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Extracts from book (MX/R 15) at the Society of Genealogists
"this chapel was built about the year 1730, and was one of those for the performance of the Marriage ceremony without obtaining a licence, or publication of banns or consent of parents. These marriages were called clandestine marriages and, although irregular, were at that time perfectly valid and binding.
The chapel was "thro' Picadilly, by the end of St. James Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left-hand".
Extracts from "London in the 18th Century" by Sir Walter Besant:-
"In Mayfair Chapel the Rev. Alexander Keith married for some years an average of 6000 couples (or persons?) every year. His advertisement in the Daily Post of July 1744 is given by Burn in his history of Fleet weddings:- "To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in Mayfair, near Hyde Park Corner, is in the corner house opposite to the City side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and the clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is, and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch" (Sydney, vol.ii.p.399).
The marriages at Mayfair were stopped by the passing of Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act on 25th March 1754.
"As for Alexander Keith, he wrote against the Bill - but in vain, for it passed:- " 'Happy is the wooing that is not long a-doing ' is an old proverb and a very true one, but we shall have no occasion for it after the 25th day of March, when we are commanded to read it backwards, and from that period (fatal indeed to Old England!) we must date the declension of the numbers of the inhabitants of England." In conversation he said, "Damn the bishops! So they will hinder my marrying! Well - let 'em! I'll be revenged. I'll buy two or three acres of ground and I'll underbury them all." On the last day of the old order Keith married nearly a hundred."