On Foreign Soil at Home: London Embassy Chapels

by Steven Dunn, appearing in Volume 49

In the heart of London, just a half-minute walk from Picadilly Circus, is an unassuming brick building, flush with the street. It has three blind arches and a pediment roof, is built of muddy-looking bricks, and its only decoration is a pair of gilt stucco angels, stuck on like stickers. One wouldn’t expect anything important to be behind its black door and might be forgiven for assuming that it was a parish hall, working man’s club, or even a Baptist chapel. But this building holds many secrets. People have been walking up the steps and through that door on Sundays for well over two centuries, crossing a legal threshold when they did, because the space behind it was subject to a completely different set of laws from the rest of England. Once inside, one finds a barrel-vaulted ceiling painted sky blue, Tuscan columns hold up a wraparound balcony, and in one corner, a small shrine to Mary is bedazzled with silver hearts—offerings of thanksgiving from grateful pilgrims. This church is among the oldest Catholic parishes in London, and one of only three that operated as parishes when such things in England were illegal.

This is because it used to be the Bavarian embassy. Due to the concept of extraterritoriality, a national embassy is, legally speaking, foreign soil, which meant that throughout the eighteenth century, when public Catholicism was effectively illegal in England, this building followed the laws of Catholic Bavaria. It is the only one of these former embassy chapels that still occupies the same building, but you won’t find much evidence of the Bavarian connection in its architecture or liturgy. The closest you’ll get is an old flag kept in a side room and a commemorative Mass once every year in spring. Indeed, this church is one of the most thoroughly English in the city, being the head church of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. That makes quite a lot of sense, though, since these chapels formed a shockingly democratic, domestic church community in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and have a uniquely English heritage as the only operating parishes in London when Catholicism was legalized in 1829. Although the other two churches have since been rebuilt, all three of these post-embassy parishes possess a defining trait which sets them apart from their neighbours: they are oddly anglo. Let me explain.

Being Catholic in Eighteenth-Century England

Bishop Richard Challoner, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District from 1758 to 1781, once described eighteenth century London as “the Babylon of modern times.” While there are many good reasons to believe this, London didn’t hold Richard Challoner in very high esteem either. England has always had a rather difficult relationship with Catholicism. For many, to be English was (and still is) to declare one’s allegiance to the crown and not to the pope. But things became more difficult in the eighteenth century in the wake of the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution,’ when the Catholic James II was kicked out in favor of a deeply Protestant dutchman, William of Orange. Loyalists to the old king would cause disruption throughout the century up in Scotland as ‘Jacobites,’ and to be a Catholic was seen by many as a declaration of treason in favor of Jacobite forces up north. Which is why anti-Catholic laws were tightened throughout the century. By 1760, Catholics could not buy land, they could not vote or serve in government, they could not build churches, and (most critically of all) they could not inherit anything from their families. If a person converted, he or she  forfeited everything to the nearest Protestant relative. And if there was none, the state took all assets as its own upon the death of a parent.

That didn’t mean there weren’t ways around this. It’s been well noted that in practice, British policy could be shockingly laissez-faire, as long as Catholicism wasn’t overtly public. Some families were important enough that they were able to keep their Catholic faith relatively hassle-free, as did, for example, the Dukes of Arundel, the most senior nobles in England outside the Royal Family. Throughout the countryside, smaller noble and gentry families tried to keep the faith with smaller, semi-secret private chapels. For non-noble rural recusant Catholics, these families were a godsend, their widely dispersed chapels functioning as hubs for the rest of Catholic England. Although partially illegal, the status quo was to keep things quiet. To bypass laws, families found loopholes, such as using trustees to buy land and paying fines for increasingly complicated legal acrobatics. But the prevalence of rural Catholic gentry declined over the century due to persecution, especially after a 1715 law permitted the government to assess a £100,000 fine on any landowning Catholic over eighteen years old. These were regularly levied to replenish government coffers. By the 1760s, the situation was dire.

