History of English Churches in Switzerland – Geneva
History of Holy Trinity Church, Geneva
Holy Trinity is the oldest permanent Anglican chaplaincy in Switzerland, and the only Swiss city with two Anglican congregations. Its story begins three centuries before its building, with a group of refugees who were not Anglicans at all.
The Marian exiles, 1555
When Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553 and set about reversing the English Reformation, Protestants fled to Basle, Frankfurt, Emden, Strasbourg, Padua, Zurich and Geneva. Calvin persuaded the Council of the Republic to allot the English community a small church beside the cathedral, Sainte-Marie-la-Neuve — now known as the Auditoire — which they shared with a congregation of Italian Protestants. Valerie Offord, Holy Trinity’s archivist, dates the Council’s grant to 14 November 1555; Paul Schniewind puts the congregation’s first service there on 15 November.
The community was small. Offord and Schniewind agree it never much exceeded two hundred people, in a city of some twelve thousand that had taken in perhaps six thousand refugees of all nations; the Swiss National Museum puts the Geneva congregation at 233 people in about 140 households, the largest gathering of Marian exiles anywhere in Switzerland. On arrival they opened a parish register, the Livre des Anglois, recording those who had reached Geneva on 15 October 1555, those already living there, and every election, baptism, marriage and burial thereafter.
It survives in the Geneva State Archives, catalogued as the register of the English church “sous le pastorat de John Knox et de Christopher Goodman, 1555–1559”, and its arithmetic is the exile in miniature: forty-eight members admitted in 1555, fifty in 1556, sixty-seven in 1557 — then ten in 1558, and two in 1559, as England became safe again. Seven marriages, four baptisms and eighteen deaths in all.
Their leader was John Knox, who was granted Genevan citizenship after arriving in September 1556 and was elected minister by the congregation that year, serving alongside Christopher Goodman. Knox set aside the Book of Common Prayer and took up Calvin’s order of worship instead — the order he would carry back to Scotland as the model for Presbyterian worship. The exiles’ services were in English, but they were not Anglican services.
What the community produced in a handful of years was remarkable. In February 1556 it published The forme of prayers and ministration of the Sacraments, containing a confession of faith, a liturgy and fifty-one metrical psalms in English. Four years later came the Geneva Bible, translated by William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby, Lawrence Humphrey, Miles Coverdale, Christopher Goodman and Thomas Sampson. It was the first English Bible to be divided into verses, annotated and illustrated, it ran to at least 140 editions between 1560 and 1644, and it — not the King James version — was the Bible the Mayflower emigrants took to America in 1620. The printing was largely financed by an Exeter merchant, John Bodley, whose son Thomas founded the Bodleian Library. The printer, Rowland Hall, thought well enough of the city to name his London printing works “the halfe Eagle and the Keye” after the arms of Geneva, and to keep its motto, Post tenebras lux.
Mary died late in 1558 and the exiles went home, many of them to senior posts in Elizabeth I’s church and government.
The permanent chaplaincy, 1814
English worship in Geneva then lapsed for the better part of three centuries, revived only in fits. In 1685 the Revd Gilbert Burnet — historian, court chaplain, later Bishop of Salisbury, and himself in exile under James II — was given permission to hold services according to the Book of Common Prayer, the first use of Anglican liturgy in the city.
Geneva regained its independence in 1813 after fifteen years of French occupation, and the English came flooding back: aristocrats on the Grand Tour, merchants, students. The State Council offered the community the use of the old hospital chapel in the Bourg-de-Four, now part of the Palais de Justice, on a twenty-five-year tenure and on four conditions — that the English pay for it, that services be held with the simplicity customary in English parish churches, that the priest be ordained and appointed in England, and that he be approved by the State Council. The first service was held there on Christmas Day 1814 by Charles Richard Sumner, ordained that June and then twenty-four years old. Schniewind treats that date as the beginning of the first permanent Anglican chaplaincy in Switzerland — a different question from the oldest seasonal chaplaincy, which he awards to Thun in 1841, ahead of the more commonly cited Interlaken and Meiringen.
Money was short from the start, but the church gave more than it asked. Between 1817 and 1853 its committee minutes record some seven hundred grants of alms — to individuals, to families, to whole parties of travellers — alongside a regular contribution to the city’s Bureau de Bienfaisance.
The church is built
In 1846 a group of British residents opened a subscription in Geneva and in England for a church of their own. It was poor timing: the revolutions of 1848 were about to convulse Europe. Through the mediation of Sir Robert Peel Jnr, then British Minister in Berne, the Council of State nonetheless granted a parcel of land on the site of the old city fortifications, on what is now the rue du Mont-Blanc — a short walk from the railway station, and, as Schniewind observes, the English church easiest to find in any Swiss city.
The Grand Council conceded the land on 30 October 1850. A foundation, the Anglican Chapel at Geneva, was formally established on 19 April 1851 — a date Schniewind attaches instead to the gift of the site itself, though the Geneva State Archives and the Swiss heritage record both place that in 1850.
