[And people wonder why the church is dying...This sort of thing happens all the time on both sides of the Atlantic.]

From the Telegraph 29.10.2012

A small royal saga, and a blow to spirituality

Tucked away just below the Strand in London, stands the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy. This beautiful, rather hidden place is all that remains of the hospital for the poor founded by Henry VIII in 1512. On Thursday, the Queen will visit the chapel for the unveiling of a window in honour of her Diamond Jubilee.

When I worked in Fleet Street in the 1980s, I used to drop in to the chapel for the occasional service or quiet moment. Last year, I returned there for a meeting which the chaplain kindly let me hold, and was reminded of its charm. But more recently I have discovered that the chapel has become a sad, divided thing.

It would take the pen of Anthony Trollope to do justice to this delicate situation. The Savoy Chapel is a very English phenomenon, a sort of anomaly of an anomaly. It is the Queen’s because she is the Duke (not, despite her sex, the Duchess) of Lancaster. At all services the National Anthem is sung, with the variation “Long live our noble Duke”. The Duchy of Lancaster is a big, well-run land and property owner. Since the 13th century, its revenues have gone to the Crown.

The Savoy Chapel is the Duchy’s only working church. But it is not a royal “peculiar”, like Westminster Abbey or St George’s, Windsor, because it is not, exactly, royal. It is all alone. Since a decision of King George V, it has also been the chapel of the Royal Victorian Order, an order of chivalry personal to the Sovereign. The order’s heraldic devices hang there.

But in modern times, the chapel has also served, in effect, as a parish church, and a much-loved one. In the week, it provides spiritual succour for office-workers. On Sundays, it furnishes a good choir. It has – or had – a loyal congregation, many of whom came in from far afield. It was rather a holy place.

In recent years, this has somehow gone wrong. It seems that the chaplain, Peter Galloway, though a learned man, made liturgical changes that the congregation disliked. Some felt he lacked pastoral skills. The life of the place began to decay.

The chapel was looked after by wardens, but, unlike in a typical Anglican parish church, these wardens had no rights. Lord Shuttleworth – good Trollopian name, that – is the Chairman of the Council of the Duchy. Lord Shuttleworth, a grand, commanding man, is the Archdeacon Grantly of this story. One day last year, he summoned the three wardens to a meeting and sacked them. He said he would take charge of the place himself, chairing a newly invented chapel council. Three of this council’s four members are Duchy employees, only one is from the congregation. Lord Shuttleworth was entitled to do this, since the Duchy is all-powerful, but the wardens – a senior coroner, the former master of a City livery company, and an army colonel – were very upset. They had not done anything wrong; they had served for many years.

It was as if the parish life was to be disregarded. As one member of the parish (not a warden) put it to me, “There’s no joy any more.” The size of the regular congregation, apart from the choir, has fallen a good deal, to below 30, often below 20. Only two of the nearly 5,000 members of the Royal Victorian Order attend regularly. Lord Shuttleworth himself has never attended a normal Sunday service at the chapel. On the website, it says that “collections are donated to charity”; but, in fact, under the new dispensation, the collections are used for the chapel itself.

One of the ex-wardens, Colin Brough, has refused to accept what is happening with the deferential restraint that a royal institution can often rely on when things go wrong. He has kept records and protested persistently. I can understand why a busy man like Lord Shuttleworth might find him irritating, and there is certainly no evidence for Mr Brough’s claim that, within three years, the Duchy will close down the congregational side of the chapel altogether. I rang up Lord Shuttleworth and Lord Strathclyde, the leader of the House of Lords, who is also Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Both denied the charge. Lord Strathclyde says he is “wholly in favour” of a continuing congregation.

All the same, there is a reason why this small saga matters. Particularly with the present Queen, the monarchy is a strong part of the nation’s spiritual life. In 2010, the Queen’s Christmas message centred on the King James Bible. This year, she has spoken publicly about the importance of the Church in giving protection to all faiths.

Part of this spiritual dimension comes from the chapels which exist under the royal wing. This year, I visited St George’s, Windsor. I had known it as the home of the Order of the Garter, but had regarded this as a pleasant piece of chivalric flummery. I had not previously realised that it is a religious order – the only one, indeed, which is continuous in the Church of England from before the Reformation. I was overwhelmingly impressed by the holiness of the place, the presence of daily prayer among the tombs of our monarchs (King George VI being the latest). It is vigorously alive, and well attended by the public.

The Savoy Chapel should be a modest version of the same thing. In a capital city which is oppressively material, the direct, personal royal link to faith in this country can provide a warm heart, a place which stands for what is prophetic rather than what is profitable. This surely matters much more than the administrative convenience of the Duchy of Lancaster.