Westminster, St Paul's and a Church by Law Established

Two churches carry the weight of English religion in London and neither is quite an ordinary cathedral. Westminster Abbey was refounded by Edward the Confessor and consecrated days before his death; every English and British coronation since 1066 has taken place in it. It is a royal peculiar, answerable to the sovereign rather than to a bishop, which is a constitutional arrangement as much as a religious one. St Paul's is the cathedral of the diocese, and the churchyard of the medieval building held Paul's Cross, an open air pulpit where royal proclamations and set piece sermons were delivered to crowds, making it the closest thing Tudor England had to a national platform.

The break with Rome turned the city into the working capital of a state church. The monasteries were dissolved and their London houses turned to other uses, the Book of Common Prayer put a single vernacular liturgy into every parish, and the monarch became supreme head and later supreme governor of the church. That settlement was enforced. Protestants were burned at Smithfield under Mary, and Catholic priests were executed at Tyburn under Elizabeth and her successors, so the city holds martyrs venerated by both sides of the same argument.

Old St Paul's burned in the Great Fire of 1666, and Christopher Wren replaced it with a domed building that is Protestant in its plan, an auditory church built for preaching to a seated congregation, in a shape borrowed from Catholic Rome.