Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

fragments and objects not only into private domestic spaces, but also into ecclesiastical interiors.
As any regular church visitor knows and as Charles Tracy’s important study has recently made
clear, the vast trade in Continental woodwork after 1815 included a significant quantity of
ecclesiastical fixtures and fittings many of which were installed in English churches. Not far
from Wreay, at Brougham Hall, was St Wilfrid’s chapel, an interior exactly contemporary with
St Mary’s, fitted up with a spectacular array of panelling screens and a great triptych, all cobbled
together by the architect L N Cottingham (1787-1847) for Lord Brougham. There was also a
considerable traffic in stained glass. 81 In both cases the historic material was often filled out, or
filled in, adapted, mutilated or simply misunderstood in the established Wardour Street tradition,
the usual coat of dark stain was then brushed over the wood in the hope of creating a unifying
effect.
Often it was the local squire who effected these improvements and there was little
explicitly religious or theological about the selection of pieces or their use. This may be taken to
indicate the extent to which, in the Anglican communion, the interconnection of state and church
allowed the gentry to feel that the parish church was an extension of their own property and
indeed their own home. Such interiors were closer to the trend in interior decoration that
Wainwright identified, than to the resonant, personal spaces created by individual antiquaries
like Scott, Britton and the Sobieski Stuarts. Even pieces which clearly had religious meaning,
and, almost inevitably, Roman Catholic iconography, such as carvings of saints, were
incorporated without doctrinal demur. At the medieval church of St Leonard’s, Old Warden, in
Bedfordshire for example, Robert Henley, Lord Ongley, simply stuffed the building with a
collection which, to an educated eye, presents a bewildering visual cacophony of dates and
styles. When Nikolaus Pevsner visited he could hardly hear himself think:
There is nothing in …[the] exterior to prepare for the shock in store upon entering. One can only just register the
high unmoulded Norman tower arch…before going under in the mass of woodwork. It oppresses you from all sides;
it is utterly disjoined, and can only here and there be read consecutively…one is all the time up against the Early
81
For the extent of the trade see ‘Catalogue of a sale of stained glass in 1804’; Kent, ‘John Christopher Hamp of
Norwich’; Lafond, ‘The traffic in old stained glass’ and Rackham, ‘English Importations of Foreign Stained Glass’.
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