Grosvenor Chapel

By Lauren Gilbert


Current Exterior of Grosvenor Chapel

St. George’s, Hanover Square was (and still is) the most venerable church in Mayfair, the most fashionable district of London by the end of the 18th century. This district was home to the bluest of blood. Consequently, St. George’s, Hanover Square was the chief site of baptisms, burials and, most importantly, weddings for the highest society in London during the Georgian era and beyond. (Over 1000 marriages were conducted there in 1816 alone.) Grosvenor Chapel, located nearby at 24 South Audley Street, is not as well known.



Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet


Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, was the head of a family long established in Cheshire, whose wealth came primarily from Welsh mines. He significantly increased that wealth when he married Mary Davies, the heiress to the Ebury estates in 1677. The property he acquired through this marriage covered a large area of what is now Mayfair, Pimlico and Belgravia. Sir Thomas started building in the 1660s but died July 2, 1700. His son Richard inherited his title, becoming Sir Richard Grosvenor, 4th Baronet. He pursued the development of the Mayfair area, including Grosvenor Square. A church or chapel at the Audley Street location had been considered as early as 1723. He signed a 99-year lease on the property with four builder-proprietors (also referred to as “under-takers”), one of whom was Richard Timbrell, a well-known builder, and the first stone was laid April 7, 1730 by Sir Richard Grosvenor himself. He had previously sold 1 ½ acre of land on Mount St. (neighbouring property) to St. George’s, Hanover Square, for burial purposes, and the original plan required that the vaults under the chapel not be used for burial purposes. The design of the chapel was similar to St. Peter’s, Vere St., which was not surprising considering Richard Timbrell was involved with the construction of both.

The chapel was finished in about a year, two ministers were appointed, and the rector of the parish was petitioned to open the chapel in April of 1731. Originally called the Audley Chapel, the name evolved to the Grosvenor Chapel. The chapel was constructed as a commercial enterprise for the landlords and builder-proprietors based on pew rentals and additional income generated by people moving to the area due to further development. (For example, in 1873, pew rentals at Grosvenor Chapel generated over 1000 pounds for the year.) At some point, in exchange for 500 pounds, Sir Richard gave the rector and churchwardens immediate freehold of the vaults and the land between the chapel and burial grounds, and gave up the rent for the site. In 1732, at Sir Richard’s expense, the original organ was built by Abraham Jordan and installed. Sir Richard died July 12, 1732.

A font was installed in 1790. Residents in the neighbourhood attended services, and the chapel was frequently used as a burial chapel. When the lease expired in 1829, the chapel was brought under the parochial system, and the freehold of the chapel itself reverted to the parish. By this time, the chapel was in poor condition, so extensive repairs and some changes were initiated. The Act of 1831 caused Grosvenor Chapel to be consecrated as a chapel of ease to St George’s, Hanover Square. This allowed the rector to appoint the priest in charge (also called the perpetual curate) to serve the congregation. Evan Nepean was the first minister so appointed, and he served at Grosvenor Chapel until his death in 1873. St. George’s benefited by having additional space for the congregation, as the seating in St. George’s was limited to approximately 1200 souls, in a district which housed roughly 36,000 people by 1850. Grosvenor Chapel added almost 1000 seats to St. George’s communicants.



Interior-note font to the left

In 1841, the font was replaced. Additional building and repairs were started in 1873 by R. H. Burden. In 1877, the pulpit was made smaller and moved from the center to the side, box pews were cut down to benches, and choir stalls were installed. Rebuilding the entire chapel was proposed but the Duke of Westminster refused to entertain the project. (Over time, the Grosvenor family were further ennobled; in 1874, the head of the family was made Duke of Westminster, the title being created by Queen Victoria. The Grosvenor family still owned land and buildings in Mayfair, and their connection to the chapel was maintained.) The churchyard at the rear of the chapel (land originally sold to be St. George’s burial ground) became a public garden in 1899, now known at the Mount Street Gardens. Significant renovations to the interior were proposed, and some carried out between 1890-1920, and the organ was reconstructed and enlarged by J. W. Walker and sons and moved in 1930. Exterior work was done in 1951-52, 1966 and 1969. A new organ was installed in the original Georgian organ case in 1990.


