Georg Frideric Handel was a Lutheran, and a determined one. He resolved, according to his early chronicler John Mainwaring, “to die a member of that communion, whether true or false, in which he was born and bred”. His background on his mother’s side stretched through several generations of Saxon pastors. And the spiritual works for which he is best known – not least, Messiah – addressed Protestant audiences in Protestant terms. In later life he was a regular attender at St George’s, Hanover Square. And he was buried among the great and the good of 18th-century Anglicanism in Westminster Abbey.