‘When will you pay me, say the Bells of Old Bailey’
The City of London’s largest parish church, this was dedicated to St Edmund the King at its earliest recorded mention in 1137, but later became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or St Sepulchre-without-Newgate. This is because it sits just outside the City walls, like the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the similarity was not lost on the Crusaders who prayed at the church before journeying to the Holy Land. Its status as the City’s largest church is due to its siting – more room was available to build here than existed within the crowded confines of the walls. The benefice belonged, in 1137, to the Prior of St Bartholomews, Rahere, but he granted it to Hagno the Clerk.
This early church was rebuilt in the middle of the fifteenth century, although Stow cannot be clear if the King at the time was Henry VI or Edward IV as the Wars of the Roses were raging. Much of the medieval fabric is still visible. Although the walls, tower and vaulted porch survive from this period, the rest of the church was gutted by the Great Fire; an unfortunate circumstance, as the Fire stopped only a few yards beyond the building. Around the corner, in Giltspur Street, can be found the effigy of a slightly obese boy, marking the spot where the Fire burned itself out. The statue’s portliness represents Gluttony, the sin for which many believed the City was destroyed. Rebuilt in the 1670’s by architects unknown, the layout was altered twice during the nineteenth century and the roof in 1932, making St Sepulchres today a mixture of styles.
The social history of the Church is dark, thanks principally to the presence of Newgate Prison just across the road, sited where the Old Bailey now stands. A tall, dark brick wall can be seen around the corner in Amen Court, and this is the last remaining section of the Prison. Sir Thomas Malory would have heard the bells pealing as he sat in his cell during the 1480’s, writing ‘Le Morte D’Arthur. However, St Sepulchre’s earliest notoriety is due to its Rector in Tudor times, the celebrated John Rogers. He helped William Tyndale translate the Bible into English during the Reformation. However, at the counter-Reformation, he was tried for heresy in the church which is now Southwark Cathedral, and consequently earned the dubious distinction of being the first Protestant Martyr of Mary I’s reign, being burned at Smithfield in 1555.
Condemned prisoners held at Newgate were originally transported to Tyburn, now the site of Marble Arch, and condemned highwaymen were presented with a nosegay at the Church door – but later the scaffold was erected in the wide street outside the Prison itself, large enough to hang 12 at once. The bells in the Church’s tower (the bells of Old Bailey) started to peal dolefully at 8 o’ clock in the morning, as the unfortunates were led to their doom. This tradition was paid for in 1605 by a Robert Dowe, who also paid for another service to be carried out the previous night. This consisted of a handbell, rung outside the condemned cells at midnight, twelve double strokes accompanied with the words:
‘All you that in the condemned hold do lie, Prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die; Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near, That you before the Almighty must appear; Examine well yourselves, in time repent, That you may not to eternal flames be sent: And when St Sepulchre’s bell tomorrow tolls, The Lord above have mercy on your souls. Past twelve o’ clock!’
Presumably Dowe granted this legacy in an attempt to save souls, yet one cannot help but wonder if there was a hint of pious sadism involved. This custom continued for a century and a half.
In The Rawlinson MSS exists this curious excerpt regarding a murder mystery uncovered at St Sepulchre: “Dr. Airy, Provost of Queen’s College, Oxon (1599-1616), passing, with his servant, accidentally through St. Sepulchre’s Church-yard: (Holborn Viaduct now almost covers this spot), where the sexton was making a grave, observing a skull to move, showed it to his servant and then to the sexton, who, taking it up, found a great toad in it; but withal observed a tenpenny nail stuck in the temple bone, whereupon the doctor presently imagined the party to have been murdered, and asked the sexton if he remembered whose skull it was. He answered it was the skull of a man who died suddenly, and had been buried twenty-two years before. The doctor told him that certainly the man was murdered, and that it was fitting to be inquired after, and so departed. The sexton thinking much upon it remembered some particular stories talked of at the death of the party, as that his wife, then alive, and married to another person, had been seen to go into his chamber with a nail and hammer, whereupon he went to a justice of the peace, and told him all the story. The wife was sent for, and witnesses were found who testified that and some other particulars. She confessed, and was hanged.”
Newgate Prison was demolished in 1902, and the widening of Holborn Viaduct carried away much of the churchyard on the southern side. Today this patch of land is dominated by a memorial to the Royal Fusiliers, and a watchtower which was originally erected to prevent grave-robbing.
Through the entrance and a vestibule, the visitor comes upon an interior described by Betjeman as ‘a forest of tall pillars’, which suggests the size of the building. The font and organ both date to 1670, the year the church re-opened after the Fire, and the twin pulpits date to 1854.
On the north side of the church can be found a chapel, originally dedicated to St Stephen Harding. The scholar Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth Tudor and Lady Jane Grey, was buried here in 1568. Henry Wood learned to play the organ in this chapel and, at the age of 14, was appointed Assistant Organist. Best known as the founder of the Promenade Concerts, Wood’s ashes were interred in the Chapel in 1944 and, every year on the Last Night Of The Proms, the wreath that adorns his bust at the Albert Hall is brought here to his grave. It is now the Musician’s Chapel, and a window shows images of Wood as a boy and a man. A case contains a Musician’s Book Of Remembrance, and in the north are the remains of what is believed to be an Easter Sepulchre.
Crossing to the south-east of the nave, a glass case on a pillar contains the very handbell that used to make condemned prisoners’ last nights even more fraught. Nearby in the south aisle are the chapel of the Royal Fusiliers, whose City of London regiment still hold Remembrance Day services in the church, and a medieval piscina which appears darkened by fire damage, probably from the 1666 inferno. A brass plaque in this aisle marks the resting place of Captain John Smith, his 1631 epitaph reading ‘Here lies one conquer’d who hath conquer’d kings’. Although he became President of the Council of Virginia and Admiral of New England, Smith is best known for having his life saved in 1607 by Princess Pocahontas. In recent times he has been portrayed by Mel Gibson in Disney’s ‘Pocahontas’, and will return in 2005 as Colin Farrell in ‘The New World’. A window of 1968 commemorates him, showing him surrounded by navigational instruments and above the three ships in which the pioneers crossd the Atlantic.
In essence, then, St Sepulchre retains an air of medieval grandeur and mystery above the busy thoroughfare of Holborn Viaduct. Its presence opposite the Old Bailey recalls its long association with the country’s foremost bastion of justice and, although the bells are no longer rung for the guilty, their mentions by Shakespeare, Dickens and the nursery rhyme have ensured their immortality!
Author Mark McManus
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