View of organ

The pew rent books were lost, so few of the regular congregants during the Georgian era are known. However, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was known to have attended services at Grosvenor Chapel regularly. His parents, the 1st Earl and Countess of Mornington, were buried there (the earl in 1781 and the countess in 1831). The walls have numerous memorial tablets. Burials in the chapel include Lady Mary Wortley Montague in 1762, Lord Chesterfield in 1773, and John Wilkes (the radical MP) in 1797. Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg (mistress of George I) was also buried here in 1743. The vaults were sealed in the 19th century, so are no longer accessible for burials.


Wall monument

The chapel continues to offer services as chapel at ease to St. George’s, Hanover Square, serving nearby residents and members of Parliament. American troops stationed in Britain during World War II, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, attended there, and the chapel continues to be popular with American tourists and visitors from other countries as well as other parts of London.


Sources include:

Callendar, Ann, ed. GODLY MAYFAIR. (London: Grosvenor Chapel, 1980).

British History Online. “South Audley Street-East Side.” HERE

GettyImages.com. ENTERTAINMENT-Elizabeth Taylor Baby Christening-Grosvenor Chapel, London. HERE

The Grosvenor Chapel website. HERE

History of Parliament Online. “Sir Richard Grosvenor, 4th Baronet (1689-1732), of Eaton Hall, Cheshire” by Eveline Cruikshanks. HERE ; “Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet (1655-1700), of Eaton Hall, Cheshire” by Gillian Hampson and Basil Duke Henning. HERE

ProjectGutenberg.org. Mitten, Geraldine Edith. MAYFAIR, BELGRAVIA AND BAYSWATER

The Fascination of London. Sir Walter Besant, ed. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1903). HERE

RegencyHistory.net. “St George’s Hanover Square-A Regency History Guide” by Rachel Knowles. Posted September 24, 2015. HERE

All images from Wikimedia Commons.

Exterior-by John Salmon, Creative Commons license, here

Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, here

Interior showing font-by John Salmon, Creative Commons license, here

Interior showing organ-by John Salmon, Creative Commons license, here

Interior of wall monument-by John Salmon, Creative Commons license, here

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Lauren Gilbert holds a degree in English, is a long-time member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and lives in Florida with her husband.  Her first published book is HEYERWOOD: A Novel.
Her second novel, A RATIONAL ATTACHMENT, is in progress.  Please visit her website here for more information.

Frankenstein & the Earl of Surrey

By Nancy Bilyeau

This is a story of magic and monsters, of poets and parents, and writers with enormous dreams and very little money.

Picture this: Young Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, known as the "poet earl" for his brilliant literary innovations in the mid-16th century, wanders through Europe in great style, tended to by servants and accompanied by learned and amusing friends. Nonetheless, Surrey pines for his ravishing mistress, Geraldine, left behind in England.

Henry Howard, earl of Surrey

In a sonnet, Surrey had written :

"Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight:
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine:
And Windsor, alas, doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind, her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can obtain her love."

One day, in Italy, the lovesick Surrey turned for a cure to one of his companions, German-born Cornelius Agrippa, who, besides being a scholar, physician and soldier, was an astrologer and student of the occult. Agrippa "was one of the most celebrated men of his time...but he was a man of the most violent passions and of great instability of temper."

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Agrippa possessed the ability to summon up apparitions for his friends, often displaying them in a crystal glass. One day, to please the Renaissance humanist Erasmus, he'd summoned an image of Tully, giving an oration in ancient Rome. For Sir Thomas More, Agrippa delivered "the whole destruction of Troy in a dream."

