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

which Edward designed, was Gothic. It incorporated a great deal of medieval stained
glass imported from the Continent in the manner familiar in Anglican churches of the
date, but unlike them it was arranged in a considered iconographic programme, almost
certainly prescribed by Milner. This was based on the doctrine of antetypes, of the Old
Testament as an allegorical prefiguring of the New, another sacred expression of the coexistence
of past and present.
The design of the chapel and the decorative scheme placed greatest emphasis on
the sacrament of the mass. The result, as Mary Shepard, who first understood the
meaning of this arrangement of glass, has argued, was a building that, like Milner’s St
Peter’s but on a considerably more elaborate scale, made a symbolic statement of faith
and renewal, not a mere reference to the past but something closer to a resurrection, the
physical re-establishment of Roman Catholicism ‘on British soil’. 21 There is no proof but
it is not, perhaps, unreasonable to see this kind of Catholic antiquarianism, so strikingly
different from its usual Anglican counterpart, as an aspect of the Catholic belief not only
in the power of relics, but in transubstantiation. The Real Presence of Christ in the mass
is perhaps the ultimate expression of the fusion of material and immaterial worlds in a
condition outside time. Thus Milner was perhaps only half fanciful in suggesting that in
the vault of this Gothic chapel, the physical manifestation of transcendent faith, he might
call up his friend again from the dead and ask him to adjudicate on the present.
A W N Pugin, who was much influenced by Milner, certainly had a similar belief
in the power of artefacts at the beginning of his career. In his first church, St James
Reading, in 1837, he helped his patron, the Catholic antiquary James Wheble, to
incorporate stones from the ruins of the medieval Reading Abbey nearby. 22 Edward
Willson who had known Pugin from childhood exerted an even more important influence
and for Willson, certainly, the stones of the old churches were imbued with sacred
meaning. Although he never said as much in print, his request to be buried at St Mary
Hainton, the medieval church he had restored and where his parents were buried,
21 Shepard, ‘ “Our Fine Gothic Magnificence” ’, p.207.
22 Hill, God’s Architect, pp.192-3.
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