King's College Chapel

Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned -

Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only - this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence!

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more;

So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof

Sel-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,

Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Lingering - and wandering on as loathe to die;

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof

That they were born for immortality.

     So said William Wordsworth about this most remarkable of buildings, King's College Chapel.  My last visit here was decades ago and after yesterday afternoon's visit, in the sharp spring sunshine, I cannot understand why I deprived myself of this incredible building for so long.  I suspect I just thought it all just too 'touristy', but, at least on a week day afternoon in mid-March, it was almost empty.  It is a place of immense beauty, of luminous transcendence.  There is something of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of the sublime, about it.  Not only that, the chapel has great cultural resonance not only through association e.g. M R James, who was Provost of King's 1904-1918, but inspiring poets, such Wordsworth (above) and Betjeman (below), and artists such as J M W Turner and John Piper; the chapel choir is one of the best in the UK, if not globally.  The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols is synonymous with King's; it is broadcast live across the world on Christmas Eve to an audience of millions. I was, as you may be able tell from this post, profoundly moved by the experience.

     And so to a bit of history.  King's College - The King's College of Our Lady and St Nicholas at Cambridge - was founded by the ill-stared English King Henry VI in 1441.  Inspired by Bishop Wykeham of Winchester the King also founded a school, Eton College.  The work here at Cambridge alone was a colossal undertaking, consuming streets and wharfs and a church, St John Zachary, of the Medieval city.  Work on the chapel, which is bigger than many cathedrals in the British Isles, began in 1446 and was finished (in the reign of King Henry VIII) in c1515, with the furnishing continuing into the 1530s.  Roughly speaking it belongs to two periods of work: firstly under Reginald of Ely, to whom we owe the plan and general form of the chapel and whose work we have encountered before at St Mary, Burwell; and secondly under John Wastell, who is believed to have constructed the 'New Building' at Peterborough Cathedral.  It is under Wastell that the antechapel or nave was built along with the great corner pinnacles, and the spectacular fan vault constructed.  The college buildings however were not completed until the early 19th century.  The chapel at Eton was not finished according to the original plan.

      The plan of King's College Chapel is simple enough; a long rectangular chapel (divided into chapel and ante-chapel by a hefty wooden screen) with a series of subsidiary chapels etc (18 in all, 9 on each side) nestling between the immense buttresses.  The design must owe something to the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral just to the n of Cambridge and I visited that morning, and perhaps also to the lost St Stephen's chapel at Westminster.

     The interior is breathtaking, almost incomprehensible.  The main body of the chapel is 40 ft wide and 80 ft high. Again very few cathedrals in Britain attain those sort of dimensions.  Wastell's design of the ante-chapel is a tour de force.  Rather like the choir at Gloucester cathedral all is tracery - it ascends from the floor to apex of the windows unifying everything; it forms the screen work veiling the side chapels, and what little wall surface there is has disappeared behind a mesh of tracery and over-sized heraldic sculpture.  Over all is the fan vault, itself a net of tracery patterns.  Incredible.  I think the decision to partially open up the side chapels to the nave with screen-work is very clever, adding an element of mystery and depth to what overwise be a lucidly simple space.

     Beyond the massive dark wooden screen - a work dating from the early years of both the English Renaissance and (perhaps surprisingly for some) the English Reformation - is the working space of the building, the beating heart, the chapel proper.  This is the design of Reginald of Ely.  And a more austere place it is.  Apparently more in keeping with the wishes of the founder.  Perhaps more like St Stephen's at Westminster in some respects.

     To step into the side chapels, however, is to enter a different world, intimate and womb-like chthonic space.  Spaces that are immediately easier to comprehend because the scale is, well, almost parochial. One gets a sense of the heft of the building, as though they had be excavated from the living rock.  Some are used as vestries, some (on the N side) house a small museum, the westernmost contain the porches, four are used as chapels, and one (the former chantry chapel of Provost Hacumblen) - most evocatively - is used as a tomb chamber.

