A Displaced Monument
ByJAMES POPE-HENNESSY.
IT is a rather disturbing experience to set off to visit a monument one has often seen in the past, and to find that it simply is not there. This happened to me one day last week. This was not a case of thoughtless demolition or of war-time bombing. The monument, which had left no trace behind it in the chapel where it used to stand, was one of the finest as well as one of the largest of English fifteenth- century table-tombs, and it showed John Holand, Duke of Exeter, who fought in the French wars of Henry VI, lying in alabaster effigy beside his two wives under a lofty canopy of great heraldic elaboration and great beauty. For the last century and a quarter this splendid tomb—on a par with anything in Westminster Abbey or St. Helens Bishopsgate- had been stranded, somewhat unsuitably, on the eastern side of Regents Park, in Ambrose Poynter's Gothic Revival chapel at St. Katharine's Precinct, a place so secluded that several of the inhabitants of the neighbouring Nash terraces never knew that the monument existed at all.
It was a Sunday afternoon. There was a blue mist over the bare flower-beds in the Park, and people were playing hockey in the distance. As I neared the elegant, yellow-brick Precinct —consisting of a chapel, surrounded by houses for the Master and the bedesmen behind railings, the general effect being that of a fanciful set of almshouses—I realised that I had not been into it since before the war. I began to picture the musty interior, with the choir stalls and wood-carvings taken, like the Exeter tomb, from the chapel of the. Hospital of Saint Katharine7by-the-TOwer When this charitable institution had been pulled down in the reign of George IV to"make way for the new Saint Katharine's Dock. When I reached the gate of Saint Katharine's Precinct I was confronted by a brand-new notice in some Scandinavian 'language which proved to be Danish, proclaiming that this was now the Danish church in London. When I finally gained access to the chapel itself' I was very much astonished: for here instead of the musty Qothic Revival plaster-work was a light, freshly painted building which might easily have been flown straight from Copenhagen or from Oslo : light-grained woods, a modern stone font, a new pulpit. Gone were the choir stalls, gone was the pulpit given to Saint Katharine's by Sir Julius Caesar; and most inexplicably of all, gone Was the massive, florid tomb of the Duke of Exeter. At first I felt that I had remembered the place wrong, and that the tomb must be shut up in some side- chapel. There was no side-chapel. By bad luck the three Danes who were occupied, in tidying the inside of the church, and the church-hall and club-room decorated in pale Scandi- navian woods, understood little English, and by the time I had tried to make a sketch of the tomb to show them, and had ended up in despair by trying to imitate its effigies in a sort of dumb crambo, they clearly thought I had gone mad. Returning the next day I saw the pastor, who soothingly explained that the foundation of Saint Katharine had at last returned to East London, that the stalls, pulpit and altarpiece had followed it to Ratcliffe, and that the Holand tomb had just been successfully re-erected in St. Peter ad Vincula inside the Tower, where it was now possible to visit it.
Always an absurd anomaly amongst the Nash terraces of Regents Park, Saint Katharine's Hospital had been founded for a specific charitable purpose in 1148, on the north bank of the Thames, just to the east of the Tower. The foundress was Matilda of Boulogne, the obscure queen of King Stephen, and her object had been to set up a small community, with a Master, a few priests and a certain number of bedesmen and bedeswomen to pray for the souls of her two children and to exercise charity amongst the poor and sick. The widow of Henry III dissolved this foundation and set up a new and more ambitious one; since her day Saint Katharine's has been the traditional concern of the Queen Consort, who remained its patroness. Under Elizabeth 1 the Master of St. Katharine's ceased to be a cleric, and thereafter its religious aspect weakened, although it was still charitably active and had substantial revenues. It also continued to provide useful sinecures for the old age of chaplains and other dependants of the queens consort. In 1824, after much opposition from the hospital authorities, the site on which it stood east of the. Tower was sold to speculators, the church and other buildings demolished, and the most interesting of its sculptural and decorative contents moved to the fine, flimsy new Gothic building in Regents Park, a part of London which had then as now " no necessity for such a mission-house and no opening for its proper working and development." By this time the post of Master of Saint Katharine's had dwindled to being a minor reward for lengthy royal service, and no longer entailed residence in the Precinct: from 1818 until 1839, for instance, it was held by Sir Henry Taylor, an officer who had served throughout the Dutch campaign with the Duke of York and subsequently became private secretary 'to George HI, to Queen Charlotte and ultimately to Queen Adelaide. In 1935 the late Queen Mary had the Holand tomb thoroughly restored to commemorate the jubilee of King George V.
At the end of the last war it was felt that the bombing of the Master's house made reconstruction impracticable. The foundation returned to the East of London to take up again the sort of work for which it had been founded, and the Crown Commissioners resumed possession of the Precinct. They have now rented it to the Danish community in London, a body of Christians who have been without a regular church in London since the middle of the last century—although permitted in the time of Queen Alexandra and, later, of Queen Mary to use the chapel of Marlborough House—and who have. now established themselves there with, in addition, a church hall and a club-room used by some one thousand Danish people in London.' A very large sum has been spent by the community on doing up the building, and while it can no longer be said that it bears much relation to the beautiful, if gloomy, conception of Poynter—an architect who later did his best to ruin several country-houses, including Crewe Hall —it seems satisfactory to see the Precinct once again full of life and purpose. The church of Saint Peter ad Vincula, whither in 1950 the dismembered Holand monument was removed as though on a magic carpet, looked deceptively serene in the mild sun- light, and even the ravens which flap and croak about the site of the scaffold on Tower Green seemed less sinister than they often seem. Rebuilt by Edward I in 1305, St. Peter's is a light, airy church, hitherto containing no monument of first-class importance, although a cluster of illustrious victims of the scaffold lie buried behind its altar-rails. The Holand monument is thus a highly important embellishment and addition to the church, and it has been splendidly reconstructed in accordance with early engravings of its appearance and relative position in the old chapel of Saint Katharine's Hospital, not many hundred yards from the eastern end of the Tower. One often feels that far too little is being done about London's church monuments: but the removal of this magnificent tomb and canopy from its irrelevant lodging on the edge of Regents Park, and its restoration to the part of London to which it by right belongs, is an achievement as successful as it is wise.
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