The Return of the Angels at Old North Church

This fall, in addition to archeological work in its crypt, Old North Church had its four carved angels conserved and repaired.

Old North Illuminated explained the origin of these artifacts:

The four Baroque angels date to the 1620s and were likely carved in what is now known as Belgium. It is unknown where they spent their first century. In 1746, however, they were on board a French ship en route to a Catholic Church in Quebec.

During this time period, England and France were almost constantly at war, and one of the ways the war was waged was economic: ships, and their cargo, were fair game. Privateers were legally sanctioned to act like pirates and pillage the ships they captured. British privateer Captain Thomas Gruchy captured the French ship on its way to Quebec and seized its cargo, including these angels.

He and his investors sold most of the goods, but Captain Gruchy, a North End resident, donated the four angels to Old North Church, where he worshiped.

The angels are thus decades older than the church, which is itself one of the oldest buildings in Boston.

Originally all four figures held trumpets, but only two of those instruments survived. Chris Gutierrez of Manzi Appraisers & Restoration also noted “evidence of previous damage that nearly split one of the angels in half,” as well as cracks that had developed over the decades.

Gutierrez and his team cleaned the figures, fabricated two new trumpets, and touched up the painted surfaces to make the two-foot-tall angels look good without hiding their age.

The angel statues returned to their places on the gallery railing in front of the church’s pipe organ in time for the Christmas season.

Cherubum and Seraphim at Old North Church

As an Anglican church, the Old North Church (formally Christ Church, Boston) was more flashily decorated than the town’s Congregationalist meetinghouses.

There are, for example, four hand-carved angels mounted on the gallery railing. Tom Dietzel recently shared a four-part online essay about them.

Those statues are thought to have been made in what is now Belgium in the early 1600s. In 1746 they were shipped across the Atlantic to a French territory—it’s not clear where. Unfortunately for the church expecting to receive those angels, that was during what British colonists called King George’s War. A Boston-based privateer named the Queen of Hungary captured the French merchant ship carrying the figures.

The captain of that privateer was a man from the Isle of Jersey named Thomas James Gruchy. He had settled in Boston and purchased a pew in Christ Church five years before. Returning to his home port considerably better off for his trouble, Gruchy agreed with five of his partners to give their church the angels and two “glass branches” or chandeliers (discussed here).

Gruchy returned to his busy mercantile career but appears to have suffered reverses in the 1750s. By 1759 he and his family had left Boston for good, and it’s not clear where he settled next.

Capt. Gruchy’s angels weren’t the only heavenly decoration at Old North. This winter the church was able to commission a historic paint analysis that peeked below its current decor, established in 1912 based on that era’s thoughts of what a colonial church should look like.

As part of that work, Brian Powell and Melissa McGrew of Building Conservation Associates exposed the painted head of a cherub they date to 1727. What’s more, they believe there are twenty more cherubs’ heads elsewhere under the paint. Powell will speak about that find and other details of the church’s eighteenth-century interior in a free public lecture on Wednesday, 11 May.

“Uncovering Cherubs: New Discoveries at Old North Church” is scheduled to start at 6:30 P.M. Afterwards the Boston Preservation Alliance Young Advisors will host “a facilitated discussion about the role preservation plays in interpretation at historic sites.” The event is free, but advance registration is required.

(Funding for the paint study and/or the lecture came from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Freedom Trail Foundation, the National Park Service, and the Marr Scaffolding Company.)

“Glass Branches” for the Old North

This week Bryan McQuarrie of the Boston Globe reported on the return of an eighteenth-century chandelier to the Old North Church in Boston’s North End.

The five-armed glass chandelier first came to the church as half of a matched pair. According to Hannah Mather Crocker’s Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston, written in the 1820s:

The chandeliers were given by Capt Gruchy. They were taken near the close of the Spanish War. They were made for one of their cathedrals, but were way laid by a privateer belonging to him and thus brought to Boston to be hung up in the North Church since remembrance.

In Rambles in Old Boston, New England (1887), the Rev. Edward G. Porter quoted this item from the Christ Church (North Church) records:

June 16, 1746. Whereas Messrs. Mr. Robert Jenkins, Capt. Grushia, Mr. Hugh McDaniel, Mr. Jno. Gould, Mr. Jno. Baker, oners of the Priveter Queen of Hungary, hath made a present to Christ Church in Boston of 4 cherubims and 2 glass branches taken by ye said Vessell, Voted, That the branches be hung in ye body of the church and ye cherubims placed on ye top of the Organ.

Thomas James Gruchy was a privateer captain during King George’s War, now known as the War of the Austrian Succession or more fondly as the War of Jenkins’s Ear. He commanded the Queen of Hungary, sharing ownership with those other men.

Gruchy reportedly captured a French ship on its way to Québec. Its cargo included those two chandeliers (the “glass branches”) and four carved wooden angels. Gruchy apparently led the choice to donate those to Christ Church, where he was a junior warden.

By 1830, that North Church—soon to be the “Old North”—had refurbished its interior. The carved wooden angels were moved to a new spot, but the chandeliers were put outside in the courtyard. A former church official was founding an Episcopal mission in the western Massachusetts town of Otis, and he took one chandelier out for its new building. The other disappeared.

That church in Otis is now defunct, the building up for sale. Episcopal officials packed up some of its furnishings, including the chandelier, and sent them back east. The National Park Service is now analyzing the pulpit and prayer desk for clues to their age, and Old North is looking for a place to hang its new, old glass chandelier.