    And that brings me smartly to the furnishings of the chapel.  Of the monuments in the Tomb Chapel the most important are the marble table-tomb to John Churchill marquess of Blandford,1702-3 and the wall tablet to Samuel Collins,1651, which retains its shadow painting.  Between the wars T H Lyon (we've seen his work before at Little St Mary) fitted up the the se chapel as a war memorial, and he did a very good job.  The ne chapel (St Edward's) contains a Late medieval panel painting 'Madonna in the Rosary' by Gert von Lom.  The Founder's Chapel houses a former altarpiece from the High Altar 'The Deposition of Christ' by Girolamo Siciolente da Sermoneta, c 1568, and 'The Adoration of the Magi' by the Master of the Von Groote Adoration.  The Whichcote Chapel, which I didn't see, functions as a baptistry containing an 18th century marble font, and, serving as a reredos, an 18th century painting by Carlo Maratta.

      Most important however is the stained glass in the 'great windows' of the chapel.  With the exception of the w window(Late Victorian) they date from 1515-1531 and are a rare survival.

    As for wood work I have already mentioned the great choir screen, but connected to that are the choir stalls - work continued on them until 1633.  In addition there a number of original doors.  In the the late 1960s the panelling at the e end was removed to storage as part of the installation of a new reredos for the High Altar - 'The Adoration of the Magi' (1633-4) by Rubens. Critical opinion divided sharply, and I incline to to those were opposed to such an addition to the chapel.

     Photos in the order of my progress through the chapel.

File into the yellow candle light, fair choristers of King's

Lost in the shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls

In blazing glass above the dark glow skies and thrones and wings

Blue, ruby, gold, and green between the whiteness of the walls,

And with what precision the stonework soars and springs

To fountain out a spreading vault - a shower that never falls.

The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry

The gold of plaster Gothic with ivy overgrown

The apple-red, the silver fronts, the wide green flats and high,

The yellowing elm trees circled out on islands of their own -

Oh, here behold all colours change that catch the falling sky

To waves of pearly light that heave along the shafted stone.

In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long,

Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass

Buttress in prayer this vaulted roof so white and light and strong

And countless congregations as the generations pass

Join choir and great crowned organ case, in centuries of song

To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass. 

Holiday III Tintern Abbey

     Friday morning found us standing outside Tintern Abbey. It's hard to know what to say about this building it is so well known. But let's start with the easiest bit, some facts: it was founded in 1131, and the abbey church rebuilt in stages in the second half of the 13th century; it remained pretty much unaltered until 1536 and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

     For the next two centuries it passed into relative obscurity - the domestic buildings robbed for building stone, but the church left oddly intact - until the late Eighteenth century when it became a locus for the secular cult of Romanticism, and it has been painted, photographed and written about repeatedly ever since. It is, rightly, still on the itinerary of tourists and day-trippers. 

     Rightly, because the church is such an elegant, slightly austere design, as befits a Cistercian house, and its setting is magical.  The reasons for choosing this particular place to found an abbey are obvious.  It is incredibly idyllic, beautiful.  An enclosed, remote place.
     The proportions of the church are superb.  The style is Geometric Decorated with touches of that next stage of Decorated Gothic, Reticulated - eg. the great west window.  Everything is clear and lucid. There is no triforium as such but a plain, blank wall, like you might find in some Medieval German churches.

     The first tours to the Abbey were started by The Rev. John Egerton, who lead parties of friends down river from Ross-on-Wye. Thomas Gray, the poet, and later William Gilpin, Anglican priest and aesthetic theorist, made the 'Wye Tour', as it became known, in 1770s in search of the picturesque;

 "The first source of amusement to the picturesque traveller," Gipin wrote, "is the pursuit of his object - the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view."

    The Wye valley with its winding course and steep valley offered much to the 'picturesque traveller' including the Abbey, then overgrown and surrounded with small scale industry. Gilpin though confessed he wanted to get a ladder and assault the abbey church with a hammer to make it more picturesque for “though the parts are beautiful, the whole is ill-shaped”. The Abbey was only seen for its scenic, landscape value; for other later visitors the melancholic emotions it stirred. Gilpin wrote up his travels in 'Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770', published in 1782. This did much to publicize the 'Wye Tour' and Turner, Coleridge, Wordsworth all followed in Gilpin's wake. "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" ('Lyrical Ballads') was written on Wordsworth's second visit in 1798.