Churches

Chapel of St Nicholas, Gipping

First appeared on Sylly Suffolk website, 1999

"The tyrannous and bloody act is done,
The most arch deed of piteous massacre
That ever yet this land was guilty of."

Coming from the murderer's lips, is this remorse or evil gloating? The genius of Shakespeare, as usual, leaves such questions open to interpretation.

The speaker is "James Tyrrel", begininng a soliloquy that opens Act 4 Scene III of that most brilliant of thrillers, Richard III. The real Sir James Tyrell, a loyal Yorkist in the Wars of the Roses, knight-banneret and master of the royal henchmen under Richard, had been dead over 80 years when Shakespeare had him carry out the king's instruction to murder "the little princes in the Tower" - the boy king Edward V and his younger brother.

The accusation originated after Tyrell's death from Thomas More, whose account is so riddled with inaccuracies as to be worthless: a classic instance of history being written by the winners. It was politically expedient to blacken the name of the deposed and slain Richard, and Tyrell had been beheaded for supposed treason against Henry VII in 1502. (His crime was to be a friend of Henry's rival Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk.)

It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare should have repeated More's libels - much odder to find Arthur Mee, author/editor of The King's England, repeating Shakespeare's fiction as fact.

In his volume on Suffolk, Mee visits Gipping and claims "One of the blackest deeds in human annals must always be remembered here". Like many of Mee's village and church portraits, his entry on Gipping is quaint poppycock. It is not as if there was any excuse whatever, by 1941, for confusing literature with history - and he had either not read WH Sewell's 1871 monogram on Tyrell's chapel, or had wilfully chosen to ignore it. His scorn of the stuccoed "modern" tower (apparently late 16th or early 17th century) and description of the rest of the building as "14th century" suggests his chief sin is ignorance.

So to the facts: Sir James Tyrell, eldest son of William Tyrell of Gipping, High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, had this extraordinary little building built, probably in the 1470s, near his isolated manor house (now gone), on the site of an earlier chapel of St Osyth Priory. It has never been a parish church, beginning as a private chapel and being since 1743 a free chapel administered by trustees.

Its nave, chancel and north vestry from a masterpiece of late Perpendicular architecture, especially its large windows and the ingenious way the north and south doors are incorporated into their design. For a tiny building with no clerestory it is extraordinarily tall, and to some tastes its flushwork might seem a little over-egged - the knapped flint and ashlar patterning so commonly seen as decoration on East Anglian churches is here all over. The tracery of the windows is not enhanced by the eyebrow effect of their arch mouldings.

All that glass and height, however, make the interior of the chapel delightfully light and airy. It is a beautiful, simple space, with its best surprises to be found in the sanctuary.

Most of the chapel's furnishing dates from the 18th century, and the east end is adorned with a wall painting from that period - an excellent example of trompe-l'oeil painting and an unusual survival. Even more unusual, and more precious, is the glass in the east window, which dates from between 1494 and 1513.

It is a collection of jumbled fragments that may have come originally from throughout the chapel. But although there is no complete composition, there are enough details to see that it was artwork of the highest quality, with the people and buildings depicted with a subtlety that puts to shame most later glasswork to found anywhere.

An exquisite weeping woman saint is generally assumed to be the Virgin Mary: she is matched by a male figure - presumably St John, the pair no doubt originally flanking a crucifixion, which would have been destroyed around the time of the 17th century Civil War.

Other figures are a bishop, an archbishop (if he really is St Thomas of Canterbury he did particularly well to survive the Reformation), and a haloed king, possibly Edward the Confessor (Tyrell's Yorkist sympathies make it highly unlikely to be the "Lancastrian saint", Henry VI). The upturned boar's head with a peacock fan in its mouth is the Tyrell family emblem.

The chapel's exterior walls too are rich in personalised ornament. There are several instances of the so-called "Tyrell knot" and the "Arundell hearts" (for Sir James's wife Anne Arundell) as well as the shields of several members of both their families. Most enigmatically, the motif AMLA occurs seven times around the building - a puzzle which scholars have identified variously as a form of Ave Maria, a highly unlikely Hebrew slogan, or simply the initials of Anne Morley Lanherne Arundell.

If we take the latest dating of the building - after 1485 - it might just be possible to see its construction as an act of penance by a man plagued with hidden guilt at nefarious deeds. I suspect WH Sewell is nearer the mark when he calls Tyrell "brave knight of slandered memory" - though it may be worth noting that when Sewell was writing the parish of Gipping was still mostly owned by the Tyrell family, so vested interest may apply to his judgement as well as to More's.

To me, however, the chapel seems less a bid for divine forgiveness than a love poem in stone and glass.

Over a doorway in what is now the vestry (which may once have been a priest's residence) is the inscription "Pray for Sir Jamys Tirell. Dame Anne his wyf". The wording, making no reference to their souls, shows it was done while they were alive.

Remorse of a murderer or an innocent man's love for his wife? After more than 500 years the jury is still out, but there is hardly enough evidence for a conviction.