Church of St John the Baptist

St John the Baptist Church is the parish and civic church of Windsor in Berkshire, standing in the High Street a few hundred yards from the castle gates. Rebuilt in the Gothic Revival style in 1820–22 and listed at Grade II*, it inherits a history stretching back to the twelfth century, holds royal gifts including Grinling Gibbons carvings and a painting presented by George III, and carries the sombre memory of the Windsor Martyrs, two of the three Protestants burnt at the stake in 1543 having been associated with the church.

The original settlement at Windsor was at what is now Old Windsor; it was Henry I who moved the royal court to the castle site in New Windsor, and St John's is recorded as existing by the reign of Henry II, by which point it had already seen several incumbents. By the end of its long life the old church comprised a nave, chancel and aisles, each under a separate gable and all flush at the east end, and its poor condition prompted a proposal in 1818 to rebuild.

The church's darkest chapter came under Henry VIII. Though the king had dissolved the monasteries and made himself Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Anglican doctrine remained Catholic in most respects, especially after the Six Articles Act of 1539 — "An Act abolishing diversity of Opinions" — which asserted transubstantiation, clerical celibacy and auricular confession on pain of death. Anthony Pearson, a Protestant preacher, preached in and around Windsor, including in St John's, and deeply influenced Henry Filmer, a tailor who was churchwarden of the church and who tried to convert the vicar, Thomas Meister, to similar views. Word reached William Simmonds, Mayor of Windsor and the town's MP, who with Dr John London, Canon of Windsor, reported to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Houses were searched and arrests made — Pearson and Filmer, along with Robert Testwood, a chorister at St George's Chapel, John Merbecke, the chapel organist, and Robert Benet, a Windsor lawyer who escaped trial through sickness. The rest were tried for heresy before a jury specially chosen to convict, and in 1543 Pearson, Filmer and Testwood were burnt at the stake on wasteland north of the castle — the site now occupied by Windsor & Eton Riverside railway station. Merbecke was pardoned, and went on to write the standard musical setting of the Anglican Holy Communion service.

The new church rose in 1820–22 to designs by Charles Hollis, with Jeffry Wyatt — later Wyatville, remodeller of Windsor Castle — as consultant. Built of large blocks of fine ashlar, with cast-iron quatrefoil columns and cast-iron trusses spanning the six-bay nave and aisles, it followed the floorplan of the old church and retained many monuments and features, with a four-stage west tower flanked by vestibules. Between 1869 and 1873 the noted ecclesiastical architect Samuel Sanders Teulon restored the church, extending the small Georgian chancel into a semi-circular apse of small squared grey stone with Bath stone dressings, the chancel arch framed with the polychrome voussoirs that were his signature; Princess Christian reopened the church.

The royal gifts define the interior. Above the west gallery hangs a large painting of the Last Supper, attributed to Francis Cleyn and restored in 2003, presented by George III in 1788 after serving as an altarpiece in St George's Chapel; it was the altarpiece of both the old and new churches until Teulon's apse displaced it to the west wall. The Royal Pew, the gift of Princess Augusta, who worshipped here, is fronted by a low screen containing panels carved by Grinling Gibbons depicting a pelican feeding its young — panels that once formed part of the altar rail at St George's Chapel, given by George III along with the painting. As Windsor's civic church, St John's also has a mayoral pew with a cushion for the mayoral mace, and many Mayors of Windsor lie in the church and churchyard. The reredos at the east end carries mosaic panels by the Venetian glass mosaic artist Antonio Salviati, and the chancel screen of 1898, by Sir Arthur Blomfield, was given in thanksgiving for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

The church's organs have a tangled royal pedigree of their own. An organ installed in the old church in 1633 was destroyed by Puritans in 1650. In 1789 George III gave the church a three-manual organ built by Father Smith in the reign of Charles II (possibly later, by John Snetzler) for St George's Chapel; retained for the new church and re-installed in the west gallery, it was removed in 1846 to St Mary, Haggerston, where it perished in a 1940 air raid. Its Gray and Davison replacement went to Langford Methodist Church in 1906, succeeded by a three-manual Hunter organ half-funded by Andrew Carnegie and opened by Charles Harford Lloyd, Precentor of Eton, on Easter Day 1906; renovated by Hunter in the 1920s, Rushworth and Dreaper in 1936 and Bishop & Son in 2009, its full restoration fund reached its target in 2020. The tower holds a ring of eight bells, all from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry — four cast by Richard Phelps in the eighteenth century and kept from the old church, four cast in the 1820s by Thomas Mears II. The churchyard war memorial was unveiled by Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, in 1920.

The roll of clergy is studded with notable names. The antiquary George Evans was vicar in 1663; John Barrow, Canon of Windsor and chaplain to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, served 1680–82; Canon Henry John Ellison, vicar from 1855 to 1875, founded the Church of England Temperance Society in 1862, and his son John Henry Joshua followed as vicar from 1895 to 1913; Ernest Blackie went on to be a suffragan bishop and Dean of Rochester; and Ralph Creed Meredith, vicar from 1940 to 1958, was chaplain to George VI and Elizabeth II — having also won the inaugural New Zealand National Badminton Championships in 1927 and represented New Zealand at international croquet. Among the curates, George Augustus Selwyn (1833–41) became the first Bishop of New Zealand, founder of the Melanesian Mission and namesake of Selwyn College, Cambridge, while the hymnwriter Samuel John Stone wrote "The Church's One Foundation" in 1866 during his Windsor curacy. Sir George Elvey, organist of St George's Chapel, doubled as organist here from 1849 to 1861. The burials and memorials gather mayors and MPs of Windsor across five centuries — from William Canon, mayor in 1489, to Sir George Henry Long in 1896 — together with the physicians William Heberden and his son, physician to George III; Idonea De Audele, Abbess of Burnham; John Kirkpatrick, commander of an East Indiaman at the Battle of Pulo Aura; and Sir Thomas Reeve, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, whose memorial, like that of Topham Foot, is an early work of the Flemish sculptor Peter Scheemakers. In the castle's shadow, the town's own church keeps its own distinct and remarkable story.