Introduction

English mediæval parish churches and cathedrals were largely Gothic, and Roman Catholicism had been practised therein, but since the 16th-century break with Rome, adherents to the old faith had had a very difficult time in these islands. Several plots, from those against Queen Elizabeth to the 1798 Irish Rebellion, all caused Roman Catholicism to be viewed with suspicion by a largely ‘Protestant’ nation. As the years passed, however, the Gothic connection with Roman Catholicism passed from common memory.

Gothic had enjoyed a certain notoriety in the 18th century, but began to be more fashionable when it was given the royal imprimatur at Carlton House (1807) and Windsor Castle (from 1824). As far as an appreciation of it as a serious style was concerned, the foundations had already been laid by writers such as Milner, Carter, Britton, A.C. Pugin, and Rickman, and as the 19th century progressed, publications based on meticulous surveys and analyses of real mediæval work appeared, completely superseding 18th-century whimsical, fanciful Gothick.

Then John Keble, defender of Anglicanism by recovering its historical links with the pre-Reformation Church, the Caroline High Churchmen, and Sacramentalism, in his Lectures on Poetry, given 1832–41, later (1844) published in Oxford by J.H. Parker as De Poeticæ vi Medica, described Gothic as the most beautiful of all architectural styles, and by far the most in harmony with the mysteries of religion (Lecture 3).

In October 1834 the old Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire, and with it the work of ‘The Destroyer’ Wyatt. Young Pugin was overjoyed. With this momentous conflagration the principles of Georgian Picturesque also went up in smoke, and on the site arose the new, Gothic Revival Palace of Westminster, won in competition by Charles Barry with whom A.W.N. Pugin was to collaborate on much of the detail.