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Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-Century Church Architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Peter Guillery
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Extract

The history of church architecture in seventeenth-century London lacks threads of continuity. It is dominated by two great men, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, whose contributions could not and did not straddle the whole metropolis or the whole of the century. Besides, the devising of a new church was too significant an act to be left entirely to those capable of architectural design. There is a related misconception that churches were seldom built in London between the Reformation and the Great Fire of 1666. Yet even within the City of London, numerous parish churches were rebuilt during this period, while Jones substantially remodelled Old St Paul’s Cathedral. Beyond the City, much more was happening. London’s earliest seventeenth-century suburban churches were broadly Gothic in style and medieval in type, while those built at the end of the century were entirely classical auditories. The same could be said of church building in a national context, although not without hefty qualification. What is fascinating, important, and insufficiently studied, is the nature of this transition and its wider historical meanings.

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Architectural History , Volume 48 , 2005 , pp. 69 - 106
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Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2005

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References

Notes

1 Julia Merritt has recently suggested that ‘we may need to revise many of our presuppositions about, and also our very approach towards, the nature and significance of the physical structure of the church in seventeenth-century religious thought and society’. Merritt, J. F., ‘Puritans, Laudians and the phenomenon of church-building in Jacobean London’, The Historical Journal, 41/4 (1998), pp. 935–60 (p. 960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Roger, Finlay and Beatrice, Shearer, ‘Population Growth and Suburban Expansion’, in London, iyoo-iyoo: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (Harlow, 1986), pp. 37–59 (p. 45).Google Scholar See also Brett-James, Norman G., The Growth of Stuart London (London, 1935)Google Scholar; and Power, M. J., ‘The East and West in Early-Modern London’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England, ed. E. W. Ives, R. J. Knecht and J. J. Scarisbrick (London, 1978), pp. 167–85.Google Scholar

3 The present article arises from a paper delivered at the Ecclesiological Society’s conference on ‘The creation of the Anglican church interior, 1660-1700’ (4 October 2003). This paper was partially based on an earlier article ( Peter, Guillery, ‘The Broadway Chapel, Westminster: A Forgotten Exemplar’, London Topographical Record, 26 (1990), pp. 97–133)Google Scholar in which connexions between the Broadway and Poplar chapels and the centralized church plans of Wren and Hawksmoor were first demonstrated. Revisiting the subject after fifteen years allows other buildings, not then known to me, to be brought into a wider discussion that takes into account intervening scholarship and arrives at new conclusions.

4 The conformist position in the English Reformation may not have been truly Calvinist, but the complexities of sixteenth-century theology need not prevent use of this widely accepted term. See the sources cited in note 6 and Diarmaid, MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (London, 2003) , pp. 259, 388–89, 502–20.Google Scholar

5 Merritt, , ‘Puritans’, pp. 935–60.Google Scholar

6 Ibid.; George Yule, ‘James VI and I: Furnishing the Churches in his Two Kingdoms’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 188, 193-97, 2041 J- F- Merritt, ‘The Social Context of the Parish Church in Early Modem Westminster’, Urban History Yearbook, 18 (1991), pp. 20-31; Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith, and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600-1900 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 28-30; Kenneth Fincham, ‘The Restoration of Altars in the 1630s’, The Historical Journal, 44/4 (2001), pp. 919-40; David J. Crankshaw, ‘Community, City and Nation, 1540-1714’, in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns and Andrew Saint (London, 2004), pp. 54, 56; Christian Grosse, ‘Sacred Places of Worship; The Liturgical Arrangement of the Genevan Temples i6lh-i8th Centuries’ (unpublished abstract of a conference paper, delivered at ‘Defining the Holy: sacred space in medieval & early modern Europe’, University of Exeter, 11 April 2003); J. P. Boulton, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion: The Administration of Holy Communion in late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’, The London Journal, 10/2 (1984), pp. 135-54. For an illustration of a communion room, see G. W. O. Addleshaw and F. Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London, 1948), p. 114.

7 Stephen, Porter and Harriet, Richardson, The Charterhouse: A Guide (London, 2000), pp. 28–29.Google Scholar The chapel underwent a Laudian refurbishment c. 1636, see Stephen, Porter and Adam, White, ‘John Colt and the Charterhouse Chapel’, Architectural History, 44 (2001), pp. 228–36.Google Scholar

8 Tower Hamlets Local History Library (hereafter THLHL), St John Wapping cuttings, a copy of an Act of Parliament of 1700; Edward, Hatton, A New View of London, 2 vols (London, 1708), 1, pp. 302–03 Google Scholar; Gordon, Barnes, Stepney Churches: An Historical Account (Leighton Buzzard, 1967), p. 54.Google Scholar

9 Hatton, , New View, 1, p. 283 Google Scholar; Pinks, W. I., The History of Clerkenwell (London, 1880), p. 50 Google Scholar; Merritt, , ‘Puritans’, p. 941 Google Scholar; Survey of London, Clerkenwell, forthcoming (information from Alan Cox).

10 Hatton, , New View, 1, pp. 257–58.Google Scholar Elliptical windows in the aisles were probably inserted when the galleries were added in the 1670s.

