St Margaret's Church, Westminster

St Margaret's, Westminster, the Church of St Margaret in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, is the church of the House of Commons, dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch and forming, with the Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, a single UNESCO World Heritage Site. For four centuries it has been "the parish church of the Palace of Westminster", the place where MPs worship, marry and are memorialised, standing modestly between the two giants of English church and state.

The church was founded in the twelfth century by the Benedictine monks of Westminster, so that the local people living around the Abbey could worship separately in a simpler parish church of their own; a medieval tradition reported by the rector Hensley Henson in 1914 made it as old as the Abbey itself, owing its origins to Edward the Confessor, the two churches, conventual and parochial, standing side by side for more than eight centuries. The present building was raised between 1486 and 1523 at the instigation of Henry VII and consecrated on 9 April 1523, called "the last church in London decorated in the Catholic tradition before the Reformation", with richly painted statues of St Mary and St John flanking a great rood cross. It narrowly escaped destruction in the 1540s, when Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, planned to demolish it for building materials for his new palace of Somerset House in the Strand, and was stopped only by armed parishioners. The defining moment came in 1614, when the Puritans of the House of Commons, uncomfortable with the high liturgy of the Abbey, chose St Margaret's for their parliamentary services, a connection that has continued ever since; the rector was for centuries also Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. The north-west tower was rebuilt in 1734-38 by John James, when the whole church was encased in Portland stone, porches were added by J. L. Pearson, and Sir George Gilbert Scott restored the interior to its present appearance in 1878, retaining many Tudor features. Scott's preliminary explorations in 1863 produced one of the church's strangest tales: doors overlaid with what was believed to be human skin, theorised by Victorian historians to be that of William the Sacrist, flayed for the spectacular royal treasury robbery of 1303 organised with Richard of Pudlicott; later study showed the skins to be bovine.

The east window is a Tudor treasure with an odyssey of its own: Flemish stained glass traditionally made to commemorate the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon to the future Henry VIII (the Abbey now dates it to about 1515-26), it passed through Waltham Abbey and a string of owners including the father of Anne Boleyn, the Dukes of Buckingham, Oliver Cromwell and General Monk before the parish bought it in 1758 for 400 guineas out of a £4,000 parliamentary grant. Other windows commemorate William Caxton, England's first printer, buried here in 1491; Sir Walter Raleigh, executed in Old Palace Yard and buried in the church in 1618; the poet John Milton, a parishioner; and Admiral Robert Blake. When enemy action destroyed the Victorian glass of the south aisle in the Second World War, the eight bays were reglazed in 1966 with an uncompromisingly modern abstract scheme by John Piper, made by Patrick Reyntiens, designed to create "a total impression of living radiance" in silvery grey with splashes of pale green, yellow and blue, dedicated in January 1967.

The registers read like a history of England. Samuel Pepys married Elisabeth de St Michel here in 1655, John Milton married Katherine Woodcock in 1656, Winston Churchill married Clementine Hozier on 12 September 1908, Harold Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish in 1920, and Lord Louis Mountbatten married Edwina Ashley in 1922, for as the church of Parliament, MPs, peers and officers of both Houses may marry here. The baptisms include Barbara Villiers, future mistress of Charles II, in 1640, her son by the king christened in 1662 under her husband's name, and, on 9 February 1759, Olaudah Equiano, the enslaved African who bought his freedom and became a leading abolitionist, recorded as "Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old". Among the burials are Caxton, Raleigh, the Tudor composers Nicholas Ludford and John Sheppard, Blanche Parry, confidante of Elizabeth I, the engraver Wenceslas Hollar, the writer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho in 1780, the early feminist scholar Elizabeth Elstob, and even Thomas Blood, the man who tried to steal the Crown Jewels. Darkest of all is the unmarked pit in the churchyard into which, on the orders of Charles II in 1661, were cast the disinterred remains of Parliamentarians evicted from Westminster Abbey at the Restoration, among them John Pym and Admirals Blake, Deane and Popham, now remembered by a memorial beside the west entrance. The church also witnessed Marian cruelty: on Easter Day 1555 the Protestant ex-monk William Flower wounded the priest administering the sacrament, repented of the violence but not of his rejection of transubstantiation, and a week later had his hand severed and was burned at the stake outside the church. In gentler times, the headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, had to leave by a back door in the First World War after preaching on "loving your enemies" while demonstrators sang "Rule, Britannia!" outside.

By the 1970s only a few hundred people lived in the parish, and the Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret Westminster Act 1972 ended its parochial status, bringing the church under the Dean and Chapter of the Abbey, its rector usually an Abbey canon. In July 2020 the Abbey announced, without consultation, that regular Sunday worship would cease and the choir be disbanded, dismaying a regular community of sixty to a hundred and twenty worshippers who treasured the church's intimacy against the formality of the tourist-filled Abbey; more than 1,700 people signed a petition, the loss was lamented in the press, and by 2025 a weekly sung eucharist had been restarted on Sunday evenings. A new girls' choir for ages eleven to seventeen was formed in September 2023 to sing alongside the professional St Margaret's Consort, succeeding the trebles long supplied by Westminster Under School, and the UK Parliament Choir gave its first performance here in 2000 under Simon Over; directors of music have included Richard Hickox, and the organ is largely the work of J. W. Walker and Sons, successor to John Avery's instrument of 1806. The Coptic Orthodox Church in Britain holds its annual new year service in the church each October. Between Abbey and Parliament, the church of Caxton, Raleigh, Milton and Churchill keeps its quieter watch over English history.