Church of St John the Baptist, Penshurst

St John the Baptist Church at Penshurst in Kent is a Grade I listed Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Rochester, standing set back from the village street in the shadow of Penshurst Place, at the centre of a cluster of buildings that once included the manor house, guild house and rectory. Few village churches in England can match its cast of characters: those buried or commemorated here include knights, earls, viscounts, a Viceroy of India, a Governor-General of Australia, a Private Secretary to two kings, two Field Marshals and two winners of the Victoria Cross — a single village church that tells a whole country's story through its brasses, carvings, effigies and windows.

A church has stood on the site since 1115, when it is mentioned in the Textus Roffensis, and there may have been a Saxon church before it, as the recent discovery of artefacts of about 860 AD on adjoining land suggests. The church's first recorded priest, Wilhelmus, was installed in 1170 by Archbishop Thomas Becket — his last public act before he was assassinated two days later in Canterbury Cathedral — and the core of the nave may date from that time. The building grew century by century: the north aisle around 1200, the south-eastern chapel in the thirteenth century, the south aisle and south chapel arcade built or rebuilt in the fourteenth, the clerestory and tower in the fifteenth, the south aisle widened and the south porch added in 1631 — the tower's unusual corner turrets and pinnacles may also be seventeenth-century — and the top of the tower in the eighteenth. George Gilbert Scott heavily restored and partially rebuilt the church in 1864–65, enlarging the north aisle and north-eastern chapel, renewing many roofs, and replacing the 1631 south aisle windows with pseudo-medieval ones thought more in keeping; a north-eastern extension followed in the twenty-first century. The exterior is of coursed sandstone ashlar, and inside there is no chancel arch but a large timber arch of 1865–66 dividing nave from chancel, two unequal arches from chancel to north chapel — one with mid-fourteenth-century headstops — a fifteenth-century polygonal font with quatrefoils and tracery, a stone pulpit of about 1865 in a hard Italianate style with mosaic inlay and Roman-style heads, and an elaborate late Perpendicular chancel screen of 1895 by Bodley and Garner with delicate tracery and a coved loft. The glass includes good heraldic work of 1627 in the west window and an 1884 south clerestory window by Holiday.

The heart of the church's fame is the Sidney Chapel in the south-east — the private chapel of the Sidney family, who have lived at Penshurst Place for over 450 years, still enter the church by a gate directly from their garden, still sit in the chapel during services, and remain responsible for its upkeep. The third chapel on the site, it was late thirteenth-century before its rebuilding in 1820 to designs by John Biagio Rebecca, the decorative painter and architect of Castle Goring, who gave it an elegant pointed tunnel vault, panelled, painted and studded with carved bosses and heraldic shields, restored in 1966. Its monuments span seven centuries: the top half of a recumbent Purbeck marble figure in chain mail of Stephen de Pencester, who died in 1299, his missing legs probably once crossed in the sword-drawing posture; the late Perpendicular altar-tomb of Sir William Sidney, to whom Edward VI gave Penshurst Place in 1552; a brass to Margaret Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1558 "in the reign of King Philip and Queen Mary"; a cross to Thomas Bullayen, brother of Anne Boleyn and uncle of Elizabeth I; the touching monument by William Stanton and William Woodman to Robert Sidney, 4th Earl of Leicester, and the nine of his fifteen children who died young — two of them shown as dancing angels balancing an urn, infant heads in the clouds above, the inscription set by his widow Lady Elizabeth Egerton, who outlived him by "seven tedious years"; the marble tomb chest of Philip Sidney, 5th Earl of Leicester; a brass to Thomas Yden (died 1514) and his wife Agnes; and W. Theed's life-sized Grecian figure of Sophia, Lady De L'Isle. In the floor lies a simple Cumberland slate to Field Marshal the 6th Viscount Gort VC — commander of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 — and on the south wall the memorial to the 1st Viscount De L'Isle, himself a VC winner and 15th Governor-General of Australia, with his wife Jacqueline, Lord Gort's daughter.

The rest of the church keeps equally distinguished company. The chancel and sanctuary mix fourteenth-century and Giles Gilbert Scott's later work beneath a quasi barrel vault, with a wooden reredos in memory of Major Francis J. Ball, and the chancel screen of 1897 commemorating the 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Viceroy of India from 1910 to 1916, with a second screen for the Hardinges who died in the First World War. The sanctuary's memorials to former rectors are led by Henry Hammond, rector from the age of twenty-eight and chaplain to Charles I. In the north aisle — broadened by Scott in 1854–55 under a scissor-braced roof — stands the Gothic memorial by Salvin, carved by Pfyffers, to Field Marshal the 1st Viscount Hardinge, Governor-General of India during the First Anglo-Sikh War and Commander-in-Chief during the Crimean War, along with brasses to the Reverend George Richard Boissier and his wife Maria, daughter of Richard Allnutt, the wine merchant who built the Palladian mansion at South Park. St Luke's Chapel at the west end of the south aisle, rededicated by Bishop David Say of Rochester in 1981, celebrates the partnership of medicine and faith: the Luke Tapestry above its altar was designed and worked by a former village doctor, Dr A. Wood, in memory of his father, Penshurst's doctor for more than fifty years, and the chapel also holds the massive black and white marble wall tablet — putti holding up an urn, probably by William Kidwell — of Sir William Coventry, the Navy Board grandee under whom Samuel Pepys served while keeping his diary. Other monuments include two thirteenth-century coffin slabs under the tower, one bearing a cross over the figure of a praying woman, a large chancel tablet to Gilbert Spencer (died 1730), and war memorials naming the village's dead of the Boer War and both World Wars.

The organ was built by J. W. Walker & Sons in 1907, with two manuals, pedalboard and thirty-three speaking stops, including two 32-foot stops on the pedal. In the churchyard before the porch stands the Dole Table, the great stone table from which money was distributed once a year to the village's needy, and among those buried outside is Richard Sax, a farmer murdered after an argument with a labourer on the estate of Lord Baden-Powell. The rectory next door housed Penshurst's priests from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, passing from the Sidney family to the Parochial Church Council and then the Diocese of Rochester, which sold it in the 1990s and built a smaller successor in its garden. Nine centuries after the Textus Roffensis first recorded it, and 850 years after Becket's final installation, St John the Baptist remains the living parish church of one of England's most storied villages.