Rushbrooke church, Suffolk

Approached down one of the three narrow winding lanes which provide the only access through bucolic Suffolk fields, and some distance from anywhere in particular, Rushbrooke church is one of the most surprising and enchanting in the county. The first unusual features are the three crowstepped gables; the porch has six steps, the nave seven and the chancel eight. I hope that occasionally murders of crows take advantage of them and alight here. Otherwise the exterior is unexceptional; the windows (of brick on the north) are all late Perpendicular. The lower stage of the tower looks Decorated (see the west window); Bettley/Pevsner record a 1407 bequest for 'making the tower', but my guess is that this refers only to the top stage where the bell-openings have segmental arches probably consistent with that date. 

Our first entry is puzzling. Normally we enter through the south (or occasionally north) door of a church and at once we see more or less the whole of the building. But Rushbrooke keeps its cards close to its chest. Here we find ourselves in a small room or vestibule with two fonts - one stone, one wood - a few minor monuments against the walls at ground level, some random objects such as fire extinguishers and what seems to be a five-tiered hat stand, and some steps to the right leading up to a locked door. In effect we're in a small section of the south aisle which has been partitioned off from the rest of the church. Turn left, and then right through a curtain, and suddenly we're surrounded by a bewildering profusion of apparently Gothic woodwork. 

On the north and south are tiered choir stalls, as in a college chapel (though there the stalls would be found in the chancel, whereas here they're in the nave). And if we turn around and look west we see an organ with dozens of painted pipes rising above a mountain range of gables and with an octofoil 'rose window', and topped by three extravagantly crocketed and finialed pinnacles. 

This is all exhilarating, even though it turns out to not be quite what it seems. It isn't medieval, but dates from the later 1830s*, and is the work of one man. He was Colonel Robert Rushbrooke (1770-1845), a fascinating character (as the linked article explains). He moved to Rushbrooke Hall probably in the late 1820s when his father was ill (he died in 1829); the Hall was a major Tudor mansion which was tragically demolished in 1961. The 'Colonel', as he was generally known, had never been in the Army, though he did reach the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Suffolk Militia during the panic over the anticipated Napoleonic invasion early in the century, was a conscientious JP and a not particularly dedicated MP. He was a keen traveller, sometimes accompanied by his wife, and once got as far as Moscow; during his voyages he acquired numerous art works for his own collections. He also, in the 1820s, acted as an agent for his friend Henry Cust, who wanted to fill his local church, Cockayne Hatley, Beds, with foreign furnishings mostly from the Low Countries. For example, in 1826 he bought and shipped the baroque choir stalls from the Regular Augustinian Priory in Oignies, Belgium, plus a Renaissance pulpit from Antwerp, which together cost £345 (about £30,000 today). (Consequently Cockayne Hatley is one of the most remarkable churches in the country.) What's more, he tried his hand as an architect in 1838 when he designed the gatehouse for Melford Hall, Long Melford, Suffolk (now a National Trust property), a successful Tudor-style composition.

However, the Colonel's all-consuming passion was not so elevated: woodwork. The stalls and organ (and also the font and pulpit) are all his own work (though he must have had some help in assembling them). He cannibalised Tudor panelling from the Hall to provide himself with raw materials (two rooms were completely stripped of their woodwork for this purpose and were thereafter known as 'the unfinished rooms'), and made use of some original bench ends with poppyheads, and a few other bits and pieces. 

He seems to have taken particular delight in carving the spandrels of the lower benches with little designs (though the motif of a shield flanked by wing-like leaves is repeated over and over, so his invention was not limitless).

Dragons or wyverns

Chickens

Fish

Crosses

Possibly bats (Simon Knott interprets them as shrouded skulls)

Snakes

Tudor roses

Grapes

Lions

Birds

Chalices

Rabbits

Five-pointed stars

Tudor roses

Three-sided pyramids

Some of the bench ends have Catholic symbolism, which would have been regarded as shocking, even outrageous by many people in a Church of England church in the 1830s ('No Popery!' was a common rallying cry then and later). There's no record (as far as I know) of the Colonel being criticised for his choices. Maybe as they were so out of the way no one who could have been troubled by them saw them, or the fact that he was Lord of the Manor (and an MP) allowed him to get away with it. Neither do we know his motives; was he a Catholic sympathiser, or was he simply attracted to the symbols for aesthetic or sentimental reasons?

