English Church Architecture.
HELMINGHAM, St. Mary (TM 191 576), SUFFOLK. (Bedrock: Upper Cretaceous, Upper Chalk.)
A church with a proud W. tower dated c. 1490, by master mason Thomas Aldrych, and a large collection within of important seventeenth to nineteenth century monuments.
This is a long, though (as it is aisleless) not especially large church, situated on the edge of Helmingham Park, at the junction of the B1077 with the B1079. The building consists of a chancel with a lean-to N. vestry, a four-bay nave with a S. porch, and a W. tower, and it is the last that dominates its appearance when viewed from the south, together with the dormer window above the junction of the first and second nave bays from the east, presumably inserted to accommodate the great Jacobean memorial within. Indeed, fine though the building is, the monuments it contains are more notable. The architecture must be described first, however, and the tower is the correct place to begin, for while not the oldest part of the church, it is both the grandest and most closely ascribed, due to the survival of a building contract for the work, dated 1490, with one Thomas Aldrych, master mason of North Lopham, Norfolk, for an agreed price of £30.
Aldrych’s tower can probably serve as a good example of moderately
expensive parochial work in East Anglia at that date, as the donor, John
Tollemache, who also built Helmingham Hall, could surely have been
relied upon to insist on something up-to-date and in keeping with his
ambitions. It is faced in knapped flint and
rises in four stages
supported by diagonal buttresses with
flushwork decoration, to
reticulated bell
As to the rest of the building exterior, the oldest significant feature is the S. doorway to the nave (i.e. inside the porch), which is Early English in style and bears a complex series of mouldings around the arch, including rolls with fillets, springing from jambs of two orders, with more rolls with fillets at the sides. The nave windows, however, are Perpendicular insertions of similar design to the W. window to the tower. They have been renewed to the south, where they are separated by buttresses with flushwork decoration. The dormer window previously mentioned, has four lights and septfoil-cusped supermullioned tracery. The S. porch roof appears to have been raised at some stage from an original lower pitch, and the area on the S. front between the two gable lines has been filled with flint flushwork arches set out in two haphazardly-arranged tiers. The Victorian chancel windows, in Decorated style, may be the work of Anthony Salvin (1799 - 1881), who restored the church c. 1840.
Inside the church, the tower arch is very tall and formed of a flat-chamfered order supported on semi-octagonal responds and of two slightly hollowed outer orders that continue all the way round without intervening capitals. The chancel arch consists of two flat-chamfered orders springing from semi-octagonal responds. The nave has an attractive collar beam roof with pendants hanging from the junctions of the principal rafters with the collars and from the centres of the collars themselves, cross-bracing between the bays, and deep wall plates carved with what may loosely be described as shell patterns and roundels containing wheels of mouchettes. The font (illustrated left) is sufficiently similar to that at neighbouring Pettaugh to suggest it may be by the same hand, being decorated by lion supporters alternating with buttresses around the stem and by lions alternating with shields on the faces of the bowl.
The more important monuments within the building are now probably best described in date order, beginning with those erected in the seventeenth century and continuing with those of the eighteenth and nineteenth. Only two of these were listed by Rupert Gunnis, both of which are signed by Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823) (Dictionary of British Sculptors: 1660-1851, London, The Abbey Library, 1951, pp. 276-279), although notes in the church ascribe a third to Peter Scheemakers, to whom Nollekens was apprenticed in 1750. The writer could find no signature on this, however, and nor did Pevsner appear to notice one.
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MONUMENTS:
The arch in the upper tier has a standing figure on either side, and there is an architrave above with a pinnacle at either end, two reclining putti inside these, and an achievement in the centre.
(ii) On the N. wall of the nave, a superficially similar but less well designed monument to yet another Lionel Tollemache (d. 1640), features a painted and rather rigid reclining figure behind two tall coffered arches, supported on Corinthian columns in black alabaster, the middle one of which inevitably obscures part of the effigy behind.
(iii) On the N. wall of the chancel, in the fourth position from the east, a monument to Lieutenant-General Thomas Tollemache, who died at Brest (France) in 1694, displays a finely-carved bust on a pedestal, with the instruments of war behind, depicted in shallow relief, and beneath, a long inscription giving details of his many campaigns.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MONUMENTS:
'Attempts to imitate [Scheemaker's] design at cut price can be quite amusing in their crudity. Such is the monument set up by Lady Dysart to her deceased husband at Helmingham in Suffolk that was announced completed in 1732. Made by William Palmer, it is essentially an exercise is reducing the design to a composition that was sufficiently light to be suspended from the wall. In essence, the composition was abbreviated to donor figure and reclining subject of grief, the scale of the design being insufficient to carry the gravitas of the original concept.' Scheemakers huge standing monument to the first Duke of Buckingham was completed in 1723 and included, besides effigies of the deceased and his wife, a life-sized winged figure of Time standing on a ledge above, holding portrait medallions, and well-fed, child-sized putti peering down from the corners.
NINETEENTH CENTURY MONUMENTS: (i) On the N. wall of the nave, immediately west of the N. door, an impressive wall monument (right) commemorates the Countess of Dysart (d. 1804), showing on the left hand side, a woman leaning on her elbow on the plinth beneath a central urn and with a book open on her lap, and on the right, a weeping putto leading a lamb. It is signed, as already mentioned, by Joseph Nollekens (1737 - 1823), a fine artist who made a particular reputation for himself by carving busts of Charles Fox and William Pitt the Younger, though he was himself the subject of 'probably what is the most candid, pitiless and uncomplimentary biography in the English Language, Nollekens and His Times [by] J.T. Smith, the sculptor's pupil, [one-time]friend and disappointed executor' (Dictionary of British Sculptors). The scene itself fails to show much originality and it is striking how generally similar it looks to William Palmer's monument to the Earl of Dysart, just discussed, but note, the deceased who is being commemorated here is a woman(!), and the inscription beneath records the Man of Feeling's proper response to the loss of his wife, in this case after thirty-one years of marriage: 'Her Death was lamented and regretted by all, and particularly by her afflicted and disconsolate Husband, who erected this Monument as a Mark, [illeg.] as it is, of his Grief and Affection, and to perpetuate the memory of the most excellent of Women.., [whose] loss was irreparable to her Husband, to her Relations, and to her Friends.'
(iii) In a round-arched recess in the chancel S. wall, a monument to John, 1st Baron Tollemache (d. 1890), features another bust beneath another broken pediment above, this time supported on two black alabaster columns, which Pevsner ascribed to Thomas Mayes.
Other (lesser) monuments include two by J. Bedford of London (d. 1875), commemorating Vice-Admiral J.R Delap (d. 1837) and Georgina Louisa Tollemache d. 1846), and a third to Lady Emma Tollemache (d. 1869) by Thomas Gaffin. Gunnis recorded Gaffin's workshop as ceasing production c.1865, but clearly that cannot be right. |