This engaging and wide-ranging collection of essays contributes much to our appreciation of a building that lay at the heart of English government for over 500 years, and yet has hitherto escaped the serious scrutiny it deserves. Presented in two parts, the book charts the life of St Stephen’s from its creation as a Plantagenet chapel royal, to its post-Reformation transformation into the first permanent seat of the House of Commons. A product of the recent Virtual St Stephen’s collaboration led by the University of York,Footnote ¹ it brings together the exceptionally rich, but previously disparate scholarship on a building that paradoxically seems to have become all the more fascinating after its catastrophic destruction by fire in 1834. Indeed, as those who have contributed to the volume demonstrate, it is a building that has enjoyed a legacy long outlasting its physical existence and which continues to inform parliamentary process and ritual today.

Commissioned by Edward i in 1292, and completed by his dynastically-minded grandson some seventy years later, St Stephen’s Chapel and its community of canons were created with the specific purpose of interceding with God for crown and kingdom. This impressive two-storey structure, fashioned using the same powerfully resonant materials deployed in Westminster’s neighbouring abbey, enclosed a relatively intimate ceremonial space at the junction of public and private in the monarch’s primary residence, the astonishing magnificence of its carefully devised decoration and the liturgy conducted within it reflecting Edward iii’s charismatic notion of sanctified kingship. Tim Ayers, FSA – who has recently published, with Maureen Jurkowski, a comprehensive translation of St Stephen’s exceptionally informative fabric accounts (Ayers and Jurkowski Reference Ayers and Jurkowski2020) – opens with an insightful exploration of the creation of a building that was, with its exquisite microarchitectural detail and expansive glazing, both at the vanguard of European architectural developments and the yardstick against which future royal foundations would be measured.

St Stephen’s Chapel, as the late Mark Ormrod’s characteristically illuminating overview attests, became a physical expression of ‘the English monarchy’s institutional power and ritualised magnificence’. John Harper and Magnus Williamson, FSA, each make valuable contributions to our understanding of the daily activities and liturgies undertaken within the royal chapel, with its novel emphasis on a constant round of sung prayer and the proliferation of polyphonic compositions by some of the most talented musicians of the age. James Hillson surveys the stylistic developments and accommodations made to the chapel’s design over the course of its unusually protracted creation, and the political events that served as a catalyst for these creative innovations, while Elizabeth Biggs examines the evolution of the chapel’s collegiate foundation over its 200-year existence up until 1548, when it became one of the highest-profile casualties of Edward iv’s Second Chantries Act.

Chapters by Paul Binski and Jane Spooner, FSA, underline St Stephen’s status as one of England’s most opulent and enduringly influential decorative programmes, for which there survive exceptionally detailed accounts records. While distinguished – like the Sainte-Chapelle, upon which it was undoubtedly modelled – by exceptional expanses of figurative glass, the chapel saw, under Edward iii, a renewed emphasis on painted decoration, including the unusually forward-looking portrayal of dynastic devotion on the chapel’s east wall. Spooner undertakes a rigorous and detailed exploration of the only surviving elements of the chapel’s painted interior, namely the exquisite Old Testament fragments now held in the British Museum. Part of a narrative scheme with accompanying textual inscriptions executed on stonework inserted into the lower sections of the window recesses, the stories of Job and Tobit are discussed as moral exempla, demonstrating the triumph of faith over adversity in an iconographic scheme that, Spooner suggests, echoed the family-focused piety of the altar wall murals.

A compelling examination of the evolution of St Stephen’s, from consecrated royal chantry to debating chamber for the Commons, is undertaken by John Cooper, FSA, and his co-authors in the volume’s second half. Evoking the expanding rows of benches required to accommodate Parliament’s ever swelling numbers, he reflects on the ways in which the physical constraints of the chapel space informed parliamentary practices while affording the Commons a permanence previously reserved for the Lords. Murray Tremellen explores the modernising alterations to the chamber made by Wren, as well as more radical and destructive interventions by Wyatt, while Paul Seaward provides fascinating reflections on the legacy of the chapel space that, as one MP remarked, fostered ‘honest confrontation’ over the ‘slithering uncertainties of semicircular assemblies’. Indeed, so entrenched had this architectural format become by the time of the infamous fire, that it informed subsequent Commons chambers designed by Barry and Gilbert Scott (developments eloquently recounted by Rosemary Hill, FSA, Rebekah Moore and Mark Collins, FSA). It is surely testament to the legacy of St Stephen’s Chapel that both architects chose to perpetuate the vernacular ‘English’ gothic style as a means of communicating political stability at Westminster.

Perhaps one of the most interesting narratives to run through the closing chapters of this study, however, is the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a group of antiquaries and architects whose diligent work – even before the galvanising catastrophe of the Westminster fire – began to foster an appreciation of the nation’s medieval heritage. John Carter’s vital documentation of the palace in the 1780s and 1790s, and the tenacious persistence of John Thomas Smith in recording the ruined chapel’s decorative scheme, mark them out as pioneers in their field, advocating better-informed preservation of the medieval past. Theirs was an approach infinitely more perceptive than the distorted ‘Gothic’ ideals doggedly pursued by Barry and his successors, and it was from these somewhat unfashionable early antiquarian endeavours that the foundations of modern-day conservation principles can be seen to have emerged.