Apart from private chapels, Mass would be said privately in the attics of pubs. This was more common in London and in other large cities, where a country house couldn’t be relied on. But these ‘pub Masses’ were regularly the subject of raids and moved around quite frequently, being supressed from time to time all at once. In essence, they were a private use of convenient space, rather than functioning sacred spaces. When they were uprooted, they were often uprooted en masse, such as in 1767. Urban recusants were rarer per capita, except where something like an embassy chapel could act as a regular valve to relieve pressure.

Within London, recusants could (and did) go to the embassies for Mass, since embassies were foreign soil. The ambassadors were happy to interact with these people, building huge embassy chapels and happily congratulating themselves for it in their private correspondence. Although London’s Catholics could attend pub Mass or try to squeeze into a private chapel in a townhouse, for most, the embassies were their parishes, whether they were ancient recusants in the city or Irish servants living in Moorfields. Some embassies even chose inconvenient sites far to the east of the diplomatically relevant Court of St James, just to put a church in an unchurched area. The Sardinians did this, building their chapel on the site of a former Franciscan priory which had been swept away after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. As the furthest east, this chapel was very popular, to the point that Bishop Challoner considered it the ‘Cathedral’ of London.

These chapels were also a hotbed for those enquiring about the faith, since conversion was even more difficult than practice. Many anti-Catholic laws could be side-stepped with a few clever tricks and a lot of money. But a 1706 law made it capital treason to convert someone. Effective catechesis was heavily restricted in England, to the point that people desiring to be received into the Catholic faith would be sent as far as France to get instruction in the faith, especially if they were women or children, since they could be placed in a convent in Rouen. For others, London was the center for Catholic conversion in the UK, and often, more specifically, the embassy chapels, where those curious about the faith could be catechised as legally as if they were in a Catholic nation.

James Boswell, for example, who had become interested in Catholicism after having an affair with a married Catholic Scot (make of that what you will), fled from Glasgow to London on a horse in the dead of the night one autumn, arriving in under two days. He had likely been directed to go there by the woman’s hidden Jesuit priest. Once there, he took a course of action that was fairly common in the 1760s. He met with a specific Catholic bookseller on Drury Lane (home of the Muffin Man), who got him lodging among the poorer recusants of London (in this case, a Catholic wigmaker). After that, he was directed to the Bavarian embassy to undergo catechesis, which he did for a while, until his father found out and asked a friend to pull him out of such nonsense, warning him just what becoming Catholic entailed.

Boswell never took the final step towards Catholicism, and for the rest of his life felt a deep sense of nostalgia for what he once found at the Bavarian chapel. But his experience was a common one, with the unnamed Drury Lane bookseller operating as a gatekeeper throughout the 1760s, and his story shows how crucial the embassy chapels were to anyone interested in converting, especially men and those without the means to go to France. The embassy chapels were not just for converts, however, and that was not their main function. They were pseudo-parishes for London’s many Catholics. That same chapel in which Boswell sought catechesis hosted seven low Masses and one high Mass every Sunday. The Sardinian Ambassador’s claim that ‘generations of London Catholic families’ worshiped in the space provided by his country seems very well supported by the reputation of these churches in the eighteenth century and their baptism, marriage, and confirmation records. They were immune to the whims of the government, escaping the persecution of private house Masses in 1767, and even staying open in times of war. In 1745, with the Jacobites raging up north, the Bavarian chapel refused to close its doors and continued celebrating Mass as normal.

The Bavarian chapel as Boswell knew it is not the one that stands today, the original having been pulled down brick by brick by an angry mob in 1780 during the Gordon Riots, fiery anti-Catholic protests stirred up by the repeal of a law in 1778 which barred Catholics from military service, there being a war in America for which soldiers were needed. The chapel one sees today is from the hand of its architect, Joseph Bonomi, but it keeps the idiosyncrasies of the previous chapel and of the other embassy chapels which survived. It has, in a manner very unusual for Catholic churches, balconies, supported on Tuscan columns, wrapping around the aisles.