11 John, Newman, ‘Laudian Literature and the Interpretation of Caroline Churches in London’, in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 176–80.Google Scholar For an earlier resume, see Thomas, Cocke, ‘Le gothique anglais sous Charles I"’, Revue de VArt, 30 (1975), pp. 21–30.Google Scholar

12 From Laud’s directions for St Paul Hammersmith in a letter to the Earl of Musgrave in 1629, as quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God William Laud, ed. James Bliss, 7 vols (Oxford, 1857), vii, p. 27.

13 Peter, Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001), pp. 298–311.Google Scholar

14 >Merritt, , ‘Puritans’, p. 959.Merritt,+,+‘Puritans’,+p.+959.>Google Scholar See also Fincham, , ‘Restoration of Altars’; Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in The Early Stuart Church 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (London, 1993), pp. 161–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crankshaw, , ‘Community’, pp. 54–60 Google Scholar; Andrew, Foster, ‘Church Policies of the 1630s’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), pp. 193–223 Google Scholar; Murray, Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616-1649 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 5–46 Google Scholar; Yates, , Buildings, pp. 15–17, 31–33 Google Scholar; MacCulloch, , Reformation, pp. 502–20.Google Scholar

15 Newman, , ‘Laudian Literature’, pp. 171–75.Google Scholar

16 Anon., , An Anatomy of Independency (London, 1644).Google Scholar

17 Anon., , Certaine Propositions Tending to the Reformation of the Parish Congregations in England (London, 1655), p. 9.Google Scholar

18 London Survey Committee, Survey of London, vi: The Parish of Hammersmith (London, 1915), pp. 16-18; Thomas, Faulkner, An Historical and Topographical Account of Fulham including the Hamlet of Hammersmith (London, 1813), pp. 118–22.Google Scholar

19 Newman, , ‘Laudian Literature’, pp. 180–81.Google Scholar

20 Simon, Thurley, ‘The Stuart Kings, Oliver Cromwell and the Chapel Royal 1618-1685’, Architectural History, 45 (2002), pp. 241–48.Google Scholar

21 Diane, Duggan, “'London the Ring, Covent Garden the Jewell of that Ring": New Light on Covent Garden’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), pp. 149–54 Google Scholar; see als° Survey of London, xxxvi: The Parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, ed. F. H. W. Sheppard (London, 1970), pp. 98-128; and Newman, ‘Laudian Literature’, pp. 181-83.

22 Gordon, Higgott, ‘The Fabric, 1547-1670’, in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004, ed. Keene, Burns and Saint (London, 2004), pp. 175–82 Google Scholar; John, Summerson, ‘Inigo Jones: Covent Garden and the Restoration of St Paul’s Cathedral’, in The Unromantic Castle and other Essays (London, 1990), pp. 41–62.Google Scholar

23 Howard, Colvin, ‘Inigo Jones and the Church of St Michael le Querne’, The London Journal, 12/1 (1986), pp. 36–39 Google Scholar; Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge.

24 Crankshaw, ‘Community’, p. 60; see also Higgott, ‘The Fabric’.

25 Giles, Worsley, ‘Of Porticoes and Serlianas: Royal, Religious and Republican Attitudes to Palladianism in England and the Dutch Republic’ (paper delivered at a Georgian Group Symposium on ‘Anglo- Netherlandish Architectural Connections in the Late Seventeenth Century’, 17 January 2004).Google Scholar

26 Guillery, , ‘Broadway Chapel’; Survey of London, xliii: Poplar, Blackmail and the Isle of Dogs, the Parish of All Saints, Poplar, ed. Stephen Porter (London, 1994), pp. 98–110.Google Scholar Except when referenced otherwise, the account of the Westminster and Poplar buildings is derived from these two extensively referenced sources.

27 The communion table, rails and reredos shown on the Westminster plan of 1711 (Fig. 2) were insertions of 1664 and later. The pulpit was evidently renewed as well, although its ‘auditory’ position, immediately to the east of the crossing, may not have changed. The post-1664 pulpit from the Broadway Chapel survives in the church of St Mary, Attleborough, Norfolk.

28 The Broadway Chapel was described in 1828 as follows: ‘The interior is not remarkable for decoration; it is made in breadth into a centre and side aisles by two rows of columns of an order between the Doric and Tuscan ... the columns sustain an entablature, which is broken at the transepts, and the cornice returned to the side walls. The ceiling of the central aisle and transepts is elliptically arched and groined at the intersection; the side aisles have plain horizontal ceilings.’ Thomas, Allen, The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent, 4 vols (1828), iv, p. 216.Google Scholar

29 Knighton, C. S., ‘The Lord of Jerusalem: John Williams as Dean of Westminster’, in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540-1640, ed. C. S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 232–58 (p. 238).Google Scholar

30 Williams was seldom at Westminster from 1626, but he remained keen to maintain control of the town. In the early 1630s he attempted to outflank Crown intervention in urban development with a proposal for the incorporation of Westminster. In this he failed and, significantly perhaps in the present context, he was seen by those opposed to him to have been in league with the townspeople: Merritt, J. F., “'Under the shadowe of the Church"? The Abbey and the Town of Westminster 1530-1640’, in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540-1640, ed. Knighton and Mortimer (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 152–82 (pp. 176–80).Google Scholar

31 Anthony, Milton, ‘Canon Fire: Peter Heylyn at Westminster’, in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540-1640, ed. Knighton and Mortimer (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 207–31 (p. 231).Google Scholar

32 Knighton, , ‘Lord of Jerusalem’, p. 251.Google Scholar See also Kenneth, Fincham, ‘William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51/1 (2000), pp. 69–93.Google Scholar

33 ( John, Williams), The Holy Table Name and Thing (n.p., 1637), pp. 210, 224.Google Scholar

34 Brian, Quintrell, ‘Williams, John (1582-1650)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) (hereafter ODNB)Google Scholar; see also John, Newman, ‘The Architectural Setting’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iv, Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 135–77 (p. 165).Google Scholar

35 Milton, , ‘Canon Fire’, pp. 212–20 Google Scholar; Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 9; Newman, ‘Laudian Literature’, p. 185; Fincham, ‘Restoration of Altars’, pp. 934-35; Yule, ‘James VI and I’, pp. 185-86; Merritt, ‘Puritans’, p. 958.

