St. Mary, Knebworth. St.Martin, Knebworth
Full bottomed wigs and tories.
The church lies in the park of Knebworth House, a Tudor brick mansion chopped about and given outrageous gothic fancy dress in the early Victorian period by the M.P. and novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton. Both books and house are flamboyant in style, and neither owes much to historical accuracy. His novels may be mostly forgotten, but the house is well known to the public through often having starred on t.v. and in films, and enough punters have coughed up their shillings to keep the scaly stucco beasts from falling on anyone’s head. The park is much used for concerts and events, and knights in armour are as likely as classic cars to be seen clanking their way across the fields by the church.
The village once stood between house and church, but the sight of the serfs proved too much for the sensitive souls who were lords of the manor, and all was swept away leaving just the twelfth century church with its fifteenth century tower. Even this seems to have got up one chatelaine’s nose; Lady Elizabeth Bulwer forbade tenants attending the church, built a mausoleum outside the churchyard for her mother and herself, and hid the tower by planting trees all around. She also argued with three rectors over tithes, refusing to speak to or acknowledge any of them.
Full bottomed wigs and tories.
The church lies in the park of Knebworth House, a Tudor brick mansion chopped about and given outrageous gothic fancy dress in the early Victorian period by the M.P. and novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton. Both books and house are flamboyant in style, and neither owes much to historical accuracy. His novels may be mostly forgotten, but the house is well known to the public through often having starred on t.v. and in films, and enough punters have coughed up their shillings to keep the scaly stucco beasts from falling on anyone’s head. The park is much used for concerts and events, and knights in armour are as likely as classic cars to be seen clanking their way across the fields by the church.
The village once stood between house and church, but the sight of the serfs proved too much for the sensitive souls who were lords of the manor, and all was swept away leaving just the twelfth century church with its fifteenth century tower. Even this seems to have got up one chatelaine’s nose; Lady Elizabeth Bulwer forbade tenants attending the church, built a mausoleum outside the churchyard for her mother and herself, and hid the tower by planting trees all around. She also argued with three rectors over tithes, refusing to speak to or acknowledge any of them.
The church still stands embowered in its own little wood, topped by the ubiquitous Hertfordshire spike. The spandrels of the doorway carry the pike head arms of donor Sir John Hotoft, ancestor of the current owners of the house. To the north of the church is one of several designer gravestones, that to head gardener John Kipling by Eric Gill, 1906, who renewed the lettering in the hall of the house. The architect Sir Edwin Lutyens married into the family, stayed here often and was responsible for designing several memorials both around the church and in the pet cemetery, fittings in both church and house, and gardens and buildings on the estate, including the Italianate church of St.Martin built in the modern village centre. This looks like a post modernist take on Inigo Jones’ barn/church at Covent Garden, and I’m sure that the 1960s loved it, finding it most amusing for its quotes, the two giant columns taking us back to Joachim and Boaz in the Temple at Jerusalem. Pevsner thought it one of Lutyens’ most remarkable churches, but then, he built very few, and the west end of this is not to his design. It has a spatially surprising interior wrapped up in an alien skin; as so often Lutyens is being clever for his friends. For me, the word that most succinctly sums it up is conceit, in all of its meanings, a dazzling game but somehow dishonest; worth a look to make your own mind up though, and open most days.
Back at St.Mary’s it’s not really the architecture that is the draw but the memorials that crowd the church. Apart from the ironwork screen under the tower and the carved Flemish scenes on the pulpit there is little of interest to be found in the nave. It is one of the many joys of the English parish church that magnates great and small would rather be commemorated in their family church near their roots: here that remembrance takes the grandest of forms. The archway to the Lytton chapel was originally opened up to take the chest tomb of John Hotoft, treasurer to King Henry V whilst Prince of Wales, later of the King’s Household and of the King’s wars and to Henry VI whilst King, an M.P. on many occasions, J.P., clerk of the court, keeper of the rolls of the Common Bench, controller of the dowager Queen’s property; a man who rose from a quiet legal background to become a power at court, and who paid for the tower and north east chapel . Only part of his brass remains on the floor beneath the archway, which now holds a 1935 memorial gate designed by Lutyens for Anthony, Viscount Knebworth, whose gravestone by the architect is outside. These gates replace the better Georgian ironwork now under the tower, which had been added when the chapel was extended to take early eighteenth century monuments.