This is the only one with two different images. On the left, possibly manna, and on the right a shell (probably referencing pilgrimages) and a rosary, the most nakedly Catholic symbol of all. It's possible that the grapes (referencing wine and therefore communion/mass) and the crosses would also have been dangerously close to Popery.

The result of all this woodcarving is a vision of late medieval England as it should have been, presided over by that glorious organ. The organ ... oh yes; I was coming to that. Just as the stalls are arranged to serve a collegiate congregation that never existed, the organ, with its bundles of gilded and painted pipes - I count forty-one - is a fake. An illusion. The pipes are not connected to the humble reed organ that provides the music. They are eternally silent. They're a bare-faced lie. But I don't care.

There's much original woodwork in the church too. All the roofs are essentially original (fifteenth century).

The steeply-pitched nave roof is plainer and perhaps earlier than that of the chancel.

The cambered tie beams, wall-posts and wall-plates of the chancel roof are attractively decorated with a sinuous tracery design.

The rood beam, a rare survival, runs across the church between the nave and chancel. The underside is decorated with soufflets (circles which have been stretched into two points on opposite sides, such as are seen in numerous Decorated reticulated windows) containing quatrefoils which in turn contain flowers. Each end is supported by a wall-post featuring a carved figure beneath a canopy. Originally the beam would have supported a rood (a crucifix, usually flanked by Sts Mary and John).

Now, however, the beam supports a coat of arms, alleged to be that of Henry VIII. It comprises a portcullis, dragon, shield topped by a crown, greyhound and Tudor rose, and on the beam itself are the words 'dieu et mon droiet' ('God and my right'). If it truly is what it seems to be it's not only rare but unique; no other church has such a thing. It is generally agreed that the Colonel must have put it there at about the same time as he introduced the stalls, but did he also make it? Is it as illusory as the organ? Or perhaps he didn't make it but acquired it from elsewhere (which doesn't preclude the possibility that it's a fake). It could have been concocted by an 18th century antiquarian, perhaps as a curiosity rather than a deliberate deception. Simon Knott does a good job of summing up the evidence; he also raises the possibility that it is in fact the arms of not Henry VIII but VII. Perhaps a close forensic examination by an art historian could settle the matter.

The east window (and the one in the south aisle) has much late medieval and Early Modern stained glass, allegedly from Little Saxham Hall (demolished in 1773). On the left is a bishop, probably fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and on the right another figure, which, on close inspection, seems to dissolve into incoherent fragments. There's a lot of very enjoyable sixteenth century heraldry.

Equally enjoyable are the two sixteenth century Flemish roundels of unicorns (often taken to be symbols of Christ (see also here)).

In 1497 Sir Thomas Jermyn (whose family had lived in Rushbrooke since the 13th century) left £66 3s 4d (about £63,000 today - incidentally, roughly a thousandfold increase) in his will to have the south aisle extended eastwards to create a family chapel, or mausoleum, in which he could be buried. However, no monument to him survives. But there are several monuments to subsequent Jermyns.

Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, 1605-84, was the most colourful and significant member of the family. He was an MP (from the age of 20) and a courtier to Charles I; he helped to negotiate the King's marriage to Henrietta Maria of France. He formed a close alliance with Henrietta Maria, so much so that the gossip at the time, and later, was that they were having an affair. In 1633 he was banished to France by the King as he had refused to marry Elizabeth Villiers (a maid of honour), who was pregnant (presumably by him), on the grounds that she'd slept with two other men. Henrietta Maria persuaded the King to allow him back in 1636. 

He fled to France on his own volition in 1641, during the early stages of the Civil War, when Parliament discovered that he'd been involved in a plot to raise an army against them. Henrietta Maria was in the Hague, and he joined her there, where he assisted her in financing an army to invade England. One source of income was her pawning her crown jewels. They landed together, with an army including French officers, at Bridlington, Yorkshire, in 1643, and joined the King in Oxford; he was created Baron Jermyn of St Edmondsbury.** In 1644, as the war continued, he and Henrietta Maria once more left for France, not to return to England until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

In-fighting among the English court exiled to France during the Commonwealth limited his power and influence, but he remained an important courtier, especially in negotiating with the French. In 1659 he was created Earl of St Albans. He had incurred vast debts in the Royalist cause, and Charles granted him leases on several places in England (and America) in recompense. One of these was St James, Westminster, which he developed, and consequently he is often known as 'the Founder of the West End'. Despite Charles' gifts Jermyn died owing an astounding £60,000 (over £11 million today), which perhaps explains the relative plainness of his monument.