36 Merritt, ‘Social Context’; Merritt, ‘Puritans’; Merritt, ‘Under the shadowe’.

37 Pye sat on the committee that oversaw Jones’s work at St Paul’s Cathedral, and, according to Ben Jonson, he ‘loved the Muses’. He had been an ally of Williams in the latter’s civic politicking in the disputed Westminster parliamentary election of 1621: ODNB; Merritt, ‘Under the shadowe’, pp. 167-68.

38 John Newman took the internal length to be 96 ft, but this was the overall dimension: Newman, ‘Laudian Literature’.?

39 Despite his secular and civic interests, Williams was rarely at Westminster in the 1630s, attending very few chapter meetings: Knighton, ‘Lord of Jerusalem’, p. 249. There are, in any case, no references to the building of the chapel in the chapter minutes, and in a later dispute in Chancery the then Dean and Chapter were unable to demonstrate any involvement in the early stages of the building project, although doing so would have strengthened their case: see Guillery, ‘Broadway Chapel’.

40 See note 14.

41 John Newman inclines to the latter view: Newman, ‘Laudian Literature’, p. 188; see also Giles, Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain in the Heroic Age (London, 1995), pp. 178–79.Google Scholar

42 As reproduced in English Orders for Consecrating Churches in the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. Wickham Legg (London, 1911), pp. 326-27.

43 Louw, H. J., ‘Anglo-Netherlandish Architectural Interchange c. 1600-c. 1660’, Architectural History, 24 (1981), pp. 1–23 Google Scholar; Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in the Austin Friars, 1604- 1642 (Leiden, 1989), pp. 224-37; Lisa Jardine, ‘Going Dutch: Shared Anglo-Dutch Cultural Interests in Late Seventeenth-century England’, and Konrad Ottenheym, ‘Vincenzo Scamozzi’s Legacy at the Borders of the North Sea: Architectural Exchange between Holland and England 1600-1665’, conference papers delivered at the Georgian Group, London, 17 January 2004 (see note 25).

44 Walter, Kramer, De Noorderkerk in Amsterdam (Zwolle, 1998)Google Scholar; Kuyper,, W. Dutch Classicist Architecture (Delft, 1980), pp. 6–56 Google Scholar; ‘The Note-book and Account Book of Nicholas Stone’, ed. W. L. Spiers, The Walpole Society, vn (Oxford, 1919), p. 137. Another Dutch church interior like those of Westminster and Poplar can be seen in Jacob van Campen’s Nieuwe Kerk at Haarlem of 1645-49. This has a cross-in-square plan, with crossed vaults and flat-ceiled corners. The date of the building rules it out as a model for the London buildings, but since it is frequently cited as an influence on Wren and Hooke the similarity is worth noting.

45 Howard, Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd edn (London, 1995), p. 930.Google Scholar Although termed ‘Dutch’ gables, this feature may have Jonesian and Italianate origins. See Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Netherlandish Scrolled Gables of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1978), pp. 95–98.Google Scholar

46 For the interior of the Broadway Chapel, see note 28. For Stone, see Colvin, , Biographical Dictionary, pp. 929–31.Google Scholar There is no evidence in Stone’s ‘Note-Book’ and ‘Account Book’ that he did more at the Broadway Chapel than provide the font, but omission from these retrospectively written sources should not be regarded as definitive evidence against an attribution, especially in the 1630s. It is clear that Stone was responsible for substantial and sophisticated works of architecture where documentation has not survived. See Spiers, , ‘Nicholas Stone’, pp. 10–11, 78–79, 104–05, 129, 136–38 Google Scholar; John, Newman, ‘Nicholas Stone’s Goldsmith Hall: Design and Practice in the 1630s’, Architectural History, 14 (1971), pp. 30–39 Google Scholar; Dianne, Duggan, ‘Woburn Abbey: the first episode of a great country house’, Architectural History, 46 (2003), pp. 57–80 (p. 71).Google Scholar Near the Broadway Chapel, in Westminster, Stone remodelled Tart Hall for Lady Arundel in 1638-9, in a style that, it has been argued, was consciously indifferent to the ‘pure’ classicism of Inigo Jones: Chew, Elizabeth V., ‘"A Mockery of the Surveyor’s Style"?: Alternatives to Inigo Jones in Seventeenth-Century Elite British Architecture’, in Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, ed. Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 57–95.Google Scholar

47 At Goldsmith’s Hall in 1635, for example, Jones ‘did advise and direct’ Stone in the design. See Newman, ‘Nicholas Stone’. John Webb, who later became Jones’s protégé, was too young to have been involved in the 1630s. It is notable, however, that his surviving drawings include a design of c. 1650 for a church with a Greek-cross plan and elliptical vaults: John, Harris and Tait, A. A., Catalogue of the Drawings by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Isaac de Caus at Worcester College, Oxford (Oxford, 1979), pi. 109.Google Scholar

