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The Queen’s Chapel in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Simon Bradley
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Extract

Today the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace is cherished as perhaps the most intact of all Inigo Jones’s works, and one which, in the words of John Harris, ‘expresses more of the quintessential Jones than any other surviving building.’ Yet its status was long uncertain, and its importance was established beyond doubt only during the scholarly restoration begun in 1937. Few archaeologically informed restorations of English classical buildings had then been carried out, and the Office of Works had to tread carefully around the sensibilities of the Royal Household to get its own way in the matter. Work on the chapel was finished in 1951, since when its strange eclipse from notice has been generally forgotten.

Type
Section 6: Cathedrals, Abbeys, Churches and Chapels
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 293 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 Arts Council, The King’s Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (London, 1973), p. 123 Google Scholar.

2 The History of the King’s Works, 6 vols (London, 1963-78), iv, pp. 248-49, v, pp. 244-54.

3 PL 2972/186. The date is from the contemporary MS catalogue.

4 Baldwin, David, The Chapel Royal: Ancient & Modern (London, 1990), pp. 137,403Google Scholar.

5 Plan in Wren Society, VII (1930), p. 244.

6 Sheppard, J. E., Memorials of St James’s Palace, 2 vols (London, 1894), 11, p. 252 Google Scholar; Baldwin, , Chapel Royal, pp. 404-06Google Scholar.

7 Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), Work 19/1068/1.

8 Worsley, Giles, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: a Pioneer Neo-Palladian?’, Architectural History, 33 (1990) p. 70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, John, The Palladians, RIBA Drawings Series (London, 1981), p. 115 Google Scholar.

9 Walpole, Horace, Anecdotes of Painting, 4 vols (London, 1767–71), 11, p. 151 Google Scholar.

10 Nightingale, Revd James, The Beauties of England and Wales, 18 vols (London, 1801-16, various authors), x, Middlesex (1815), part iv, p. 306 Google Scholar; Pyne, W. H., Royal Residences, 3 vols (London, 1819), in, p. 1 on. and facing p.39Google Scholar.

11 Brayley, E. W., Londiniana, 4 vols (London, 1829), 11, p. 304 Google Scholar; Timbs, John, Curiosities of London (London, 1867 edn), p. 630 Google Scholar.

12 Port, M. H., Imperial London (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 20 Google Scholar.

13 Building News, 3 (1857), p. 144.

14 Sheppard, Memorials, 11, pp. 227-32; Sinclair, William, The Chapels Royal (London, 1912), pp. 217-18, follows himGoogle Scholar. Sheppard refers to published correspondence on the subject of c. 1868, partly in Notes and Queries, but with inadequate bibliographical information.

15 Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1891-92), based on notes by Horne, A. P. Google Scholar.

16 Gotch, J. Alfred, Inigo Jones (London, 1928), pp. 131-32Google Scholar.

17 Cf. his unpublished catalogue of the Jonesian drawings at Worcester College, Oxford, 1913.

18 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, 4 vols (London, 1924-30), 2, West London (1925), p. 118. The reference may be to a drawing of 1645 in the Royal Collection, the evidence of which is ambiguous at best.

19 Wren Society, VII (1930) pp. 207-08, 254, and plate 28. Cf. however Genochio, H., ‘St James’s Palace and the Chapel Royal’, London Society Journal, 180 (1933), p. 27 Google Scholar, in which Jones is credited with the shell.

20 Photograph dated 1894 in Sheppard, J. E., Memorials, II, p. 249 Google Scholar.

21 PRO, Work 19/1047, not numbered.

22 PRO, Work 35/945, Calendar, item 37.

23 Baldwin, Chapel Royal, p. 144; PRO, Work 19/1068/147.

24 PRO, Work 19/945, Calendar, item 5; for Weber see Baldwin, Chapel Royal, p. 373.

25 PRO, Work 19/945, Calendar, item 37.

26 PRO, Work 19/945/50-55.

27 PRO, Work 19/945/101.

28 PRO, Work 19/945/102-03a.

29 PRO, Work 19/945/103b.

30 PRO, Work 19/945/104-06.

31 See Chettle, George H., The Queen’s House, Greenwich, Survey of London, monograph 14 (1937)Google Scholar.

32 PRO, Work 19/945/119.

33 PRO, Work 19/945/107, 109, III.

34 PRO, Work 19/945/118.

35 PRO, Work 19/945/114-17.

36 PRO, Work 19/945/114-18. The colour was modified after further tests done in 1982.

37 PRO, Work 19/945/108.

38 PRO, Work 19/945/136-37, 144-45, 149.

39 PRO, Work 19/945/189, 198.

40 PRO, Work 19/1068, drawing captioned ‘Marlborough House Chapel: Revised suggestion for Altar treatment’, 5 July 1938; PRO, Work 19/945/199.

41 PRO, Work 19/945/199, 213.

42 PRO, Work 19/945/205.

43 PRO, Work 19/945/208, 212.

44 PRO, Work 19/954/212-13.

45 PRO, Work 19/945/221.

46 PRO, Work 19/945/226-35. Blacking’s frontal, made by a Mr Noyes, remains in place in the chapel. A Persian rug acquired to put in front of it was put into store in 1940, and destroyed in an air raid the following year (PRO, Work 19/945/179, 235, 19/1068/35, 51). The use of such rugs for altars was favoured from the late nineteenth century by e.g. Temple Moore ( Brandwood, G. K., Temple Moore: An Architect of the Late Gothic Revival (Stamford, 1997), p. 148)Google Scholar.

47 PRO, Work 19/945/215, 19/1068, drawing captioned ‘alternative treatment of the altar’, 16 July 1938.

48 PRO, Work 19/945/102-03a.

49 PRO, Work 19/945/107, 149.

50 The Times, 28 October 1938; Country Life 84 (1938), pp. 450-53; PRO, Work 19/1068/2-9.

51 PRO, Work 19/1297/59. External bomb damage sustained in 1944 was made good by the following year (PRO, Work 19/1068/21-22, 28-30).

52 PRO, Work 19/1068/78, 98-113.

53 Lees-Milne, James, The Age of Inigo Jones (London, 1953),pp. 81–83 Google Scholar.

54 PRO, Work 19/1068/132, 134.

55 PRO, Work 19/1297/63-72.