This church in all its present taste, the vestry agreed should become the parish church; but it was not till March, 1845, that the Reverend Chairman reported to the vestry that the Church Commissioners had executed the deed to transfer the rights, &c., from St. Mary’s to St. James’s.
A distinct understanding was come to at this time that the old church should be enlarged. And “by these means,” says the report of 1840, “accommodation will be provided for four thousand persons, or including Bayswater chapel, which may hereafter be made a parochial chapel, for more than five thousand persons, in a parish supposed to contain twenty thousand souls.” The report goes on to state that each of the four districts, into which the parish will be divided, “will be placed under the immediate care of its respective minister or ministers; and these important results will have been obtained _without any compulsory levy on the parishioners_.”
Besides a miscalculation of at least four thousand in the then actual population of Paddington, these reporters must have been very ignorant of the previous history of the parish, or they must have had very bad memories. We have seen how St. Mary’s was built, and how it was paid for; and a church-rate enforced by warrants of distress, and these again backed up by the certainty of imprisonment, till the rate and all expenses were paid, I think one may call a compulsory levy. Even those who lived in the parish the year before this report was written, had felt the twitch of this clerical scourge,—not the last they were to feel by a great number; for on the twenty-fourth of April, 1839, a church-rate was made, and the Cash Accounts for the year ending, April, 1838–39, shew that £850 5_s._ 9¾_d._ had been collected by “compulsory levy,” in these years, “to pay off Mrs. Jenks’s last Church Bond Debt.” But how these reporters could have forgotten the day ever memorable in the annals of the present vestry of Paddington, I cannot imagine; nor how that on this fifth day of May, 1829, when the church-rate was in danger, the Bishop of London, the Viscount Bernard, the Honourable Mr. Mac’Donald, the Rev. John Joseph Pike, and nine others,—having taken the oath of office, to execute faithfully, impartially, and honestly, according to the best of their skill and knowledge, the several powers and authorities reposed in them—proceeded at once, with other vestrymen, to make a church-rate of threepence in the pound; for so far as I can discover, this is the only time the vestry of Paddington was ever honoured, at its sittings, by a visit from the spiritual and temporal lord of the parish.