Surrey longed to see the faraway Geraldine, and Agrippa complied. In the "magical glass," Surrey saw the "beautiful dame, sick, weeping upon her bed, and inconsolable for the absence of her admirer." The Howard heir was distraught.

This is a story that appeared in a chapter devoted to Agrippa in William Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers, published in 1834. And ever since, puzzled historians and biographers and literary critics have tried to figure out if there is one true thing in it.

A necromancer is a wizard, a seer, someone who can conjure the spirits of the dead for purposes of magically revealing the future or influencing the course of events. Godwin's book begins with divination from the ancient times, moves through the Old Testament seers, Roman oracles and the "Arabian Nights," picks up speed in medieval times with Bacon and Magnus before concentrating on the Renaissance necromancers: Agrippa, Paracelsus, Faustus, John Dee, Nostradamus. Then it's time for the Lancashire witches and King James I's demonology before finishing up with the witches of New England. Whew.

The fact that Godwin, the revered writer of the book Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams, wrote a tome about centuries of necromancers is bizarre. But that's not the only strange and remarkable aspect. Godwin was the devoted father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. And in that famous horror novel, it is the 16th century writings of Agrippa that obsess a young student named Victor Frankenstein, leading him to create a living man from the parts of the dead.

 

             This first edition of Shelley's 'Frankenstein' sold for $175,000 in auction in 2015.

Before we continue, it must be acknowledged: The story of Agrippa revealing Geraldine to Surrey is fishy. Not that they weren't real people. Surrey, the first cousin of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, is famous in his own right: He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt were the first English poets to write in the sonnet form.

As for Agrippa, born in Cologne, he mastered six languages and studied medicine and law as well as the work of the Humanists. Alchemy was his passion, and he believed "magic comprises the most profound contemplation of the most secret things, their nature, power, quality, substance and virtues." He published De Occulta Philosophia, three volumes on magic. The lives of Agrippa and Surrey overlapped by 19 years, but the story of their meeting and traveling together in Italy is almost certainly not true. Moreover, Godwin may have known that ... but found it impossible to resist throwing it in the pot. More on Godwin later!

The facts: The charismatic Surrey was executed for treason in 1546. Henry VIII had grown acutely paranoid about the Howard family's pretensions to the throne. Surrey was the biggest threat because he had royal blood through his mother, Elizabeth Stafford, the oldest daughter of the third Duke of Buckingham, another arrogant charmer who lost his head to Bluff King Hal.

The sonnet "Description and Praise of His Love Geraldine" is one of Surrey's finest. Sir Walter Scott and Michael Drayton would later pay homage to its romantic power. But their being a real, devouring love behind the poem is also just too good to be true. The girl in the poem is thought to be based on a real female: Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth earl of Kildare. But when he wrote it, she was at most 10 years of age.

Elizabeth Fitzgerald, aka Geraldine, after marrying

The aristocratic Fitzgerald family came from Ireland to London in 1533, when Elizabeth was six years old, and she and her brother became playmates to Henry VIII's children. Her father, however, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for corruption; he died there "of grief" in 1534. It is thought that a sympathetic Surrey wrote the sonnet in 1537 for the 10-year-old girl to improve her chances of someday making a good marriage.

So Surrey and Genevieve weren't really in love and Surrey never traveled through Italy. It's settled. Yet, nonetheless, Agrippa conjuring up Geraldine in a magic glass for Surrey is a story that kept showing up in art and letters. Watercolour painter Edward Corbould, favorite of Prince Albert, was the toast of London with his "The Earl of Surrey Beholding the Fayre Geraldine in the Magic Mirror."

