Summary
Roman Catholic church, completed in 1791, construction funded by Elizabeth Heneage.
Reasons for Designation
The Roman Catholic Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, High Street, Newport is listed at Grade II* for the following principal reasons:
Historic interest:
* it has a strong claim to be the oldest surviving, and possibly the first, Catholic church to have been built for a public congregation since the passing of the Second Catholic Relief Act of 1791 which made the construction of Catholic churches legal for the first time since the C16.
Architectural interest:
* the design of the church illustrates well the architectural restrictions imposed on Catholic church construction in the late C18, while also displaying a level of confidence in its elegant external design with prominent features such as the projecting classical-style porch at its street elevation;
* the original late-C18 layout and features survive well, including notable original fittings such as the marble font, the gallery with its box pews and composite columns, and other internal joinery, as well as good-quality later internal features such as the founder’s memorial wall tablet.
Group value:
* it has strong group value with the presbytery (Grade II, NHLE entry 1034544) which was formerly the home of the church’s benefactress Elizabeth Heneage as well as other nearby listed buildings, including Holyrood Hall (Grade II, NHLE entry 1034576), a former Society of Friends’ meeting house currently in use as a hall associated with the church.
History
England’s many medieval churches had been built for a Roman Catholic mode of worship (the Latin rite). Elizabeth I’s 1559 Act of Uniformity rendered them all part of the Church of England and outlawed the Catholic Mass. The following two centuries imposed severe civil inequalities, public suspicion and periods of outright persecution upon a diminishing minority of Catholic worshippers in England. Aside from a small number of private chapels and foreign embassies, there were very few buildings dedicated to Catholic worship.
The passing of the Second Catholic Relief Act in 1791, 232 years to the day after public Masses had been made illegal, allowed Catholics, subject to the swearing of an oath to the King, to practice their religion without fear of prosecution. It permitted the first new generation of Catholic places of worship to be built in England and Wales since the Reformation. They were forbidden to feature bells or steeples and were typically small, classically or domestically detailed, and were often hidden or set back from public view.
Following the 1791 Relief Act, Newport resident Elizabeth Heneage, initiated the building of a Roman Catholic church in the garden of her mid-C18 house; the house would later become a presbytery (Grade II, National Heritage List for England (NHLE) entry 1034544). The construction cost of the church was £2000. Building work at Newport was completed in 1791 and the church was certified for the use of Catholic worship at the Quarter Session in Winchester on 17 April 1792. It was dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury. The architect has not been established. It has been suggested that it may have been the Reverend Thomas Gabb, a Londoner who trained as a priest at Douai; he is credited with the design of the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury at Cowes, also funded by Elizabeth, constructed in 1794 (Grade II, NHLE entry 1223731).
The Church of St Thomas of Canterbury has a claim to be the oldest surviving ‘public’ Catholic church to have been built since the Second Catholic Relief Act in 1791 and it has also been suggested to be the first such church built after the Act was passed.
Elizabeth Heneage (nee Brown, 1734-1800) was the only child of John and Mary Brown. She was born in Sheate Manor, near Gatcombe; the house was owned by her maternal Uncle Thomas Urry. She was educated at the Catholic convent school in Hammersmith. Elizabeth married James Heneage, of Hainton Hall, Lincolnshire, with whom she had three children, two daughters, and a son who died in infancy. Following her husband's death in 1786, Elizabeth returned to the Isle of Wight and bought a house in Pyle Street, Newport, in the garden of which she would build the Church of St Thomas. She brought her former family chaplain, Simon Lucas, to be the first resident priest in Newport. A private founder’s chapel was incorporated into the church with a separate entrance accessible from Elizabeth’s private garden. Elizabeth died in 1800 and was buried near the church entrance.
Details
Roman Catholic church, completed in 1791, funded by Elizabeth Heneage.
MATERIALS: built of brick laid in Flemish bond with stone detailing. The front elevation is red brick while the side and rear elevations incorporate blue-brick headers. The building sits under a pitched slate roof.
PLAN: rectangular plan, orientated north to south, with the porch entrance facing the street to the south, and the sanctuary to the north flanked by the sacristy and former side chapel.
EXTERIOR: the two-storey building has a regular arrangement of multi-pane sash windows within round-headed openings. On the front elevation, at the top of a set of steps, is the porch with Doric columns, triglyph frieze and pediment with dentil course; beneath is a six -panel, two-leaf entrance door topped by a fanlight. The porch is flanked by a pair of blind windows, and above are three further openings, the central of which is blind with ashlar keystone and impost blocks. The elevation is topped by a pediment with dentil course; within the pediment is a blind circular window with key blocks. There is a string course above the ground floor and above the first floor a course runs continuously around all elevations. The side elevations have two rows of five-arched openings; those on the upper row are taller. Within the west return are a pair of side entrances with panel doors topped by multi-pane skylights. To the rear is the apsidal end and ground floor window, partially infilled with brick. A later single-storey, flat-roof extension wraps around the building’s north-east corner.
INTERIOR: at the south end is a canted entrance hall with two-leaf, four-panel entrance doors and flanking six-panel side doors, all of which provide access to the principal open hall. A gallery, supported by fluted Ionic columns, runs along three sides of the hall and over the main entrance, where it curves forward slightly. The gallery is accessed by a pair of staircases with panelled balustrades, located on either side of the entrance. The gallery retains the original box pews and the gallery fronts have turned balusters which are late-C20 or early-C21 replacements that replicate the style of the former altar rail. A cornice and dentil course runs below the gallery balustrades.
At the north end of the building, the liturgical east end, is the sanctuary, which is terminated by a shallow apse within a rounded arch. There is a pulpit, an open altar table, and a tabernacle set on a pedestal set against the east wall, all were added after the 1970s but have a late-C18 style. This is all oversailed by a tester which hangs from the ceiling. The former altar rails have been removed and placed on the south wall either side of the main entrance. Flanking the sanctuary are screens with arches which contain windows and doors, these enclose the sacristy to the east, and the confessional, formerly the founder’s private chapel, to the west. There are corner statue niches beside the doors to these enclosed areas.
The church nave contains C19 open-back pine pews. Adjacent to the entrance, on the nave’s west wall, is a marble wall tablet dedicated to the church’s founder Elizabeth Heneage. Below the wall tablet is a C18 marble font with an oval basin on a pedestal; the basin has fluting to the underside and a contemporary cover. There is coloured or stained glass over the main entrance doors and in the windows of the former founder’s chapel and sacristy screens and elsewhere, including pictorial scenes and plain coloured glass. The Stations of the Cross are wall-mounted stone reliefs. There are further wall monuments and brass candle holders attached to the nave walls. There is a C19 organ in the middle of the gallery above the entrance.
