CHURCH.
The church of St. Lawrence at Little
Stanmore was given by Roger de Rames (fl. 1130) to
St. Bartholomew's priory, (fn. 78) recorded as the appropriator c. 1244. There was a vicarage by that date (fn. 79)
and 16th-century incumbents were described as
vicars. (fn. 80) The living, however, first listed as a
donative in 1708, (fn. 81) was considered from the 17th to
early 19th centuries to be a perpetual curacy. (fn. 82)
Incumbents during that period normally called
themselves ministers, presumably in order to be
distinguished from their salaried curates. Henry
Poole styled himself rector from 1785, (fn. 83) although it
was not until after the District Church Tithes Act of
1865 that Little Stanmore was raised to become a
rectory, in 1868. (fn. 84) St. Lawrence's church served the
whole parish, save during a brief period when the
duke of Chandos maintained his chapel at Canons, (fn. 85)
until 1932. The conventional district of All Saints,
Queensbury, was then constituted out of the
southern part of Little Stanmore and northern
Kingsbury, becoming a separate parish in 1941. (fn. 86)
After the Reformation the church was impropriated by the lay lords of the manor, being acquired
by Hugh Losse in 1552 (fn. 87) and passing from his
grandson to the Lake family. (fn. 88) Although the profits
were vested in trustees under the will of Sir Lancelot
Lake, (fn. 89) the right of presentation was retained by his
heirs and afterwards, at least until 1786, by the dukes
of Chandos. (fn. 90) In 1810 the trust had been 'inefficient
for some time' (fn. 91) and in 1811 the advowson was the
subject of a Chancery suit, which perhaps stemmed
from a claim that William Hallett had bought it after
the first duke's death. (fn. 92) From 1811 until 1829 the
rector of Great Stanmore acted as minister. (fn. 93) In
1832 trustees presented George Mutter, (fn. 94) who
himself soon acquired the advowson (fn. 95) and all tithes
on most of the parish, although those on some 127 a.
became payable to Sarah Noyes and the Grand
Junction Canal Co. (fn. 96) The right of presentation was
exercised by Maria Mutter in 1844, by Thomas
Murray Mackie in 1850, by Dorothy Norman in
1868, and by the retiring rector, John Burton
Norman, in 1897. (fn. 97) It passed between 1907 and 1915
to Muriel, Countess De La Warr, (fn. 98) and was
transferred in 1929 to the bishop of London. (fn. 99)
The church was valued at 30s. c. 1244-8 (fn. 1) and £2
in 1291. (fn. 2) The vicarage was said to be worth 3 marks
c. 1244 (fn. 3) and the vicar was paid 46s. 8d. by St.
Bartholomew's in 1535. (fn. 4) It was alleged in 1638 that
the 'curate', apparently the incumbent, had for long
received one penny out of every shilling for the
yearly value of all unploughed and pasture lands but
that Lady Lake would pay nothing for her many
hundreds of acres, had forbidden other parishioners
to pay, and had laid claim to his dwelling house. The
council referred the complaint to the Attorney-General for prosecution and ordered that meanwhile
the curate should enjoy his customary rights. (fn. 5)
Lancelot Lake, as impropriator, received tithes
worth about £50 a year and paid £40 to the minister
in 1650; (fn. 6) in his will, proved in 1680, however, the
profits were reckoned at £100. (fn. 7) After tithes had been
demanded from the tenants of the free school lands,
the vestry in 1792 forbade payment and resolved to
meet the costs of any action which the incumbent
might bring. (fn. 8) In 1835 the net income of the incumbent and chief tithe-owner, George Mutter, was
£267. (fn. 9) A rent-charge of £415 10s. was awarded in
1838 to Mutter and a further £36 10s. to Sarah
Noyes and the Grand Junction Canal Co., in lieu of
all tithes. (fn. 10) Similar sums were payable in 1887, when
there was no glebe. (fn. 11)
In 1638 it was stated that for about 40 years the
curates had enjoyed a dwelling house near the
church, where Lady Lake was ordered to leave the
incumbent undisturbed. (fn. 12) A vicarage house, with its
yard and great orchard and an orchard adjoining the
churchyard on the north, was mentioned in 1666. (fn. 13)
It may have been the house, 'fit for residence' in
1835, (fn. 14) which stood west of the church, with a
garden on the south side of Whitchurch Lane. (fn. 15) The
building was replaced in 1852 by one designed by
Anthony Salvin, east of the church and on what is
now the north-west side of St. Lawrence Close. (fn. 16)
Salvin's rectory was pulled down in 1967 and a
smaller house built in St. Lawrence Close in 1970. (fn. 17)
William Paris, by will dated 1271-2, left 5s. for the
fabric of Little Stanmore church and 24 sheep to
support a light there. (fn. 18) In 1547 there was a church
house for which the tenant William Stile, perhaps a
relative of the vicar John Stile, paid 5s. a year. (fn. 19)
A church hall had been built in Whitchurch Lane,
between Meads and Montgomery roads, by 1911.