Corbould's famous painting

The origin of this story can be traced to a book written after Surrey's death, from the quill of another author of the 16th century, the sort of talented rapscallion that keeps surfacing in our narrative. Thomas Nashe, a parson's son, became a leading Elizabethan playwright, poet and satirical pamphleteer. In his book The Unfortunate Traveller, published in 1594, a man named Jack Wilton rollicks through Europe, surviving many adventures and meeting famous people as if he were a Tudor-era Zelig. Some of the stories in the novel are based on real events, such as the Peasant Revolt in Germany. One of the people Wilton meets is the Earl of Surrey, and while traveling together they encounter Agrippa and his magic crystal. Geraldine revealed!

Nashe, a friend of Ben Johnson's, is thought to be one of the contributors to Henry VI, Part 1, published under William Shakespeare's name. On the opposite end of the prestige spectrum, he wrote erotica such as the notorious The Choice of Valentines, about a trip to a brothel. In response to the outraged criticism over his writing the 50 Shades of its day, Nashe penned this: "When the bottom of my purse is turned downward and my conduit of ink will no flower flow for want of reparations, I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow."

Nashe was dead by 1601. A friend's epitaph: 

 "Let all his faults sleepe with his mournful chest/And there forever with his ashes rest/His style was wittie, though it had some gall/Some things he might have mended, so may all/Yet this I say, that for a mother witt/Few men have ever seene the like of it."

Surrey's stature grew in the pantheon of Renaissance literature over the next two hundred years ... and so did doubts about the Agrippa anecdote described by Nashe.  One early Surrey biographer pointed out that, aside from Geraldine being nine years old when the sonnet was being composed, "it is unlikely Howard was ever in Italy because he never made any mention of it." In the 16th century--no surprise--traveling around Europe was difficult even if you had money. The promise of the Grand Tour dangled far in the future.

And so we come to the Godwin family.

William Godwin's early life was a bit like Nashe's.  His austere Calvinist father was a Nonconformist minister in Norwich; Godwin was the seventh of thirteen children. He made his way to London in his twenties and, living hand to mouth,  joined a circle of young philosophers, poets and revolutionaries such as William Blake and Thomas Paine. In 1793 he published Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, an enormously influential book that decried government and urged people to use their own reason to plan their actions. Godwin is today considered the founder of political anarchism.

Godwin fell in love with a fellow author and spirited revolutionary, Mary Wollstonecraft, a passionate believer in the rights of women who had an illegitimate child and suicide attempts in her own past. She died days after giving birth to their only child, the future Mary Shelley.

As the death toll of the French Revolution became more known, those who called for anarchy became less popular. Godwin, remarried, saw sales of his books begin to decline. He started a publishing business but it failed, nearly sending Godwin, a hopeless businessman, to debtors' prison. Friends rescued him with loans.

Mary Godwin Shelley

Through it all, he devoted himself to the education of his daughter. Mary not only studied literature and languages but was surrounded by her father's scientist friends, chemists and surgeons who were fascinated by the notion of "animal electricity," also known as "galvanism," the study of muscle contractions causing an electrical current.

Godwin was furious and heartbroken when Mary, 17, ran away with the married poet Percy Shelley. London gossip snickered that Godwin had courted Shelley, heir to a fortune, because he was desperate for a patron for his strained writing life, and "sold" his child to the dissolute young man. It was definitely untrue.

It's well known that when Mary, Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori gathered at the Villa Diodati  in 1816, competing to see who could pen  the best ghost story, the talk was of the occult, of alchemists and necromancers. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley gave direct credit to Agrippa for setting things in motion. She wrote of her main character, a young student, coming across a book:

"Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate. I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years old, we all went on a party of pleasure to the Baths near Thoneo. The inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to this inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind..."

The student's fate was set. One day Victor Frankenstein would use "natural philosophy" to create life.

In mid-April 1817, Mary Shelley finished her fair copy of the novel. Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus was published in 1818, to mixed reviews. After her husband drowned in 1822, Mary returned to England. She became close again with her father, whose book sales foundered further as Frankenstein gained strength. Mary thrived as a writer and editor, and eventually helped to support her father financially. She wrote a friend in 1831 she was "full of disquietude for my father, who lives by his pen."