The Architect Bonomi

Bonomi was a very Italian, very Catholic architect, who began to operate in London independently just after the outbreak of ‘the American war’ (which did not help business). Originally brought to England by the Adam brothers in 1767, he would become one of the most pre-eminent Catholic architects in England by the end of his life, if not one of the most pre-eminent architects in England full stop. He is, for example, the only architect Jane Austin mentions by name. His career suffered dramatically though, due to the knowledge that he was, according to a letter from his son Ignatius to Lord Buchan, “Catholic and alien.” Suffering not only from being Catholic, but from being an Italian too, he was prevented from becoming a Fellow of the Royal Academy when the academicians voted on it in 1790. Several members of London’s art world were outraged; Joshua Reynolds was so angry he resigned his position when he found out. But the cause was almost certainly related to his faith, especially since his first major public commission had been completed only few months earlier—the Bavarian chapel on Warwick Street.

Bonomi was not a cheap architect and choosing him to redesign the Bavarian chapel, and later the Spanish chapel as well, was a statement. The fact that he was asked to touch up the much less-damaged Sardinian chapel after the riots is also quite telling regarding his reputation. Indeed, expense is one reason Austen mentioned Bonomi. Although she was certainly aware of buildings by Adam and Wyatt, she was much more aware of buildings by Bonomi and presumed her readers would be as well.

That the restrained grandeur of Bonomi’s Bavarian chapel is hidden behind a plain façade shows how anti-Catholic riots were still at the front of every Catholic mind when it was built. While the interior follows Bonomi’s tendency to play with pure geometry, possibly having been influenced by Ledoux’s work after a trip to France between 1783 and 1784, the exterior is extremely subtle, evoking the style used by non-conformist Baptist and Presbyterian chapels in London. The apse end of the interior was redone in 1875 by John Francis Bentley, who later designed Westminster Cathedral, but other than that, it remains mostly as Bonomi imagined it.

And it has balconies. Balconies are a common feature in embassy chapels and a common feature in English churches from the time, but they are very rare in Catholic ones. They pre-date Bonomi’s influence—they were present in the earlier Sardinian chapel by Giovan Battista Bora—but he included them in both the Bavarian embassy and St James’ Spanish Place, likely by request. These balconies were a critical part of an embassy church, a fashion far more English than continental, but they were included in London’s chapels for a very different reason. They allowed as many parishioners as possible to pack into London’s few Catholic churches on Sunday. And they later played a critical part in the parish life of chapels such as the one on Warwick Street because, as with most of these chapels, by the early nineteenth century much of the ‘Bavarian’ church’s decoration and upkeep was neither funded nor spearheaded by the Bavarian government but by the congregation itself.

The Congregations

These churches were run like normal parishes and became very English in character. But they would become even more domestic, even more reliant on their congregational culture, after the disastrous French revolutionary wars distracted most of the nations to which these embassies belonged.

Throughout George IV’s regency, the burden of maintenance and upkeep was often upon the congregants themselves, with the approval of London’s Vicar Apostolic. This fact shows that they were, in a manner distinct from private chapels and from Masses in the attic of a pub, domestic parishes, run as if Catholicism was perfectly legal in England.

These churches were very domestic, and at times, shockingly democratic. The Bavarian chapel was effectively maintained and run by a group of English Catholics who called themselves “the Committee for the Maintenance of the Bavarian Chapel” and who occasionally got into conflicts with the ambassador. In 1827, perhaps operating under a previously established status quo, the committee voted to dismiss a certain priest without telling the emissary, Baron de Cetto, who later found out and wrote an infuriated letter to the Vicar Apostolic of London threatening to involve the Archbishop of Munich, despite the fact that the chapel was under the Vicar’s jurisdiction. The baron was livid, and, for extra intimidation, he had the letter written in the third person by a secretary. This clearly worked, because the Vicar Apostolic, Bishop Poynter, wrote his own letter in response, also in the third person, desperately apologizing and promising no disrespect was meant to the baron or the King of Bavaria. Eventually, the issue was resolved and the committee agreed to inform the ambassador before making any changes, but it still shows the church had a shockingly local, ground-up culture, and the committee was angered by the baron’s refusal to accept the church’s pre-existing traditions.

