St. Anne's Church

Anne's (St.), Soho, a parish in Westminster, taken out of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, 30th of Charles II. (1678). The church (in Wardour Street and Dean Street) was erected on a piece of ground called Kemp's Field,² and was consecrated by Bishop Compton, March 21, 1686. It has more than once since been repaired. The interior was remodelled and improved in 1866 (Mr. A.W. Blomfield, A.R.A., architect). The architect is not known. The present turret was erected in 1806 by S.P. Cockerell. The church was dedicated to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, in honour of the Princess Anne, daughter of the reigning sovereign.

Vpon the twentie-first of the same March, 1685–1686, was the new parish church St. Anne's, Soho, consecrated by the Lord Bishop of London, Henry Compton, a most pious prelate and an admirable governor. This parish is taken (as was St. James's) out of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, by Act of Parliament, and the patronage thereof settled in the Bishop of London and his successors. The consecration (as was the buildinge) of it was the more hastened, for that, by the Act of Parliament, it was to be a parish from the Lady Day next after the consecration; and had it not been consecrat that day, it must have lost the benefit! of a year, for there was noe other Sunday before our Lady Day.—Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, p. 223.

I imagine your Countess of Dorchester [Sedley"s daughter] will speedily move hitherward, for the house is furnishing very fine in St. James's Square, and a seat taking for her in the new consecrated St. Anne's Church.—Letter of April 6, 1686 (Ellis's Letters, 2d S., vol. iv. p. 91).

In the churchyard is a tablet to the memory of Theodore, King of Corsica, who died at a tailor's in Chapel Street, in this parish (December 11, 1756), soon after his liberation by the Act of Insolvency from the King's Bench Prison.

As soon as Theodore was at liberty he took a chair and went to the Portuguese minister, but did not find him at home: not having sixpence to pay, he prevailed on the chairmen to carry him to a tailor he knew in Soho, whom he prevailed upon to harbour him, but he fell sick the next day, and died in three more.—Walpole to Mann, January 17, 1757.

He was buried at the expense of an oilman in Compton Street, of the name of Wright, but Horace Walpole paid for the tablet (which has a crown "exactly copied" from one of Theodore's coins) and wrote the inscription:—

The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings
But Theodore this moral learn'd ere dead;
Fate pour'd its lessons on his living head,
Bestow'd a kingdom, and denied him bread.

You will laugh to hear that when I sent my inscription to the vestry for the approbation of the minister and churchwardens, they demurred and took some days to consider whether they should suffer him to be called King of Corsica. Happily they have acknowledged his title.—Walpole to Mann, February 29, 1757.

In the church are buried Lord Camelford, killed (1804) in a duel with Captain Best; David Williams (d. 1816), founder of the Literary Fund. In the churchyard are buried Brook Taylor, LL.D. (d. December 29, 1731), discoverer of Taylor's Theorem and author of the Principles of Linear Perspective; Sir Hildebrand Jacob (1790); William Hazlitt (d. 1830), a headstone over whose grave has a pompous inscription very unlike the style of the writer the inscription celebrates. In the church are monuments to Sir John Macpherson, "the gentle giant," who for some months acted as Governor-General of India; and William Hamilton, R.A., a feeble though not ungraceful painter. The register records the baptism (1736) of John Horne, known now as John Horne Tooke. "Many parts of this parish," says Maitland, (1739), "so greatly abound with French, that it is an easy matter for a stranger to imagine himself in France." This is true of the parish a century and a half after: it is still a kind of Petty France. The emigrants from all the Revolutions have congregated hereabouts. [See Greek Street.]