48 Jones, of course, was a Crown servant and the designer of two Roman Catholic chapels. Wittkower argued that, while these assignments may have caused Jones some discomfort, the description of him by Gregorio Panzani, a papal agent, as ‘puritanissimo fiero’ need not be believed, and that Jones’s own religious preferences probably lay somewhere in between: Rudolf, Wittkower, ‘Inigo Jones — Puritanissimo Fiero’, The Burlington Magazine, 90 (1948), pp. 50–51.Google Scholar

49 John, Summerson, Architecture in Britain: 1330 to 1830, 5th edn (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 136 Google Scholar; see also Inigo Jones’s notes as published by John Webb, The most notable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly called Stone-Heng on Salisbury Plain, Restored (London, 1655); Summerson, ‘Inigo Jones’; Worsley, Classical Architecture, p. 7; Keith Thomas, ‘English Protestantism and Classical Art’, in Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1330-1660, ed. Lucy Gent (London, 1995), pp. 221-38 (pp. 228-30).?

50 Jonesian astylar classicism of the 1620s and 1630s has been interpreted as a manifestation of decorum, whereby relatively low-status buildings had their own architectural vocabulary: Giles, Worsley, ‘Courtly Stables and their Implications for Seventeenth-Century English Architecture’, The Georgian Group Journal, 13 (2003), pp. 114–40.Google Scholar

51 William, Prynne, A Quench-Coale; or, A briefe Disquisition and Inquirie, in what place of the Church or Chancell the Lords-Table ought to be situated, especially when the Sacrament is administered? Wherein is evidently proved that the Lords-Table ought to be placed in the Midst of the Church (London, 1637), p. 103.Google Scholar The first sermon in the Broadway Chapel was given by the leading puritan preacher and writer William Gouge: Richard Newcourt, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense (London, 1708), p. 923.

52 ODNB; maintenance for a minister remained a problem, as it did more widely, as Palmer pointed out to the House of Commons in 1646: Herbert, Palmer, The Duty and Honour of Church-Restorers (London, 1646), p. 45.Google Scholar In 1652 Pye had to provide for the chapel’s minister, taking the right of nomination himself: see Guillery, ‘Broadway Chapel’.

53 See also note 28.

54 Baker, T. F. T. ed., The Victoria County History of the County of Middlesex, xi: Early Stepney with Bethnal Green (hereafter VCH) (Oxford, 1998), pp. 74–75 Google Scholar; Tolmie, Triumph, passim.

55 British Library (hereafter BL), East India Company Minutes, B/20, p. 154 (6 May 1642).

56 Robert, Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1655 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 115.Google Scholar Thomson had been a member of gathered Independent congregations in the 1640s. He was a Stepney vestryman from 1647 and lived in Worcester House, a huge medieval mansion at the south end of Stepney Green, from 1650 to 1675. He was a principal author of the Navigation Act of 1651 and a member of the High Court of Justice.

57 John, Strype, Stow’s Survey of London, 2 vols (London, 1720), n, appx I, p. 103.Google Scholar

58 Greenhill, who had longstanding connexions with Thomson, had been involved in Congregationalist experiments in Holland in the 1630s, and formed a gathered Congregational church in Stepney in 1644. In 1645 he shifted towards parochial Independency, his congregation using the nearby parish church of St Dunstan Stepney, antagonizing the more radical members. Trimming further, in 1652 Greenhill became the vicar at St Dunstan, Parliament having by this time provided for the maintenance of ministers in parish churches through the sale of sequestered lands. See ODNB; Greaves, Richard L. and Robert, Zaller, Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Brighton, 1982-84), n, p. 25 Google Scholar; Tolmie, , Triumph, pp. 66, 98, 101–23, 171 Google Scholar; Brenner, , Merchants, p. 423 Google Scholar; THLHL, W/SMH/A/1/1, Stepney Meeting Church Book, 1644, fols 1-4.

59 By 1662 Walton had been ejected from West Ham, whence he had gone, and established the Bethnal Green Meeting, which became the Bethnal Green Congregational Church. Greenhill was ejected from St Dunstan, to return to his nearby gathered congregation in Stepney Meeting House. The Act of Uniformity hit London harder than any other part of the country, causing the expulsion of one in three ministers. See Survey of London, Poplar, pp. 98-103; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658-166J (Oxford, 1986, reissued 1993), pp. 176-77; Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), Comm. XII a /12, fols 344-45; LPL, Comm. XII c / 2, fols 17, 55; Matthews, A. G., Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 509 Google Scholar; THLHL cuttings, East London Advertiser, 2 March 1962.

