Sir Christopher Wren

The materials necessary for writing a life of Sir Christopher Wren are so difficult of access as possibly to explain the unsatisfactory character of such biographies as do exist. Mr. James Elmes, who venerated Wren’s genius, published in 1823, a Life which contained a careful if a dry account of Wren’s architectural works and of some of his scientific discoveries. He also published a smaller work, ‘Sir C. Wren and his Times,’ intended perhaps to give a flavour of personal interest to the other volume. Neither book succeeds in doing this, and both have suffered from the circumstance that Mr. Elmes’ failing eyesight did not permit him to correct the proofs of either work, and accordingly many serious errors as to names and dates stand unaltered in them. There is a sketch of Wren in the British Family Library, one published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and one in the ‘Biographica Britannica,’ but in them all it is with some of the works of the great architect that we become acquainted, not with himself.

The chief authority to which any biographer of Wren must perforce turn is, the ‘Parentalia, or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens: viz., of Matthew, Bishop of Ely; Christopher, Dean of Windsor and Registrar of the Garter; but chiefly of Sir Christopher Wren.’ This work, a folio, with portraits[1] of the three whose lives it records, was published in London in 1750, dedicated to Mr. Speaker Onslow. It was chiefly written by Christopher, the eldest surviving son of Sir Christopher Wren, finished and finally published by Stephen Wren, M.D., the second and favourite, son of the Mr. C. Wren above mentioned, ‘with care of Joseph Ames,’ a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Several copies were presented to the University of Oxford.

The ‘Parentalia,’ of which but a small edition was published, is now scarce and little known. It is put together, not quite at hap-hazard, but with no real method or order: digression ensues upon digression until all clue to the original date or subject is lost. Nor is the very imperfect ‘index of names’ of any real assistance in the labyrinth thus created. Yet, with all its faults, the book is of great interest, and bears amidst all errors and omissions an unmistakably genuine stamp.

‘Bishop Wren’s Diary,’ reference to which will be frequently found in the following pages, was kept by him in the blank leaves of ‘Pond’s Almanack,’ after this fashion:

‘August 30.—Per vim hostilem eripior domo meâ.1642.’

These entries cease with the death of his wife in 1646; even his own release from prison is not mentioned.

The old heirloom copy of the ‘Parentalia’ intrusted to the writer of these pages contains a large additional number of prints and wood engravings by Virtue, Vandergucht, Loggan, and others, some printed accounts of the City Churches, and several letters, rough drafts of treatises, Garter records, and other MSS. in the handwritings of the Bishop, the Dean, Sir Christopher himself, and of some of their correspondents. Among the curious omissions of the ‘Parentalia’ are the maiden name of Bishop Wren’s wife, the date of the death of Sir Christopher’s mother, Mrs. Mary Wren, and the places and the dates at which either of Sir Christopher’s two weddings took place. Some of these and other gaps I have, by the aid of ‘Notes and Queries,’ been able to supply. Wren’s son and grandson are both alike silent on all political matters subsequent to the Restoration. The Popish Plot, the Trial of the Seven Bishops, King James’s Abdication, the Landing of William of Orange are all passed by in perfect silence. The traditional politics of the Wrens were certainly those of the loyal Cavalier party, and they were in favour at the Court of the Stuarts.

It is curious how all political colouring disappears from the record after the period of the Restoration. Yet Sir Christopher, his cousins, and the very Mr. Wren who writes the book were all in Parliament, and that in more or less critical times. Such accidental hints as there are point, I think, to Sir Christopher as adhering, though very quietly, to the politics of his ancestors; and assuredly neither he nor his descendants had any cause to love the house of Hanover!

Wren was a steady Churchman, bred up in that school of Andrewes, of Laud, and of Matthew Wren, which, if it was anti-Puritan, was equally and emphatically anti-Roman. For this reason, if for no other, after the trial of the Seven Bishops had shaken the confidence of every Churchman in the country, Wren may have acquiesced in a settlement which appeared to promise protection to the Church without finally excluding the Stuart line. The ‘Parentalia,’ published five years after the last Jacobite rising in 1745, preserves, as has been said, a political silence which may be that of discretion or of disappointment.

One word should be said as to Gresham College, where Wren held his first professorship. It was founded in 1579 by the will of Queen Elizabeth’s great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham. The college was no other than his own house in Bishopsgate, forming a quadrangle round a large garden. The seven professors, each of whom gave a lecture a day in term time, had a salary of 50l. a year and were lodged in the house. Gresham College escaped the Fire, and gave lodgings at that time to the Lord Mayor and the aldermen, who had been less fortunate. In 1768 it was pulled down by Act of Parliament, to give a site to the new Excise Office, and the original collegiate scheme was destroyed, though the lectures are still given in a lecture hall.

Little is known of Wren in his Masonic capacity. He is said to have been a member and a master of the ‘Old Lodge of S. Paul,;’ now known as the ‘Lodge of Antiquity.;’ All the records of the Lodge belonging to that time have unfortunately been lost, so that they cannot be consulted with reference to this matter.

The question has been raised whether Wren was a Freemason or not. On this point the ‘Parentalia’ makes no explicit statement, though it appears to imply Wren’s connection with the Order.

The Duke of Sussex caused a plate to be engraved in 1827 and affixed to the mallet which Sir Christopher was said to have presented to the Lodge, with this inscription:—‘A. L. 5831. A.D. 1827. To commemorate that this, being the same mallet with which His Majesty King Charles II. levelled the foundation stone of S. Paul’s Cathedral, A. L. 5677, A.D. 1673. Was presented to the Old Lodge of S. Paul, now the Lodge of Antiquity, acting by immemorial constitution, by Brother Sir Christopher Wren, R.W.D.G.M., Worshipful Master of this Lodge and Architect of that Edifice.’

The statement respecting King Charles’s presence is probably an erroneous one. The Lodge possesses also three gilt wooden candlesticks in the form of columns, inscribed ‘Ex dono Chr. Wren Eq. A. L. 5680.’

Where quotations have been made directly from the Wren MS., from the ‘Parentalia,’ or from Evelyn’s Diary, the spelling and stopping of the originals have been faithfully reproduced. For the rest, the writer can only hope that these pages may serve as a contribution towards that full and worthy biography of the great architect which may yet, she trusts, be written before London is finally robbed of the Churches with which Wren’s genius endowed her.

ANCESTRY OF THE WRENS—MATTHEW WREN—TRAVELS TO SPAIN WITH THE PRINCE OF WALES—INTERVIEW AT WINCHESTER HOUSE—BISHOP ANDREWES’ PROPHECY—WREN MADE MASTER OF PETERHOUSE—BISHOP OF HEREFORD—CONSECRATION OF ABBEY DORE—OFFICE OF RECONCILIATION—FOREIGN CONGREGATIONS AND THE NORWICH WEAVERS—RESULT OF ‘A LECTURER’S’ DEPARTURE.

The name of Christopher Wren is no doubt familiar to the great majority of English people, and to Londoners especially; but it is to many of them little more than a name with which is connected S. Paul’s Cathedral and a now, alas! diminished number of City churches. Yet the great architect’s ninety-one years of life were passed among some of the most stirring times of our history, in which his family played no inconsiderable part, and he himself was not only the best architect of his day, but was also the foremost in many other sciences. A singularly patient and far-seeing intellect aiding a strong religious faith enabled him ‘to keep the even tenour of his way’ through a life of incessant labour and considerable temptation. It has been truly said,

‘It seems almost like a defect in such a biography as that of Wren, that it presents nothing of that picturesque struggle, in the rise from a lower to a higher condition, which has so commonly attended the conquest of genius over difficulty.’[2]

Far otherwise, the Wren family was an old one, tracing its descent from the Danes; one of the house fought in Palestine under Richard I., and his fame long survived, as in Charles I.’s time it was quoted against one of the knight’s descendants.

In 1455, during the reign of Henry VI., in the Black Book (or register) of the Order of the Garter, mention is made of a Wren who probably belonged to this family:—

The heart of S. George was presented by Sigismund, Emperor of Germany, on his admission to the Order of the Garter.

The spelling of ‘Wrenne’ was a very common form of the family name, and it seems very likely that John Wrenne belonged to this family, who were much connected with S. George’s, Windsor.

William Wren was in Henry VIII.’s time the head of the family; his younger brother Geoffrey, who was a priest, was of Henry VII.’s privy council, and was confessor both to him and to Henry VIII. He held the living of S. Margaret’s, Fish Street, in the City of London, from 1512 till his death.[3] Geoffrey Wren was also a canon of S. George’s at Windsor, where he founded the seventh stall. There he died in 1527, and was buried in the north aisle of the chapel under a brass bearing his effigy in the Garter mantle, with this inscription at his feet:

This tomb and brass have disappeared, as has the ‘South Lodge’ with its window displaying his coat of arms and emblem; the latter, a wren holding a trefoil in its claw, and his motto—‘Turbinibus superest coelo duce praescius.’ Dean Wren explains this emblem as chosen because, ‘the trefoil or clover shrinking before a storm foretold a change of weather,’ and the wren was supposed to have the same prescience. Both motto and emblem were changed by the descendants of the family.

William Wren’s grandson, Francis, was born 1552, two years before the close of Queen Mary’s reign, at Monk’s Kirby in Warwickshire, where the family had property. He was a mercer and citizen of London, and was steward to Mary Queen of Scots during her captivity in England. He married Susan, daughter of William Wiffinson; they lived in the parish of S. Peter’s Cheap, and had three children: a daughter Anna, and two sons; Matthew, born 1585, and Christopher, born 1589. Both were educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School, and there Matthew especially attracted the notice of Lancelot Andrewes, then Dean of Westminster, who frequently came to the school where he had been bred, and examined the boys in various subjects, particularly in the Hebrew Psalter. He was struck by the proficiency of the eldest of the Wrens, and obtained for the boy a scholarship at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, of which he was himself master. From that time Dr. Andrewes appears never to have lost sight of Wren, but to have guided his studies and fostered ‘the most passionate affection for the ministry of the Church’ which the young man showed. Nor was Wren’s university life undistinguished, for he became Greek scholar of his college, and when King James visited Cambridge, Matthew Wren, then in priest’s orders, ‘kept the Philosophy Act’ before him with great applause. The subject given was, ‘Whether dogs were capable of syllogisms.’ Old Fuller says of this extraordinary ‘Act,’ ‘he kept it with no less praise to himself than pleasure to the king; where if men should forget even dogs should remember his seasonable distinction what the king’s hounds could perform above others by virtue of their prerogative.’[5] Probably this speech and its ready wit remained on the mind of the King, who dearly loved a compliment to the royal prerogative, and determined him to favour Matthew Wren.