Thomas, Lord Jermyn, d.1703. The heraldic plaque flanked by grumpy putti is clumsy.

Sir Robert Davers (d.1722) and his sons (d.1723 and 1743).

Much the most interesting and touching monument is that to Thomas Jermyn, who died aged 15 in 1692:

It's the only monument with an effigy, which is a little smaller than life size. He reclines on one elbow, his hand on a skull; there's something almost jaunty about the pose of his right leg. He's dressed and bewigged in the manner of an adult, as was the custom at the time, and has a neutral expression on his face. The carving is at least averagely good, and I'm surprised that it hasn't been tentatively assigned to a sculptor. The inscription tells a melancholy story: he 'most unfortunately lost his life by the accidentall fall of a Maft, [the original uses the long 's', which looks similar to a lower case 'f', here, but, oddly, nowhere else] on the 27th day of December 1692.' My first thought was that he could have been a midshipman (a young trainee officer in the Royal Navy), but by chance his death was recorded by a diarist, John Hervey,*** 1st Earl of Bristol, which gives some of the details. 'DEC. 27. - Tuesday, Mr Thomas Jermyn going to play in a Liter which ley upon the river behind Beaufort House,**** ye mast fell down upon him (they being about to lower it) and beat out his brains.' So far from being a proto-adult, as his clothing and my guess would suggest, he was still boyish enough to be drawn to places where he could play. A liter (ie lighter) was a flat-bottomed barge which transported goods and passengers from larger ships moored away from the quay or bank because their drafts were too deep to get closer; the lighters enabled their contents to alight on solid ground. What makes all this even more poignant is that if this page of genealogy is correct, then Thomas's 'unhappy Father and Mother' had nine children, seven of whom died in early infancy. Only one, Merielina (1672-1727), survived into adulthood. The death, therefore, of their only surviving son aged 15 years and 26 days, on the very verge of adulthood, must have been an especially bitter blow.

The church is a short distance from the hamlet of Rushbrooke, and it's worth having a stroll. This very substantial Tudor brick well-house, with a pyramidal roof and no fewer than eight buttresses - surely massively over-engineered for its function - is the only relic of what once must have been a lively though small community. As we've seen, the Jermyn family owned it in the Middle Ages, though it passed to the Danvers in 1703; the Rushbrookes bought it in 1808 (they had some claim to having founded it, hence their name). They stayed a little over a century, until it was acquired by Lord Rothschild in 1938. As far as I know the Rothschilds still own it, and all the modern improvements (but also the demolition of the hall) are due to them.

Built 1956-63 to accommodate estate workers, the Hamlet (as it's named) comprises white-painted houses with monopitch slate roofs. Everything is immaculate; the gardens are beautifully tended, and each one is enclosed by an identical yew hedge trimmed with mathematical precision. On the day I was there apart from a solitary woman mowing the grass there was no sign of life at all. No doubt this was simply because everyone who lives there was at work or school, but it did feel a bit Midwich Cuckoo-like.

Rushbrooke church was open when I visited. 

* Bettley/Pevsner say 1820s, but Tracy (p.327) states that it must have been constructed in the later 1830s and finished by 1840.

** An information sheet in the church strongly implies that this was because had he been captured as a commoner by the Parliamentarians he would have been hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, but as an aristocrat the punishment would have been simply hanging, a much more merciful death. However, I'm not sure that he would have been executed at all, and if he were would the Parliamentarians observe the niceties of social decorum?

*** Two items on the same double page spread catch my attention. On June 30th Hervey records that 'The Castle of Namur capitulated, and ye garrison march'd out the next day when ye ffrench took possession of it.' The Siege of Namur was where Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby (one of my favourite fictional characters) was wounded in the groin. And on March 7th 1693 Hervey records the death of his wife, Isabella, 'at ye very moment she was deliver'd of my daughter Elizabeth.' The following page consists entirely of mourning quotations in Latin and English.

**** Beaufort House, built by Thomas More in 1520 and demolished in 1740, was where the northern end of Battersea Bridge now is, at the junction of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street.