60 Thurley, , ‘Stuart Kings’.Google Scholar

61 John, Burgess, as quoted by Crankshaw, ‘Community’, p. 58.Google Scholar

62 As quoted by Thomas, , ‘English Protestantism’, p. 225.Google Scholar

63 In 1807 the church was deemed ‘a most disgraceful building of brick totally unworthy of description’, James Peller Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum; or, An Ancient History and Modern Description of London, 4 vols (London, 1807), iv, pp. 565-66. The partial collapse of the ceiling in 1810 resulted in the closure of the church. Its demolition in 1817 followed an Act of Parliament for rebuilding (57 GUI c. lxxii). The ability of the parish to raise the required funds from rates had been greatly improved following the opening of the nearby London Docks in 1805. The replacement church of St Paul Shadwell, which still survives, was designed by John Walters and consecrated in 1820: Elizabeth, Williamson and Nikolaus, Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London: Docklands (London, 1998), p. 206.Google Scholar

64 Power, Michael J., ‘Shadwell: The Development of a London Suburban Community in the Seventeenth Century’, The London Journal, 4/1 (1978), pp. 29–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shadwell is unusually well documented thanks to a Parliamentary Survey of 1649 (Guildhall Library [hereafter GL], MS 11,816, fols 66-209), analysed by Power.? See also Power, M. J., ‘The East London working community in the seventeenth century’, in Work in Towns 830-1830, ed. Penelope J. Corfield and Derek Keene (Leicester, 1990), pp. 103–20 Google Scholar; David, Johnson, ‘Estates and Income, 1540-1714’, in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004, ed. Keene, Burns and Saint (London, 2004), pp. 307–09.Google Scholar

65 LPL, Comm. XII a/12, fols 344-45.

66 Archives of the Mercer’s Company, Acts of Court 1651-57, fols 20ir and 2031.

67 Power, ‘Shadwell’; The Lady Ivie’s Trial for Great Part of Shadwell in the County of Middlesex before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys in 1684, ed. John C. Fox (Oxford, 1929).

68 Archives of the Mercer’s Company, Acts of Court 1651-7, fol. 233V.

69 The wealthiest inhabitant of Shadwell in the 1650s was John Winterborne (d. 1665). Having earlier held leases of the St Paul’s estate, Winterborne and Samuel Wightwick, a merchant and lawyer, had bought the expropriated land in 1652 for the vast sum of £9,540 5s. Winterborne, a Stepney vestryman for Shadwell in 1655-58, therefore co-owned the land on which the church was built: GL, MS 19,931, MS 25,820; THLHL, TH 2423; The National Archives (hereafter TNA), C9/412/26; TNA, C10/160/27; TNA, PROB 11/322/171. The other Shadwell vestryman in 1655-58 was John Wright (d. 1671), a shipwright who, following litigation in 1654, appears to have taken Wightwick’s place as Winterborne’s partner. Edward Arlibeare, a mast-maker, had been a churchwarden for Shadwell in 1653-55. Henry Gleade, a carpenter, succeeded him. George Care(y), a builder, was the hamlet’s sideman from 1655: Memorials of Stepney Parish, ed. G. W. Hill and W. H. Frere (Guildford, 1891), pp. 184-85, 198, 207-08, 210; Fox, Lady Ivie’s Trial, pp. 24, 107-08; TNA, C5/402/213; TNA, C10/160/27; TNA, PROB 11/337, f°l- I25- Wright and Arlibeare were on the Commission appointed in 1657 to consider the division of Stepney into several parishes, and Arlibeare’s will of 1667 included a bequest to ‘the Minister of New Chappell’ in Shadwell, as well as money for an annual sermon in his own name: LPL, Comm. XII c/1, fol. 43; TNA, C104/241.

70 LPL, Comm. XII c/2, pp. 244, 345-46; LPL, Comm. IV/9, pp. 9, 26; LPL, Comm. XII c/i, fol. 43; LPL, Comm. Ill/6, p. 175. Meade (1629-99) had been made the morning lecturer in Stepney in 1655, Greenhill being the afternoon lecturer. He was displaced to Holborn in 1660 where he rallied Nonconformists until he was ejected in 1662. He lived at Maurice Thomson’s Stepney Green house in 1663, before spending time in the Netherlands. In 1669 he became Greenhill’s assistant, succeeding him in 1671 as pastor at the Stepney Meeting House, which was said to have had, at five hundred, the largest Dissenting congregation in London. Meade had the Meeting House rebuilt in 1674, incorporating four Tuscan columns, gifts from the States of Holland, in a galleried preaching-box interior to a large brick building that looked like a house from the outside, perhaps to avoid attracting too much attention. This stood to the south of Thomson’s mansion, which Thomson sold to the Meeting in 1675 shortly before his death. Meade continued to preach at Stepney up to his death: ODNB; Hill and Frere, Memorials, p. 189. His surprisingly elaborate chest tomb is prominently situated just outside the south porch of St Dunstan Stepney. For two other large galleried late seventeenth-century meeting houses that incorporated ‘Tuscan’ columns, both in Southwark, see Robert, Wilkinson, Londina Illustrata, 1 (London, 1825), pp. 135–39.Google Scholar The possible influence of the churches discussed in this article on the architecture of early Nonconformist meeting-houses is a subject that warrants further research.

71 For ‘£20,000 or some other great sum of money': The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 338. See also TNA, C10/160/ 27; GL, MS 19,931; Fox, Lady Ivie’s Trial, pp. 4-25, where the account of the descent of the property is, in some particulars, obfuscating.

72 Latham, ed., Pepys, p. 338.

73 Ibid., pp. 397-98.

74 GL, MS 19,931.

75 22 CII 27. Neale gave up a strip of land west of the chapel for a parsonage and houses. The rental income was to maintain the rector.

76 Newcourt, Repertorium, p. 708; George, Hennessy, Novum Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense (London, 1898), p. 372.Google Scholar

77 William, Maitland, The History of London from its foundation to the present time, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London, 1760), 1 /1, p. 37 Google Scholar; Power, ‘Shadwell’. Neale is not so credited in earlier accounts: Hatton, New View, 11, pp. 481-84; Strype, Stow’s Survey, 11 /1, p. 105.

