The Devoted Tomb

Steven Baltsas, WPAMC ’25

Bath Abbey’s walls are crammed with memorial plaques. The milky, pale marble contours are classical: perfect white figures feigning ancient sculpture. There are sumptuous swags, urns, and pudgy cherubs, most dating to the eighteenth century. However, a tomb of darker materials beckoned me closer; a tomb more impactful in meaning. 

“Reader this riddle read with mee,” requested the penultimate line of its inscription. The verse remembers Lady Jane Waller (1601–1633)—by its account, a woman “full of spirit.” Ordered by her husband, later the Parliamentarian general Sir William Waller (1598–1668), the tomb is built of English alabaster and touchstone with carved effigies of the Waller family and mourning figures above.

The seated children, Richard (1631–1636) and Margaret Waller (1633–1694), appeared from behind the columns as I walked closer to the monument. They sit in upholstered armchairs with tacks on the sides and textiles rendered beneath. In a much shorter chair, Margaret is on the right, baptized in February 1633. That May, the Wallers visited Bath, where Jane died a decade following her marriage to William.¹

A tomb in this fashion tied the couple to their noble kin. Representations of their clothing, grooming, furniture, and even pillows in stone forged these family associations and allied them with other English tombs and cultural currents.

By the dawn of the seventeenth century, Renaissance classicism had become the design language of England. Architecturally reflective of this, the family is framed by a large pedimented canopy on composite columns with two coffered recesses drawn from continental design.

Exposure to continental sculpture brought variation in posture to sculptors’ work. Tomb effigies, standardized in the medieval period as static figures in prayer, became individualized in poses such as Jane and William’s. Contemporary classicism drove an interest in pure white and technicolor marbles shipped from Italy and North Africa. However, alabaster had been a staple in British monument creation for centuries. In the period, quarries of alabaster were abundant in the Midlands region north of Bath.² This coveted material was even an English export to the continent. But white marble won the day. Characters in playwright Ben Jonson’s works discuss this transition in tastes for tomb materials, calling alabaster “rude” and requiring paint of “most orient colors.”³ The unpainted faces of the Wallers allow the alabaster to speak for itself. Beneath the glossy surface, its variegation (the result of iron oxides), seems to contain the family’s essence like a fossilized amber insect.

While Jane gazes up at her husband, he stares outward towards us. Whether he was meant to peer down at her, we’ll likely never know: Royalist soldiers bashed his face during the English Civil War. A sole eye peers out at us; the broken visage complicates the message intended. By his sculptor’s intention and William’s approval, Jane lies besides her husband forever devoted to him.

Though the next decade of William’s life was tumultuous, he contributed payments to the abbey’s sextons for the maintenance of Jane’s tomb. In 1643 and 1648, in the midst of civil war battles against the Royalists, William returned to the abbey. On his second visit, he found his enemies had vandalized it. Payments to the abbey ceased.⁴ He had remarried and bore a son in the late 1630s, and political tribulations kept him from Bath. While he intended to be buried with Jane, the space beside her inscription is still blank; he lies in the floor of Westminster Abbey.

I left the tomb considering its heart-wrenching aspects. What struck me most was the fact Jane couldn’t know of her abandonment by family who would be buried hundreds of miles from the abbey. Was she brought to the healing waters of Bath to improve her postpartum condition? Did she know she would die here, or that her son Richard would soon follow her? Most poignantly, is this how she wished to be portrayed? 

The tomb not only immortalizes Jane’s material world, that of early seventeenth-century England, but exists in an emotional landscape transcending her tomb.

1. John Adair, Roundhead General: The Campaigns of Sir William Waller (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing Ltd.), 11, 18. ↩︎
2. Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1993), 60–61. ↩︎
3. Katharine A. Esdaile, English Monumental Sculpture Since the Renaissance (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1927), 2–8, 11. ↩︎
4. Oliver Taylor, Bath Abbey’s Monuments: An Illustrated History (Cheltenham, UK: The History Press, 2023), 63–66. ↩︎