Lancelot Andrewes, who had been Bishop of Chichester, was in 1609 translated to Ely, and so enabled to watch over the University and ‘to search out,’ as he entreated his friends to do also, ‘hopeful and towardly young wits,’ and train them up for Holy Orders.[6] He made Matthew Wren his chaplain, gave him the living of Feversham in Cambridgeshire, and some years later made him a canon of Winchester. But very different duties from the ordinary ones of a parish priest devolved upon Wren. King James planned for the Prince of Wales the famous ‘Spanish match,’ and gave a most reluctant consent to the Duke of Buckingham’s scheme, that the Prince should himself go to Spain to fetch home his bride. Two of his chaplains were to attend the Prince, and by the advice of Bishop Andrewes and of Laud, then Bishop of S. David’s, Dr. Leonard Maw, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Dr. Matthew Wren were chosen. The Prince and Buckingham departed hastily, leaving the chaplains and suite to follow as they could. King James had no sooner allowed the expedition than he repented of it, and being unable to recall his permission, was tormented by a thousand fears for the Prince’s safety. The nation was in a state of ferment, persuaded that the Prince’s faith would be tampered with as well as his person endangered. Thus the two chaplains had by no means an enviable post. They went down to Newmarket, took their leave of the King and received his last instructions:—

A full list followed of vestments for the clergy, ornaments and hangings for the altar, and altar lights, Latin service books, directions for a room to be adorned chapel-wise, and for frequent services, all to be read in Latin so that the Spaniards might comprehend them. All this careful provision seems to have been defeated by the fact of the Prince and his suite being lodged in the palace at Madrid, so that there was no public service, only bed-chamber prayers. Contemporary letters show that the chaplains’ position was not an easy one, though the Prince remained steadfast, and in the congenial atmosphere of the dignified Spanish court became every day more gracious. ‘Dr. Wren forbears,’ says one of these letters, ‘to write any particulars, but intimates all is not as it should be.’ It was no doubt a necessary precaution on the chaplain’s part to preserve this discreet silence, but it is tantalising to have only a hint concerning the transactions in Spain. How the negotiations were delayed, how the King recalled the Prince and the marriage was broken off, are historical facts too well known to need repetition here. One result seems to have been a strong bond of affection between the Prince and those who went with him on this singular expedition.

That his departure was attended with some sea-peril appears from one of Edmund Waller’s[8] early poems on ‘the Danger which His Majesty, being Prince, escaped in the Road at S. Andero’:—

A description follows of the Prince being rowed in a barge to his own ship, a sudden storm arises in which there is a great difficulty in making the ship; at length the Fates allow the rope to be successfully thrown, knowing it to be for England:—

On October 8, 1623, Dr. Wren’s diary records ‘we landed at Portsmouth,’ and his first and only journey out of Great Britain was over.

The sea-voyage, probably a stormy one, made an impression on his mind and he preached before the Universities on the text ‘One deep calleth to another.’ This is said to have been a remarkable sermon, and old Fuller declares that he became an excellent preacher. The one sermon of his now extant, preached at a later date, on the text ‘Fear God, honour the King,’ shows that he modelled his style greatly on that of Bishop Andrewes, though without attaining to the same excellence. The sermon is a bold and outspoken one, and has its striking passages. King James, in testimony of his approval of Dr. Wren’s conduct as his son’s chaplain, bestowed on him the valuable living of Bingham, in Nottinghamshire, to which he was inducted during the next year, resigning his fellowship of Pembroke and the living of Feversham.

Previous to this event, and soon after the Prince’s return, a singular incident occurred. Wren, who had been down to Cambridge, came up, as he says, ‘suddenly’ to London, and as it was late, lodged with his sister in Friday Street, instead of going to Winchester House, where the Bishop kept ‘three rooms near the garden’ fitted and reserved for him, and where he had lodged twice or thrice. He had, however, seen the Bishop twice, also the Bishops of Durham and S. David’s, had taken leave of them on a Saturday, and was prepared to return to Cambridge on the Monday morning following. His journey was, however, delayed by an event which shall be given in his own words:—[9]

After this the four friends separated and Wren returned to Cambridge.

In two years from the time of that conference King James died, in the following year the saintly Bishop Andrewes, the kind and unfailing friend of both the Wrens, died also. It is to the great discredit of James I., and probably was the inconstancy to which Dr. Wren alluded, that, as has happened in our own day, the greatest Prelate, the ‘incomparable preacher,’ the truest and wisest champion of the Church, was passed over when the archbishopric was vacant, an inferior man put above him, and at last the see of Winchester offered to him in tardy amends. At Archbishop Bancroft’s death in 1610, everyone’s eyes had turned to Bishop Andrewes as his natural successor: but, in the words of a contemporary letter from Lord Baltimore (then Mr. Calvert) to Sir T. Edmonds,

The consequences of such an ecclesiastical appointment made for so insufficient a reason were disastrous indeed. Had Andrewes succeeded Bancroft, and had Laud succeeded Andrewes, ‘the Church had been settled on so sure a foundation that it had not easily been shaken.’[11]

There was general lamentation when Andrewes died, and few can have mourned him more sincerely than Matthew Wren, whom he had loved as a son. Wren attended the funeral, received the gold ring which was the Bishop’s bequest to him, and composed the Latin epitaph for his tomb in S. Saviour’s, Southwark, which is no unworthy tribute to the holy Bishop.

During this year Dr. Wren was elected, by the unanimous wish of the fellows, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he ‘exercised such prudence and moderation in his government that he reduced all the fellows to one sacred bond of unity and concord.’ Besides this he rebuilt the college in great part from the ground, and perceiving that the absence of a chapel was a great obstacle in the way of reverent and frequent services, he did not rest until he had raised subscriptions enough to build a handsome chapel, and to ornament it richly.[12] The wood-panelled hexagonal roof, the marble steps on which the altar stands, flanked by two tall candlesticks, give a character to the interior enhanced by the east window, which is in part a copy of that famous picture of the Crucifixion, then just finished, by Rubens, at Antwerp. This window was carefully taken down in the Rebellion before the college was for the commissioners destroyed all the other ornaments, pulling down ‘two mighty angels with wings, divers other angels, the four evangelists, and Peter with his keys on the chapel door, together with about a hundred cherubim and many superstitious letters in gold. Moreover,’ they say, ‘we found six angels on the windows which we defaced.’ After the Restoration the hidden glass was brought forth again and put back in its place over the altar.[13] While Dr. Wren was thus adorning his college chapel King Charles did not show himself forgetful of Bishop Andrewes’ well-loved pupil and chaplain, but in 1628 appointed him Dean of Windsor and registrar of the Order of the Garter. The year after this appointment the peace between England and France was solemnly ratified in the chapel at Windsor and Dean Wren administered the oath to the French ambassador, the Marquis de Châteauneuf.

About this time, as his diary says, he was ‘joined together in happy matrimony.’ His wife was Eliza Brownrigg, the widowed daughter of Thomas Cull, Esquire, of Ipswich; she had one daughter by her first marriage, and seems to have been possessed of some property in Suffolk. The marriage was in truth as happy as the cruel times in which their lot was cast would allow, though chequered with many sorrows; for of the twelve children whose birth Wren records in his diary, six died while very young. When King Charles journeyed to Scotland for his coronation he summoned Wren to attend him. No shadow of the coming trouble showed itself then. The young King was everywhere received with enthusiasm. Whether Dr. Wren, mindful of Andrewes’ words, suspected what lay under this fair show, there is no record left to tell us. In after years Sir Thomas Widdrington’s venomous attack on himself must have strangely recalled his tones when on this occasion he addressed the King in terms of fulsome adulation at Berwick. On his return from Scotland the King passed the holy week at York, where on Maunday Thursday Dr. Wren washed the feet of thirty-nine poor old men in warm water, drying them with a linen cloth, and Dr. Curle, Bishop of Winchester, washed them over again in white wine and then kissed them.

Shortly after this, Dr. Lindsell, the Bishop of Hereford, died, and Matthew Wren was appointed (1634) to the vacant see. He thereupon resigned the Mastership of Peterhouse, probably with much regret, for all his life he retained a strong affection for his University. His successor was one whose name is well known in church history, Dr. John Cosin, afterwards Dean of Durham and Bishop of Peterborough, a great authority on the ritual and ornaments of the Church. The King would not then suffer Wren to resign the Deanery of Windsor. When Dr. Juxon, who was Clerk of the Closet, was made Bishop of London, the King showed how highly he valued and esteemed Bishop Wren by giving him the post which Juxon resigned, and Dr. Wren then gave up his Deanery. His new post was one of great nearness to the King; to fill it well required great tact and a discreet deafness to the whispers of court intriguers. King Charles was well aware of this, and as soon as Wren had settled himself in his new post said to him:[14]

The wisdom of the King’s counsel was quickly shown, for when Dr. Hackett came in his turn of office as the next month’s chaplain, he told Wren how they had expected him to be made Bishop of London, and but for the Archbishop preferring Juxon, as a man of whom he had experience and on whom he could rely, it would have been done. Wren paid no regard to these suggestions, suspecting them to be the device of some discontented courtier in order to make him the Archbishop’s enemy. To keep his faith with the King and the Archbishop, he presently told them what had passed. The King praised his conduct and told him, ‘there was no truth in the report, but only a plot to kindle coals between them two.’

Bishop Wren began vigorous work in Hereford, holding a visitation, collecting and setting in order the statutes of the cathedral, which were in a state of great confusion. Another congenial piece of work came also into his hands. John, Viscount Scudamore, a friend of Laud’s, had inherited, with other property, the old Cistercian abbey of Dore, near Monmouth; the building had been greatly damaged in the reign of Henry VIII., but the transepts, chancel, and lady chapel still stood, as they do now, and Lord Scudamore was minded to restore the building to its true use. He accordingly repaired it, setting up again the old stone altar on its four pillars, and providing the church with everything needful for service. Bishop Wren was unable to consecrate the building himself, being in constant attendance on the King, but he busied himself in drawing up an office for the occasion, like, but not identical with, that used by Bishop Andrewes, and commissioned Bishop Field of S. David’s to act for him. Bishop Wren was, as Lord Clarendon testifies, ‘much versed in the old liturgies, particularly those of the Eastern Church.’ He employed himself, at Laud’s request, in preparing a service for the reconciliation of those who had apostatised when in slavery with the Moors, and when released wished to return to the faith. The merchants and seamen who were taken by ‘Barbary pirates,’ and when released came sadly back to England with their story of cruel sufferings undergone and faith reluctantly forsworn, were numerous enough to require a special provision to be made for them.

Knolles’ quaint ‘Historie of the Turks’ shows that they even made descents on the western coasts of England and carried off men, women, and children into slavery. In 1636, with some of the much-grudged ‘ship-money,’ a very successful expedition was made under Lord Rainsborough against Sallee, which resulted in the release of large numbers of captives and a promise from the Moorish king to suppress Christian slavery. It is significant that the real leader of the expedition was John Dunton, a reformed renegade taken off the Isle of Wight in command of a Sallee ship. He was tried and condemned, but saved his life by offering to show the assailable points of the Barbary ports, and sailed as master on Lord Rainsborough’s ship.[15]

The ‘Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turcism,’[16] which Wren and Laud prepared together, is a very striking one. First came the solemn excommunication, then for two Sundays the penitent came to the door of his parish church in a white sheet carrying a white wand, craving the prayers of all ‘good Christians for a poor wretched renegado;’ on the second Sunday he was allowed to enter and kneel by the font and pray to be ‘restored to the rights and benefits of the blessed sacrament which I have so wickedly abjured,’ and then return to the church porch as before. On the third Sunday, when the Apostles’ creed had been said, after being publicly put in mind of his sin, and advised ‘that a slight and ordinary sorrow is not enough for so grievous an offence,’ the penitent, kneeling eastward, and bowing to the very pavement, was to confess his sin and declare his sorrow and repentance, and to ask the prayers of the congregation. Also to ‘thank God for His mercies, especially for the divine ordinance of His Holy Sacraments, and of His heavenly power committed to His Holy Priests, in His Church for the reconciliation of sinners unto Himself and the absolving them from all their iniquity.’

After this follows, with slight alteration, a collect, also from the Visitation of the Sick, and then the priest was to take the penitent by the hand, take away from him the white sheet and the wand, and address to him, once again as dear brother, an affectionate exhortation to walk worthy ‘of so great a mercy,’ and promise him re-admission to the Holy Communion on the next opportunity. How often this service was employed does not appear. The whole form is so beautiful that it is matter for regret it should be so much forgotten.

