The Monks, The Poets, and Off with Their Heads!

The Showtime series, The Tudors, has peaked my interest in English history tremendously.  So, when we decided to take this Trans-atlantic cruise and spend a couple of days in London, I was so excited to go to some of the sites we missed on our first trip here. 

The Crowne Plaza St. James is located about three blocks from Buckingham Palace, where we were to meet our our Big Bus - a open-air, double-decker English bus - for a hop-on, hop-off tour of London.

We found out today that 26 of the staterooms at Buckingham are open for tours from the last week in July until the first few days of October.  We had done this tour four years ago when we were here, so we opted to head out for Westminster Abbey.  A drive around this amazing city is always so interesting and with 70 degree temperatures and sunny skies, we couldn't resist sitting on the top of the bus enjoying the sites. 

Westminster was originally a monastery.  It is incredibly beautiful.  We couldn't take photos inside, but the history there is amazing.  Henry VIII, Anne of Cleves, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary I, and many, many other monarchs are buried within these walls.  This is also the church where Princess Diana's funeral was held 13 years ago this week.  We used the headsets and did our own directed tour of the Abbey.

One of the final stops is at Poet's Corner in Westminster.  Miss EAU will appreciate this - I saw memorials to Byron, Kelly and Sheats (Byron, Shelley and Keats), as she so often called them when I had her as my English teacher in high school.  We saw the graves of  Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy and memorials to Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters - Emily, Charlotte and Anne - and William Shakespeare, as well as the grave of George Frederic Handel.  This place was just amazing.

Then, we were off again to the Tower of London. The Tower Bridge is often mistaken for London Bridge.  They are definitely not one in the same.  My fascination with Henry VIII was evident as one of the places I most wanted to see was where Anne Boleyn and Kathryn Howard were both beheaded and are buried in a chapel there.  There is a monument of the chopping block where both lost their heads.

We saw the Crown Jewels which were magnificent.  The jewels were originally housed in Westminster, but were moved to the Tower of London in 1303.  This is an astonishing collection of priceless Coronation jewels - crowns, sceptres, and orbs - filled with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and endless semi-precious stones and pearls.

After spending seven hours at these two spots, we reluctantly returned to our hotel for a good night's rest before we head to Southampton tomorrow for the Crown Princess and our grand adventure across the Atlantic.  Stay tuned.