‘Daylight upon magic’: Stained Glass and the Victorian Monarchy

Abstract

This article presents stained glass as an important source of material evidence for attitudes to monarchy in Victorian Britain. It argues that expressions of veneration for Victoria by different religious constituencies were not merely instinctual and affective but considered and erudite. The ways in which different Anglican constituencies in particular marked key moments in Victoria’s reign within their churches made her person and throne a symbol for their ecclesiastical visions. The article supports its argument by offering a close, contextual reading of one such memorial, Charles Eamer Kempe’s Diamond Jubilee window (1898) in St Saviour’s, Southwark. Although nominally intended as a memorial to the long dead Prince Albert, it made only oblique reference to him. Instead, the window’s patron and the church’s rector William Thompson described the four figures depicted in its lights — Pope Gregory, King Ethelbert, Stephen Langton, and William of Wykeham — as ‘illustrating the union of <i>Church and State</i>’. Its message that the national Church had always been the indivisible ally of godly monarchs since the dawn of English history was the more powerful when read against Kempe and Thompson’s broader scheme for the redecoration of the restored St Saviour’s. Together they created a series of windows which not only interwove the English monarchy with the cosmic salvation narrative of Christianity but represented the church as a benevolent and inclusive patron of eminent writers, thinkers, and philanthropists in Southwark.