Celia Fiennes wrote, over two hundred years ago, that the “great Church wch is dedicated to St. Albans is much out of repaire. I see the places in the pavement hat was worn like holes for kneeling by the devotes of ye Religion and his votery’s as they tell you, but the whole Church is so worn away that it mourns for some Charitable person to help repaire it.” That person was forthcoming in the fulness of time, in that ferocious controversialist and amateur architect, Lord Grimthorpe, who “restored” the Cathedral at his own expense. As a result, it mourns, and others mourn for it, more than ever. Enormous sums of money have been expended upon the vast building, amounting to over £160,000. Of this amount £40,000, raised by public subscription, went upon the works executed between 1870 and 1879. The remaining £120,000 or more was spent by Lord Grimthorpe in playing at being an architect.
NEW WAYS WITH AN OLD ABBEY
The Abbey had, indeed, been gradually falling into decay for many years, and, about the middle of the nineteenth century, had at last become quite ruinous. In 1833, some reparations had been made to the tower, but these were slight, and work was only seriously begun in 1856, following a faculty granted to a committee which, calling itself “national,” was nevertheless impotent to raise more than £30,000. Some slight accretions were made to this fund as the result of the added interest upon the Abbey being made the Cathedral Church of a new diocese, in 1875; but these were soon engulfed in the mere work of securing the sinking foundations. Sir Gilbert Scott was then called in to undertake the work, and instantly shored up the great tower, then on the point of falling. Until 1833, it had been crowned with a dwarf timber and leaden spire, but this had been removed, and the ring of eight bells had, three years earlier, been silenced, for fear of bringing the heavy mass down. Great cracks had appeared in the walls of the transepts, being slowly ground to powder by the settling of the tower, and the interior of the building was always filled with an impalpable dust, from the same cause. Still the tower sank slowly, and it was seen that the four great piers at the crossing, which had hitherto supported it, were at last failing. The real marvel was that they had not failed before, for a singular discovery was made at this time, at the base of the south-west pier, by which it was proved that at some distant period—probably about that of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.—an attempt had been made to wreck the place. A kind of cavern, some six feet wide, had been excavated in the foundation and strutted with timbering which had evidently been placed there for the two-fold purpose of protecting the excavators, and of firing it when the undermining process had been completed. Why this brutal idea had been abandoned, when so near completion, must be left to conjecture; but it is plain to see that in all those centuries the congregations and visitors to the Abbey had been in danger, at any moment, of being crushed to death by a possible sudden collapse of the tower.
This injury was repaired, and new foundations were laid, down to the solid chalk, and the upper parts of the tower were secured. Funds at that time permitted of little else being done. In 1871, an appeal for £50,000 was issued, resulting in a subscription of about £21,000; and in 1875, a further appeal for £30,000. Then the clerestory began to fall. A new faculty was granted, and more subscriptions came in, but by 1879 all these funds were again exhausted, and the restoration committee resigned. Then came the great opportunity which Lord Grimthorpe had long desired, of getting the restoration entirely into his own hands. He was an incredibly wealthy man,[2] with a passion for exercising the part of amateur architect, and an equal passion for controversy. He procured a new faculty, granting him unlimited power at his own expense, to “restore, repair, and refit the Church.” Thus, disastrously for antiquity, was the old building made over to him, without let or hindrance, to do as he would.
LORD GRIMTHORPE
The handiwork of Lord Grimthorpe is writ large, all over the building. He did the most extraordinary things. In restoring the transepts he put in what purported to be “Early English lancets,” with false heads that look like genuine heads from without, but from within are seen to be cut off square; and was so enamoured of the red Roman tiles that give so noble an appearance to the exterior that, in rebuilding the walls, he supplied the lack of genuine ones for the new work by especially manufacturing “Roman” tiles of his own, to form the walls of the south transept; designed in what has been very fitly styled “Railway-station Gothic.”
LORD GRIMTHORPE.
It would be wearisome to follow Lord Grimthorpe in detail, in his new way with an old Abbey. With extraordinary passion and virulent contempt for public opinion, he swept away genuine Norman work, and in many places gave a brand-new appearance where had before been the bloom of antiquity. Controversy followed upon controversy, during the progress of these works, and Lord Grimthorpe went grimly on his way, replying to arguments with the personal abuse of which he was a better master than he was of architecture. His critics were “the usual howlers”; Street to him was “the immortal author of the worst great Gothic building in the world,” by which, of course, he meant the Law Courts; the foremost architects and antiquaries talked “ignorant nonsense,” and were persons who would “call everything destruction on which they have not got a percentage.” Here, indeed, be “words that sting, and thoughts that burn.” They are vehement, and they hurt, which was the object of them. Like Alan Breck, he was a “bonnie fighter,” even though, as an architect, he did not begin to exist. One of his worst atrocities was the hateful wash-tub done in stone, which serves for pulpit in the nave.
His work is, indeed, only too evident all over the building, and he himself is represented in sculptured stone in a spandrel over one of the western porches; and is shown in the likeness of a recording angel, with a pen and a scroll upon which he is probably entering the sins of architects, or writing some new Evangel on matters architectural. But the sculptor, although the portrait is excellent, has made a mistake in representing him apparently at a loss for a word. Whether pleading a case in court, or abusing fellow-controversialists, his eloquence suffered from no such impediment.