Barbican Living
St Giles' Cripplegate
Memorials to the famous
"Milton and Cromwell, Andrewes, Foxe and Speed
And Martin Frobisher: Our mighty dead:
Are these the saints? A glory gilds each head,
And hallows Cripplegate."
Sir Robert Pearce
See the History section for creation of St Giles' Cripplegate
The stained glass windows were all blown out in the bombing which nearly destroyed the church. When it was restored by Godfrey Allen, he left most of the side windows with plain glass to increase the light in the church. The baptistery has a modern stained glass window celebrating the centenary of the Cripplegate Foundation. It even includes the Barbican towers. Another window was installed as a memorial to Edward Alleyn, an Elizabethan theatrical impresario who owned the Rose Theatre across the river and the Fortune Theatre in Golden Lane, founded Dulwich College, and left a bequest which benefits the parish. The window at the east end is the most impressive, mainly because traditional Gothic tracery is used.
There are four busts under the organ gallery, celebrating the parish’s four most famous names: John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Paul Bunyan and Oliver Cromwell. Milton is at least buried here, although as a Puritan he was hardly a pillar of the Jacobean church. Daniel Defoe came from a non-conformist who did not even worship at St Giles but at a chapel in Bishopsgate Street run by a preacher expelled from the Church of England. Paul Bunyan occasionally attended St Giles’ church when he happened to visit London. Oliver Cromwell at least got married at St Giles’, but one afternoon’s acquaintance seems a thin excuse for erecting his bust in the church.
There are plaques on the walls commemorating some famous individuals buried at St Giles’: Martin Frobisher, John Speed, and John Foxe, the author of The Book of Martyrs, which gave the gruesome details of Protestant priests killed during Queen Mary’s reign.
John Speed, who died on July 28th, 1629, was buried in St Giles. A monument was put up consisting of a bust, flanked by two stone doors. Only the bust now remains since the doors were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. But I have located an engraving in John Thomas Smith's Antiquities of London (London, 1791) which shows the monument and inscriptions as it originally looked.
