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. I was, as you be able tell, 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 Sermoneta, c 1568, and 'The Adoration of the Magi' c 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'sLost 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.