First United Methodist Church

The patron saint, St. Mildred, was the daughter of Merivaldus, Prince of West Mercia. Her mother founded the Minster Abbey in the Isle of Thanet, and she herself founded a new abbey in Thanet, of which she became Abbess and where she died, a.d. 676. Her connection with the City of London, so it is said, arose from the fact that she was in the habit of sending large quantities of corn to the City by boat, and the citizens of London would therefore hold her in grateful memory.

Passage source: The Registers of St. Mildred, Bread Street and of St. Margaret Moses, Friday Street, London, published 1912.

St. Mildred's shared the fate of many other churches in being burnt down in the Great Eire of 1666. The only portions that remain of the old building are the walls that support the floor of the present Church. It was rebuilt by Wren and opened on March 23rd, 1683, at a cost of £3705 13s. 6JcZ., and it is one of the most perfect specimens of Wren's architecture. Four groups of winged figures in the dome were removed in 1841, otherwise the church is very much the same as Wren left it. As may be seen, the woodwork is very beautiful, the carvings round the altarpiece, on the pulpit and sounding-board are of exceptional merit and are attributed, though not with certainty, to Grinling Gibbons. The two figures on the right and left of the altar are Moses and Aaron, and are well painted, but the artist is unknown. The thing which makes the Church specially interesting is its connection with Sir Nicholas Crisp - the " Nicky Crisp " who figures as one of the minor characters in Whyte Melville's novel " Holmby House." . He, as the monument over the vestry door states, was a devoted and loyal servant of both Charles I. and Charles II., in whose service he spent £100,000, only a small portion of which was recovered. He was also instrumental in developing the trade with Guinea. He gave to the Church, for the Service of the Lord's Supper, two splendid silver flagons, which are still in use and are probably now worth £1000 each. These with the other Church plate were conveyed for safety to Hackney during the fire. The item for coach hire is to be seen in Churchwardens' Accounts. He also erected in 1622 a splendid east window containing five lights. The subjects on the glass were The Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth, The Gunpowder Plot, The Plague of 1625, and the figures of himself with his wife and children. He died in 1666 and his heart was buried in an urn beneath the image of his beloved king, Charles I., at Hammersmith. He dwelt in a magnificent house at Hammersmith, of which an account is given in Lysons'' " Environs," and on the site of which Brandenberg House was afterwards built. Pepys, the diarist, mentions him in connection with -a sluice -which Sir Nicholas proposed to construct at Deptford to hold 200 ships, and on which scheme Pepys and other commissioners had to make a report. His body was buried in the family vault at St. Mildred's on the south side of the chancel. When the bodies were removed from beneath the church in 1898, his stone coffi.ii was discovered and opened and found to contain a lead coffin roughly shaped to his likeness. A photograph of the open coffin may be seen in the vestry. The body was re-interred at Hammersmith and so joined to his heart. His helmet is placed under the monument over the vestry door. The Church plate is ancient and very fine, one large chalice of silver gilt being almost unique. The Eegisters are very interesting, and date, with some gaps, from 1559. One entry, which visitors always want to see, is the marriage of Shelley, the poet, to Mary Godwin, Dec. 30th, 1816. And there is another interesting entry not so often called for, viz., the marriage of Henry Cecil, afterwards the Marquis of Exeter, to Sarah Hoggins, on 3 Oct. 1791, to which we owe Tennyson's famous poem " The Lord of Burleigh." There are also the old registers of St. Margaret Moses, a neighbouring church, which was destroyed in the Great Eire and never rebuilt, the benefice being joined to that of St. Mildred. The monuments in the present Church, apart from the Crisp monument, are of no great interest. In the old church there were the monuments of Lord Trenchamit 1300,, William Palmer, "Blader" (Corn Merchant), 1356, Sir John Hawlen, parson of the Churchy who rebuilt in 1485 the parsonage-house (which had loeen destroyed by fire with the then parson and his man), Christopher Turner, Surgeon to Henry VIII. in 1530, Sir Ambrose Nicholas, Sir John Shadworth, Lord Mayor of London 1401. The only things to be seen now that survived the tire are the Registers, the plate, the helmet of Sir Nicholas Crisp, probably the old figure of Time on the pulpit, and the cover of the font. There is a complete list of Rectors from 1333 to the present time. The most remarkable is Hugh Oldham, 1485, who afterwards became Bishop of Exeter. What should interest those who come to this Church more than anything else is, that on this spot, if not within these present walls, with few interruptions the Service of God has gone on for more than 600 years. The thought that so many generations of London citizens with their wives and children have come here to worship God gives a special sanctity to this holy place/

Passage source: The Registers of St. Mildred, Bread Street and of St. Margaret Moses, Friday Street, London, published 1912.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on London City - 29,804 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.