Wren had been Bishop of Hereford but one year, when the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. R. Corbet, was translated to Oxford, and Bishop Wren translated in turn to the vacant see. It is easy to see Laud’s hand in this. Norwich was a large wide diocese, much shaken by schism and faction and abounding with lecturers who were the torment of the Church at that time and were not unaptly compared ‘to bats or reremice, being neither birds nor beasts, and yet both together,’[17] i.e. neither clerk nor layman.

They were not unfrequently men who had been ordained without cure of souls and served as chaplains in gentlemen’s houses, or men whose orders were doubtful, or mere laymen who had failed in other callings. They were all strong Calvinists, seldom read the services, but called a fast, quite irrespective of those of the Church, and gave a lecture. This speedily became a ‘running lecture,;’ i.e. was not confined to one place but ran from parish to parish. Every possible check was put by the Archbishop upon these lectures, which were fatal to the proper order of the parishes and all church discipline. Private gentlemen were forbidden to have chaplains, all who preached were compelled to wear a surplice and first to read the Church Service, and in the afternoon to teach the Church Catechism. Wren, Mainwaring, Corbet, Montague, and other like-minded bishops set themselves vigorously to enforce the Archbishop’s plans, esteeming the discipline and doctrine of the Church more valuable than the popularity which their firmness forfeited. Norwich presented an especial difficulty to the Bishop in the great number of weavers and other workmen who had taken refuge there from the Low Countries in times of persecution, and who still kept up their schismatic services.

As his treatment of the Norwich weavers has always been the principal ground of attack against Wren, from Lord Clarendon down to writers of the present time, it is needful to enter somewhat into the question, and to see where the truth lies.

These foreign workmen had settled in England at various times, escaping from persecutions in the Low Countries and in France, and, though they had never had any distinct permission to use their own services, their doing so had been winked at by Queen Elizabeth and King James. Now they had reached a third generation and continued to profit by an exemption which was enjoyed by no other body of the kingdom. It will be borne in mind that as the laws then ran and were understood, every English subject was required to be also a member of the Church of England. The first generation of refugees were an exception, but when they reached a second and third generation, had their own ministers and pretended to the power of Ordination, they became an anomaly, and as Laud, when Bishop of London, said, ‘The example is of ill-consequence in Church affairs to the subjects of England, many being confirmed by it in their stubborn ways and inconformities.’ The matter was not likely to be mended by Archbishop Abbot; but when Laud succeeded him he addressed himself, in 1634, vigorously to the business, and set out this dilemma:

Every art that could be used was employed by the congregations to avoid returning an answer to the Archbishop’s inquiries, whether the English-born members would conform and use the Liturgy in their own language. The two congregations in Norwich resisted vehemently and remonstrated with Bishop Corbet, who was then bishop of the diocese; but Archbishop Laud himself visited the diocese and caused the injunction to be published in the congregations. It had been modified until it only ordered that, while strangers, as long as they were strangers, might use their own discipline, yet that the English Liturgy should be translated into French and Dutch for the better fitting of their children to the English Government. In Canterbury, he kept them ‘on a harder diet,’ and allowed only the translated Liturgy. All this took place before Bishop Wren came to Norwich, so it is manifestly unjust to accuse him of having set the measure, moderate as it was, on foot. The congregations remained a focus of Calvinism and discontent, secretly encouraged by all the leading Puritans, and envied by the lecturers who wished themselves in the like case.

Another trouble in Norwich, was the failure of business amongst the cloth weavers, whose trade was the chief industry of the town; the failure appears to have been, in a great measure, caused by the plague, which raged in London in 1636,[18] and put a stop for a considerable time to the weekly traffic between it and Norwich. Many of the workmen in consequence betook themselves to Holland, to obtain the means of livelihood. The same thing had happened in Bishop Corbet’s time, but as in this instance it coincided with Wren’s first visitation, there were not wanting those who said that his severity in enforcing conformity was the main reason of their departure. This accusation seems never to have been made at the time, but only later on, when every conceivable charge was being raked up against the Bishop. He truly says, that, often as at the council board the failure of the weaving trade and the emigration of the skilled workmen to Holland was lamented, it was never suggested that his severity was in any way the cause of it. In his defence, prepared for the House of Commons, the Bishop, besides accounting for much of the emigration by the failure of trade, consequent on the plague, reduces the number, by comparing it with the records kept at the various ports, from the alleged 3,000 to about 300, and drily says: ‘The defendant humbly conceiveth that the chiefest cause of their departure was the small wages given to the workmen, whereby the workmasters grew rich, and the workmen were kept very poor.’

The charge has been often revived, the more so as though the accusation is well known enough, the defence, only to be found in the ‘Parentalia,’ is hardly known except to the few who have threaded the labyrinth of that scarce volume. That Wren was a great upholder of discipline and authority, a man of a fiery energetic temper, decided opinions, and an unyielding, perhaps a severe, disposition, is certainly true; but it is also true that he practised, as Laud and Strafford did, an even-handed justice, laying his hand on rich and poor alike, and would not turn aside for any suggestion of policy or expediency. It should, however, in fairness be added, that though he made his authority felt and obeyed, he did not press matters to extremity against any clergyman without grave cause, and was very ready to receive those who showed any readiness to submit. Of the 1,300 clergy in the diocese, not including those attached to the Cathedral or the schoolmasters, in spite of ‘many disorders,’ there were in 1636 but thirty excommunicated or suspended, some for contumacy, some for obstinately refusing to publish the King’s declaration, some ‘for contemning all the Orders and Rites of the Church and intruding themselves, without licence from the Ordinary, for many years together.’ His returns to the Archbishop show how very thoroughly and diligently he, to use a modern phrase, ‘worked his diocese,’ visiting parish after parish, causing the fabrics to be repaired,[19] the clergy to reside, to hold the appointed services and to catechise the children. Here and there a lecturer who promised conformity was allowed to remain, but generally they were checked and discouraged. Great Yarmouth must have gladdened the Bishop’s heart, as, two years before Bishop Wren came to the Diocese, the lecturer had gone to New England, ‘since which time,’ the Bishop says, ‘there hath been no lecture and very much peace in the town and all ecclesiastical orders well observed.’ It was in truth a great undertaking to bring the Diocese of Norwich into order; but Wren did not shrink from the task, and had all the support which the King and the Archbishop could give, a support afterwards imputed as a crime both to those who gave and to him who received it.

DR. C. WREN—BIRTH OF HIS SON CHRISTOPHER—EAST KNOYLE—ORDER OF THE GARTER—HOW A MURDERER WAS DETECTED—CHRISTOPHER AT WESTMINSTER—A LATIN LETTER—DIOCESE OF ELY—IMPEACHMENT OF LORD STRAFFORD—OF ARCHBISHOP LAUD—ARTICLES AGAINST BISHOP WREN—RESIGNS THE DEANERY OF THE CHAPELS ROYAL.

Less is known of the early years of Christopher Wren than of his brother’s more eventful life. Christopher went to Oxford, to S. John’s College, was admitted to Holy Orders, and, like his brother, became chaplain to Bishop Andrewes, from whom in 1620 he received the living of Fonthill Bishops in Wiltshire.

It may be said in passing, that to receive preferment from Lancelot Andrewes was in itself a proof of merit, for it was his especial care, in the three dioceses which he successively governed, only to promote able and good men to ‘such livings and preferments as fell within his gift, and to give Church preferment to none that asked for it.’ To this rule he rigidly adhered, and his disciple, Matthew Wren, followed the same plan when he became a Prelate of the Church.

Christopher did not hold this living more than three years, and then received, also from Bishop Andrewes, the neighbouring living of East (or Bishop’s) Knoyle, very near Fonthill Abbey, afterwards a place famous for its beauty and its curiosities, then the property of a Mr. Robert Cox. This gentleman had an only child, Mary, who inherited his property; she became the wife of Christopher Wren, probably a few years after his appointment to East Knoyle, where their seven children were born—five girls, of only one of whom there is any subsequent record, and two sons. A Christopher, baptized in the November of 1630, who probably died very young, as in the register the record stands, ‘Christopher, first sonne of Doctor Wren,’ ‘first’ is added above in another hand. The next baptism is, ‘Christopher, 2nd (sic) sonne of Christopher Wren, Dr. in Divinitie and Rector now.’ This is in the entries for 1631 (O.S.), followed by those for March, and is dated only ‘10th.’

This ‘second Christopher’ is the one who was to make the name afterwards so famous; but the date is very perplexing. Dr. Wren and his son both reckoned the latter’s age from his birthday, October 20, 1632, as appears again and again in the ‘Parentalia,’ notably in Dr. Wren’s own MS. note to a letter from his son.[20] The East Knoyle Register would, if the baptism is rightly put among the entries for March 1631 (O.S.), make the birthday October 20, 1631; but it seems more likely that this is an error, and 1632 the correct date.

At East Knoyle Dr. Wren appears to have passed most of his time, leaving it occasionally, as he had done his previous living, to attend on Bishop Andrewes. He was a good scholar, if less deeply learned than his brother; a mathematician, a good musician, and had besides some knowledge of drawing and architecture. He employed himself in decorating East Knoyle chancel, and to him, in all probability, are owing the[21] ‘flower borders, figures, and texts of Scripture in raised plasterwork;’ which, though much defaced, still cover the chancel. The subjects are—‘Jacob’s Dream,’ ‘The Ladder with the Angels,’ ‘Jacob anointing the Pillar.’ Over the chancel arch ‘The Ascension of our Lord.’ Round the capitals of the columns are quaint inscriptions:

Sic
ut  pr ae
o  sis.  Am
or  a.   A Deo  a
o  pta.[22]

‘Unum necessarium.’ The texts of holy Scripture, which are very well chosen, are all quoted from that earlier translation known as the ‘Bishops’ Bible,’ to which the Psalms, Offertory sentences, and ‘Comfortable Words’ of the Prayer Book belong.

Besides this, Wren contrived a new roof for the church, as the old one was falling into decay. In the hall of the rectory he put up the following inscription:

‘In quamcunque domum introeritis primum dicite:
paX sIt hVIC DoMVI
Tam solenni præcepto, tempestivo voto
Subscripsi introiens
C. W. Rector,
Julii 28. Anno dicto.’[23]

The inscription is not a little characteristic of the gentle, peace-loving nature of Christopher Wren, and the quaint conceits in which the wits of the time delighted. This form of chronogram was one which he frequently used. His second daughter, Susan, was born in 1627, and as she and the ‘second Christopher’ clung closely together in after life, and the others are never mentioned, it seems likely that they two were the only survivors of the seven children. Christopher was a very delicate, weakly boy, who early gave promise of brilliant abilities. No records say when Mrs. Wren died, but various things seem to show that she died when her children were still very young.

Dr. Wren had been one of the King’s chaplains in ordinary since 1628, and so well did he acquit himself that when his brother the Bishop resigned the deanery of Windsor and the registrarship of the Garter, the King appointed Christopher to the vacant post. It was an appointment which suited him well; he took up with equal energy his brother’s work, of arranging the documents and records, and continuing the history of the Order. Two autograph letters relating to this are preserved in the ‘Parentalia,’ one from the chancellor of the Garter, Sir Thomas Rowe:—

Sundry particulars follow, and he promises a record of the members of the Garter from its foundation. The King, he says, is anxious that every ‘chapiter of the Order’ should be fully recorded. Sir Thomas asks for ‘the papers of Sir John Fynnet’ in order to send them to King Charles, ‘who is very curious of them.’ ‘On all occasions,’ the letter concludes, ‘I shall be glad to give y^u ye testimonye of my desire to be esteemed and to be y^r affectionate friend to serve y^u,

‘Tho. Rowe.

‘Cranford, 9 Jan. 1636 (O.S.)’

The Dean’s answer comes promptly:—

‘Jan. 10, 1636 (O.S.)