After fires in 1966 and 1970, a new one was opened
in 1972. (fn. 20)
The curate Richard Davy, a former Carthusian,
was denounced to Cromwell in 1538 by the curates
of Kingsbury and Hendon for objecting to the
suppression of images. (fn. 21) Davy presumably was a
salaried curate, like the one paid by the vicar in
1547. (fn. 22) Lady Lake's hostility was said in 1638 to
have endangered the service of God by threatening
the incumbent with destitution (fn. 23) but his successor,
Nicholas Holland, was a 'constant preaching
minister' in 1650, when all the parishioners could
conveniently attend the church. (fn. 24) The most distinguished incumbent was the Huguenot refugee
John Theophilus Desaguliers, natural philosopher
and inventor of the planetarium, who was nominated
in 1714. (fn. 25) Offence was caused by his many distractions, which included superintending the water
engineering for Canons, and Chandos himself
pointed out that a corpse had lain three days in the
church, since neither the incumbent nor his curate
could be bothered to bury it. Desaguliers quarrelled
with his patron in 1741 but retained the living until
his death in a London coffee-house in 1744. (fn. 26)
Services were held once on Sundays in 1810, when
the sacraments were administered four times a year
to only ten communicants, (fn. 27) perhaps because most
parishioners, who lived along the west side of
Edgware Road, found it easier to reach Edgware
parish church. Benjamin John Armstrong, incumbent from 1844 to 1850, prided himself on having
sometimes doubled his congregation to 300, in spite
of the church's isolation, and recalled hearing that
c. 1835 a bell-ringer had locked up the building for
want of any worshippers. (fn. 28) Two Sunday services
were held in 1851, attended by some 170 people in
the morning and 130 in the afternoon, as well as by
about 30 children from Sunday school, when bad
weather was blamed for keeping the numbers
unusually low. (fn. 29) In 1835 the incumbent, George
Mutter, was also rector of Chillenden (Kent) and
perpetual curate of Broadway Chapel, St. Margaret's,
Westminster; he often attended vestry meetings (fn. 30)
but paid £80 a year to a curate. (fn. 31) Mutter's successor,
Armstrong, described his own parish work in a
diary (fn. 32) and wrote a popular book on the church. (fn. 33)
Since 1961 the rector has normally been assisted by
a curate. (fn. 34)
The church of ST. LAWRENCE stands on the
north side of Whitchurch Lane, its churchyard and
the south entrance to Canons Park forming a gap in
a line of semi-detached houses of the 1930s. Nothing
survives of the building recorded in 1272. The oldest
part of the present fabric is the early-16th-century
west tower, of red brick and flint rubble rendered
with cement; it is battlemented and three-storeyed,
with a north-east stair turret. (fn. 35) The remainder was
rebuilt for the duke of Chandos (d. 1744), as an
unaisled nave and retrochoir with, slightly later, a
pantheon to the north. The work was largely carried
out by John James in 1714, (fn. 36) although the rain-water
heads are dated 1715, and is now the only architectural memorial to the duke's taste. The walls outside
are simple, of purplish brick with plain stone-arched
windows and broad Tuscan corner pilasters. (fn. 37) Inside
the nave walls are panelled and painted in grisaille,
probably by Francesco Sleter assisted by Gaetano
Brunetti. (fn. 38) Together with the vaulted ceiling,
painted by Louis Laguerre, they form a baroque
monument unique in England. At the west end is a
