Some of our finest scuplture is to be found in the monuments erected in all parish churches new or old during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. A whole illustrated literature of this has been developed by the late Mrs Esdaile and Mr Rupert Gunnis. The work of great sculptors ignored or despised by the Victorians, such as Roubiliac, Rysbrack, Stone, Wilton, the Bacons, Hickey and Paty, has received recognition owing to their writings.
From the middle of the 18th century until its end, new churches were Classic, usually in the manner of the Brothers Adam, with chaste decorations in low relief in interior plaster and woodwork, and comparatively plain exteriors. The individuality of architects was beginning to assert itself over traditional plan and local styles. Cross-shaped churches were built with altar at the eastern axis and there were square and octagonal churches as well as proprietary chapels with the pews all arranged for a view of the occupier of the pulpit. These last buildings came as near to a Dissenting chapel as Anglicanism permitted.
Gothic never died. The style was driven by the Renaissance out of churches and houses into barns, farms and cottages. It was revived in a romantic form, suggesting Strawberry Hill (1733), even in the 17th century. And a slender case might be made for its never having died even in ecclesiastical building. There are Stuart churches which are Tudor Gothic, such as Low Ham in Somerset (1624), and Staunton Harold in Leicestershire (1653), which are like late Perpendicular medieval churches, and not a conscious revival but a continuance of the old style. St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, until its rebuilding by Gibbs in 1721, had been continuously rebuilt in the Gothic style since the time of Henry VIII. There are churches like St John’s, Leeds (1632), and Compton Wynyates (1663), which are a mixture of Classic and Tudor Gothic. Then there are the first conscious imitations of old forms by architects, such as Sir William Wilson’s tower of St Mary’s, Warwick (1694), and Wren’s tower and steeple to St Dunstan-in-the-East (1698), and his towers of St Mary Aldermary (1711) and St Michael’s Cornhill (1721). There is an interesting and well-illustrated chapter on this subject of the earlier revival of Gothic in M. Whiffen’s Stuart and Georgian Churches. The plan of these buildings was almost always traditional with an emphasized chancel. Now and then a Lutheran element crept in. In the Gothic church of Teigh in Rutland (1783), the small font is fixed by a brass bracket to the Communion rails. But the seats face north and south and the pulpit is at the west end.
In the reign of Queen Anne Parliament passed an act to remedy the insufficiency of accommodation for worship in London and the vicinity. Leading architects of the time like James Gibbs, Archer and Hawksmoor were employed, and several fine churches which challenge those of Wren were the result. Other large towns, for this was a time when the population of the midlands was rapidly expanding, followed London’s example.
Throughout the 18th century there was great interest in theology. Anyone looking through the library of a country house can verify this, for he will find rows of superbly bound volumes of sermons and controversial pamphlets and histories of religion. In the spas and the richer parts of London, private chapels were built for favourite clergy. They are well described by T. Francis Bumpus in London Churches, Ancient and Modern:
‘Well pewed, well warmed, undedicated, unendowed, unconsecrated, here captivating preachers of the Morphine Velvet, lavender-kid-glove school of theology dispensed the most comfortable doctrines. The pews were filled, and the good promoters were amply repaid by the pious tenantry, but accommodation for the poor was never thought of.’
Not all proprietary chapels were like this. Some were undoubtedly missions for teaching the Faith to the rich and indifferent or for bringing the Gospel to the poor. When town parishes grew very large in the 18th century, it was sometimes the custom for a chapel to be rented or built, and, if it did not succeed, to be sold again, or in some instances taken over by dissenters. St Martin-in-the-Fields had two such chapels which have now disappeared, and there were three in the parish of St Margaret Westminster and seven in the parish of St Pancras.
Few of these proprietary chapels survive as such today. Sometimes there is, in a large provincial town, one very Evangelical church, in classic style, whose patronage is in the hands of private trustees. This may well once have been an 18th-century proprietary foundation. In 1746 there were nineteen in London, excluding chapels belonging to Royal and Episcopal Palaces, Almshouses, Prisons, Livery Companies and Inns of Court. Those which have not been pulled down or become Dissenting places of worship, have been consecrated and turned into parish churches. I remember one in Bath called Kensington Chapel, which was Calvinistic yet Anglican, but which is now a furniture store. At another in Homerton, London, known as Ram’s Episcopal Chapel, I attended worship, and the clergyman wore a black gown and bands for preaching. This charming 18th-century chapel is now, alas, demolished. At Christ Church, North Brixton, London, is an extremely original and impressive episcopal chapel re-erected in 1904 in the Byzantine style from designs by Professor Beresford Pite. It was built privately and in it the black gown was still used in 1952.
WING: ALL SAINTS – this monument was sculpted by Roubiliac, a French artist of the 18th century who worked mostly in England; his work fell out of fashion by the 19th century
© Michael Ellis
Another reason for the erection of new churches in the 18th century was the inadequacy of medieval buildings. They could sometimes hold galleries erected in the aisles and at the west end, but no more. Old prints shew us town churches which have almost the appearance of an opera house, galleries projecting beyond galleries, with the charity children away up in the top lighted by dormers in the roof, pews all over the aisles and in the chancel, and only here and there a pointed arch or a bit of window tracery to shew that this was once a gothic medieval church. Walls began to bulge, stone decayed, structures were unsound and ill-behaved children could not be seen by the beadle and clerk. The only thing to do was to pull down the building. A surviving interior of this sort is the parish church of Whitby. To go into it is like entering the hold of a ship. There are box-pews shoulder high in all directions, galleries, private pews, and even a pew over the chancel screen. Picturesque and beautiful as it is, with the different colours of baize lining the pews, and the splendid joinery of varying dates, such an uneven effect cannot have pleased the 18th-century man of taste. Therefore when they became overloaded with pews, these old churches were taken down and new ones in Classic or Strawberry Hill Gothick style were erected on the sites.
In the country there can have been little need to rebuild the old church on the grounds of lack of accommodation. Here rebuilding was done at the dictates of taste. A landlord might find the church too near his house, or sited wrongly for a landscape improvement he was contemplating in the park, or he might simply dislike the old church on aesthetic grounds as a higgledy-piggledy, barbarous building. Most counties in England have more than one 18th-century church, now a sad relic in a park devastated by timber merchants, still crowning some rise or looking like a bit of Italy or ancient Greece in the pastoral English landscape.
Eighteenth-century churches are beautiful primarily because of their proportions. But they were not without colour. Painted hatchments adorned the walls, gilded tables of the Commandments were over the altar, with Moses and Aaron on either side, the Royal Arms on painted wood or coloured plaster was above the chancel opening, coloured baize lines in the pews, rich velvets of all colours were hanging from the high pulpit and the desks below it, an embroidered velvet covering decked the altar in wide folds, gilded candles and alms dish stood on the altar. The art of stained glass was not dead in the 18th century as is often supposed. East windows were frequently coloured, with pieces of golden-yellow 16th-century foreign glass brought back from a Grand Tour, and gold, blue and dark green glass, partly pot-metal and partly coloured transparency, such as went on being made in York until late in the century. Another popular kind of window was the coloured transparency –