In 1984 St Mary and All Saint’s Church, Chesterfield celebrated being 750 years old with a new window depicting the history of Chesterfield from the eleventh century onwards. It begins by depicting the Battle of Chesterfield in 1266 between Henry of Almain, the nephew of King Henry III, and Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby all the way through to mines at Clay Cross, the Midland Railway Station and one of George Stephenson’s locomotives. He made his home at Tapton House.
Incidentally, St Mary’s and All Saints is the largest church in Derbyshire, famous for its twisted spire – the result of inexperienced workmen using green wood in the aftermath of the Black Death of 1348. The spire’s wooden skeleton sits on top of the church’s tower – weight is the only thing that holds it in place (or it least it was when I went up there many many years ago). George Stephenson is buried at Holy Trinity Church, Newbold Road (pictured with the locomotive) and is said to haunt Tapton House. I don’t know about that but there is a fine statue of him holding a model of The Rocket outside Chesterfield’s railway station.
There may have been a church on the site of All Saints in Breadsall since Saxon times – certainly the stones at the bottom of the tower suggest as much. The Normans rebuilt and there were further changes in the thirteenth century to create a place of worship in the Early English style. Succeeding generations placed their mark on the building. It even boasted a set of chained medieval books and an Elizabethan altar until the night of 4th June 1914 when the whole lot went up in smoke.
The problem with this neat scenario is that aside from Alice’s confession (seated on the far left of the picture next to her two daughters and a prison warder) the only evidence of suffragette involvement were three letters which arrived after the event and some graffiti on a wall a mile away – in other cases letters were left at the scene at the time of the arson rather than arriving afterwards. The only other evidence was a woman sized hole in a window and a hat pin which was found nearby.
Thomas Beresford died some ten years after his wife, Agnes. They were buried in St Edmund’s Church, Fenny Bentley opposite their home in Fenny Bentley Old Hall. Their tomb tells us quite a bit about the couple – they had sixteen sons and five daughters – all of them in their shrouds, as indeed are Thomas and Agnes.
St John the Evangelist in Leeds is a seventeenth century church built between 1632-34. To put that in context this is during the later part of the twelve years when Charles I ruled without Parliament. In 1638 John Hampden was sent to trial for refusing to pay ship tax (traditionally paid in coastal communities but not by the whole country) and John Lilburne was flogged for selling un-licensed Puritan books. Between the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 and the onset of the English Civil War there were an increasing number of strands of protestant belief. Many of these branches of Puritanism did not want to be part of the Church of England because they saw it as too ritualistic and too hierarchical. In 1639 Charles I went to war with his Scottish subjects in the so-called Bishops War about the prescriptive content of the prayer book. During this period of increasing religious turbulence, just prior to the English Civil War, very few new churches were built in England. During the Commonwealth period new churches harked back to the past – the Crown and to superstitious times. To build a new church would have been an act of defiance against Parliament. Prior to the Commonwealth Period there were new chapels built during the reign of Charles I, notably by Inigo Jones in 1627 – the Queen’s Chapel at St James. However, the queen in question was Henrietta Maria who was, of course, a Catholic. Consequentially if you had enough money for a new-fangled architect designed place of worship you ran the risk of being associated with European ideas, the Court, Laudianism and at worst Catholicism. In 1636 a new chapel was built in Somerset House – it was a Catholic Chapel.
Parliament believed that Harrison was a Royalist and there is a tale that when the king was in Leeds as a prisoner that Harrison took him a lidded tankard of ale, except rather than ale the contents of the pot were gold coins – whether this was to support the king during his captivity or facilitate his escape is a matter for speculation. The moment is commemorated in the Harrison Memorial Window but this was not created until the nineteenth century. And it would have to be said that Harrison didn’t get on with all of Leeds’ inhabitants. There were a number of scurrilous songs about him – we know about this because there was a court case with Harrison taking twenty-two people to court for libel.
The problem for Harrison was that he lived in difficult times and despite his generosity he was insufficiently Puritan for some tastes. In time he found himself being fined by Parliament – which must have been somewhat irritating given that he had loaned them money in 1642. As a result of his ultimate loyalty to Charles I and also as a result of his religious faith which although not described as Laudian was not as austere as Puritan taste demanded much of his wealth was confiscated and his is, described by an article from the Yorkshire Evening Post (29 Oct 2005), as spending his final years in comparative poverty.
