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By 1800 the Chapel Royal had become the fashionable place
at which to worship. Services were well attended by the nobility and gentry and often
by the Prince Regent and members of the Royal Family. Among those who preached were
the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Moore. Many others preached there including
Samuel Wilberforce, the son of the great antislavery campaigner.
Besides ordinary worship there were also many concerts and
recitals of sacred music. The Chapel was one of the few places in the country at
the time which actually possessed an organ.
Then Hudson
began to establish the Chapel on a more permanent basis. In April 1801 he
converted the Chapel to a freehold at the cost of £25. In 1803 he decided to
open the Chapel all the year round, so great was the call on its services. He
therefore obtained on June 24th an Act of Parliament "to establish a Chapel of
Ease at Brighthelmston." It should be remembered that he secured the Chapel as a
Chapel of Ease to the parish church. This agrees well with his keen sense of
"the parish". He probably took this step to recover the vast capital outlay
which had come from his own pocket. He may not have realised that the building
of the Chapel would be so expensive.
A feature protected the rights of the Vicar of Brighton. No marriages or burials were
permitted, but the Curate was entitled to perform Baptisms and Churchings
provided that he charged double fees, half of which were to go to the Vicar.
Hudson was permitted to sell the pews "for the highest and best prices that can
be gotten for the same". He was however required with Richard Day and John Bull
of Ship Street, Esquires, to select pews which when rented would raise £115 per
annum for the Curate's stipend. The Curate was exempted from
paying the rate on proprietors for the repair of the Chapel. The Proprietors, that
is those who bought pews and then leased them to others, were required to
keep the Chapel in good repair.
The Bishop of Chichester
consecrated the Chapel Royal on August 16th, 1803.
One story appears in its best known form in a recent short history of the church. "The
Prince attended Occasionally until he took as a personal challenge, as well he
might, an outspoken sermon on the text "Thou art the man" and never attended
again." There is the evidence, however, from Baxter's Brighton Guide of 1822 that the
Prince attended regularly until the opening of the Royal Chapel in the Pavilion in
that year.
The Chapel's royal connections
were by no means slight. The Prince, as mentioned above, laid the foundation
stone and was present at the opening service in 1795. The Prince was present
at a Thanksgiving service for the victory of Trafalgar and he attended a charity
concert in August 1813 "the Grandest Concert for the Infirmary". But the Prince's
link with the Chapel Royal was on a firmer footing than occasional attendances. The Royal
archives record that the Prince rented pews in the south gallery from the years
1810-19 at the cost of 15 guineas a half year. Though he had these pews
no one knows how often the Prince himself made use of them. They do not
appear to have been infrequent certainly until the celebration of Divine Service in the
Pavilion in 1815 and the opening of the Royal Chapel there in 1822. it
seems unlikely that any violent dislike of the Chapel Royal or its ministers seized
the Prince in 1815 because of his continued renting of pews and patronage
of concerts. Several members of the Royal Family attended after the Prince
opened his own Chapel.
On February 3rd, 1804, Hudson petitioned the Bishop to license him
as the Perpetual Curate of the Chapel. He then resigned the benefice of Brighton. Hudson, it
will be remembered, was allowed to serve Cure of the Chapel Royal in order to
indemnify him for the expenses incurred in building, if the sale of
the pews did not sufficiently repay him. The pews had been sold in 1803
and it would appear that Hudson was taking the only step which he could
to regain some of the vast sums which he had expended ten years before. it
is also a sign of the Chapel's growing importance that it required a full-time
clergyman.
The Chapel continued as the height of respectable
church-going in Brighton and saw many of the famous and even infamous coming
through its portals.
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