Henry Jermyn
by Anthony Adolph (author of Full of Soup and Gold: The Life of Henry Jermyn)
The church of St James's Westminster was the brainchild of Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, K.G. (1605-1684). He was a Stuart courtier, who as a young man struck up a very close friendship with Charles I's young queen, Henrietta Maria of France, and remained her closest friend and servant all her life. It was rumoured at the time, and may actually be possible, that it was he, not Charles I, who was the true father of her son Charles II. Whatever the truth, Jermyn was certainly a father-figure in the young man's life. Jermyn shared Henrietta Maria's rise to influential power in her husband's court, and then all the troubles and dangers of the Civil War (1642-1649), and the long exile of the Stuart dynasty in Paris, while Olive Cromwell ruled England. During the war and exile, Jermyn worked unstintingly to preserve the Stuart dynasty and help Charles II to regain his throne, and consequently accrued a debt of some £45,000. He was very influential in restoring Charles II to the throne in 1660, but as the king could not possibly repay Jermyn in cash – the sum was about 6% of the state’s total annual income – he granted him the fields of St James’s, Westminster instead.
Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, from a portrait by Van Dyck
Jermyn could have crammed the area with unsanitary, unpaved streets and wooden, thatch-roofed houses, like the rest of London, but instead he implemented a very grand plan. Over the past century, the Italian renaissance in Classical architecture, that sought to rediscover and revive the great building styles of Imperial Rome, had reached Paris. Henrietta Maria’s Florentine mother Maria de’ Medici had been influential in this: through his friendship with Henrietta Maria, and his experience of modern Paris, Jermyn had been inspired to recreate something similar here in London, and so he did. He laid out St James’s Square, surrounded by tall, elegant buildings, and around it he planned a grid of broad, paved streets, including one that he named after himself, Jermyn Street. It all seems very familiar to us now because so much of London is like St James’s, but this is so because so many later builders were inspired by Jermyn’s development of St James’s. This came first. It took a long time to build, starting in 1661 and only just being finished in Jermyn’s lifetime.
Although Henrietta Maria was a Catholic, and her sons Charles II and James II became Catholics too, Jermyn had been brought up an Anglican and remained one all his life. His new development was part of the country parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields (though his development had put paid to most of the fields!), but to make it complete he wanted it to become a parish in its own right. He planned the site of a church just north of Jermyn Street, backing onto the little country lane called ‘Piccadilly’, but for years the church authorities stalled in giving permission to separate the area from St Martin’s. Eventually, Jermyn decided to put his own money into the project, £7,000 in all, laying the foundation stone of his church in 1676 and commissioning the promising young architect Sir Christopher Wren to design it. Wren responded with an appropriately Classical design, experimenting with the impressive barrel-vaulting he would later use, on a much larger scale, in St Paul’s Cathedral. To decorate the otherwise rather austere interior, Jermyn commissioned work from the talented young carver, Grinling Gibbon, some of which (such as the font, depicting Adam and Eve) survived the Blitz bombing of the church, so can still be admired now.
Sadly, Jermyn died in January 1684, in his house in St James’s Square (where Chatham House now stands) just before the church was completed. However, it was not long after that the Anglican authorities relented, and allowed the area to become a parish, with St James’s Church at its heart. On 13 July 1685, the Bishop of London led a procession of clergy into St James’s Square and up to the door of Jermyn’s house, where Jermyn’s lawyer Martin Folkes handed over the title deeds of St James’s Church. They then went up Duke of York Street and into the brand-new church, bishop, clergy, Folkes, Wren and all of Jermyn’s nephews and nieces, to attend the first service ever held there. Above the altar, on the sides of the furthest barrel vault, they could see, as we can now, two little shields showing a crescent moon between two stars on a black background: Jermyn’s coat of arms.
Jermyn had wanted to be buried in the parish church of his native Rushbrook, Suffolk, ‘amongst my ancestors’, and so he was, below an impressive Classical monument there. But Henry Jermyn’s true monuments are the streets and square of St James’s, and the beautiful church that still watches over it all.
Anthony Adolph (author of Full of Soup and Gold: The Life of Henry Jermyn)
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