Tom Stacey

Window of opportunity

Tom Stacey on how, as an act of penance, his great-great-uncle donated the great west window to King’s College Chapel

Tom Stacey on how, as an act of penance, his great-great-uncle donated the great west window to King’s College Chapel

As the choristers of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, fill our ears on radio and our eyes on television with their double Christmas bill of carols for the birth of Jesus, the light that plays upon the Chapel’s sublime fan vaulting is, as ever, exquisite. Yet behind that light I have a tale to unfold, mysterious and dark.

The Chapel’s great west window was the largest single scene in stained glass in Europe when consecrated in 1879. For all I know, it is so still. It depicts the Last Judgment — what mediaeval iconography called a ‘Doom’. Bottom right, angels with flaming swords drive the damned down into one of Saddam Hussein’s torture dens. Bottom left, the blessed are ushered up to Paradise by heavenly facilitators and angels blowing straightened-out trombones.

Paradise is an enormous colonnaded amphitheatre dominated by Our Lord seated in Judgment, flanked by apostles and saints galore and, in Jesus’s own metaphor as reported by Matthew, with his (saved) sheep coming in on his right and the (damned) goats going out on his left. St Michael is on hand with his scales, and no appeal process evident.

Oh, to be a sheep. Such a thought surely gripped the mind of the ex-fellow of King’s who proposed and donated this mid-Victorian Doom in murrey, cobalt, sanguine and carnelian glass, which in our family is known (in hushed tones) as Stacey’s Repentance.

King’s, Cambridge, was founded in 1441 by the pious if extravagant young Henry VI, the year after he had founded Eton. Let’s not ‘tax the royal saint with vain expense’, as Wordsworth was later to counsel us: the building of King’s’ immense chapel was snagged by Henry himself intermittently losing his marbles, the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist terror and the Tudor accession.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in