Church Monuments

On Sundays​ , as a child, I accompanied my mother and siblings to the parish church at Lingfield in Surrey. The services meant very little to me, though my curiosity was awakened by the preference in some sections of the congregation for the crisp and definitive ‘Eh-men’ instead of the attenuated intonation of ‘Ah-men’. I was also curious as to what it was that made the spotty boys and girls in the choir giggle. And I worried that the hot-water bottle would tumble out of my mother’s coat, as it had once done on her way to taking communion.

For the most part my mind was elsewhere, sometimes pondering imagery from familiar hymns: wondering where the ‘rock of ages cleft for me’ might be located (perhaps near where ‘Alf the sacred river ran’?) and what the ‘gracious calling’ might sound like, were I to stand ‘beside the Syrian sea’. At the same time, I was gazing at ‘St Georgius’ in shining plate armour in one window, with a dragon like an explosion at his feet, and at the richly robed, long-haired, androgynous figure leaning lightly on an anchor and looking searchingly out at me from another.

More often still, I was in the company of the Cobhams of Starborough Castle, two of whose full-length, life-size effigies lay on the tomb chests in the Lady Chapel and a third, with his wife beside him, in the very centre of the chancel of the main body of the church. One effigy was engraved in brass, another was carved in stone and painted, while the couple in the chancel were carved out of alabaster. The church had been built for them and in my mind they formed the real congregation.

On weekdays I was able to make rubbings of the brass knight, starting with his face, with a moustache drooping over the chainmail on his chin, and ending with his spurred feet resting on a greyhound with its head raised in adoration. The stone effigy, also of the 14th century, had lost its gold and silver and enamel inlay but at its feet there was a Saracen in a vividly disconsolate posture which I liked to draw. The alabaster effigies of the following century had more noble features. Their heraldic beasts seemed to growl and the Saracen’s head on the helm was magnificently ferocious.

When my imagination began to wander in the centuries between Plantagenet tombs and Edwardian stained glass, I gave some attention to the other monuments in the church and, notably, to a neat tablet with garlanded urn, honeysuckle ornament and elegant lettering dedicated to Sir James Burrow (1701-82) of Starborough Castle, a lawyer active in the intellectual life of Georgian London (‘above 30 Years Vice President of the Royal Society’). We read that ‘the Convivial Character was what He chiefly affected as it was his constant Wish to be easy and cheerful Himself and to see others in a like Disposition.’ The absence of any sentiment suited to a sacred building or any reference to religious faith is striking, but perhaps less rare in the 1780s, when this was erected, than at any other time. My father, who recorded his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘Wine and Song’, very much approved.

Two huge marble cartouche monuments of an earlier date seemed miraculously suspended in the Gothic chancel. The quality of design and execution was worthy of the best work in Wren’s churches. Swags of drapery, garlands of flowers and cherubim nestle beside, or are threaded through, the resilient scrolls of the convex inscription plates. This type of cartouche was not originally devised for memorials, and appropriate imagery was not easily accommodated within it. Here we find, in the earlier of the two, an urn balanced on a cherub’s head at the top and a sort of footnote below consisting of a heart clutched by a pair of hands, one male and the other female – awkward additions perhaps proposed by the patron. The other cartouche incorporates palm branches, which are more appropriate for martyred saints.

The earlier of these cartouche monuments has the epitaph divided into two shield-shaped parts, recording on the left the dates, offices and honours of Francis Howard, 5th baron of Effingham, appointed governor of Virginia by Charles II. In the other column Francis laments the loss of his young wife, ‘dilectissima Philadelphia … Charissima, Desideratissima Conjunx’. The other cartouche monument lists the many virtues of ‘that Truly noble and Religious Lady Mary Howard’, wife of the 6th baron, which included ‘Charity to the Poor’, ‘Parental care’ and ‘Goodness & kindness to her Domesticks’.

In one of these two monuments the inscription is in Latin and in the other in English. Choice of language indicates the anticipated public. By 1800 the use of Latin had become unusual on monuments, except in college chapels and cathedral cloisters, but in 1685, when Philadelphia died, it was still common. Her husband may have wished to record his terrible loss in the dignity of an ancient language, but there was little point in listing the merits of Lady Mary if few other ladies, very few of her servants and fewer still among the poor could read about them. Two centuries later, knowledge of Latin was not assumed even in the most intelligent female company. Otho Lawrence in W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic (1878), when visiting his atheist uncle’s burial ground, translates the inscriptions there for the benefit of Miss Merton (who is, however, familiar with the Italian of the Divine Comedy).