The Garter history appears to have been carefully continued, and Dean Wren describes, in a long picturesque account, the admission on May 19, 1638, of the Prince of Wales, then but eight years old, as a ‘companion of the Garter.’ The little Prince, Dean Wren says, acquitted himself admirably during the three days of intricate ceremonial, doing his part with accuracy and spirit, a sweet dignity, and an unwearied patience until all was completed.

He must have been a very hopeful, engaging, boy, and it is sad to think how little his after life fulfilled its early promise: had he remained in his father’s care a very different record might have been left of him in English history. The Service of Admission is a curious one, and the prayers on the putting on the Garter, the ribbon, the collar, and the mantle have considerable beauty. On this occasion the festival was celebrated with great splendour. King Charles presented two large silver flagons, cunningly carved and very richly gilt, offering them on his knees with these words: ‘Tibi, et perpetuo Tuo servitio, partem bonitatis Tuae offero Domine Deus Omnipotens.’[24]

These were added to the treasury of the Garter, which contained many articles of great value. There was a set of triple gilt silver plate wrought by Van Vianen[25] of Nuremberg, estimated at over 3,000l., several other pieces of plate, Edward IV.’s steel armour, gilt, and covered with crimson velvet embroidered with pearls, rubies and gold, fifteen rich copes embroidered in gold, altar-cloths and hangings worked with the same costly material.

There was also the blue velvet mantle, the George and Garter of Gustavus Adolphus, each letter of the motto made in diamonds. These had been sent to the King of Sweden by Charles I. at the close of the campaign in 1627 as a mark of friendship and respect for his valour, and were the richest ever sent even to a sovereign.

After the heroic king’s death on the field at Lutzen, in 1634, a solemn embassy brought the mantle and the jewels back to England, when they were consigned to the Dean and Chapter of Windsor, with a charge from King Charles to lay them up in the treasury ‘for a perpetual memorial of that renowned King, who died in the field of battle wearing some of those jewels, to the great honour of the Order, as a true martial prince and companion thereof.’

A few years later King Charles presented Dean Wren to the rectory of Great Haseley[26] near Oxford, with a fine old church containing two crusaders’ tombs.

In the parish of Haseley is the manor of Ryecote (or Ricot), which by marriage had become the property of Sir Henry Norris, Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, whom she created Baron Norris (or Norreys) of Ryecot, and whose descendants, now the Earls of Abingdon, possess the manor to this day. During Dr. Wren’s incumbency, a strange event took place. Among the retainers of Lord Norris was an old man who had charge of the fish ponds; he had one nephew, who was the heir of all his uncle’s possessions and savings. The nephew enticed the old man out one night, waited till he fell asleep under an oak tree, murdered him by a blow on the head, dragged the body to one of the ponds, tied a great stone to the neck and threw the corpse in. There it lay five weeks, during which time Lord Norris and all the neighbours wondered what had become of the old man. At length the body was found by the men who were about to clean the pond, and were attracted to the spot by the swarms of flies; they raised the corpse with great difficulty and recognised it.

The stone tied to the neck was evidence of foul play, though no one could guess at the murderer. Lord Norris, in order to detect the criminal, after the usual manner, commanded that the corpse, preserved by the water from the last extremity of decay, should on the next Sunday be exposed in the churchyard, close to the church door, so that everyone entering the church should see—and touch it. The wicked nephew shrank from the ordeal, feigning to be so overwhelmed with grief as to be unable to bear the sight of his dearest uncle. Lord Norris, suspecting that the old man had been murdered by the one person whom his death would profit, compelled him to come, and to touch with his finger, as so many had willingly done, the hand of the dead. At his touch, however, ‘as if opened by the finger of God, the eyes of the corpse were seen by all to move, and blood to flow from his nostrils.’ At this awful witness the murderer fell on the ground and avowed the crime, which he had secretly committed and the most just judgment of God had brought to light. He was delivered to the judge, sentenced, and hanged.

The event must have made a deep impression on Dean Wren, who recorded it at length in Latin and signed the record to attest its truth.

He also mentions that in the east window of the church was the

Dr. Wren seems to have divided his residence between Haseley and Windsor, probably spending most of his time at the Deanery, where many of the learned men and philosophers of the day sought his society. Among these was the Prince Palatine Charles, who was a frequent guest at the Deanery, enjoying its learned quiet, and interested in his host’s young son, whose great gifts were early remarkable. Many a little note did Dean Wren make of curious things that came under his observation, particularly of an oak that grew in the New Forest and sent out young fresh leaves on Christmas Eve. So much discussion was raised about it at court and King James would so little believe it, that good Bishop Andrewes sent a chaplain on Christmas Eve to the forest, who gathered about a hundred fresh shoots, stuck them into wet clay, and sent them straight to the court, where Dr. Wren witnessed the opening of the boxes. The tree was then cut down by some spiteful fellow, ‘who,’ says the Dean, ‘made his last stroke on his own leg, whereof he died, together with the old wondrous tree.’

King Charles engaged Dr. Wren to make an estimate for a building at Windsor for the use of the Queen; it was to be of considerable size, containing a chapel, a banqueting room, galleries and rooms for the Lord Chamberlain and court officials. The estimate exists in business-like detail, the total amounting to 13,305l.; but it was probably not even begun.

To his other employments the Dean added the tender care of his young son. Christopher’s case was one of those rare ones in which a precocious child not only lives to grow up, but also amply fulfils his early promise. His delicate health was the cause of much anxiety to his father and to his sister Susan, and it may be that the skill in nursing and medicine for which she was afterwards famous, had their beginning in her watchful care of her little brother.

His frail health seems to have been rather a spur than a hindrance to his studies, and when very young he had a tutor, the Rev. W. Shepheard, who prepared him for Westminster, where he was sent in his ninth or tenth year. Westminster was then under the rule of its famous headmaster Dr. Busby, to whose especial care young Christopher was committed.

The school with its stir of life, the grand abbey, the Houses of Parliament then empty and silent, Lambeth, from which his uncle’s friend, Archbishop Laud, might be seen frequently coming across the river in his barge; the whole surroundings must have been wonderful to the country-bred boy who was one day to connect his name indissolubly with that of London. Did he, one cannot but wonder, ever on a holiday take boat down the river, shooting the dangerous arches of London Bridge, and look at S. Paul’s with its long line of roof, its tall tower and shattered spire; little S. Gregory’s nestling by its side, and all the workmen busied on the repairs which had been begun after King James’s solemn thanksgiving in 1620? Laud, while Bishop of London, had carried on the works with a vigour that had given them a fresh impetus, and was one great cause of his unpopularity. Inigo Jones had superintended them and finished the interior, and at the west end, the stately portico of Portland stone, which, though incongruous, was in itself beautiful, was being erected by King Charles’s orders. How little could the boy have guessed at the ruin which was approaching those pious builders, or the desecration and destruction that awaited the fine old building itself.

At school no pains were spared with so promising a pupil as young Wren soon showed himself to be. His sister Susan married, in 1643, Mr. William Holder, subdean of the Chapel Royal, of a Nottinghamshire family, a good mathematician, and one ‘who had good skill in the practic and theoretic parts of music’[27] Susan Wren was sixteen when she married, and though childless the marriage was a very happy one.

Mr. Holder early discerned his young brother-in-law’s talent for mathematics and gave him private lessons. Mr. Holder was subsequently appointed to the living of Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire, which he held until 1663.

Among the few autograph letters of Christopher Wren’s which remain in the family, is one written to his father from Westminster in a boy’s unformed hand, the faintly ruled lines still showing.

While young Christopher was thus delighting his father with his ‘first-fruits,’ his uncle the Bishop was encountering many adversities. While he was busied in Norwich, and in the midst of his work, Dr. White, Bishop of Ely, died; he had resided mostly in London, as was then too commonly the habit of the bishops, and it is to be supposed that there was plenty of work to be done in the diocese. Laud reckoned it as a very important one on account of its university, and could think of no one so well suited to the post as Bishop Wren, who was a distinguished Cambridge scholar. To Ely accordingly the Bishop was translated, May 5, 1638, and rejoiced in renewing his connection with the university where his early years had been spent. The expenses attending so many removals must have fallen heavily upon him; all the more, as in Norwich the palace was out of repair and he lived for some time in a house of his own at Ipswich, which was probably a part of Mrs. Wren’s property, finding that much attention was required by that part of his diocese. Prynne was born at Ipswich, and though shut up in the Tower of London,[29] retained friends in his native town; thus the Bishop knew he was entering a hornet’s nest. Prynne speedily produced his ‘Quench-Coal,’ which professed to answer a tract called ‘A Coal from the Altar,’ wherein were explained the reasons for placing the Holy Table altarwise, and railing it in. Next came ‘The News from Ipswich,’ which reviled all bishops under the names of ‘Luciferian Lord Bishops, execrable Traytors, Devouring Wolves,’ and the like; especially attacking Wren, and declaring, that, ‘in all Queen Marie’s time, no such havoc was made in so short a time of the faithful ministers in any part, nay in the whole Land, than had been made in his Diocese.’ There was one great riot at Ipswich, which the Bishop was able to quell. Prynne was fined, branded, and imprisoned in Carnarvon Castle, and the town was for the time tranquil, but Prynne was destined to be a deadly and utterly unscrupulous enemy.

For nearly two years after his translation to Ely, Dr. Wren was able to govern his new diocese in comparative peace. Little opposition seems to have been made, for the factious spirit which was rampant in Norfolk and Suffolk was less violent here. In his beloved university there were many points which needed amendment. When he was master of Peterhouse and built the chapel, he gave it that which many colleges then lacked, and were lacking still when he returned, to visit Cambridge.

The churchyards of the parish churches had been in many instances encroached upon and profaned, and in most of the chancels were ‘common seats over high and unfitting that place.’ ‘In all these businesses,’ says Archbishop Laud in his yearly report to the King, ‘the Bishop hath been very tender, both out of his respect to his mother the University of Cambridge, and because divers of the benefices are impropriations belonging to some of the Colleges there.’ Nor was Wren’s care alone for the fabrics of the Church; he was careful to secure resident and diligent clergy in all the parishes as far as he could and to see that they did their duty. His advice and help were readily given. A clergyman, Mr. John Bois, applied to him for advice in the case of a woman of twenty-nine, of whom no one knew whether or no she was baptized. Mr. Bois had applied by letter and word of mouth to the previous Bishops of Ely (Bishops Buckeridge and White), and could get no answer. Bishop Wren replied to him promptly, directing him to baptize her forthwith, which was accordingly done.[30] Upon these peaceful labours the long-pending storm broke and called Wren to harder duties.

In 1640 the discontent of the times declared itself openly in Scotland, where the Puritan party took up arms against the King, and began to league themselves with the party in England whose opinions or prejudices coincided with their own. King Charles had summoned a parliament, and again dismissed it, having obtained no assistance against the Scotch. ‘The minds of men had taken such a turn,’ says Hume, ‘as to ascribe every honour to the refractory opposers of the King and the ministers. These were the only patriots, the only lovers of their country, the only heroes, and perhaps, too, the only true Christians.’ The mob of sectaries in London, encouraged by the successes obtained by the Scotch, burst into S. Paul’s, where the High Commission then sat, and tore down the benches, with cries of ‘No Bishops—no commission!’ Before this they had attacked Lambeth Palace, threatening to tear the Archbishop in pieces, and would probably have done so had he not been prepared for them. From that time he knew his life to be in constant peril. An unknown friend had written to warn him that the Scotch Puritans justified assassination, and openly hoped the Primate might meet the same fate as his early friend and patron, the Duke of Buckingham. His integrity and singleness of mind, to which Clarendon gives high testimony, had made him bitter enemies. A hasty temper and sharp mode of speech alienated many who could not but respect him. The difficulties of his task had been doubled by the lax, un-Catholic rule of his predecessor at Lambeth. Both Puritans and Romanists alike reckoned him as their greatest opponent. He was nearly seventy years old, and sadly felt that ‘there wanted not many presages of his ruin and death.’ The King’s return, on October 30, brought a gleam of sunshine.

