God’s Architect by Rosemary Hill

Author:Rosemary Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2007-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Part Five

27

The New House and the New Palace

Autumn and Winter 1844

… the age of ruins is past…

– Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, 1844

At Nottingham on 27 August Bishop Gillis, who was to preach at vespers, spent an unhappy morning ‘at the basin’. He was sick with nerves at the thought of such a distinguished congregation. As usual the day before he had been in ‘black despair, not a syllable thought of’, and as usual, he rose to the occasion. ‘The whole thing was so fine I was carried off my legs and went off like the aerial steam engine at fifty miles an hour.’1 The consecration of St Barnabas was magnificent. Sixteen bishops and more than 100 priests, watched by large and largely friendly crowds, processed in Pugin’s vestments. The Mass was celebrated with only the ‘plaintive and monotonous chaunting’ of plainsong, which recalled the ‘ancient glories of the Papal worship’ to the minds of the press correspondents.2

It was a far cry from the little procession in Derby in 1838 when George Myers had carried the trowel to lay the foundation stone of Pugin’s first important church. As Lord Shrewsbury said at the inevitably ‘splendid’ cold collation afterwards, ‘When we look back on the condition of Catholicity in this country ten… years ago… and now see that we occupy the reverse of our once degraded position, we never ought for a moment to forget to thank God.’ They ought also, he continued, to thank ‘him whose noble views of church architecture have of late been developed, and whose indefatigability is, in my opinion, the very life and soul of the restorative movement now going on’.3 Wiseman followed suit. ‘The architectural taste of Mr Pugin has enkindled a light the rays of which will cover the present era with a halo of brightness… [he] has done more than execute great works – he has founded a school; he has formed public taste.’4

Their tributes had a distant air, and indeed Pugin’s career was nearer its effective end than anyone can then have imagined. The immediate reason, however, for the elegiac tone was that the architect was not present to enjoy his triumph. Pugin was on his way from London to Birmingham to prepare for Louisa’s funeral. When the ceremonies at Nottingham were over, Gillis and Shrewsbury, along with George Myers, went to join him there. Louisa was buried in the crypt of her husband’s first cathedral, St Chad’s. Her funeral was gorgeous and solemn; a dark reprise of the festival of flowers Pugin had created for her reception into the Catholic Church. The coffin was draped in a black velvet pall and placed in the chancel. Above it soared a great canopy of flame, a chapelle ardente, which Pugin had designed and Myers had made over the previous few days. This ‘chapel of fire’ was Pugin’s version of a late medieval custom. Bearing row upon row of candles, it rose fourteen feet, a lambent catafalque, blazing amid the gloom of the cathedral. After the requiem the coffin was carried, to the sound of the ‘In Paradisum’, into the crypt.

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