6 days ago
Sacred Mysteries: From smashed glass to a bright revival
In 1547 an edict of Edward VI ordered superstitious monuments in churches to be destroyed. There should 'remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows or elsewhere'.
In Elizabeth's reign no stained-glass windows were put in churches, and in 1571 the longest in the official Book of Homilies 'against peril of idolatry and superfluous decking of churches'. It said: 'Images placed publikely in Temples cannot possibly bee without danger of worshipping and idolatrie, wherefore they are not publiquely to bee had or suffered'.
Yet within a generation religious stained glass crept back into chapels and churches, beginning with the Earl of Salisbury's chapel at Hatfield in 1609. This revival that 'should not have happened' kicks off a learned and beautifully illustrated volume from the Ecclesiological Society, that force for good that still uses the seal designed by AWN Pugin in 1844.
The theme, explored in the society's conference in 2023, is Stained Glass Revivals, taking in postwar achievements from Harlow to Glasgow, from Ely Place to East Acton. But first came that Jacobean revival, here examined by Mark Kirby, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
Salisbury put biblical scenes in his windows at Hatfield far from the gaze of the unlearned. The windows used the bold, bright colours that had emerged from the Continent (the glass-making tradition having been lost in England).
What survives of that first revival is found in private chapels and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Some glass was installed in London and later destroyed. One case of a chapel is at Trinity Hospital, Greenwich (now backed by the bulk of Greenwich power station). This hospital or almshouse was one of several built by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, long suspected of papistry and stating in his will that he died 'a member of the Catholicke and Apostolike Churche, saying with Saint Jerome In qua fide puer natus fui in eadem senex morior '.
The Greenwich window, the first since the Reformation to depict the Crucifixion, was made in 1614, the year of his death, and, in the judgment of Dr Kirby, 'has a sense of making a death-bed declaration of faith'.
At Oxford the two earliest examples of new glass were at Wadham, made by Bernard van Linge, and at Lincoln College, made by Bernard's brother Abraham van Linge. 'As artistic endeavours, these are not of he greatest quality,' Dr Kirby admits. More successful were windows made by Abraham van Linge at Queen's, Christ Church, Balliol and University College between 1633 and 1642.
This was the period of the pursuit by Archbishop Laud and his allies of the 'beauty of holiness', as the Psalm has it. An associate of Laud was Viscount Scudamore (1601-71) who undertook the remarkable restoration of the church at Abbey Dore, Herefordshire. Windows here show signs of inexperienced craftsmen edging their way to express their pictorial ambitions.
In a chapter about Scudamore, Robert Walker points out that faces are simply drawn in black line on white glass, and the extensive use of pot-metal (through-coloured glass) goes against the trend in the wider world of stained glass. His conclusion is that Scudamore himself might have been the artist. Certainly a vidimus, or glass design, is among the Scudamore papers, clearly sketching the finished windows.