Evelyn[31] says:—

Lord Strafford was impeached and sent to the Tower, and the Archbishop next attacked. Sir Harbottle Grimston, in a virulent speech, vented his hatred against Archbishop Laud; ‘and those prelates he hath advanced—to name but some of them: Bishop Manwaring, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Bishop of Oxford, and Bishop Wren—the last of all those birds, but one of the most unclean ones.’ The debate which followed ended—as in the temper of the House it was certain to do—in a vote that the Archbishop was a traitor. Allowed the afternoon at Lambeth to collect papers for his defence, he attended the evening prayers for the last time in the chapel that he had repaired and adorned with loving care. The service, which he had restored to its full beauty, soothed that bitter hour. ‘The Psalms of the day (December 18) and chapter l. of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy to receive it,’ he wrote in his diary. The poor thronged round Lambeth Palace, and bitterly lamented the departure of their best friend, showering blessings on his head as he was carried away. He remained in the custody of Maxwell, the Usher of the Black Rod, ten weeks, compelled to pay 436l. for his charges, besides a fine of 500l. He was then transferred to the Tower.

The Archbishop being secured, the Bishops were next attacked. Hampden came to the Lords with a message to acquaint their lordships that the Commons had received matters of a high kind against the Bishop of Ely, for the ‘setting up of idolatry and superstition in divers places, and acting the same in his own person;;’ adding that he was intending to escape from England, and that they therefore desired he might be put in security, to be forthcoming and abide the judgment of Parliament. Bishop Wren was in his place in the House when this summons came, and was ordered to find bail for 10,000l.; helped by three of the bishops, he managed to do so. When the Primate was in custody, and Wren under censure, at the beginning of the next year Lord Strafford was attacked. Dr. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, not long released from the Tower, anxious to please the Commons, declared that the canon law forbade the Bishops to sit as judges in a case of blood. He spoke in the name of the other Bishops; and the decision was too welcome to Strafford’s enemies not to be agreed to instantly; but it was a concession afterwards very dangerous to those who made it. The issue of that iniquitous trial, perhaps as great a perversion of justice as England had ever then known, needs no repetition here.

The King’s best advisers were in prison or under restraint, except good Bishop Juxon, who bravely told him he ought not, upon any considerations in the world, to do anything against his conscience; and Bishop Williams, who hated Strafford and Laud alike, sent by the Commons to induce the King to sign the death-warrant, had a fatal success.

Bishop Wren came to Windsor after this to marry Princess Mary, the King’s eldest daughter, to William, eldest son of Henry Frederick, Prince of Orange, whom he succeeded in six years. The alliance was one which gratified the Parliament, being so Protestant a connection. Little, however, could they have guessed how deadly an enemy Princess Mary’s son would prove to the house of Stuart. Ten days after this wedding came May 12, when ‘the wisest head in England was severed from the shoulders of Lord Strafford.’ So writes John Evelyn. To the Archbishop, his friend’s death must have been a terrible blow. He was just able to bestow a parting blessing through his prison window, and to hear Lord Strafford say, ‘Farewell, my lord. God protect your innocency.’ The Princess’s marriage was the last occasion on which Bishop Wren was to officiate as Dean of the Chapels Royal.

The Commons had been industriously at work against him since the first attack in December, and as Archbishop Laud said of Prynne, ‘by this time their malice had hammered out somewhat.’ The committee sent in a report, charging the Bishop with ‘excommunicating fifty painful ministers, practising superstition in his own person, placing “the table” altarwise, elevation of the elements, the “eastward position,” as it is now called, at the Eucharist, bowing to the Altar, causing all seats to be placed so that the people faced east, employing his authority to restrain “powerful preaching,” and ordering catechising in the words of the Church Catechism only, permitting no prayer before the sermon but the bidding prayer (canon 5), publishing a book of articles, to which the churchwardens were sworn, containing 187 questions.’

Upon this report a debate ensued, ending in a vote that it was the opinion of the House that Matthew Wren was unworthy and unfit to hold or exercise any office or dignity in the Church, and voting that a message be sent to the House of Lords to desire them to join the Commons in petitioning his Majesty to remove Bishop Wren from his person and service. Evelyn’s expression, ‘to such an exorbitancy had the times grown,’ aptly describes the state of matters when, for details such as these of the government of a diocese, and for practices which, if they had been proved, were both legal and reasonable, an assembly of laymen presumed to pronounce a bishop unfit for his office in the Church. Whether the petition ever came before the King does not appear, but Wren thought it best to take the initiative; for he writes in his diary five days after the debate: ‘I hardly obtained leave from the King to resign the deanery of the Chapels Royal.’

BISHOP WREN ACCUSED—WESTMINSTER ABBEY ATTACKED—IMPRISONMENT OF THE BISHOPS—BISHOP WREN’S DEFENCE—‘UTTERLY DENIETH ALL POPISH AFFECTIONS;’—THE GARTER JEWELS—ARCHBISHOP LAUD MURDERED—CHRISTOPHER AT OXFORD—PHILOSOPHICAL MEETINGS.

The concession Bishop Wren had thus made did not satisfy the Commons, and on July 20 they drew out the report into twenty articles of accusation, containing all the former charges and several additional ones, among which were the setting up of altar-rails, ordering the Holy Communion to be received kneeling, ordering the reading of the ‘Book of Sports,’ and preaching in a surplice; causing by prosecutions 3,000 of the King’s poor subjects to go beyond the sea.

For these offences they prayed that Bishop Wren might answer, and suffer such punishment as law and justice required. The articles were transmitted to the House of Lords at a conference, and were read by Sir T. Widdrington, Recorder of York,[32] who prefaced them by a venomous speech against the Bishop of Ely, whom he compared to ‘a wolf devouring the flock; an extinguisher of light; a Noah, who sent out doves from the ark, and refused to receive them back unless they returned as ravens, to feed upon the carrion of his new inventions, he himself standing with a flaming sword to keep such out of his diocese.’ He accused the Bishop of raising fines for his own profit; called him a great robber, a malefactor, ’a compleat mirror of innovation, superstition, and oppression: an oppugner of the life and liberty of religion, and a devouring serpent in the diocese of Norwich.’

These are but a few phrases from Sir Thomas’s speech; he used no argument, adduced no proof, but contented himself simply with clamour and reviling, and these were amply sufficient. In the Long Parliament it was enough to accuse anyone, especially a bishop, of Popery, superstition and ‘innovation’—which was a term invented by Bishop Williams, then as now commonly applied to the oldest dogmas and practices of the Church—to insure his imprisonment, or at the least a heavy fine. In Wren’s Diary opposite the day of the month is merely, ‘Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered.’ Dr. Pierce, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was attacked at the same time; but at first no active steps were taken against them, perhaps because the Commons found matters not yet ripe for a wholesale imprisonment of the Bishops. Dr. Wren well knew that matters would not stop here, and while awaiting the next attack began to prepare his Defence against the Articles of Accusation.

The mob in the meanwhile were encouraged by caricatures, libels, and invectives to rail against the Bishops and impute every misfortune and every trade failure to them, by which means the Puritan leaders contrived to stir up a yelling mob of men and women.

All petitions against the Church were received and the petitioners encouraged and praised. The populace insulted the Bishops whenever they appeared, and threatened their lives. Westminster Abbey was attacked, when the Bishops were there, by a violent mob, led by Wiseman, a knight of Kent. The officers and choirmen of the Abbey with the boys of the School, among whom must have been Christopher Wren, defended it gallantly, and the fray ended when Wiseman was killed by a tile thrown from the battlements by one of the defenders. After this the Bishops who were in London met in the Deanery at Westminster, the lodging of Williams, Archbishop of York, who had just been translated from Lincoln to York, in succession to the late Archbishop Neile,[33] to consult what should be done. At the Archbishop’s suggestion, they drew up a paper, remonstrating against the abuse offered them, and the manner in which they had been hindered from coming to the House of Lords, their coaches overset, their barges attacked and prevented landing, and they themselves beset and threatened. They claimed their right to sit in the House of Lords and vote, and protested against all that had been done since the 27th of that month (December, 1641), and all that should hereafter pass in time of this their forced and violent absence. This paper was signed by the Archbishop and eleven Bishops, of whom Bishop Wren was one, and presented to the King, who delivered it to Littleton, the Lord Keeper, to be communicated next day to the Peers. The Lord Keeper, who had already deserted his benefactor, Lord Strafford, contrary to the King’s orders showed the paper first to ‘some of the preaching party in both Houses,’ and then to the Peers. Upon the reading a conference was desired between the Houses, and the Lord Keeper declared that the Bishops’ paper contained ‘matters of high and dangerous consequence, extending to the deep intrenching upon the fundamental privileges and being of Parliament.’ The Commons, whose part, like that of the Lord Keeper[34] was pre-arranged, impeached the Bishops of high treason; the usher of the Black Rod was despatched to find and bring them before the House. They, lodging in different parts of London, were not all collected until eight o’clock on the winter’s night, and then, their offence being signified, were committed to the Tower.[35] The Bishops of Durham and Lichfield, both aged and infirm, obtained leave to be in the custody of the Black Rod. The other bishops were carried to the Tower on the following morning. A libellous pamphlet was published at this time, entitled ‘Wren’s Anatomy, discovering his notorious Pranks &c., printed in the year when Wren ceased to domineer,’ has in the title-page a print of Bishop Wren sitting at a table; out of his mouth proceed two labels: on one, ‘Canonical Prayers;;’ on the other, ‘No Afternoon Sermon.’ On one side stand several clergy, over whose heads is written ‘Altar-cringing Priests.’ On the other, two men in lay habits, above whom is this inscription, ‘Churchwardens for Articles.’ It serves to show what were considered as really the Bishop’s crimes, and that he had a fair proportion of faithful clergy.[36] The Archbishop of York had served the Commons’ turn in procuring the King’s assent to Lord Strafford’s death-warrant, and had enjoyed for a short time a remarkable though transient popularity both on that account and as Laud’s bitter opponent. The Commons were, however, soon weary of him, and gladly availed themselves of the pretext afforded by the protest to throw him aside. A pamphlet was published, which had a great success, entitled the ‘Decoy Duck,’ in allusion to the fens of his former diocese of Lincoln, in which he was represented as only released from the Tower in order to decoy the other bishops there. It was thought prudent that the bishops should make no attempt either to see each other, or Archbishop Laud, who had preceded them to that dreary lodging, so that only loving messages passed between the prisoners. So many bishops being in custody, and five sees vacant, the Commons took their opportunity, and brought in a Bill depriving the Bishops of their seats in Parliament, and of the power of sitting as judges or privy councillors. It was feebly opposed by the Churchmen, who had been alienated by the prelates’ desertion of Lord Strafford, and was finally carried. The remark made a little later by Lord Falkland on Sir E. Deering’s ‘Bill for the Extirpation of Episcopacy,’ when the Churchmen, weary of their attendance, left the House at dinner-time, and did not return—‘Those who hated the bishops, hated them worse than the devil, and those who loved them did not love them so well as their dinner,’—appears to have been applicable to this occasion also. Not very long after the first-named Bill had passed, some of the bishops were set at liberty, but Bishop Wren was not released until May 6, 1642.

