St Etheldreda's Church

St Etheldreda's Church stands in Ely Place, a quiet enclave off Charterhouse Street in Holborn, London. One of only two surviving buildings in the capital from the reign of King Edward I, dating from around the 1280s, it is a building of exceptional rarity and beauty — the former private chapel of the Bishops of Ely, and today one of the oldest churches in England in current use by the Roman Catholic Church. It is dedicated to St Etheldreda, the Anglo-Saxon princess and saint who founded the monastery at Ely in 673.

The church was built in the later thirteenth century, most likely between 1284 and 1286, as the town chapel of Ely Palace, the London residence of the Bishops of Ely. It was probably raised for John Kirkby, who became Treasurer in 1284 and Bishop of Ely in 1286, and who left the estate to the monks of Ely on his death in 1290. An early London example of Decorated Gothic, related to the great contemporary works at Old St Paul's, it follows the form of grand private chapels such as the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and St Stephen's Chapel at Westminster, with two storeys — a large and noble upper chapel above a crypt or undercroft. The upper chapel is lit by early bar tracery, with an unusual variant of intersecting tracery in the great east window, and between the side windows are tall arch-and-gable frames for statues, a form whose sacred associations derive from medieval reliquaries.

The chapel saw much of the drama of medieval and Tudor England. In 1302 the Earl of Warenne swore his loyalty to Edward II here, and in 1381 John of Gaunt moved to the palace after his own Savoy Palace was destroyed in the Peasants' Revolt — Ely Palace is remembered too in Shakespeare's Richard II and Richard III. After the Reformation outlawed the Catholic Mass in 1534, the chapel passed to Anglican worship, and in 1576 Bishop Cox was famously pressured into leasing much of the property to Elizabeth I's favourite Sir Christopher Hatton for a rent that included a single red rose each year. For a brief period in the early seventeenth century the upper church was granted to Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, as an embassy chapel considered to stand on Spanish soil, where Catholic worship — still illegal in England — was once more permitted, making it a haven for English Catholics. During the Civil War the palace was seized by Parliament, and under Cromwell most of it was demolished.

In 1772 the Bishops of Ely were permitted to sell the property; all the buildings except the chapel were pulled down, and the surveyor Charles Cole laid out the present Ely Place, refurbishing the chapel in the Georgian style. Through the early nineteenth century it served various congregations, including Welsh-speaking Anglicans, until it was put up for auction in 1874 and bought for £5,400 by Father William Lockhart of the Rosminian order — bringing it back into Catholic hands after more than three hundred years. Under Lockhart, Sir George Gilbert Scott restored the crypt and upper church to their thirteenth-century form, and John Francis Bentley, later architect of Westminster Cathedral, designed a new choir screen. The restoration was completed in 1878, when Catholic Mass was celebrated here for the first time in over two centuries, and the church received a precious relic — a piece of St Etheldreda's hand, kept in a jewelled casket beside the high altar. For many years afterwards St Etheldreda's was the oldest Catholic church building in England in use.

The twentieth century brought both damage and renewal. In May 1941, during the Blitz, a bomb tore through the roof and destroyed the Victorian stained glass, and repairs took seven years. New glass by Joseph Nuttgens was installed in the east window in 1952, depicting the Trinity, the Evangelists and saints including Etheldreda herself, while the side windows show scenes from the Old and New Testaments. In the 1960s statues of English Catholic martyrs of the Tudor age — among them St Swithun Wells, St Anne Line and St John Houghton — were set along the walls, a fitting commemoration in a church that had itself been a refuge for persecuted Catholics. Because St Etheldreda was traditionally invoked against ailments of the throat, the church still holds an annual Blessing of the Throats.

From its building as a bishop's chapel in the age of Edward I, through its Tudor intrigues, its years as an embassy haven and its restoration to Catholic worship, St Etheldreda's, Ely Place, remains a remarkable survival — a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture and one of the most historic Catholic churches in London.