Canterbury and the Gothic Revival

For our great-grandchildren,

Leela and Oliver, to read one day

Acknowledgements

Many fellow citizens have contributed to our final tribute to the city and Cathedral. Our gratitude goes to: Cressida Williams and Dr Toby Hewitson at the Cathedral Archives; Philip Hadfield and his colleagues at Canterbury Museums and Galleries; the King’s School, Canterbury, and particularly Mary Berg and Peter Henderson, and their librarian at St Augustine’s, for their co-operation; Professor Jackie and Richard Eales, who commented on the historical accuracy of the first two chapters; Andrew Lyle and Pat Butler, who detected inaccuracies in the text; Paul Crampton and Jane Boucher, who provided access to additional information; and Heather Newton and Geoff Downer, for sharing their knowledge of the Cathedral’s fabric.

Our particular admiration and thanks go to our granddaughter, Victoria Lyle, for her picture-research and negotiation worldwide, and to our local photographer, John Kemp. For the second time he devoted uncounted hours to recording and processing his stunning images. Finally, we are grateful to the Dean of Canterbury, Dr Robert Willis, who took the time to read and commend this book.

Our apologies to anyone inadvertently omitted. We acknowledge that any remaining imperfections are our responsibility.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1.  Creating the Gothic Image

2.  From Decline to Revival – Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

3.  The Dawn of the Gothic Revival: Buildings

4.  The Dawn of the Gothic Revival: Images

5.  Gothic – The National Style

6.  The Recovery of St Augustine’s Abbey

7.  The Consequences of St Augustine’s College

8.  Dean Alford and After

9.  Gothic in the Colonies

Last Words

Some Further Reading

Glossary

Plates

About the author

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Cover Pictures:

Bell Harry Tower. The Cathedral’s crowning glory was completed in 1504; because its picture is taken by most pilgrims, this image has been spread worldwide.

The Compass Rose. Symbolising the spread of the Anglican communion worldwide, this compass lies above the probable site of St Augustine’s first church, traced by archaeologists in 1993.

Mono Pictures:

St Denis’ interior

The Cathedral Quire, north

The Cathedral Corona

The Cathedral nave

Christchurch Priory ruins

St Augustine’s Abbey ruins

Archbishop William Laud

William Somner

Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (1644)

The Cathedral’s old west front

Fonthill Abbey

Lee Priory, near Canterbury

The Scott Monument, Edinburgh

Thomas Rickman’s frontispiece

Thomas Rowlandson cartoon: Dr Syntax

T.S. Cooper by John Prescott R.A., 1850

St Augustine’s Monastery (lithograph by T.S. Cooper)

The Cathedral and the railway by L.L. Razé

The throne in the House of Lords

The Grange and St Augustine’s Church, Ramsgate

Cambridge Camden Society seal

Revd Francis Close’s sermon, 1844

The ‘Canterbury Vauxhall’

Library interior of St Augustine’s College

Chapel façade of St Augustine’s College

Students’ range of St Augustine’s College

Realigned monuments in St Augustine’s College, lower chapel

St Augustine’s College exterior by L.L. Razé

William Butterfield

Butterfield’s pulpit in the Cathedral

The Archbishop’s throne in the Cathedral

The font of St Mary’s, Ottery St Mary, Devon

All Saints’, Margaret Street, London

The apse of St Margaret’s Church, Canterbury

The Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford

The Cathedral’s south-west porch

The Cathedral’s porch, west side

Statue of Dean Alford on the Cathedral’s west front

Tomb of Archbishop Broughton

Tomb of Dean Lyall

The Clergy Orphan School by L.L. Razé

Revd Samuel Marsden landing at the Bay of Islands, 1814

William Broughton and his bishops

St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne

George Selwyn

Old St Paul’s, Wellington

The Provincial Council Chamber, Christchurch

Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898)

