The new organ was installed ready for the chapel’s re-opening in November 1821. It was customary for instruments to be completed and demonstrated in the organ-builder’s workshop before being dismantled and transferred to their permanent location, and this is probably what happened with the St John’s organ. A musical gentleman-amateur from Chichester, John Marsh, travelled up to London in November to see Mr Lincoln about a job the workshop was undertaking for his son, a clergyman; he was put out to find HCL preoccupied in the chapel which had just been repaired, painted & enlarged, by bringing forward the galleries, & was to be opened the next day, with a large & complete new organ … on which his people were hard at work in finishing, & which therefore prevented his completing that at my Son’s chapel, to hear the effects of which, with the Venetian swell, was the principal reason of my coming up this time’. Despite disappointment at the lack of progress on his son’s organ, Marsh took the opportunity to attend the opening at St John’s Chapel the following day. John Purkis (1781-1849), a blind organist who held appointments at St Clement Danes in the Strand and St Olave, Southwark, played. Marsh noted in his diary:

After service, I went up to the organ loft where I saw Mr. Lincoln, whom I told that if the sound of this fine instrument had not put me into good humour again, I should have expressed my great displeasure at his having brought me up to town to no particular purpose, as he must have known what he had to do in completing this organ; [in] answer to which he told me that he might yet have been able to finish our chapel organ, had not one of his best workmen been taken ill at the beginning of the preceding week.

Marsh returned to Bedford Row in May 1822 to hear Charles Wesley (Organist of St Marylebone Parish Church) and Purkis play ‘on the fine new organ there … before several amateurs’; he missed Wesley’s performance but was ‘much pleased with Purkis’s playing. A few days later (13 May), he went again, this time to meet Lincoln and try the organ for himself; as a result he was gratified at being able to give a favourable account of it in writing to Mr. D. Wilson [sc. The Revd Daniel Wilson, the minister], who had requested me to do so, to assist in counteracting some injurious reports respecting it & the sale of the old organ, set on foot by Miss Cecil the present organist, who seemed much prejudiced against Mr. Lincoln, perhaps (as was suggested to me) from his not complying with a demand of hers for an allowance, as organist, out of the purchase money, although she had no concern in bespeaking the organ, or choosing the builder of it.

Marsh refers here to the practice (common throughout the nineteenth century) of organ-builders paying ‘commission’ to organists who helped to secure them contracts. The sum might be as much as 5% of the contract price. Although frowned upon by vestries and those responsible for paying for the organ it proved hard to eradicate and clearly Miss Cecil felt it was her due. Her prejudice against HCL is slightly surprising in view of the fact that he was the only organ-builder whose name appears as a subscriber to her Twelve voluntaries. Marsh’s diary provides a rare glimpse of HCL in his environment, and his descriptions of the installation, opening and reception of the new organ are particularly valuable in view of the lack of other documentation. Lincoln’s new organ would have stood in a gallery. The chapel was square in plan, with rows of windows along the south wall on Chapel Street, and a large window between the two eastern entrances in Millman Street. The north and west walls abutted adjoining properties and may therefore have lacked gallery windows; if so, it is possible that the organ was placed in one of these galleries.

The organ case must have made a strong visual impression in the relatively small interior of the chapel. The architectural front is a curious confection of elements: pilasters, sun-bursts, palm fronds, acanthus leaves and husks decorate a wooden case which, in form, consists of a wide central flat of pipes, with smaller double-storied flats and a semi-circular outer tower to either side. The pipes are gilded and the wood is finished with a dark stain. Such stylistic eclecticism is entirely typical of the period.

Lincoln’s organ had superficial similarities to the Harris instrument that it replaced: the number of stops was exactly the same (although four of Harris’s Choir registers were ‘borrowed from the Great), and both Swell keyboards commenced at tenor e. However, HCL incorporated a number of progressive features in his scheme. The Great mutations and cornet of the earlier organ gave way to a second open diapason and mixture, perhaps in the interests of congregational accompaniment. The cornet – a brilliant, reedy solo stop composed of five ranks of pipes at different pitches – had gone out of fashion and had been absorbed with its tierce into the treble of the main chorus mixture; organists preferred semi-orchestral solo stops such as the cremona, hautboy, trumpet and bassoon that HCL carefully provided. (Miss Cecil’s voluntaries, with their solo passages for the bassoon and cremona, reflect this preference.) The provision of pedals and pedal pipes was also forward-looking. Pedals had been virtually unknown in English organs before 1790; when first introduced, they were mainly seen as a useful accessory for holding down the bass notes of the Great keyboard (again, Theophania Cecil’s voluntaries provide examples). Large-scale wooden pedal pipes, mainly of unison (8’) pitch, began to appear after 1800; at first they were seldom more than an octave-and-a-half in compass – as at Bedford Row – but they lent weight to the bass in accompaniment. Lincoln’s organ would also have been distinguished from Harris’s by its tonal refinement, a certain delicacy in some of the registers (e.g., the dulciana), and a smoother, slightly more opaque tone, all of which reflected the musical taste of the early nineteenth century.

The cost of the organ is unrecorded. To judge by other Lincoln work it would probably have been around £600; a later statement that it cost £1200 is almost certainly wide of the mark. The use of the organ in divine worship would have been comparatively modest. According to one contemporary, who was probably referring to the Harris organ rather than its successor, The prayers were read without any chaunting; a psalm was sung after the second lesson, as well as before the communion service and sermon; the organ, which was one of the finest old instruments in England, was played by Miss. Cecil, a mistress of the art, who caught up and carried on the sentiment and feeling of the hour; and the whole was grave, devotional, and edifying. There would perhaps also have been a short voluntary at the beginning of the service, and a more extended, livelier piece at the end; some churches retained the ‘middle voluntary’ before the first lesson. Not being a parish church, St John’s had no charity children to provide a choir, and, in any case, the principal focus in proprietary chapels was always the sermon, delivered by a fashionable preacher.

St John’s Chapel remained a magnet for Evangelicals of the Established Church, though its influence declined after the departure of Daniel Wilson to be Vicar of Islington in 1824. In 1848, his successor, The Revd the Hon. Baptist Noel, felt compelled by the Gorham Controversy to leave the Church of England; he became a Baptist (appropriately enough) taking much of the congregation with him. His eventual successor was the Revd Joseph Butterworth Owen, and it was during his necessarily brief tenure (1854–7) that disaster struck. A contemporary account describes the event that was to terminate the chapel’s existence:

One Thursday evening in November, 1856, when the verger was about to ring the bell and summon the congregation for the usual week-day evening service, he could produce no sound. Still many were assembled, and divine service proceeded; but when the Minister ascended the pulpit, he perceived, from signs not to be mistaken, that the whole of the immense and massive roof had shifted and sunk, and might at any instant crush him and the whole congregation. A very short sermon naturally, and most wisely, followed this discovery; and that was the last sermon preached, or ever to be preached, in a chapel where the TRUTH AS IT IS IN JESUS, had been so long and so faithfully held forth by a succession of able and pious ministers.

It would seem that a decision was taken the following year not to rebuild; by the second half of the nineteenth century, proprietary chapels had fallen from episcopal favour, and this may have influenced the fate of St John’s Chapel. Owen was found another post, and in 1863 the building was demolished. Despite the unsafe condition of the chapel, it proved possible to remove the organ, which was offered for sale.