From the churchyard this chapel has a humble secular look, with cottage style windows and tumbled brickwork buttresses; within it is packed with the grandest of tombs and their wrought iron railings, and white marble figures gesticulate on every side amidst columns and pediments. It feels like there’s no room to move. Sir William Lytton wallows in a wig, both of them full bottomed: carved by Edward Stanton stretched out on his marble bed. Life sized Virtues stand outside the four columns that support the coffered arch over head, and more figures look down from on top, really only visible from a ladder. Opposite is Sir George Strode, another mass of marble lawn and lace lying between two pillars with the pile of pediment and putti overhead contrasting with the ragged roof. They both look over their shoulders towards Lytton Strode Lytton who stands in breeches and bands, coat and big cuffs in a niche between pilasters under a broken pediment, a lighter baroque by Thomas Green of Camberwell of 1710, and the last of the big three. Less magisterial monuments to earlier and later Lyttons fill in the gaps with smaller figures or none; one of the most interesting is that to Anne Lytton of 1601, one of the St. John family. Her small marble tablet is decorated with symbols of death: a pot of dead flowers, a coffin, a skull, an hourglass, a pick and shovel, the hand of Fate cutting the thread of life: all fairly usual memento mori. Along the bottom, amongst rolling hills, the dead rise, heads and hands coming out of the soil, a quiet but disturbing detail amongst the baroque opera of the later tombs. There was only room for smaller kneeling figures on the monument to William Lytton Strode and his wife, but the 1732 memorial makes up for this by the wealth of small scale symbolic sculpture on the sarcophagus between them, with the family portrayed on a panel above.
There are a couple of brasses in the church, the best to Simon Bache of 1414, installed as rector here by Sir John Hotoft, and himself treasurer of the household of Henry V, and canon of St. Paul’s. It is probable that he was an absentee, appointing a vicar, and using his ecclesiastical appointments to finance his life at court. His worn brass is a good one with the folds of his robes reinforcing his praying hands, the simple shapes a foil for the detail of his cope, with its repetitive foliate designs and its recognisable saints engraved down each side. It is English, but with Flemish influence, and is on the south chancel wall. Opposite is the elegant memorial to Judith Strode of 1662, a surprisingly timeless white marble bust set against a sophisticated black background, baroque crossed with artisan mannerism that ends up looking almost art nouveau.
This is a church for the worship of ancestry, if not of the individual dead: for the importance of blood stock and of genes, for one family to inflate itself to itself. But by doing so through the medium of art, more is revealed than these powerful men perhaps could see; the craftsmanship is often superb, but the porcine underbelly of these lords may be the memory we carry away.
This church used to always be open, now it’s usually locked. Being on the lawn of the big house with all its paying visitors, you’d think they’d help . . . Contact 01438 747098 for access to St.Mary’s, 01438 313241 for St.Martin’s, which is open 8.30-3.00 in the week.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.
This is a church for the worship of ancestry, if not of the individual dead: for the importance of blood stock and of genes, for one family to inflate itself to itself. But by doing so through the medium of art, more is revealed than these powerful men perhaps could see; the craftsmanship is often superb, but the porcine underbelly of these lords may be the memory we carry away.
This church used to always be open, now it’s usually locked. Being on the lawn of the big house with all its paying visitors, you’d think they’d help . . . Contact 01438 747098 for access to St.Mary’s, 01438 313241 for St.Martin’s, which is open 8.30-3.00 in the week.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.