William Godwin, in later life

Godwin, although he'd written more than a dozen books, did not have a publisher when he created Lives of the Necromancers. It took him two years to find one for it, even though Mary was exerting personal pressure on editors and publishers she knew. Everyone rejected it. Finally, an obscure London publisher, Andrew Mason, took the book in 1834. (In his chapter on Agrippa, Godwin conceded that the "sole authority" for the Surrey section was Nashe. The episode is followed by tales of black-cat familiars and dangerous potions.)

The book found fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe,in particular, enjoyed its treatment of magic and superstition.

Poe, who hated just about everything, praised Lives of the Necromancers in Southern Literary Messenger, saying, "No English writer with whom we have any acquaintance, with the single exception of Coleridge, has a fuller appreciation of the value of words." Poe continued:

"Unlike the work of Brewster, the Necromancy of Mr. Godwin is not a Treatise on Natural Magic. It does not pretend to show the manner in which delusion acts upon mankind — at all events, this is not the object of the book. The design, if we understand it, is to display in their widest extent, the great range and wild extravagancy of the imagination of man. It is almost superfluous to say that in this he has fully succeeded. His compilation is an invaluable work, evincing much labor and research, and full of absorbing interest."

Edgar Allan Poe

(More recently, biographers have studied the book as proof of the shared interests of Mary Shelley and William Godwin. Some critics are rather baffled, trying to decide whether Godwin was mocking the gullible or celebrating mystical beliefs.)

Lives of the Necromancers was the last book written by William Godwin. In 1833, in recognition of his body of work, the Whig government granted him a pension of 200 pounds a year and a modest home in New Palace Yard. In April 1834, at the age of 80, he caught a cough and died, his daughter by his side. At his request, Godwin was buried next to his long-dead first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.

The books of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have never gone out of print.

And neither have the books of magic written by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.

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Nancy Bilyeau is the author of a trilogy of mysteries set in the 16th century: The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry. for sale in North America, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. The Crown was an Oprah pick: "The real draw of this suspenseful novel is its juicy blend of murder, lust, conspiracy and betrayal."  The Chalice won the RT Reviewers Award for Best Historical Mystery. The Tapestry was released in paperback in March 2016. For more information, go here.

Let There Be Light...Lighting London's Streets

by Regina Jeffers

In describing London at the end of the 1600s, Francis Maximilian Mission, author of Nouveau voyage d'Italie: avec un mémoire contenant des avis utiles à ceux qui voudront faire le mesme voyage (New travel from Italy: with a report containing of the opinions useful to those which will want to make the mesme travel), said:

“They set up (at every tenth house) in the streets of London (Mr Edward Hemming was the inventor of them about fifteen or sixteen years ago), lamps, which, by means of a very thick convex glass, throw out great rays of light which illuminate the path…They burn from in the evening until midnight, and from every third day after the full moon to the sixth day after the new moon.”

Mission had erred in his estimation of the use of lighting in the early 18^th Century, but the City, obviously, impressed the French writer and traveler. As early as the 17^th Century, the law enforced street lighting from Michaelmas (September 29) to Lady Day (New Year’s Day until 1752, but with the adjustment of the calendar from Julian to Gregorian, April 6) each evening until midnight.

In 1417, Sir Henry Barton, Mayor of London, ordained “lanterns with lights to be hanged out on the winter evenings between Hallowtide and Candlemasse.” Paris led the way with lighting the streets. A 1524 order said inhabitants were to keep lights burning in windows, which faced the street. With the regulations of 1668 to improve London’s streets, the residents were “encouraged” to hang out their lanterns each evening.

In 1690, an order required residents to hang their own lights before their homes. By an Act of the Common Council in 1716, all housekeepers, whose houses faced any street, lane, or passage, were required to hang out, every dark night, one or more lights, to burn from six to eleven o’clock, under the penalty of one shilling as a fine for failing to do so.

