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

about Gothic architecture and its meaning by building his own chapel in Winchester,
consecrated on 5 December 1792. It was not the first church in the Gothic style to be built
since the Middle Ages but Kenneth Clark was surely right to describe it as the first to be
built from ‘what we might call Gothic Revival motives’. 61 Previous post-medieval Gothic
churches had been rare and they derived in most cases either from a general sense of
historic appropriateness or a specific desire to incorporate the estate church ‘within the
larger strategy of the landscaped park’. 62 The church of St Mary at Tetbury in
Gloucestershire, by Francis Hiorne of 1777-81 is perhaps the only predecessor of
Milner’s chapel in the sense of being a parish church independent of a private patron, but
there the motive seems to have been simply the replacement of a ruinous medieval
building with a successor in the same style.
The fact that Milner’s was a Roman Catholic chapel, built the year after the
passage of the Second Catholic Relief Act had made such a thing legally possible, gave it
one highly particular meaning, which will be discussed elsewhere. 63 From the point of
view of architectural antiquarianism it is significant principally in other ways. The first is
simply the fact that Milner built it at all. He was not an architect, indeed he relied on
Carter to develop it from his initial drawings, so why should he want to put up a
building? He was certainly not the first antiquary to realise his understanding of the past
in three dimensions, even before the eighteenth-century Gothic Revival. William
Stukeley created a Druid garden and there had no doubt been other examples.
It was only with this generation, however, that antiquaries began with some
regularity to translate their ideas into buildings. It was part of a twofold change that came
about in the later eighteenth century. First there was a shift from predominantly secular to
religious buildings. Secondly, unlike Walpole at Strawberry Hill, a gentleman who loved
his house for its rarity and distinction, the more middle-class, campaigning antiquaries of
this period wanted to propagate the Gothic as widely as possible, reviving it with what
they believed were its intrinsic qualities, as a part of the broader culture. Churches are,
61
Clark, The Gothic Revival, p.102.
62
Brooks, The Gothic Revival, p.101, which also gives a list of comparable examples.
63
See Chapter 5.
51