Building began in May 1851 to designs by the architect David Monod, with Jean-Pierre Guillebaud directing the work and altering it in 1852: an Anglo-Norman neo-gothic church on a cruciform plan, built of Meillerie stone and molasse, with a square porch-belfry carrying four pinnacles and an openwork balustrade. The foundation stone was laid on 1 October 1851 by Charles Richard Sumner — by now Bishop of Winchester, thirty-seven years after taking that first service in the hospital chapel — and it was Sumner again, with the special permission of the Bishop of London, who consecrated Holy Trinity on 30 August 1853. It seated about 350 and cost £4,000, of which the Swiss Church of Geneva gave £1,123. The tower was never strong enough for the two bells it had been designed to carry, and the roof had to be renewed in 1866 after water got in.
The town of Geneva presented the clock, with an inscription that has outlasted the mechanism:
Puisse cette petite horloge, faible gage de leur gratitude, ne marquer que des heures heureuses pour la grande nation Anglaise, surtout pour ceux de ses enfants que nous avons le bonheur de posséder au milieu de nous.
Schniewind adds, drily, that the clock is reported never to have worked. It was overhauled at last in 2015–16, with help from the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation.
Stormy beginnings
Holy Trinity’s first decades were quarrelsome. In the 1870s the Committee dismissed the Revd Henry Downton, who had served fourteen years, at twenty-four hours’ notice; the congregation arriving for Morning Prayer the next Sunday found the gates locked, and decamped to the nearby Hôtel Métropole, where Downton took the service anyway. Three years later, when the Revd Acton Sillitoe arrived to take up a post to which the SPG had appointed him, Committee members physically barred him from the church and had him hauled before the Justice of the Peace for causing a disturbance. The SPG withdrew its patronage. Quieter times came with the Revd William Jephson in 1876, and from 1883 the newly established jurisdiction for northern and central Europe brought regular episcopal visits, which had the useful effect of confining disputes to the bishop’s next call.
A place in the city
By the century’s end the church was one of the city’s established institutions. A Mrs Jephson — the name of the chaplain who had brought the quarrels to an end — gave the east window in 1884, English glass on the subject of the glory of the Blessed Trinity. In 1887 the church endowed a bed at the Cantonal Hospital to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, free to any British subject for up to thirty days a year; ten years later it set up the Victoria British Aid Fund, which Offord recorded as still active in 2016. When Victoria’s train from Aix-les-Bains halted at Cornavin for exactly nine minutes in September 1890, it was Holy Trinity’s chaplain, the Revd Joseph Last, who presented the Loyal Address. The British Consul, Daniel Barton, founded the Harmonie Nautique band and built the Victoria Hall to give it somewhere to play in bad weather; his wife Victoria Alexandrina — daughter of Sir Robert Peel Jnr, and Queen Victoria’s goddaughter — is commemorated on the chancel’s south wall.
Church and state in Geneva were separated in 1907, and in 1910 the foundation was reconstituted as a society, on a constitution that made every British subject of either sex a voting member after a year’s residence in the canton. During the First World War a government prohibition on heating churches forced Holy Trinity and the American Episcopal church of Emmanuel to hold joint services in alternate buildings through the winters — an arrangement both sides thought worked very satisfactorily. (Offord dates Emmanuel’s building to 1874; Schniewind gives its opening as 1878. The two accounts differ and we have not been able to settle it.) Financial trouble after the war brought the Colonial and Continental Church Society in to help, and the depreciation of sterling in the 1930s thinned the British community further. The congregation was reduced to a handful during the Second World War, and Offord credits its survival to the arrival of the Revd Cecil Williams in 1940.
The building was listed as an historic monument on 16 February 1983, weeks before a renovation appeal that raised the largest sum in the parish’s history — Sfr 1,350,000, including a new organ by the Swiss builder Kuhn. A service of thanksgiving marked the completion on 2 June 1985.
Since then
Holy Trinity remains an active chaplaincy in the Archdeaconry of Switzerland, within the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe, and is still entirely self-supporting. Its Christmas Eve carol service long ago outgrew the building and moved to the Cathedral of St Pierre, the only church in the city large enough to hold it. An outreach begun in the early 1990s by members living around Nyon has since become the independent chaplaincy of La Côte.
This account rests on sources published up to 2016 and does not describe the church’s present-day life. For that, see Holy Trinity Church, Geneva.
Date of first Chaplaincy: 1814 (English worship in Geneva from 1555)
Church dates: Consecrated 30 August 1853; in use ever since
Patron: Self-supporting; assisted by the Colonial and Continental Church Society after 1918
Current Status: Active Anglican church; listed as an historic monument since 1983
Sources
Valerie Offord, A Brief History of the English Community in Geneva and Holy Trinity Church (Holy Trinity Church, March 2016)
Paul Schniewind, Anglicans in Switzerland, Past and Present (pp. 33–39)
H. van Muyden, “Significant events in the history of the English Church in Geneva”, Holy Trinity Church, Geneva
Archives d’État de Genève — Livre des Anglois, register of the English church under John Knox and Christopher Goodman, 1555–1559 (AEG, E.C. Communautés diverses 2), and Construction de l’église anglicane
Vitrosearch — Holy Trinity Church, rue du Mont-Blanc 14b (entry edited by Valérie Sauterel, 2008)
Genève-archi — Église anglaise
Further Reading
Dyne Steel (ed. Valerie Offord), The History of the English Church in Geneva (1986) — out of print
Valerie Offord, The Welcoming City: English-Speaking Protestants from 1555 to the present day, exhibition catalogue, Geneva State Archives (2003)