The aforementioned Edward Hemming attempted to set up lights in 1685 Cornwall as an example of his plan to light London with whale-oil lamps. Needless to say, the Companies opposed Hemming’s plan. Those who made tallow chandlers, tinsmiths, and horners saw Hemming’s proposal as a threat to their livelihood.

The historian, James Peller Malcolm, recorded that “Globular lights were introduced by Michael Cole, who obtained a patent in July 1708.”  Malcolm went on to describe “a new kind of light, composed of one entire glass of globular shape, with a lamp, which will give a cleaner and more certain light from all parts thereof.” Supposedly, Cole first exhibited the light outside a St James coffee house in 1709.

Cesar de Saussure, who has left an amusing and detailed description of his journey from Yverdon, Switzerland, through the German States and then across the North Sea from Rotterdam to London, describes the London streets of 1725 as, “Most of the streets are wonderfully well lighted, for in front of each house hangs a lantern or a large globe of glass, inside of which is placed a lamp which burns all night. Large houses have two of these lamps suspended outside their door by iron supports, and some houses even four.”

The most commonly used fuels until the late 18^th Century were olive oil, fish oil, beeswax, whale oil, sesame oil, nut oil, etc. From parish to city parish, a system was put into place to raise a rate from “eligible” households for lighting the streets. Later, a similar system was used for financing paving the streets and establishing a watch. A series of Acts of Parliament established the necessity for proper lighting for London’s streets. A 1736 Act gave the City of London the power to charge the inhabitants for lighting the streets throughout the year.

From Dan Cruickshank and Neil Burton’s Life in the Georgian City, we learn,

“The aldermen and common council began by determining how many houses there were in the City, valued them, decided how many lamps were needed and what they would cost to erect and maintain, and then determined what proportions of the total each rateable inhabitant would have to pay. There were, it was calculated, 1,287 houses with rent under 10 pounds per annum 4,741 with rent between 10 and 20 pounds per annum; 3,045 with rent between 20 and 30 per annum; 1,849 with rent between 30 and 40 per annum; and 3,092 with rent of 40 pounds and upwards per annum. 'In all, 14,014 houses, then inhabited and chargeable.' 

"The reference to rent should not be confused with actual rent paid.' Rates were calculated on the value of a house that was expressed in terms of the rent it was worth. This is not to say that the occupier was actually paying that rent: he could have been a freeholder, a most rare thing in the 18th Century city, paying no rent; a lessee paying merely a nominal ground rent to the landlord; or a sublessee on a short lease paying a rack rent. The committee then established that the number of lamps required was 4,200, exclusive of those wanted in 'public buildings and void places.' 

"This was based on the decision that lights should be 'fixed at 25-yd distance on each side of the way in the high streets, and 35 in lesser streets, lanes, etc.' The money was calculated and raised in the following manner: The several wards of the City agreed for lighting them at an average of 41s. per annum per lamp, at which rate the expense of 4,200 lamps amounted to 8,610 pounds. The fixing of those on posts and irons, averaged at 14s. 6d. each [equalled] 3,045 pounds. 'Houses under 10 pounds [rent] paid 3s. 6d. per annum; under 20 pounds paid 7s. 6d.; under 30 pounds paid 8s.; under 40 pounds paid 9s. 6d.; upwards of 40 pounds paid 12s.'"

In 1726, Stephen Hales procured a flammable fluid from the distillation of coal. From "158 grains [10.2 g] of Newcastle coal, Hales stated he obtained 108 cubic inches [2.9 L] of air, which weighed 51 grains [3.3 g], being one third of the whole." However, Hale's results passed without notice for several more years.  

  

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Regina Jeffers loves all things Austen and is the author of several novels, including Darcy’s Temptation, Captain Wentworth’s Persuasion, The Disappearance of Georgiana Darcy and Second Chances: The Courtship Wars .

Her website is: www.rjeffers.com