78 Neale renegotiated a more secure lease of his Shadwell property in 1678, and by 1684 he had invested in a market and waterworks in Shadwell. He had to fight for the property in 1684 in a notorious court case against Lady Theodosia Ivie, the proceedings of which successful action he published, as vindication, in 1696. These have been republished as an object lesson and entertainment: Fox, Lady Ivie’s Trial. From 1694 Neale began the development of the area later known as Seven Dials, for which he is now perhaps best known, his name enduring in Neal Street and Neal’s Yard: Power, , ‘Shadwell’, pp. 42–43 Google Scholar; ODNB.

79 The best of the early accounts are by Hatton and Strype (see note 77), although the fullest and best illustrated is later in date, in Robert, Wilkinson, Londina Illustrata, 2 vols (London, 1825), 1, pp. 61–68.Google Scholar For other views, see the Museum in Docklands Library and Archive, Shadwell portfolio; GL, Prints and Drawings, Collage refs 22,161-62, 23,693-94.

80 Hatton, , New View, n, pp. 481–84.Google Scholar

81 The north door carried the date 1656: Strype, Stow’s Survey, n/I, p. 105.

82 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), DL/C/345, fol. 83. I am grateful to Kenneth Fincham for this reference.

83 Wilkinson, , Londina, 1, p. 62.Google Scholar See also Summerson, , ‘Inigo Jones’; Worsley, Classical Architecture, p. 8 Google Scholar; Higgott, ‘Fabric’.

84 Wilkinson, Londina, 1, p. 66; LMA, DL/C/345, fol. 83. The south-west vestry was added in 1675, the doorway from the church having had a heavily quoined surround (Fig. 13). The south porch had already been rebuilt in 1691: Hatton, New View, 11, pp. 481-84.

85 The prominence of the single roadside entrance to the north might suggest a passing similarity with the Chapel Royal, Stirling, of 1594, or even with the original five-bay entrance front of the rather more Dutch Tron Church in Edinburgh, of 1636-47. However, a general tendency towards centralization for auditory use aside, there does not seem to be any strong link between Reformed Scottish church-building and any of these London churches. See Hay, George, The Architecture of Scottish Post-Reformation Churches, 1560-1845 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 28–69 Google Scholar; Yule, ‘James VI and I’, pp. 204-07.

86 Inside the building there was already a middle aisle in 1670 (LMA, DL/C/345, f°l- 83).

87 Kuyper, Dutch Classicist Architecture, pp. 6-56. The Shadwell interior is also reminiscent of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam of 1670-75 (I am grateful to Gordon Higgott for this observation). The entablature mouldings in the Shadwell Chapel may have been lost by the time the church was drawn. Perhaps they were victims of inefficient internal valley gutters, problems with which may be reflected in what looks like the loss of plaster at the springings of the vaults. The ornamental iron ties may imply structural problems. At Poplar, the roof carpentry of three or four years earlier shows evidence of uncertainty in the tying of trusses over a vault: ed. Porter, Survey of London, Poplar, pp. 98-103.

88 LMA, DL/C/345, fol. 83.

89 The pulpit shown in the late Georgian views is not the same as that of bellied form and early date that survives in the nineteenth-century church of St Paul Shadwell.

90 At Shadwell there was a north gallery by 1683, when a faculty was granted for a south gallery, paid for by the inhabitants: LMA, DL/C/345, f°l- 23ov (I am grateful to Kenneth Fincham for this reference). A further or replacement north gallery was paid for by Captain Thomas Bryant in 1691, which date appeared on the west gallery: Hatton, New View, II, pp. 481-84; Strype, Stow’s Survey, n/I, p. 105. Perhaps this was when these variously inserted galleries were unified to appear as they did in the early nineteenth century, bearing panels with portrait medallions.

91 LMA, DL/C/345, f°l- 83; GL, MS 22,356.

92 Designed by the London mason John Young, Holy Trinity, Berwick, was paid for by the Mercers’ Company.

93 Laurence, Butler, ‘Leicester’s Church, Denbigh: an Experiment in Puritan Worship’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, 37 (1974), pp. 40–62 Google Scholar; see also Thomas, , ‘English Protestantism’, pp. 228–29.Google Scholar

94 A longer view of this possibility was articulated by Chris Wakeling at an English Heritage conference, ‘Looking Back, Going Forward: 20th-Century Attitudes towards Religious Buildings’ in June 2003 in a paper titled ‘The Puritan Tradition: Myths, Origins, and Architecture in the Modern Age’.

95 LMA, DL/C/ 345, fol. 83; see Kenneth, Fincham, “'According to Ancient Custom": the Return of Altars in the Restoration Church of England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (2003), pp. 29–46.Google Scholar The ornamented chancel ceiling at Shadwell may have formed part of the beautification of the east end ordered in 1670. The reredos that is visible in the early nineteenth-century views (Figs 12 and 13) cutting across the lower part of the round east window was installed following a faculty in 1735, when its predecessor, which? Hatton described in 1708 as having a ‘compass pediment’ and Queen Anne’s arms, was said to be ruinous: Hatton, , New View, II, pp. 481–84 Google Scholar; Barnes, , Stepney Churches, p. 56.Google Scholar

96 Stow lamented that ‘both the sides of the streete bee pestered with Cottages and Allies, even up to White chappel church: and almost halfe a mile beyond it, into the common field': John Stow, A Survey of London, 2 vols, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (London, 1908), n, p. 72.