Samuel Johnson observed of the humanist scholar George Buchanan that his writing ‘has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern Latinity, and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits’. Such an opposition might be adopted to describe the dilemma faced by many who were commissioning church monuments in that period. More than half of the male effigies in English church monuments of the 18th century are dressed in Roman armour or senatorial robes – ‘modern Latinity’ of a kind. Women are often loosely and partly draped and generally avoid the ‘instability’ or ephemerality of fashionable female attire. There are even several naked breasts among the portraits on the memorials to women in Bath Abbey: most notably in the bust portrait of Mary Frampton (d.1698), erected by her sister and certainly not intended to be enticing (as was surely the case in many painted portraits at that date). Indeed, Mary is described as a ‘virgin Saint’ in the epitaph ‘by Mr Dryden’, elevating her far above the fashionable world assembled in Bath. There may be an intention to recall the personifications of Piety or Charity but Dryden writes: ‘So faultless was the Frame, as if the Whole/Had been an Emanation of the Soul.’ Then: ‘Heav’n did this transparent veil provide/Because She had no guilty thought to hide.’

Monuments became increasingly feminine in the second half of the 18th century. Not only was the death of a young wife or a daughter a common pretext for commissioning a monument, but mourning female figures, often personifications or generalised representatives of the bereft family, were favoured now that the erection of a monument was a part of the business of mourning. Monuments were only rarely ordered in advance of death by the person to be commemorated, as had been frequent before 1700. Despite their combination in the cartouche commemorating Francis and Philadelphia Howard, domestic sentiment may usually be distinguished from dynastic pride as the dominant motive for the creation of a church monument and gradually came to be far more common.

Women were granted a near monopoly in spiritual matters. They look up to heaven. Their souls ascend in lower relief. They represent uninhibited sorrow, their bodies sometimes so completely draped over an urn as to appear to be little more than animated drapery. They are converted into willow trees on gravestones and into locks of hair in mourning jewellery. In the same period, women were not expected to be present when a coffin was lowered into the ground. The urn was another instance of ‘modern Latinity’, a ubiquitous euphemism for the coffin, which further declined in favour when cremation was revived and urns were really put to use.

When I began work on a thesis on English church monuments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries about 55 years ago, I was sent to visit Margaret Whinney, author of the Pelican History of Art volume on post-medieval English sculpture. She informed me that there were now only five people in Britain known to be interested in the subject. Since then, the number has greatly increased, thanks in part to the Buildings of England series and to the publications of a few academics, notably Malcolm Baker and the late David Bindman. In a recent conference at the V&A, several foreign research students gave excellent papers on little-known sculptural masterpieces in English churches. There was no greater portrait statue erected in 18th-century Europe than Louis-François Roubiliac’s statue of Newton in the antechapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, and no more accomplished sculptural group than that by Joseph Nollekens of ‘Maria Howard of Corby comforted by Religion’ in the parish church of Wetheral, a few miles from Carlisle – both also feature in Wordsworth’s poetry.

The monument to Maria Howard is singled out by C.B. Newham in the introduction to his Country Church Monuments (2022) as an outstanding masterpiece to be found ‘almost as far from London as one can get in the area covered by this book’. Newham provides fine photographs of 365 monuments, taken while visiting ‘nearly nine thousand sites on his quest to create a complete photographic record of England’s rural parish churches’. The book is divided into nine geographical divisions (including one for Wales) and the monuments are arranged chronologically in each division, with succinct entries providing valuable information, much of it biographical but with pertinent observations on style and imagery, with examples selected from the tenth to the 20th century.

Even those who have taken a serious interest in British sculpture between 1600 and 1900 are likely to encounter in Newham’s book many monuments that were previously unknown to them. The character and quality of the monuments Newham selects differ only in their relative obscurity from those in the great cathedrals, college chapels and town churches. Among the latter, Bath Abbey, exceptional for the quantity and variety of its medium-sized monuments, has recently been the subject of a thoughtful survey, Oliver Taylor’s Bath Abbey’s Monuments (History Press, £22).

Taylor first documents the abbey’s dependence on fees for monuments as well as burials and funerals, then the action taken to deal with excessive congestion and finally the recent conservation initiatives. He records what is known of the sextons whose merits are habitually ignored by ‘lettered Arrogance’. He includes in his survey the nearly 900 ledger stones as well as the 635 wall monuments. He has discovered printed notices and poems about the monuments (which were once a major public attraction) and notes the verses inscribed on them. But he devotes more space to the lives of those commemorated, and to the (often colonial) source of their wealth, than to the imagery in the monuments themselves, so the subject is by no means exhausted.

A scholarly catalogue of the monuments in Westminster Abbey is now being prepared.* There are about the same number of wall monuments there as in Bath Abbey but many more of high quality and great ambition, frequently impaired by intrusive neighbours (whereas in parish churches an appropriate theatre is occasionally provided). To record the changing conventions of memorial sculpture is to trace the ways in which our ancestors affirmed their faith and stifled doubt, expressed their grief and placated guilt, contrived to assert their piety – even their humility – at the same time as their status. The choices made were determined by fashion but also, as with the pronunciation of Amen, represent ideological positions, often unconscious, which cry out for explication or, at least, for intelligent speculation.