Church of King Charles the Martyr, Falmouth

The Church of King Charles the Martyr is the Church of England parish church of Falmouth in Cornwall, standing in the very centre of the town it was built to sanctify — for church and town were founded together, products of one ambitious baronet's bargain with a restored king.

The story begins at the end of the English Civil War, when the future Charles II fled into exile via Pendennis Castle, a mile or so from where the church now stands, vowing to build "a chapel for public worship... and when the wars ceased, to send an able and conscientious chaplain to preach God's word therein". After the Restoration it was Sir Peter Killigrew of nearby Arwenack Manor — long ambitious to found a town and a church on the Haven — who turned the royal vow to account. In 1660 he sent an emissary to the King in London seeking a charter for the new town of Falmouth, offering land for a church, parsonage and churchyard if the King would sponsor the project. Owing partly, perhaps, to his diplomatic dedication of the new church to the King's martyred father — Charles I, executed on 30 January 1649 and commemorated under the title King Charles the Martyr — Sir Peter succeeded, receiving "much help... through the generosity of Charles II and the Duke of York, and the liberal contributions of diverse honourable and worthy persons". He laid the foundations on 29 August 1662; on 21 February 1664 John Bedford, Rector of Gerrans in the Roseland, preached the first sermon, and the church was consecrated on 22 August 1665, with Bedford's son Francis appointed first rector by Seth Ward, Bishop of Exeter. The new parish of Falmouth was carved from Budock parish, its rectory endowed by Sir Peter with a rate on every house — a levy the town's numerous Nonconformists were most unwilling to pay, so that later rectors were "glad to make arrangements for its final extinction".

One historian has remarked that Falmouth parish church has probably undergone more alterations and additions than any other church in the United Kingdom. The original building is thought to have been some sixty-six feet square. In 1684 the third rector, Walter Quarme, carried out the first extensions, building a chancel at the east end and the lowest stage of the tower; Sir Peter Killigrew paid for a west gallery in 1686, with galleries over the north aisle following in 1699 and the south aisle in 1702 — the year the first organ, by John Russell of London, arrived at the west end. In 1738 the tower was raised and received a twelve-hundredweight bell, since replaced, after various changes, by an eight-bell carillon. By 1813 Falmouth's population had passed 7,000, so the 1684 chancel was demolished, the church lengthened eastward by nearly a third, and the chancel rebuilt. After slow deterioration through the early nineteenth century, a major reconstruction began in 1896: the three pitched roofs and the galleries were removed and the walls raised to take three new barrel ceilings with ornamental plasterwork, the work occupying about a year. A new organ chamber followed in 1915 — the organ's former position becoming the Warrior Chapel — electric lighting arrived in 1907, and the baptistery was formed in 1936, though the font dates from 1759. The architectural result divides opinion: Charles Henderson observed in 1925 that the church "is interesting for its curious mixture of the Gothic and Classical styles. Its worst feature is a weak west tower in the former manner. A Wren steeple would have been far more suitable to the situation."

The church's most consequential rector was William John Coope, who held the living from 1838 to 1869 and was the pioneer of Tractarianism in Cornwall. Deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement during his Oxford years, Coope arrived to find the church in poor repair and introduced ritual changes in accordance with Tractarian ideas, arousing opposition from a section of the parishioners — opposition that had abated by 1847, though a complaining letter about the conduct of services appeared in the West Briton in 1849. Coope wrote many publications emphasising the Catholicity of the Church of England, and the church was much improved in his time, with new vestries, a north porch, a stained east window, and a new reredos and pulpit. Resistance to his practices culminated in a dispute with Archdeacon W. J. Phillpotts in 1866; supported by the newly formed English Church Union, Coope prevailed, and the archdeacon's planned legal action was dropped.

Music has a long and occasionally comic history at King Charles the Martyr. The first pipe organ, installed in the west gallery in the spring of 1703 by John Russell of London at a cost of £200, was not met with universal acclamation — one local lampoonist versified: "Arrived at the church, 'tis diverting to see / Them all strut to Ned Kendall's vile twiddle dum dee, / whose bass and whose treble, comparatively speaking, / are like old pigs grunting and little pigs squeaking." After ninety-five years of little maintenance it was sold, replaced in 1798 by a Hugh Russell instrument of fifteen stops with a swell enclosed behind newly fashionable "Nag's Head" shutters. That organ, in bad repair by 1881, gave way to a three-manual Hele and Co of Plymouth instrument in the Warrior Chapel; tonal alterations of 1910 added a Posaune reed and Small Open Diapason, and works completed by Christmas 1915 — a Vox Humana rank, partial conversion to tubular pneumatic action, a Choir tremulant — accompanied the move to the new organ chamber, the instrument then boasting thirty speaking stops and 1,886 pipes. By the 1970s it was becoming unplayable, and in January 1978 Lance Foy of Truro began building a new instrument, installed in 1979 using parts from the redundant church of St Thomas, Bristol and much of the Hele pipework; Foy rebuilt it again in 1993 with an Ophicleide and Trumpet unit, new upperwork, additional stops, a refurbished console and a new piston capture system. The result is the largest organ in Cornwall after the Father Willis at Truro Cathedral. The church's all-male choir, disbanded in the late 1960s for want of choristers, has given way to an adult SATB choir singing two services each Sunday, and since 2012 the Director of Music — Lance Foy himself — has run a Saturday Lunchtime Concert Series from May to October.

Among those buried at the church is James Cunningham, 14th Earl of Glencairn — the friend and patron of Robert Burns, whose death the poet mourned in verse. Three and a half centuries after Sir Peter Killigrew dedicated his new church to a martyred king, the church of King Charles the Martyr still presides over the port town that grew up around it.