A county of new towns and London sprawl still has some interesting Catholic heritage.
I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
The large unwelcome fields of roots…
And now I see these fields once more
Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,
Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched,
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills…
They still are there. But now the shire
Suffers a devastating change,
Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.
One can’t be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root
Where Father and his business friends
Drove in the Landaulette to shoot.
So John Betjeman lamented the increasing urbanisation of Hertfordshire, a slightly curious county at the best of times. However, well preserved rural landscapes and historic estates still surprisingly survive, juxtaposed with new towns and main roads.
The county has two salient features.
The first of these is the A1(M) hurrying people from north to south, and vice versa, through the county; the Great North Road was a more romantic title.
The second was the dominance of the great Benedictine Abbey of St Alban’s throughout the Middle Ages. Built originally to house the remains of England’s proto-martyr of (probably) the late 3rd century, it achieved much of its present shape in the rebuilding of the 12th century with its sturdy tower and massive length of 85 metres, the longest medieval church in England. On the dissolution of the abbey in 1539, the church became the responsibility of the town. In 1877 the Anglican See of St Albans was created.
There seems to have been little active recusancy in the county, possibly through the establishment of the firmly Protestant Cecil family at Hatfield House, rebuilt in 1611. The only “blot” on the Cecil escutcheon was the 4th Earl of Salisbury who wisely, save for timing, became a Catholic in 1688.
Since the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, Hertfordshire has formed part of the Archdiocese of Westminster.
The earliest surviving post-Emancipation ecclesiastical building in Hertfordshire is the school chapel at St Edmund’s College, Ware; the latter traces its roots back to the seminary founded by Cardinal William Allen at Douai in 1568. In 1793 the French Revolution forced the Douai English College to transfer to Ware. In 1844 Bishop Thomas Griffiths, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, commissioned AWN Pugin to build the chapel of the College. It was consecrated in 1853. The main body of the beautiful chapel is built in Middle Pointed style in pale brown brick with ashlar dressings below a slate roof. The design is based on that of an Oxbridge chapel with a transeptal antechapel at the west, a long choir and side chapels. The main chapel is entered through an elaborate seven-bay-wide and two-bay-deep rood screen of Caen stone with graceful arches. The great rood is of carved oak with a painted pine wood figure of Our Lord. AWN Pugin was also responsible for the design of the high altar, the reredos, the stalls and the vast seven-light east window with its glass by Hardman. EW Pugin built the Lady Chapel while FA Walters built both the Shrine Chapel with its relic of St Edmund (Rich) from Pontigny, and the Galilee Chapel; Cardinal Francis Bourne (1861-1935), an alumnus of the school, is buried in the latter.
The Church of the Immaculate Conception and St Joseph, Hertford is a small stone-and-flint church built by the architect Henry Clutton in 1858-9 in 13th-century French Gothic style for the future Cardinal Vaughan. The site was originally owned by St Mary’s Priory, a daughter house of St Albans Abbey. The interior plan has a four-bay nave, a short polygonal chantry and a north aisle. A rather depressing reordering took place in the 1970s. Fortunately two decades later Fr Gladstone Liddle employed the architect Anthony Delarue to supervise a rich scheme of restoration and redecoration. Following the uncovering and conservation of the original painted design the sanctuary was repainted in 1996-97 with a new polychromatic scheme by Alexander Sidorov in collaboration with Howell & Bellion. A crucifix which had hung on the east wall was placed on a new rood beam across the chancel arch. A Gothic loggia was added outside the main entrance. Further wall paintings have been added around the altar in the Lady Chapel. The redecorated church is extremely beautiful.
One of the finest 19th-century churches is to be found in the somewhat unprepossessing purlieus of Watford. The foundation stone of the neo-Perpendicular Church of the Holy Rood was laid on August 29, 1889. The architect appointed was JF Bentley who was to go on to build Westminster Cathedral in very different (Byzantine) style. The exterior walls of the church are finished in knapped flint facing and stone dressing. The north-west corner has a splendid flint tower. Inside the nave is wide, and two tiered arcades separate it from the shallow transepts. Bentley’s harmonious and largely complete fittings are sum-ptuous. The single feature that dominates the church is the magnificent rood loft. Pevsner described the church as “one of the noblest examples of the refined, knowledgeable and sensitive Gothic Revival at that time.”
(AWN Pugin, Henry Clutton, JF Bentley, Fr Gladstone Liddle and Anthony Delarue were all converts to Catholicism.)
St Joseph and the English Martyrs, Bishop’s Stortford is a handsome Italianate church built in basilica style by E Doran Webb in 1906 for the Etonian convert and Redemptorist priest Fr Oliver Vassall-Phillips. The west front is stone with red-brick curved aisle walls. The interior plan consists of an aisled nave with a vaulted roof. There are many internal fittings of note, including the columnar baldacchino over the high altar of Carrara marble. The handsome high-backed timber sanctuary stalls were installed as a First World War memorial. The balustraded altar rails survive in part. In the 1970s destructive proposals for internal reordering were drawn up by Austin Winkley but these were thankfully never implemented, and instead the church was more modestly reordered in 1975. The Redemptorists left in 1994 and the parish has subsequently been served by diocesan priests.
In 1906 the convert son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the writer Mgr RH Benson, acquired Hare Street House and in part financed the nearby new Catholic church of St Richard of Chichester, Buntingford, which was built after his death in 1914 as a memorial in Perpendicular style by Arthur Young. The tower has a typical Hertfordshire copper spire. The Lady Chapel has a Bath stone Gothic altar and reredos and is furnished with curios probably collected by Mgr Benson. The latter was himself buried in the orchard at Hare Street over which a chapel by the convert Fr Benedict Williamson was erected in 1917. Hare Street House was bequeathed by Benson to the Archdiocese of Westminster as a country retreat for the archbishops. It was regrettably disposed of by the archdiocese in 2019. Benson’s corpse was exhumed and transferred to St Edmund’s Ware.
Other Catholic churches of interest in the county include St Thomas of Canterbury and the English Martyrs, Royston (the convert Fr Benedict Williamson 1916-19), Our Lady of Lourdes, Harpenden (FA Walters 1928-9), St Teresa of the Child Jesus, Borehamwood (FX Velarde 1961-2) and Corpus Christi, Tring (Anthony Delarue 1998-9).
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