It was a brief respite. He went down to his diocese, to a house at Downham, near Ely, where his wife and children were living, and there, August 17, he kept the last wedding-day that he and his wife were ever to celebrate together. On August 25 King Charles set up his standard at Nottingham and the Civil War began. On the 30th of the month Bishop Wren’s house was entered by soldiers and he was taken prisoner, without, it will be observed, the shadow of a legal charge against him. On September 1st he was again thrown into the Tower, leaving Mrs. Wren with a daughter only eight days old and mourning for their son Francis, who had died in the previous month. Matthew, the eldest son, was then only thirteen years old. Bishop Wren’s was a singularly steadfast, hopeful nature, and it may be that he expected to be speedily released by the victorious Royalist armies. Could he have foreseen the duration of his imprisonment and the miseries which were to befall the Church and the country, even his dauntless spirit might have been crushed. He did not seek an interview with Archbishop Laud, lest they should be accused of plotting, and so each injure the other. Otherwise it would not have been difficult, as the Archbishop was at first carelessly watched, in the hope that he would, by escaping, rid the Commons of a difficulty. The Archbishop ‘would not, at seventy years, go about to prolong a miserable life by the trouble and shame of flying,’ though Grotius sent him an intreaty to copy the example of his own marvellous escape from Loevenstein Castle twenty-one years previously.[37] The services in the Tower Chapel, where they probably met at first, could have given them little comfort, marred and mangled as the services were by the intruders, who came often with no better object than to preach insulting sermons against the prelates.

Dr. Wren busied himself in the completion of the ‘Defence,’ to which allusion has been made in the first chapter.[38] It is too long to allow of being set out in full, but a few points may be touched upon. Of the ‘fifty painful ministers;’ whom he was said to have excommunicated, for some of the sentences there was, as has been said, very sufficient reason. As the Bishop says, ‘Excommunication doth by law fall upon those that are absent, either from visitation, or synods; and suspension is a censure which in the practice of those courts is incurred in one hour and taken off in another, and is of little or no grievance at all except it be wilfully persisted in.’ He complains of so vague a charge, not stating who the clergy were, and proceeds as well as he can recollect to mention those who had fallen under his censure. For those whose licence to preach had been withdrawn, the greater number ought never to have received it at all; one had been a broken tradesman in Ipswich, one a country apothecary, another a weaver, another ‘no graduate, not long translated from common stage-playing to two cures and a publick lecture.’ Yet still when all were reckoned who had ever been censured or admonished, the Bishop thinks that the fifty will hardly be made up.[39]

It is a curious instance of the temper of the times that one head of so serious an indictment should be that ‘To manifest his Popish Affections, he in 1636, caused a crucifix to be engraven upon his Episcopal seal.’ Bishop Wren carefully addresses himself to the defence of this point, and to that of bowing at the name of our Lord, and to the Altar.

For bowing to the Altar, while setting out how old a practice of the Church it was, designedly continued at the Reformation, how a like reverence was paid always to the King, or to his chair of estate if he was not in the Presence Chamber,

For the crucifix—

The part of the Defence, which has been most challenged, is that for the use of the ‘Eastward position.’ It is, however, important to remember that the Bishop had to defend himself against the charge, that once, while celebrating in the Tower Church at Ipswich, he had ‘used idolatrous actions’ in administering the Holy Communion, Consecrating the Elements with his face eastward, elevating the Paten and Chalice ‘above his shoulders and bowing low either to or before them when set down on the Table.’

The charge of ‘idolatry’ divides itself into three heads. The last two Wren met by a full denial, the first he confesses, while explaining his reason for his position in that special instance, when, as he says, the Elements being on the middle of the Holy Table, ‘were farther from the end thereof than he, being but low of stature, could reach over his book unto them and yet still proceed in reading the words without stop or interruption and without danger of spilling the Bread and Wine ... and he humbly conceiveth that although the Rubrick[41] says that the Minister shall stand at the north side of the Table, yet it is not so to be meant as that upon no occasion during all Communion time he shall step from it.’ For the rest, the whole tone of the Defence is brave and dignified; and despite the knowledge that his life was at stake, despite of the ‘humbly conceiveth’ which runs through it, it is evident that the Bishop considered his position to be in reality unassailable, and that he was more or less condescending in making these explanations. There is an irony in the studied simplicity with which the scholar and theologian explains elementary truths and ordinary rules of church discipline to a House of Commons who certainly stood in need of instruction in such matters.

The Bishop, when his part was done, and he had received notice to prepare for trial on a day appointed, put his manuscript, with an injunction of secresy, into the hands of a lawyer who was supposed to be friendly, that he might give his advice on the technical and legal parts.

‘The person,’ says the ‘Parentalia,’ ‘thus intrusted discovering (on the perusal) matters of such moment, as he conceived might be very expedient for the Prosecutors to be forewarned of, betrayed his trust, and to ingratiate himself treacherously delivered up the Bishop’s papers to the chief persons in power of the governing faction. The consequence thereupon was—that the resolution which had been taken to bring him to trial for life was suddenly countermanded and an order by the House of Commons made to continue him in prison during their pleasure.’

So began the long years of Bishop Wren’s captivity. Few trials could have been harder for a man of vigorous active nature to bear than this one which rendered him powerless, when all he held dear was at stake, loaded him with calumnies and prevented his uttering a word in his defence. The diary gives no hint of what his feelings were. In silence he resigned himself, resolved to afford no triumph to his enemies. Dean Wren was somewhat better off, though he had his share of misfortunes. The valuable plate and treasures belonging to the Order of the Garter were a serious responsibility, and, though the treasure-house was strong, he could not feel that it offered a sufficient security. The plate and armour were not easily hidden, but the Diamond George and Garter of Gustavus Adolphus he determined, if possible, to save. Accordingly, with the help of one trustworthy person and every precaution for secresy, he dug a hole in the treasury floor and there deposited them, concealing the place with the utmost care, and leaving a note in the hand of one worthy person intimating where the jewels might be found in the event of his death. He had good cause to rejoice in this precaution, for a few months later, in October 1642, down came

‘one Captain Fogg pretending a warrant from the King and demanding the keys of the Treasury, threatening if they were denied him by the Dean and Prebendaries, to pull the Chapel about their ears.’

As his threats had no effect, he forced the stone jambs of the doorway with crowbars, and carried off all the treasures except those which the Dean had buried. These, however, did not long remain secure, for in 1645 they were discovered and placed in the keeping of Colonel Ven, then governor of Windsor Castle, and finally, through several hands, reached the trustees of the Long Parliament, who sold the jewels to Thomas Beauchamp, their clerk. The Deanery was not spared during the first pillage of the chapel, though the Dean possessed a formal protection from the Committee of Public Safety, but was ransacked by the soldiers, and the Registry of the Garter, sealed by order of the House of Lords, broken open, and the records stolen. Dean Wren lost many things of value—books and manuscripts dear to the careful scholar, and also plate, including two large silver tankards, the gifts of the Elector Palatine. Of his own effects the Dean was only able, after an interval of six years, to recover one harpsichord valued at ten pounds; but he succeeded, after much expense and frequent attendances at Somerset House, by the favour of the trustees’ chairman, Major Wither, in regaining the registers of the Order of the Garter, known from the colours of the velvet in which they were bound as ‘the Black, the Blue, and the Red,’ though not until a considerable space of time had passed; they contained all the principal records of the Order, and were therefore very valuable. The diamonds however, he was never able to regain, or the Altar Plate. After the first plunder of the Chapel and the Deanery Dr. Wren appears to have left Windsor and to have followed the Court for a time.

Christopher, meanwhile, was at Westminster advancing steadily in learning, while the loyal principles of his family must have been confirmed by the whole tone of the school which was ardently royalist. South, in a sermon for January 30, says,[42] speaking of Westminster: ‘Upon that very Day, that black and eternally infamous Day of the King’s murder, I myself heard, and am now a witness, that the King was publickly prayed for in this School but an hour or two (at most) before his sacred head was struck off.’

Whether at this period Christopher ever saw his uncle in the Tower does not appear. The Bishop’s position was sad enough. During 1643 and 1644 his diary records the death of five of his children; in the monotony of his prison life these sorrows must have pressed on him with double force. Nor was there any consolation to be derived from public matters. The royal cause, prosperous at first, grew less and less so, as the King’s lack of money became an ever-increasing difficulty. Another grief, keenly felt by all Churchmen, was the order of the Parliament for the abolition of the Prayer Book and the alteration of the Thirty-nine Articles in a sense pleasing to the Puritans. Then came the long-deferred trial of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was treated with a cruel disregard of his high position and of his age, every kind of insult and indignity being offered him. He however rose superior to it all, and defended himself with an eloquence, vigour, and courage which dismayed and enraged his enemies, though it could not change their purpose. The Bishop of Ely’s name was frequently mentioned, and his promotion objected to as one of the Archbishop’s crimes; but no further steps were taken against him then, as he was safe in custody, and the Commons had enough on their hands.

In his defence, the Archbishop thought it prudent to say nothing respecting the Bishops whose advancement was objected against him, deeming it for their interest to entangle them as little as possible in his misfortunes. They were able to speak for themselves he said, but the memory of the dead Archbishop Neile he warmly defended. The trial was long protracted in order to give a specious colouring of justice to the predetermined sentence.

For this Prynne ‘kept a school of instruction’ for the witnesses, and tampered with the Archbishop’s papers, of which he had forcibly possessed himself. The spirit that guided the whole trial was shown in his reply to one who said the Archbishop was a good man. ‘Yea, but we must make him ill.’ The Peers raised a feeble opposition. The King, whose consent the Parliament had not attempted to procure, sent to the Archbishop by a sure hand, from Oxford, a full pardon under the Great Seal, but neither received the least attention.

On January 10, on Tower Hill, the unjust sentence was fulfilled. Few things are more touching than the account given by his chaplain and biographer, Heylin, of the way in which the Archbishop met that cruel fate. It is some comfort to remember that, though the Church Services were then forbidden, yet his enemies did not interfere, but suffered the Burial Service to be read in All Hallows, Barking, where he was first interred. After the Restoration, the coffin was removed to S. John’s College, Oxford, and buried under the altar in the chapel. He left Bishop Wren and Dr. Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury, executors of his will. It contained a great number of bequests for charitable foundations, especially for his native town of Reading; but as his whole estate had been taken from him, these were unfulfilled. His murder was an immense triumph to all the Sectarians in England and Scotland, who probably considered it as a death-blow to the Church.

The Bishop of Ely in his cell must have listened in grief and horror to the tolling of the Tower bell which proclaimed the bloody death of the friend with whom he had laboured for many years, latterly his patient fellow-prisoner. The entry in the diary is brief: ‘Parce, O Deus Requisitor sanguinis.’ The same fate seemed very near to himself, and he was ready to follow the Archbishop; but he had eighteen years of close imprisonment to endure, and a different work to do.

Early in 1644, George Monk, then a colonel in the King’s service, was taken prisoner by Fairfax in his attack upon the army besieging Nantwich, in Cheshire. He was imprisoned first at Hull, and then, as he was thought too important to be exchanged except for some considerable prisoner, he was sent to the Tower, and there remained two years. The Tower charges were high, and a long confinement in its walls was a strain upon the resources of a prisoner, which reduced those, whose fortune, like that of Monk, was scanty, to extreme poverty. The King, who knew Monk’s condition, contrived to send him a hundred guineas, and upon this he existed for some time, and resisted the offers of Cromwell, then rapidly rising in power and authority.

Somehow or other, Monk contrived to obtain several interviews with Bishop Wren, who did his best to confirm the soldier in his loyalty. He perceived that Monk, whose popularity with the army was very great, and whose military talents were thought to be of a high order, might one day be a valuable ally, and a useful counterpoise to Cromwell. At length, when the King’s cause appeared for the time lost, and Monk himself was reduced to extreme poverty, he yielded to Cromwell’s request, and accepted a commission in the Irish army, under his kinsman Lord Lisle. Before his release, Monk had a final interview with the Bishop of Ely, and, as he knelt to ask the Bishop’s blessing, bound himself with a solemn engagement never to be an enemy to his king, and said he was going to do his majesty the best service he could against ‘the rebels in Ireland, and hoped he should one day do him further service in England.’