wooden gallery with the duke's box beneath a
canopy painted by Belucci. At the east end there are
wooden Corinthian columns on each side of the
altar, making the organ, beyond, appear as if on a
stage; both altar and organ are flanked by paintings
attributed to Belucci (the Nativity and Pietà) and
Laguerre. On the north the pantheon, designed for
the Brydgeses' monuments (fn. 39) and later converted
into a vestry, leads to a farther painted room, the
Chandos mausoleum, completed by James Gibbs in
1735. Restorations were carried out to the whole
fabric in 1854, to the mausoleum in 1936, to the
tower by Sir Albert Richardson in 1951, and to the
interior by a local artist, W. P. Starmer, in 1953. (fn. 40)
In 1971, when the painted plaster along the north
wall of the nave had been shored up for several years
and after extensive damage to the mausoleum, a
national appeal was launched to save the church.
Apart from Victorian glass in the south windows
and a wooden altar-screen erected in 1900, (fn. 41) when
the old one was moved to the entrance to the
mausoleum, the interior has been little changed. The
oak box-pews are original, as are the iron rings to
which service books were chained, the wrought iron
altar-rails, and the font. The pulpit, also 18thcentury, was altered in 1854. Several of the books
are kept by the organ, together with a copy of the
'vinegar Bible' of 1716, presented by Chandos. The
organ, built by Abraham Jordan and in a case
perhaps by Grinling Gibbons, has been enlarged and
much renovated. (fn. 42) It was played by Handel when
the duke's household attended church, before the
completion of the chapel at Canons; Handel, however, was not the regular organist nor need he have
composed the Chandos anthems here, as stated on a
brass plate. (fn. 43) An impressive white marble monument
to James, duke of Chandos (d. 1744), stands against
the east wall of the mausoleum; it is probably by
Andrew Carpentier and depicts the duke, in Roman
costume, between kneeling figures of his first two
wives. (fn. 44) Against the south wall are the sarcophagi of
his daughter-in-law Mary, marchioness of Carnarvon
(d. 1738), by Sir Henry Cheere, and of Margaret,
marchioness of Carnarvon (d. 1760). In the churchyard to the south is the table-tomb of John Franklin,
with a recut inscription bearing the old-style date
1596. Another stone, erected in 1868, alleges that
William Powell was the 'harmonious blacksmith'
once thought to have inspired Handel; in reality
Powell was the parish clerk and the blacksmith no
more than an apprentice, William Lintern, who took
up music and gave his own nickname to one of
Handel's compositions. (fn. 45) In 1863 it was ordered that
coffins beneath the monument rooms be reinterred
and the vaults closed up and in 1864 that no new
burials should normally be made in the eastern part
of the churchyard. (fn. 46)
The church has one bell, cast in 1774 by Thomas
Janaway. (fn. 47) A set of silver-gilt plate, dated 1715, was
given by Chandos when he was earl of Carnarvon in
1716; it comprises a flagon, two large cups, two
patens, and an alms-dish. (fn. 48) Registers record baptisms
from 1559, marriages from 1552, and burials from
1556. (fn. 49)
When All Saints, Queensbury, was created a
conventional district in 1932, worshippers first
attended a hall in Dale Avenue, Little Stanmore. By
1938, however, services were held in Waltham
Drive, close to the site of the existing church, which
is in the old parish of Kingsbury. (fn. 50)