It was the achievement of Sir Robert Shirley ‘to have done the best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most callamitous.’ So at least reads the inscription over the west door of Holy Trinity, the chapel he founded at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The most notable things Shirley did were to build his chapel in an elaborate Gothic style during the Commonwealth and to conspire on behalf of the exiled Charles II. He died in the Tower for his pains. Holy Trinity, so evocative of the Catholic Middle Ages, was as damning a statement of his sympathies as the weapons he was caught stockpiling for the Royalist cause.
The private chapel as propaganda is one of the themes in Annabel Ricketts’s richly rewarding study of country-house worship in the two centuries after the Reformation.
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