It also illustrates how incredibly public the pseudo-parochial ministry of these chapels was. In letters from members of the ‘Committee,’ the church is alternatively referred to as ‘The Bavarian’ and simply ‘Warwick Street,’ and several letters complain that the church—being in essence funded and maintained by its parishioners—shouldn’t be thought of as the personal domain of the ambassador, as that would be contrary to both its vocation and culture. One congregant, complaining about the baron’s anger at their having dismissed a priest by vote, even sarcastically ends his letter with “so much for public business…” He also complains that this arrangement has been long in agreement and does not subvert ecclesiastic authority, since the right to invest or dismiss priests remained fundamentally with the Vicar Apostolic, and since the congregation took it upon themselves to fund the construction and maintenance of the church after most Bavarian financial support had dried up many years before.

Committees raised funds for the maintenance of these chapels on their own, and although the monarchs of the various embassies in which they were situated would occasionally contribute, they were not the major source of income. In 1798, for example, the Sardinian embassy decided to close its chapel due to the war with Napoleon, but it was reopened at the request of the Vicar Apostolic one year later with the assurance that the congregation would pay for it like a normal church. The Bavarian chapel raised money by leasing the right to sit on the balcony to parishioners—an arrangement that remained even after emancipation. The price in 1847 was set at one shilling for the left, and six pence for the right. Since all the embassy chapels in their earlier iterations had balconies overlooking the altar, it is not unlikely that the others had similar arrangements for upkeep. The Sardinian chapel even had double decker balconies, enabling it to pack huge numbers in. We know this because Augustus Charles Pugin, father of the famed neo-Gothicist A. W. N. Pugin, published lithographs of each, all with balconies. Ironically, the elder Pugin was a staunch Protestant and included rising incense and devout worshipers as a subtle jab at ‘Catholic superstition’ in his plates. It did not have that effect on his son, whose entire career was dedicated to proving that ‘Catholic superstition’ is the only true religion, and that ‘superstitious Gothic’ is its only true style.

In their capacity as essentially public buildings, these chapels also continued being visited by curious onlookers and locals, regardless of their faith. It was at the Bavarian chapel—the same one there today—that Saint John Henry Newman saw his first Mass as a boy, although he said he didn’t remember much apart from a preacher, a pulpit, and a boy swinging a censer.

Conclusion

In 1829, Catholicism was fully legalized in England, and in 1850, the ecclesiastic hierarchy was re-established. But these churches maintained their peculiar character and their peculiar cultures long after it became easier to go to church elsewhere. Many even travelled great distances to attend Mass at an ancestral parish.

And the buildings remain, and with them, something of their character will always remain. Embassy chapels in London represent a distinct built tradition, which itself comes from a distinct culture as the oldest pseudo-parishes in England. During my time in London this past summer, I often went to the Bavarian chapel—now officially called the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory—for the 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sundays. Mass is in the Ordinariate rite, with all its rich music and English heritage. The gift of the Bavarian chapel to the Ordinariate is a recent development, but the English Catholic heritage of this church is very old. Its roof is the same one under which John Henry Newman saw his first Mass on the same ground Boswell fled to when he wanted to convert. It is these former embassy churches that generations of English Catholics—whether new converts or ancient believers—have kept coming back to as their own. These churches may have been rebuilt and their congregations may have shifted with time, but despite having different nations associated with them, they are all uniquely English, and a venerable and holy part of the built history of London.