St John the Baptist's Church, Brighton

St John the Baptist's Church in the Kemptown area of Brighton holds a special place in the history of English Catholicism: it was the first Roman Catholic church built in Brighton after Catholic Emancipation, and it is intimately bound up with one of the most romantic and controversial figures of the Regency, Maria Fitzherbert — the secret wife of King George IV — who funded the church and lies buried within it. A handsome Classical-style building on Bristol Road, completed in 1835 and listed at Grade II*, it is a monument both to the revival of Catholic worship in England and to a love affair that touched the throne itself.

For centuries the laws of Britain forbade Roman Catholic worship, and it was only with the Papists Act of 1778 and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 that the restrictions began to be relaxed. The 1791 Act allowed Catholic churches to be built for the first time, though under strict conditions: they were not permitted bells or steeples, and were to be plain in appearance. Brighton's Catholic community was small at the time, but it grew in the 1790s for two reasons. Many refugees from the French Revolution settled in the town after escaping France, swelling the Catholic population; and Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Catholic, began her relationship with the Prince Regent, the future George IV, whom she secretly married in 1785 — a marriage that was illegal under the Act of Settlement and the Royal Marriages Act, but which she always regarded as valid. She accompanied the Prince whenever he visited Brighton, and kept her own house, Steine House, on the Old Steine, close to his fantastical Royal Pavilion.

The first Catholic place of worship in Brighton was established above a shop in 1798 — one of the earliest in Britain. In 1805 the priest in charge, a French émigré, began raising money for a permanent building, and a Classical-style church was completed on the High Street in 1807. By 1818 the congregation had outgrown it, and a new rector, a friend of Maria Fitzherbert, wished to extend it; Mrs Fitzherbert donated £1,000 towards the work. But before anything could be done, the full achievement of Catholic emancipation in 1829 — which removed almost all the remaining restrictions on Catholics — encouraged Brighton's Catholic community to seek a new site for a larger and more elaborate church than the old laws would have allowed.

A piece of undeveloped land on the estate of the Marquess of Bristol was bought for £1,050, and William Hallett — later a mayor of Brighton — designed and built the new church of St John the Baptist. It was consecrated on 7 July 1835 and opened two days later. This consecration was itself a notable event: many of the 900 Catholic churches opened in England since the 1791 Relief Act had not been formally consecrated, and St John the Baptist's was only the fourth new church to be consecrated in England since the Reformation of the sixteenth century — a measure of how far the Catholic Church had come, and of the importance of the new Brighton church. Built in the Classical style, with a dignified façade, it expressed the new confidence of a community that no longer had to hide its faith.

Maria Fitzherbert did not long survive the church she had helped to create. She died in 1837 and was buried at St John the Baptist's, and a memorial stone and sculpture were placed in the nave. The sculpture shows her wearing three wedding rings — a touching and eloquent detail, recording her three marriages: to her two earlier husbands, both of whom had died, and to the Prince of Wales, the marriage that she held to be true though it could never be acknowledged. Her tomb makes the church a place of pilgrimage for all who are drawn to the extraordinary story of the woman the Prince Regent loved, and whom, on his deathbed, he is said to have asked to be buried beside, wearing her miniature portrait around his neck.

The church continued to grow and serve the Catholic community of Brighton; a school bearing its name was established in the 1850s, and St John the Baptist's became the mother church of Catholicism in the town, the oldest of the eleven Catholic churches that now serve Brighton and Hove. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it remained at the heart of Catholic life in the city, and it continues today as an active parish church, its Classical front a landmark on Bristol Road and its history a vivid chapter in the story of English Catholic revival.

St John the Baptist's stands in the Kemptown district on the eastern side of Brighton, a short distance from the seafront and the famous Brighton Pier. The Royal Pavilion — the pleasure palace of the Prince Regent whom Maria Fitzherbert secretly married — lies a little to the west, along with the Old Steine where she had her house, the antique shops and cafés of the Lanes and the North Laine, the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and all the lively attractions of one of England's most vibrant seaside cities.

From the secret marriage of Maria Fitzherbert and the Prince Regent, through the first hidden Catholic worship above a Brighton shop, to the building of the church in 1835 with her generosity and its rare consecration so soon after emancipation, and her burial within it beneath a sculpture showing her three wedding rings, St John the Baptist's Church gathers a remarkable story of faith and royal romance into one building. A Grade II* listed church and the first Catholic church in Brighton after emancipation, it remains the living mother church of Catholic Brighton — and the resting place of the woman who loved a king.