ellen (d. 1845), widow of John Home-Purves, he had a daughter.
CANTERBURY, a city and county of a city, the metropolis of an archdiocese of the Church of England, and a municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Kent, England, 62 m. E.S.E, of London by the South-Eastern & Chatham railway. Pop. (1901) 24,889. It lies on the river Stour, which here debouches from a beautiful narrow valley of the North Downs, the low but abrupt elevations of which command fine views of the city from the west and south, while the river presently enters upon the flat belt of land which separates the elevated Isle of Thanet from the rest of Kent. This belt represents the existence, in early historic times, of a sea-strait, and Fordwich, little more than 2 m. north-east of Canterbury, was once accessible for shipping. The city surrounds the precincts of the great cathedral.
The Cathedral.—It was to Canterbury, as the capital of Æthelberht, the fourth Saxon king of Kent, that in 597 Augustine and his fellow-missionaries came from Rome, and their settlement by Æthelberht in his capital became the origin of its position, held ever since, as the metropolis of the Church of England. Æthelberht, whose queen, Bertha, was already a Christian, gave the missionaries a church whose mythical founder was King Lucius. Augustine was a Benedictine and established the monastery of that order attached to the cathedral; this foundation was set upon a firm basis after the Norman Conquest by Archbishop Lanfranc, who placed its charge (as distinct from that of the diocese) in the hands of a prior.
Preparatory to the description of the cathedral, the principal epochs in the history of its erection may be noted. The Romano-British church occupied by St Augustine, of basilica form, remained long in use, though it was largely rebuilt by Archbishop Odo, c. 950; after further
History of
the building.
vicissitudes it was destroyed by fire in 1067. Archbishop Lanfranc, taking up his office in 1070, undertook the building of an entirely new church, but under Anselm (c. 1100) Prior Ernulf rebuilt the eastern part, and his successor Conrad carried on the work. A fire destroyed much of this part of the building in 1174, and from that year the architect, William of Sens, took up the work of rebuilding until 1178, when, on his suffering serious injury by falling from a scaffold, another William, commonly distinguished as the Englishman, carried on the work and completed it in 1184. In 1376 Archbishop Sudbury entered upon the construction of a new nave, and Prior Chillenden continued this under Archbishop Courtenay. The building of the central tower was undertaken c. 1495 by Prior Goldstone, with the counsel of Selling, his predecessor, and Archbishop Morton.
This Perpendicular tower is the most notable feature of the exterior. It rises in two storeys to a height of 235 ft. from the ground, and is known variously as Bell Harry tower from the great bell it contains, or as the Angel steeple from the gilded figure of an angel which formerly adorned the Exterior. summit. The Perpendicular nave is flanked at the west front by towers, whose massive buttresses, rising in tiers, serve to enhance by contrast the beautiful effect of the unbroken straight lines of Bell Harry tower. The south-western of these towers is an original Perpendicular structure by Prior Goldstone, while the north-western was copied from it in 1834–1840, replacing a Norman tower which had carried a spire until 1705 and had become unsafe. The north-west and south-west transepts are included in Chillenden’s Perpendicular reconstruction; but east of these earlier work is met with. The south-east transept exhibits Norman work; the projecting chapel east of this is known as Anselm’s tower. The cathedral terminates eastward in a graceful apsidal form, with the final addition of the circular eastern chapel built by William the Englishman, and known as the Corona or Becket’s Crown. St Andrew’s tower or chapel on the north side, corresponding to Anselm’s on the south, is the work of Ernulf. From this point westward the various monastic buildings adjoin the cathedral on the north side, so that the south side is that from which the details of the exterior must be examined.
When the nave of the cathedral is entered, the complete separation of the interior into two main parts, not only owing to the distinction between the two main periods of building; but by an actual structural arrangement, is realized as an unusual and, as it happens, a most impressive Interior. feature. In most English cathedrals the choir is separated from the nave by a screen; at Canterbury not only is this the case, but the separation is further marked by a broad flight of steps leading up to the screen, the choir floor (but not its roof) being much higher than that of the nave. Chillenden, in rebuilding the nave, retained only the lower parts of some of the early Norman walls of Lanfranc and the piers of the central tower arches. These piers were encased or altered on Perpendicular lines. In the choir, the late 12th-century work of the two Williams, the notable features are its great length, the fine ornamentation and the use of arches both round and pointed, a remarkable illustration of the transition between the Norman and Early English styles; the prolific use of dark marble in the shafts and mouldings strongly contrasting with the light stone which is the material principally used; and, finally, the graceful incurve of the main arcades and walls at the eastern end of the choir where it joins the chapel of the Trinity, an arrangement necessitated by the preservation of the earlier flanking chapels or towers of St Anselm and St Andrew. From the altar eastward the floor of the church is raised again above that of the choir. The choir screen was built by Prior de Estria, c. 1300. The organ is not seen, being hidden in the triforium and played from the choir. There are several tombs of archbishops in the choir. The south-east transept serves as the chapel of the King’s school and exhibits the work of William of Sens in alteration of that of Ernulf. Anselm’s chapel or tower, already mentioned, may be noticed again as containing a Decorated window (1336). This style is not common in the cathedral.
Behind the altar is Trinity Chapel, in the centre of which stood the celebrated shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury. The priory owed its chief fame to the murder of Archbishop Becket (1170) in the church, his canonization as St Thomas of Canterbury, and the resort of the Christian Becket’s shrine. Pilgrimages. world on pilgrimage to his shrine. Miracles were almost immediately said to be worked at his grave in the crypt and at the well in which his garments had been washed; and from the time when Henry II. did his penance for the murder in the church, and the battle of Alnwick was gained over the Scots a few days afterwards—it was supposed as a result—the
