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Book review: The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a royal chapel became the House of Commons by John Cooper

03 January 2025

William Whyte enjoys new research on the Palace of Westminster

DRAWN up a mere month before his death, Henry VIII’s will was an important constitutional document, establishing the line of succession that would follow him and making provision for life until his son, Edward VI, came of age. It was also a personally revealing text, demonstrating just how protean the old king’s faith remained.

Not least of the will’s ambiguities was the fact that it contained provision for the canons of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, to pray for Henry’s soul. The cost of this intercession would be borne, the will made clear, by the Court of Augmentations, the body that had absorbed the resources of dissolved monasteries across the land. In other words, the paradigmatically reforming king was using Protestant money to pay for Catholic worship.

As Dr John Cooper shows in this consistently engaging little book, the story of St Stephen’s is filled with similar ambiguities. Founded by Edward I, refounded by Edward III, it would be closed by Edward VI less than a year after his father died. The altar was removed, the choir stalls were stripped out, and the gorgeous vestments and glittering ornaments were all taken to be sold. The prayers that Henry VIII had paid for were stilled, and the chapel, once an important part of the religious life of Westminster, was surprisingly, but permanently, converted into the House of Commons.

For the past few years, Cooper has led a team of scholars exploring the history of St Stephen’s. The outcome has been a stream of publications and a fascinating website, which recreates the chapel in full colour through the centuries. This book unfortunately does not include any of those fabulous illustrations. The pictures here are almost unintelligibly small and dingy.

But the text fizzes with insight and tells a fascinating story. It recreates a succession of lost worlds: the medieval chapel; the creation of the parliamentary chamber; the Commons as it was rebuilt by the architects Christopher Wren and James Wyatt. There is even space for a discussion of the building’s eventual destruction in the fire that ravaged the Palace of Westminster in 1834.

Not simply a work of architectural history, The Lost Chapel of Westminster includes discussions of how political life was lived in the sectarian 17th century and the drunken Hanoverian period. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger was once so far gone that he said that he could no longer see the Speaker; his companion observed, in turn, that he could see two. Attentive to the most recent work on the subject, Cooper also gives a good account of how women managed to engage with this all-male environment. Sitting above the chamber, beneath the medieval roof, looking down through the ventilator installed in the ceiling, elite women of the early 19th century had a better view than many MPs.

St Stephen’s, Cooper argues, helped to shape parliamentary practice and became a symbol of English liberty. It is far from what Henry VIII would have wanted, of course. But it is all the more intriguing for that.
 

The Revd Dr William Whyte is a Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.

The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a royal chapel became the House of Commons
John Cooper
Bloomsbury £25
(978-1-80110-451-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50

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