Bishop Wren held firmly to his trust in Monk’s loyalty, though many things might well have shaken his confidence. In the curious life of Dr. John Barwick, one of the King’s most faithful agents, from whom Sir Walter Scott may have taken many of the features of his indefatigable plotter ‘Dr. Rochecliffe,’ it is said that[43] ‘he’ (Dr. Barwick) ‘often heard the Right Reverend Bishop of Ely promise himself all he could wish from the General’s fidelity.’ As Monk gave no other hint of his intentions, refusing even to receive Charles II.’s letters, this assurance was precious to the Royalists.

In 1646, Christopher Wren left Westminster, and at the age of fourteen went up to Oxford, and was entered as a Gentleman Commoner at Wadham College. He had, young as he was, distinguished himself at Westminster, inventing an astronomical instrument, of which no description remains, and dedicating it to his father in a short Latin poem,[44] which has been often praised for the flow and smoothness of its lines; a set of Latin verses in which the signs of the Zodiac are transformed into Christian emblems, is, in spite of its ingenuity, much less successful; a short poem on the Nativity also in Latin, belongs probably to the same date, and is of the same order of poetry.

Far more graceful are the playful lines cut on the rind of an immense pomegranate sent to ‘that best man, my dearest friend E. F., by Christopher Regulus,’ in which on the ‘Pomo Punico,’ as he calls it, Christopher rings the changes on ‘Punic gifts’ and ‘Punic faith,’ and declares his pomegranate is connected neither with the one nor the other.

One English poem, an attempt to paraphrase the first chapter of S. John’s Gospel, fails of necessity from the impossibility of such an attempt, and Wren handles the English verse far more stiffly and uneasily than he did the Latin. What however is striking is the penmanship of the ‘Parentalia’ autograph; the writing, the capital letters, and the little flourishes are executed with a delicate finish really remarkable.

There is no date to this autograph, but the handwriting appears firmer and more regular than that of the dedication to his father, and it was probably an Oxford composition.

Christopher came up to Oxford a slight, delicate boy, with an understanding at once singularly quick and patient, readily seconded by very dexterous fingers, and keen powers of observation. He brought with him a reputation for, in the phrase of the day, ‘uncommon parts,’ and speedily showed that besides a classical education, he had acquired a strong bent for the experimental philosophy of the ‘New learning.’

Oxford, when Wren came there, was not only the seat of learning, it was a Court and a Camp as well, to which all the Royalist hearts in England turned. In the midst of these curiously differing influences, Christopher pursued his studies under the care of the ‘most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins,’[45] as Evelyn calls him, a man as devoted to experiments as Christopher himself. Dean Wren had been in Bristol with his daughter and son-in-law, accompanying Prince Rupert, and on the Prince’s unexpected surrender of the town to Fairfax (1645), seems to have returned with Prince Rupert and Mr. and Mrs. Holder, either to his own living of Great Haseley, or to Mr. Holder’s at Bletchingdon.

In those times no place could long be a tranquil habitation. The King’s affairs went from bad to worse, and at length the near approach of Fairfax with his victorious army made it evident that Oxford could no longer be a safe refuge for the Court. King Charles accordingly left Oxford in disguise, and, attended only by Mr. Ashburnham and Dr. Michael Hudson,[46] who was well acquainted with the lanes and byeways of the country, proceeded by Henley-on-Thames and St. Albans, to Southwell in Nottinghamshire, throwing himself on the loyalty of the Scots, then encamped at Newark. How unworthy of his confidence they proved to be, and how they finally sold him to the Parliament, are matters of history too notorious for repetition here.

Oxford, thus saved from the ruin of a siege, capitulated to Fairfax June 24, 1646, on the express condition that the University should be free from ‘sequestrations, fines, taxes and all other molestations whatsoever.’ But the Parliament was not famous for keeping its engagements, and at once proceeded to break through those made with Oxford and reduce it to the same condition as Cambridge, which they had devastated in 1642. A passage from ‘Querela Cantabrigiensis,’ which is supposed to be written by Dr. Barwick, gives some idea of what this condition was:

Wadham College probably suffered less than many, as its head, Dr. Wilkins, who had married Cromwell’s sister, was very submissive to the then Government. As matters settled down somewhat at Oxford towards 1648, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, Dr. Wallis, Mr. Theodore Hank, who came from the desolated Palatinate, and Mr. S. Foster, the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, met together weekly, ‘to discourse and consider,’ writes Dr. Wallis, ‘(precluding theology and state affairs), of philosophical enquiries, and such as related thereunto: as physick, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, staticks, magneticks, chymicks, mechanicks, and natural experiments with the state of those studies as then calculated at home and abroad.’

The meetings, at which Christopher Wren, young as he was, appears to have been a constant attendant, were frequently held at the house of Dr. Goddard for the convenience of his having there a workman skilled in the nice work of grinding glasses for microscopes and telescopes. Dr. Goddard became body physician to Cromwell, was by him made Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and subsequently represented the university in Parliament. Dr. Wallis, a famous Oxford mathematician, was employed by the Parliament to decipher the King’s cabinet of letters taken at Naseby, and also was proved by Matthew Wren, the son of the Bishop, to have deciphered several very important letters sent by Charles II. to England, and intercepted at Dunkirk.

As by degrees these meetings were more largely attended, and men came who held very different opinions from those of Dr. Goddard and Dr. Wallis, the exclusion of theology and politics from the discussions was a needful precaution. Many inventions of Christopher’s date from this time, a design for a reflecting dial for the ceiling of a room, ornamented with quaint figures and devices, some Latin lines ending in a chronogram of his age, and the date of the invention, suggested probably by the one in the rectory at East Knoyle, which he had known from a child; an instrument to write in the dark; and an instrument of use in gnomonics.[48] At the same time he had attracted the notice of Sir Charles Scarborough, a friend of Dean Wren’s, then just rising to fame as a surgeon. Christopher, whose health, as has been said, was delicate, fell dangerously ill and considered that he owed his life to the skilful care of his new friend. Dr. Scarborough, who could recite in order all the propositions of Euclid and Archimedes, and could apply them, found in his patient a kindred spirit, and induced Wren, young as he was, to undertake the translation into Latin of the ‘Clavis Aurea,’ by the Rev. W. Oughtred, a mathematical treatise of great reputation.

That Christopher was able to satisfy the old man is evident from the preface, even while making allowance for the complimentary style of the time. Mr. Oughtred speaks of—

Mr. Oughtred was a Canon of Chichester, and after the siege of the city and the wanton sack of the cathedral by Sir E. Waller in 1642, deprived and heart-broken, wandered to Oxford, refusing the offers of home and emolument which came to him from France, Italy, and Holland. He gladly availed himself of young Wren’s services in the work of translation, which he had not energy to undertake himself, and waited, hoping for better times. When at length they drew near, and he heard of the vote passed at Westminster (May 1, 1660), for the Restoration of the Royal Family, the relief was too great, and Mr. Oughtred ‘expired in a sudden ecstasy of joy.’[50]

Dean Wren, in the meanwhile, though deprived of his living, does not seem to have been in any personal danger, having a protection from Parliament, possibly obtained by his friend the Elector Palatine, or Speaker Lenthall, by favour of which he boldly attended the Committee Meetings at Somerset House. He made an attempt to gather together the Knights of the Garter, and addressed the following petition, an autograph copy of which is contained in the ‘Parentalia’:

A copy of this Petition he sent to the Deputy Chancellor. It would seem to have startled the Knights, and Dr. Wren evidently wishes the way smoothed. His letter, also an autograph, is headed

Whether the Dean succeeded in gathering the Knights together, and what the ‘Things nearly concerning their Honor’ may have been if they were not, as the letter implies they were not, the King’s deliverance, the ‘Parentalia’ does not say, neither does it give any hint of the illness to which the end of the Dean’s letter appears to point.

DEATH OF MRS. M. WREN—KING CHARLES MURDERED—A MONOTONOUS WALK—INVENTIONS—A DREAM—ALL SOULS’ FELLOWSHIP—BEGINNINGS OF ROYAL SOCIETY—ASTRONOMY—AN OFFER OF RELEASE—THE CYCLOID—CROMWELL’S FUNERAL—LETTERS FROM LONDON.

La Royauté seule, depuis vingt ans, n’avait pas été mise à l’épreuve; seule elle avait encore à faire des promesses auxquelles on n’eut pas été trompé.... On y revenait enfin, après tant d’agitations comme au toit paternel qu’a fait quitter l’espérance et où ramène la fatigue.—Monk, par M. Guizot, p. 69.

A heavy sorrow fell upon the imprisoned Bishop of Ely at the close of 1646. His wife was worn out by grief for the loss of her children and anxiety for her husband, for whom Laud’s fate seemed but too probable, and the Bishop’s diary records that on ‘December 8, 1646, Ad Christum evolavit pia anima conjugis E. mediâ post 5^vum matutinam.’[51] The diary contains no remark, no murmur, though this loss left Bishop Wren very desolate and full of anxiety for his seven surviving children, of whom the eldest, Matthew, was but seventeen. Upon such troubles as these prison life must have pressed heavily, and if Bishop Wren’s captivity was half as strict as was that of Dr. John Barwick, who was consigned to the Tower in 1650,[52] it was a sufficient hardship. Every rumour which reached his ears from the tumultuous world outside must have added to his grief. The King’s affairs grew more desperate, and the shadow of Cromwell loomed larger and larger. Probably the Bishop did not expect a long captivity. It must have come to his ears that in the proposed treaty of Newport (1648), ‘the persons only who were to expect no pardon were the Princes Rupert and Maurice; James, Earl of Derby; John, Earl of Bristol; William, Earl of Newcastle; Francis, Lord Cottington; George, Lord Digby; Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely,’ and some fifty others.[53]

Condemned thus without a trial, without a chance of his vindication being known, the Bishop betook himself to prayer, and to writing a commentary on the Holy Scriptures, a task for which, as a fine Hebrew, Greek and Latin scholar, he was well qualified. In this work he found solace and support, and quietly waited until the tyranny should be overpast.

There is no need to recall in detail the thickcoming sorrows of that time; it is but too easy to guess how doubly galling imprisonment must have been to Bishop Wren when the royalists who were at liberty were straining every nerve, exhausting every device to save if possible their beloved King from his fate. In vain—at length came the fatal January 30 (1649), and King Charles, attended by Bishop Juxon, walked to the scaffold and uttered his final words, ‘I have a good cause and a gracious God on my side; I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ There was one of the King’s loyal subjects who, we may well believe, envied Bishop Juxon his privilege of attendance on his master to the last—Bishop Wren, who had been with him in bright early days, had attended him when Prince of Wales, on his romantic journey to Spain, and, when the weight of the corruptible crown first came upon the prince’s head, had accompanied him on the journey to Scotland for his coronation at Scone, who ever since then had been so trusted by him.

No word of his own grief, of his unavailing longing to see his King once more, and once more kiss his hand, is expressed in the brief record in his diary. It is simply ‘A sanguinibus, O Deus!’

Horror at the crime, at the stain of innocent blood which now defiled his country, seems to have swallowed up all expression of personal feeling. By degrees the rigour of his imprisonment appears to have been a little relaxed, and by the connivance of his gaoler he obtained the opportunity, rarely granted to prisoners, of walking upon the leads of one of the towers. Thither he daily went for his exercise, and, says the writer of the ‘Parentalia,’

It would seem that the Bishop, finding his life was for the time spared, and having a steady conviction that the evil days would pass, had determined to keep himself ready in body, as in soul, for what work the future might bring. A prison life leaves little to be recorded; the days wore away in the Tower, divided between devotion, study, and that unchanging monotonous walk which at least gave the prisoner a distant glimpse of the world from which he was excluded.

