During the reign of James II, 54 Lincoln's Inn Fields was occupied by priests of the Franciscan Order, who built a chapel behind it.
[3] A well-known print of London's eighteenth-century Catholic bishop, Richard Challoner shows him preaching in the Sardinian Chapel, behind him the chancel with its reredos painting of the Deposition.
[1] Challoner called the Embassy Chapel "the chief support of religion in London," where it served as an "ersatz cathedral.
"[4] By the late eighteenth century, a new legal principle had come into being, extraterritoriality, according to which, "the ambassador and the precincts of the embassy stood as if on the soil of his homeland, subject only to its laws.
In 1798, the Sardinian ambassador closed the chapel and proposed to let the house, but the chaplains and the Vicar Apostolic, Bishop John Douglass, were able to obtain the property.
[2] When the thoroughfare of Kingsway was driven through the previous maze of tiny streets west of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the church was one of the many buildings that had to be demolished.
Several furnishings in the present church were brought from the old one, including the oval marble font with mahogany cover, the organ of 1857, the arms of the House of Savoy, the large painting of the Deposition, and in the south aisle the sarcophagus-shaped Lady Altar.