97 Newcourt, Repertorium, p. 699; Strype, Stow’s Survey, 11, p. 45; ODNB; Barnes, Stepney Churches, p. 48.

98 It was in Whitechapel in the early 1640s that Thomas Lambe’s General Baptists formed what was at that time ‘easily the most visible and notorious of all sectarian congregations in London': Tolmie, , Triumph, p. 76.Google Scholar

99 LMA, DL/C/344, fols I70v-i72r; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 508 for Whalley; Matthews, A. G., Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 52 for JohnsonGoogle Scholar; TNA, PROB/11/365 for Ralph Davenant’s will, which provided for a school in Whitechapel Road; John Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, pt 1 /II (Cambridge, 1922), p. 13; Roland Reynolds, The History of the Davenant Foundation Grammar School (Abingdon, 1966), pp. 2-3; Wilkinson, Londina, 1, pp. 73-75. Thomas Fuller (1608-61), the church historian and another eminent moderate Calvinist divine, who preached tolerance through the Commonwealth while clashing with Peter Heylyn, was another relation, being the nephew and protégé of Bishop Davenant: ODNB.

100 LMA, P93 / MRY1 / 90, fol. 4. This is a nineteenth-century book of notes abstracted from the earlier vestry books, which appear not to survive. A register of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deeds and wills (LMA, P93/MRY1/91) and a transcription of monumental inscriptions from the seventeenth-century church (LMA, P93/MRY1/172) were in 2003 deemed unfit for consultation. In due course these sources might reveal more about the rebuilding.

101 LMA, DL/C/345, fols 88v, ii2v; Hatton, New View, 11, p. 406; National Monuments Record (NMR), Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (RCHM) inventory card, 1924.

102 RCHM inventory card; Hatton, , New View, n, p. 406.Google Scholar Meggs’s Almshouses on Whitechapel Road had been built and endowed in 1658: Wilkinson, , Londina, 1, pp. 91–93.Google Scholar His own house was among the largest in Whitechapel, being assessed for fifteen hearths in 1674: TNA, E179/143/370, r. 32.

103 LMA, DL/C/344, fols 170V-72Ï; Matthews, Walker Revised, p. 52.

104 Strype, , Stow’s Survey, n, p. 45.Google Scholar

105 John, Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646-1689 (London, 1991), pp. 52–64 Google Scholar; John, Spurr, ‘Schism and the Restoration Church’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41/3 (1990), pp. 408–24 Google Scholar; Fincham, , ‘Return of Altars’, pp. 46–54 Google Scholar; Bill, Jacob, ‘Church life and liturgy after the Restoration’, lecture at the Ecclesiological Society annual conference, ‘The creation of the Anglican church interior, 1660-1700’, 4 October 2003; VCH, pp. 75, 81–82.Google Scholar

106 Internally the church measured 90 feet by 63 feet: Maitland, , History of London, 1/1, p. 29 Google Scholar; www.churchplansonline.org, ICBS No. 03575, plan by Simmonds, G. H., 1845; Ordance Survey Map, 1873.Google Scholar

107 GL, anonymous engraved view of the German Lutheran Church, c. 1720; Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, p. 248. The motif was also used by Robert Hooke in c. 1669-70 for the stables at Somerset House. See Giles, Worsley, ‘Taking Hooke Seriously’, The Georgian Group Journal, 14 (2004), pp. 1–25 (p. 6).Google Scholar

108 It was probably always thus, but the north side of the church may have been embellished, possibly in 1735’ when it was ordered that the church should be ‘repaired and Beautified': LMA, P93/MRY1/90.

109 Newcourt, , Repertorium, p. 699.Google Scholar

110 www.churchplansonline.org, ICBS No. 03575, plan by Simmonds, G. H., 1845.Google Scholar

111 Hatton, , New View, II, p. 406 Google Scholar; Strype, , Stow’s Survey, 11, p. 45.Google Scholar

112 Jeffery, Paul, The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London: The City Churches (London, 1998); Anthony, Geraghty, ‘Introducing Thomas Laine: Draughtsman to Sir Christopher Wren’, Architectural History, 42 (1999), pp. 240–45 Google Scholar; Anthony, Geraghty, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Wren City Church Steeples’, The Georgian Group Journal, 10 (2000), pp. 1–14.Google Scholar

113 Wren’s ‘Letter to a Friend on the Commission for Building 50 New City Churches’, c. 1711, in Christopher Wren, Parentalia: or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1750), p. 320. It is perhaps relevant that after the Fire a number of congregations ejected Nonconformists from their chapels for temporary use for Anglican worship.

114 St Mary at Hill, rebuilt in 1670-74, might be advanced to contradict this, but, as Paul Jeffery has shown, this church had a dome at the centre of flat ceiled nave and transept axes until 1826 when its ceilings were rebuilt with crossed vaults: Jeffery, , City Churches, pp. 112–14, 285–88 Google Scholar; Paul, Jeffery, The Parish Church of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London, The Ecclesiological Society (London, 1996), pp. 13–17.Google Scholar

115 Jeffery, , City Churches, pp. 112–16, 204–05, 265–67.Google Scholar The church of St Genevieve, Euston, Suffolk, of 1676, also traditionally linked to Wren, has an interior with detailing very reminiscent of that in Whitechapel.

