ABSTRACT
This chapter is a broad survey of the embassy chapels and their music from the early eighteenth century until 1829, the date of closure of the Portuguese chapel. By this time the Bavarian and Sardinian chapels had already closed as embassy chapels and had re-opened as public places of worship. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of embassies of Roman Catholic powers in London offered public access to their chapels. The style of worship in the embassy chapels during the eighteenth century has been described by Edward Norman as 'baroque and triumphalist, bringing the atmosphere of the European counter-reformation to English worship'. Almost nothing is known about the circumstances in which the young Samuel Wesley (1766-1837) began to be involved with the embassy chapels from around September 1778 or even earlier. The period between the passing of the second Catholic Relief Act in 1791 until the closure of the Portuguese embassy chapel in 1829 was a brilliant sunset.
