All Saints’ Church, Northampton

All Saints’ in the centre of Northampton is once of the few churches of that city which troubles itself to open to the public. It rewards the visitor with a rather magnificent interior, which one might call baroque, and in keeping with the archetypical ‘City churches’ of central London. Externally, it is something of a hotchpotch, with surviving medieval features from the period before Northampton’s Great Fire of 1675 coexisting with late seventeenth/early eighteenth with all their flourishes and detail. It looks like a plain sponge cake dripping with excessively gaudy icing, apart from a bump in the middle that refuses to be covered. Standing atop the portico is a statue of Charles II, the old Stuart, who once punished the town for its avowed parliamentarianism during the late wars by ordering its walls’ and castle’s demolition. Although he contributed to the town’s and church’s cost of rebuilding post-fire, this erected statue was surely a virtue-signalling piece of toadying royalism. To place an image of a king who lived like Lothario and died a Romanist above the entrance to a Protestant church would be like the apostolic church placing a statue of Nero or Epicurus above its doors. Well might that Merry Monarch be dressed as Caesar.

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. Ps 2:11-12

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