Christ Church Cathedral, Christchurch, New Zealand

John Medley

The Church of the Nativity, Huntsville, Alabama

Colour Plates

1.      Eastern Crypt of the Cathedral

2.      The Cathedral nave

3.      The Great Gallery of Strawberry Hill

4.      Horace Walpole

5.      A.W.N. Pugin

6.      St Giles, Cheadle

7.      A.J. Beresford Hope

8.      Revd Edward Coleridge

9.      The Great Court of St Augustine’s College

10.    Spandrel at All Saints’, Margaret Street, London

11.    The pulpit at All Saints’, Margaret Street, London

12.    St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne

13.    Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, New Brunswick

14.    Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral

Introduction

When you hear ‘Gothic Revival’, what probably springs to mind is Strawberry Hill, the Houses of Parliament or St Pancras Station; so why a book about Canterbury’s place in this mainly nineteenth-century phenomenon? The answer lies in St Augustine’s mission of AD 597; a year later the Cathedral and Abbey were begun, and became the joint power houses of an expanding Church. The bold decision of the monks at the Cathedral five centuries later, in 1174, to rebuild their burnt choir in the new French Gothic style, would have revolutionary consequences. This first major example in England was copied across the country by pilgrims returning from the shrine of St Thomas Becket, where the high vaulting, tall pillars and large windows combined to produce a stunning Gothic space. This shrine, placed at the apex of a series of steps, created a separate raised space at the east end of the church. The appeal of such a layout was strong in the 1840s, as the High Church Cambridge Camden Society planned the restoration of parish churches in what they considered the natural English Gothic style. They wanted to reinstate a separate chancel, an area that had been demoted during the Reformation in the interests of preaching and congregational worship.

Through the troubled Reformation centuries, antiquarians from William Somner onwards would secure the survival of Canterbury’s Gothic image. For the Gothic Quire had in turn spurred later architects to produce fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic examples of great beauty in the nave and Bell Harry Tower. In the early years of the Gothic Revival, the Cathedral’s romantic and ‘picturesque’ appearance made it a favourite subject for topographers, lithographers and artists. Academic studies of the evolution of Gothic cathedrals followed the popularisers.

The 1840s would prove to be a seminal decade in Canterbury, as elsewhere. Robert Willis’s groundbreaking Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral was adumbrated at lectures here in 1844. This was to prove an important year. The ideas of Pugin, of the Tractarians, and of the High Church Ecclesiological Society had become the talk of the day. Under their influence, three key individuals came together in that year: A.J. Beresford Hope, Revd Edward Coleridge and William Butterfield. Their project was to rescue England’s first Abbey of St Augustine from its fate as a rundown brewery and pleasure garden. Their campaign from 1844 to 1848 to create an Anglican missionary college on the site would have important consequences.

The architect of the college buildings, William Butterfield, would see his career take off; and his influence on secular and ecclesiastical buildings at home and abroad would affect the later spread of the Gothic style. The early advocates and founders of the college, and its missionaries, would go on to do much to make Gothic – whether in wood, stone or brick – as natural a style in the British colonies as it had become in England itself.

Unlike Victorian industrial cities, whose expansion coincided with the Gothic Revival, Canterbury boasts no Gothic civic buildings, hotels or grand mansions; one isolated Gothic bank stands in the High Street. So the host of modern tourists come to visit the three-part Gothic Cathedral and its Precinct in a setting of narrow lanes lined with mainly late medieval buildings encircled by its ancient walls.

While the divided Abbey site shows medieval ruins and glimpses of the Gothic Revival missionary college, the visitor sees a cathedral under active restoration. The present campaign owes much to the initiative of its Victorian deans and architects, under the inspiration of the Gothic Revival.

The Conflagration

On the evening of 5 September 1174, sparks from a minter’s fire smouldered unseen between the leads and the flat roof of the Cathedral Quire.

The monk Gervase takes up the story:

The flames rose to the slope of the roof and the sheets of lead yielded to the increasing heat and began to melt. The raging wind, finding a freer entrance, increased the fury of the fire; and the flames beginning to show themselves, a cry arose in the church-yard: ‘See! See! The church is on fire.’

Then the people and the monks assemble in haste, they draw water, they brandish their hatchets, they run up the stairs, full of eagerness to save the church, already, alas! beyond their help. But when they reach the roof and perceive the black smoke and scorching flames that pervade it throughout, they abandoned the attempt in despair, and thinking only of their own safety, make haste to descend. … The halfburnt timbers fell into the choir below upon the seats of the monks; the seats, consisting of a great mass of woodwork, caught fire, and the mischief grew worse and worse. And it was marvellous, though sad, to behold how that glorious choir itself fed and assisted the fire that was destroying it. …

In this manner, the house of God, hitherto delightful as a paradise of pleasure, was now made a despicable heap of ashes, reduced to a dreary wilderness, and laid open to all the injuries of the weather. The people were astonished that the Almighty should suffer such things, and maddened with excess of grief and perplexity, they tore their hair and beat the walls and pavement of the church with their heads and hands, blaspheming the Lord and and His saints, the patrons of the church. …

Translated from the Latin by Professor Robert Willis (1844)

1

Creating the Gothic Image

On the morning of 6 September 1174, the bewildered monks of Christchurch Priory stood amid the smouldering ruins of their beloved Romanesque Quire, finished only forty-four years before. They were in no state to come to a considered – far less to a united – decision about what should replace it.

This cloistered community had survived four tumultuous years since the notorious murder of their Archbishop, Thomas Becket, in December 1170. After his hurried burial – in the face of his enemy de Broc’s threat to throw