By a miracle that temptation was withstood.  For the moment Henry intended to construct a bishopric with its cathedral out of the old corporation and abbey.  He might have done so and yet have yielded immediately after to his cupidity, as he did with the Cathedral of Osney.  It ended in the form which it at present maintains.  The greater part of its revenues were, of course, stolen, but the fabric was spared and enough income was retained to permit the continuous life of Westminster to our own time.

Men are slow to conceive what might have been—­nay, what almost was—­in their national history; it seems difficult to our generation to imagine Westminster Abbey absent only from the national life; yet Abingdon is gone, all but a gateway, Reading all but a few ruined walls, Chertsey has utterly disappeared, so has Osney, so has Sheen—­to mention the great river houses alone:  Westminster alone survives, and the only reason it survives is that it had about it at the time of the destruction of the monasteries a royal flavour, and that its existence helped to bolster up the Tudors.  But for that it would have been sold like the rest, the lead would have been stripped from its roof, the glass broken and thrown aside, and a Cecil or a Howard would have built himself a palace with the stones.  It is but a chance that the words “Westminster Abbey” mean more to us to-day than “Woburn Abbey,” “Bewley Abbey” or any one of the scores of “Abbeys,” “Priories,” and the rest, which are the names of our country houses.

Chertsey and Abingdon were less fortunate than Westminster.

Chertsey, indeed, has so thoroughly disappeared that it might be taken as a symbol of all that England had been for the thirty generations since Christianity had come to her, and then, in two generations of men, ceased suddenly to be.  There is, perhaps, not one in a thousand of the vague Colonials who regard Westminster Abbey as a sort of inevitable centre for Britishers and Anglo-Saxons, who has so much as heard of Chertsey.  There is perhaps but one in a hundred of historical students who could attach a definite connection to the name, and yet Chertsey came next in the list of the great Benedictine Abbeys; Chertsey also was coeval with England.

Chertsey went the way of them all.  The last abbot, John Cordery, surrendered it in the July of 1537, but he and his community were not immediately dispersed, they were taken off to fill that strange new foundation of Bisham, of which we shall hear later in connection with the river, and which in its turn immediately disappeared.  Not a year had passed, the June of 1538 was not over, when the new community at Bisham was scattered as the old one at Chertsey had been.

Of the abbey itself nothing is left but a broken piece of gateway, and the few stones of a wall.  But a relic of it remains in Black Cherry Fair, a market granted to the abbey in the fifteenth century and formerly held upon St. Anne’s Hill and upon St. Anne’s Day.