116 See note 107. Hooke’s diary, in which there is no mention of Whitechapel, only commences on 10 March 1672. John Tanner, who had built the Poplar Chapel, was City bricklayer from 1661 until 1671, and alive until late 1672. Hooke noted his burial on 20 September. GL, MS 1758, p. 7.

117 The Diary of Robert Hooke 1672-1680, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (London, 1935); Jeffery, City Churches, p. 114. I am grateful to Lisa Jardine and Anthony Geraghty for sharing their thoughts on the possibility of Hooke’s involvement.

118 There is no evidence that Hooke possessed a copy of Architectura Moderna and he only bought Philips Vingboons’ illustrated survey of recent Dutch architecture in November 1674. See Anthony Geraghty, ‘Robert Hooke’s Collection of Architectural Books and Prints’, Architectural History, 47 (2004), pp. 113-25. See also Alison Stoesser-Johnston, ‘Robert Hooke and Holland: Dutch influence on his architecture’, Bulletin van de Koninklijke Nederlandse oudheidkundige bond, 99 (2000), pp. 121-37. h1 blurring the boundaries between what was Dutch and what was local, it is worth noting that the elderly William de Keyser, Hendrik’s son, was employed in Wren’s City Church office in 1671, probably in connexion with the design of St Mary-le- Bow: Anthony Geraghty, ‘William de Keyser and Wren’s St Mary-le-Bow’, conference paper, 17 January 2004 (see note 25); Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, p. 299.

119 Jeffery, , City Churches, pp. 116–21, 246–49, 256–59 Google Scholar; Bradley and Pevsner, City Churches, pp. 97-9; British Architectural Library, RIBA Drawings Collection, SC2/i(3), reproduced in Sir John Summerson, ‘Drawings of London Churches in the Bute Collection: A Catalogue’, Architectural History, 13 (1970), pp. 30-42 (p. 39 and fig. 19).

120 Information kindly provided by Kenneth Fincham.

121 Gordon, Higgott, ‘The revised design for St Paul’s Cathedral, 1685-90: Wren, Hawksmoor and Les Invalides’, The Burlington Magazine, 146 (August 2004), pp. 534–47.Google Scholar

122 Wren, , Parentalia, p. 320 Google Scholar; Jeffery, , City Churches, pp. 250–52.Google Scholar Subtle cross-axial emphasis was widespread, as in the partially surviving chapel built in Hatton Garden in the 1680s, latterly St Andrew’s Schools and now ‘Wren House’.

123 Wren, , Parentalia, p. 320.Google Scholar

124 Stevenson, Christine, ‘Robert Hooke, Monuments, and Memory’, Art History, 28/1 (February 2005), pp. 43–73.Google Scholar

125 Judi, Loach, ‘Anglicanism in London, Gallicanism in Paris, Primitivism in Both’, Plus (fa Change ... Architectural Interchange between France and Britain, ed. Neil Jackson, Papers from the Annual Symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 1999 (Nottingham, 2000), pp. 9–32.Google Scholar

126 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), London, v: East London (London, 1930), pp. 1-3, 15-16, with supporting inventory cards in the NMR, of 1919 for St Nicholas and c. 1927 for St Mary Magdalene, both by A. W. Clapham; Bridget, Cherry and Nikolaus, Pevsner, The Buildings of England; London 2: South (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 402, 599 Google Scholar; Colvin, , Biographical Dictionary, p. 917.Google Scholar

127 Leftwich, B. R., ‘The Parish of St Nicholas, Deptford’, Ecclesiological Society Transactions, 1/4 (1941), p. 224 Google Scholar; BL, Add. MS 78629A, 1 Evelyn Papers, Map of Deptford in 1623, as copied and annotated by John Evelyn, c. 1703.

128 Yates, , Buildings, pi. 8 and pp. 87, 89.Google Scholar Of St George Portsea, Pevsner wrote ‘It must strike American visitors as a greeting from New England': Nikolaus, Pevsner and David, Lloyd, The Buildings of England: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 439.Google Scholar The direction of travel was, of course, the other way round, which indicates the relevance of London’s humbler seventeenth-century churches to North American ecclesiology, for which see Dorsey, Stephen P., Early English Churches in America 1607-1805 (New York, 1952)Google Scholar, and Dell, Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (London, 1997).Google Scholar

129 Malcolm, James Peller, Londinium Redivivum (London, 1803), in, p. 477 Google Scholar; see also Port, Michael H., The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711-27, A Calendar (London, 1986)Google Scholar; William, Palin, ‘The Conception and Siting of the "Stepney Churches": A Study of the Relationship between the churches of the "Fifty Churches" Commission and their Surroundings in the parish of St Dunstan’s, Stepney’ (unpublished MA thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1998).?Google Scholar

130 Loach, , ‘Anglicanism’; Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London Churches (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Vaughan, Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders (London, 2002).Google Scholar

131 Donald, Findlay, ‘Centralised Plans for Anglican Churches in Georgian England’, Georgian Group Report and Journal, (1989), pp. 66–74 Google Scholar; Terry, Friedman, The Georgian Parish Church: ‘Monuments to Posterity’ (Reading, 2004) , passim.Google Scholar

132 Loach, , ‘Anglicanism’, pp. 17, 25–26 Google Scholar; Stevenson, ‘Robert Hooke’.