He was allowed the Bible and paper and ink, but no other books. It is the testimony of one who has studied Bishop Wren’s manuscript—

Two sermons and some treatises were also written during his captivity. Probably suspicion attached to anything that he did, for it is said to have been all written by stealth.

His nephew’s life differed as widely from his own as did their characters. Christopher was at Oxford, deep in the experiments of the ‘New learning,’ and in the inventions which it suggested to his ready brain and dexterous fingers.

One invention which he was at the time proud of was that of a—

So successful was this instrument, that he obtained a patent for it for seventeen years. In the same year an exact duplicate of this invention was brought from France, and another patent taken out for the same number of years, by Mr. William Petty,[56] who claimed to be the inventor.

Wren was indignant at the notion that he had copied another person’s idea, and gives good reasons for his belief that his own instrument had been described to Petty by a friend of his. Three years later Wren wrote of it as ‘an obvious Thing, a cast-off Toy;’ ending, ‘Indeed though I care not for having a Successor in Invention, yet it behoves me to vindicate myself from the Aspersion of having a Predecessor.’

Another invention Wren describes as a ‘weather clock.’ It consisted of a clock affixed to a weather cock that moved a rundle covered with paper, upon which the clock moved a black-lead pencil, so that the observer, by the traces of the pencil on the paper, might certainly conclude what winds had blown in his absence for twelve hours’ space. The ‘Parentalia’ contains a careful drawing in pen and sepia of this invention elaborately worked out and remarkable for the truth and finish of the drawing. Some of these designs, and an instrument for sowing corn, nearly identical with a modern ‘drill,’ he dedicated in a quaintly formal letter to his father’s friend, the Prince Palatine. He appeared before the Prince in another character, due probably to his Westminster training. A play was performed (about 1652) at Oxford before the Prince, Dr. Seth Ward,[57] and several others, entitled ‘Hey for Honesty, down with Knavery,’ translated by Thomas Randolph from the Plutus of Aristophanes, in which Christopher sustained the part of Neanias.[58] It is provoking to have this bare record merely, and no clue as to the success or failure of any part of the performance, especially where the young actor was concerned.

To about the same date belongs a Latin letter written by Christopher to his father, signed ‘Christophorus Regulus,’ describing in glowing terms a visit paid in the spring to a friend’s house. Some pretty touches give ‘the lofty woods with their clamorous republic of rooks, the great fountains, the placid pools—without, you might say a terrestrial paradise, but within, heaven itself.’ It may have been, though there is nothing in its favour but conjecture, that this was Bletchingdon House, and that among ‘the virgins singing holy psalms,’ whom he mentions, was his future bride Faith, (or as she spelt it, ‘ffaith’) Coghill. The letter says much, as does all that passed between them, for the warm affection existing between father and son, and the sincerely religious tone of Christopher’s mind.

The desperate efforts of the Royalists shortly after this period to overthrow Cromwell’s tyranny and to put Charles II. on the throne, received a cruel check in the disastrous battle of Worcester (1651), Cromwell’s ‘crowning mercy.’ This crushed the hopes of the Royalists and obliged them to turn their every effort and thought to effecting the escape of their prince. He must have passed very near Knoyle Hill, when he crossed Salisbury Plain and met at Stonehenge the friends who at last succeeded in conveying him to the coast. Knoyle Hill had its own fugitive to shelter.

Aubrey, the Wiltshire Antiquary, gives the account of a vivid dream which Christopher Wren had, when staying, in the autumn of 1651, with Dean Wren at Knoyle. He

It seems likely that this ‘kinsman’ was Bishop Wren’s son Matthew, who afterwards went to the Hague. There also, when his escape had been with great difficulty contrived, went King Charles, as his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, was his steady friend. In the hope of utterly putting down the Cavaliers, the greatest severity was shown at this time to all who had helped the King, and even to those who merely boasted of their good will towards him. Among those who suffered was Inigo Jones, who had been architect to James I. and to Charles I., had been steadily loyal to the Stuarts, and was therefore an object of suspicion. He lived to see what was thought the utter downfall of the monarchy, and following upon this the desecration and ruin of the finest churches in England. S. Paul’s, on which he had spent much labour and skill, was, as being connected with Archbishop Laud, an object of special hatred to the Puritans. It suffered every possible injury. The fine portico designed by Inigo Jones was filled with stalls, blocked up by booths, and used as a market-place. The year after the battle of Worcester, Inigo Jones died, poor and lonely, in a lodging close to the defaced cathedral. He and Christopher Wren must probably have met. Wren had a sincere admiration for his predecessor’s skill, and spoke of the S. Paul’s portico as ‘an exquisite piece in itself.’

In the autumn of 1653, Wren, then just twenty-one, was elected to a fellowship at All Souls, and happy in the comparative tranquillity of Oxford, pursued the various studies which he loved. All this time he was ‘making himself,’ as was said of Sir Walter Scott in his childhood on the Scotch hills, though perhaps at the time no one could have guessed the particular manner in which he would distinguish himself.

In the following summer he made acquaintance with John Evelyn, who had come up to Oxford to hear the ‘Philosophy Act.’ Evelyn mentioned that after a dinner at All Souls he ‘visited that miracle of a youth Mr. Christopher Wren, nephew to the Bishop of Ely.’[60]

The acquaintance thus made with Christopher Wren ripened into a friendship lasting until Evelyn’s death in 1706.

Dr. Wilkins was also of Evelyn’s friends, though he was very submissive to Cromwell.[61] It is curious to contrast two accounts which occur in the same page of Evelyn’s diary.

Dr. Wilkins appears, like too many of that time, to have regarded the Church as utterly overthrown, and probably believed honestly in his peculiar interpretation of the text upon which he preached. Much credit is however due to him for the idea of the Oxford meetings, and for the hospitality which he showed. These meetings were the germ of the Royal Society, and to them Dr. Thomas Sprat (afterwards Bishop of Rochester), a great friend of Christopher Wren’s, bears testimony:—

In 1656, on the 29th of May, Dean Wren died. Sorrow and anxiety, the desolation of the Church, the apparent ruin of the monarchy, had worn out his gentle spirit; and probably little thinking how great a change was approaching to free the country, he passed away, aged 69, at the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Holder, and was buried in the chancel of Bletchingdon Church.[63] When we look back to the years of the Rebellion, their darkness is lightened for us by the knowledge that the Restoration came at last, and it is difficult to realise fully how the times appeared to those who actually lived in them, to whom the years brought only fresh losses and sorrows, and the sickness of hope deferred.

Knowing how, on the 29th of May, but four years later, all England was welcoming back the King to ‘enjoy his own again,’ one can hardly forbear wishing that Dean Wren might have been spared to see that day; yet those who loved him best cannot have grudged him the fulness of that peace which all his life he had desired, and which he had invoked upon his first home. Christopher was very warmly attached to his father, as all his letters show, and must have grieved greatly for his death.

Soon after this he was summoned to London. The Gresham professor of astronomy, Mr. Laurence Rooke, retired in 1657, and the chair was offered to Wren. He was but twenty-four and doubted whether he should accept such a post while so young, and he clung to Oxford and his studies there.

The friends whom he consulted advised him differently; accordingly he came up to London and delivered his opening address to a considerable audience. It was in Latin, and after a brief apology for his youth passed into a sketch of the history of astronomy. He dwells on the great riches of the science, how it is the handmaid of theology, the queen of sciences, speaks of the vast discoveries made by its means, touches upon Copernicus, whose mind first grasped the idea that the earth moved round the sun, then upon Kepler and upon Galileo, and the storms that had arisen, when in 1632 he had demonstrated that truth at which Copernicus had guessed; he praises highly Galileo’s invention of the telescope, pays a tribute to the great men who had lectured at Gresham on these subjects, and especially to his own predecessor, Rooke, and winds up with an eloquent description of London as a Pandora of cities to whom each of the choir of planets gave a peculiar blessing, on whom the sun shines benignly, who possesses more inhabitants than any city in the world, a healthy air, a fertile soil stretching far around her, beautiful buildings springing as of themselves from the earth, and, lastly, is blessed by the moon, ‘the governess of floods,’ who alluring the seas thus far inland by means of the beloved Thames, makes her the city which nourishes the best seamen of the world. The rough draft of this address, written by Christopher in a bold hand with a few changes and corrections, is preserved in the ‘Parentalia.’

This professorship obliged him to come up to London and give a course of lectures every Wednesday in term time at Gresham College. None of these lectures have been preserved, and it seems from a hint in one of Dr. Sprat’s letters, that Wren was in the habit of lecturing from rough notes merely, and used no pains to keep any record of them.

At this time he made acquaintance with Richard Claypole, who was married to Elizabeth, Cromwell’s favourite daughter; both she and her sister, Lady Falconbridge, were faithful members of the persecuted Church of England. Dr. Hewet still read the Prayer Book services in S. Gregory’s Church, which adjoined S. Paul’s, and there the two sisters resorted, there Dr. Hewet secretly married Mary Cromwell to Lord Falconbridge, as neither would be satisfied with the ceremony performed by an independent preacher. Cromwell’s daughters used all their influence with their father on the side of mercy, but when the excellent Dr. Hewet fell under his displeasure they pleaded in vain for his life.[64] Mr. Claypole professed a fondness for mathematical science and frequently invited Christopher Wren to his house. On one of these occasions when Wren was dining there, Cromwell himself entered, and, as was his custom in his own family, sat down to table without speech or ceremony. After a while he fixed his eyes on Christopher and said, ‘Your uncle has been long confined in the Tower.’ ‘He has so, sir,’ said Wren; ‘but he bears his afflictions with great patience and resignation.’ ‘He may come out an he will,’ was Cromwell’s unexpected reply. ‘Will your Highness permit me to take him this from your own mouth?’ said Wren, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘Yes, you may,’ said Cromwell briefly. At the earliest possible moment Christopher hurried to the Tower to communicate to his uncle the tidings that the long years of his imprisonment were over. When he had poured out his news the Bishop replied warmly that it was not the first time he had received the like intimation from that miscreant, but he disdained the terms proposed for his enlargement, which were a mean acknowledgment of his favour and an abject submission to his detestable tyranny; that he was determined to tarry the Lord’s leisure, and owe his deliverance, which was not far off, to Him only. Such an answer must have been startling enough to Christopher, and may have opened his eyes to the causes of Cromwell’s seeming leniency. He left the brave old man to await the deliverance which the keen sight of faith showed him as drawing near, and returned to his own work.

The death of Mrs. Claypole in the following summer must have checked an intimacy upon which Bishop Wren looked with little favour. She died of a terrible illness, and in the paroxysms of her pain bitterly reproached Cromwell for the innocent blood that he had shed, and particularly for that of Dr. Hewet.

At about this period some experiments were made by Wren’s philosophical friends wherein he took a principal part, and to which the barometer, now in common use, is mainly due. The first instrument of the kind was invented by Torricelli, the pupil of Galileo, who used it in order to ascertain the pressure of the air on fluids, the supposed cause of which pressure was the passing by of the body of the moon. Pascal, in those earlier days when his great genius employed itself on natural philosophy, made several experiments at Rouen, in 1646, with a friend, M. Petit, using ‘Torricelli’s tube,’ as it was called. Similar trials were afterwards made by M. Perier, his brother-in-law, among the mountains of Auvergne. They then discovered that the rising and falling of the mercury was due not to the moon, but to the differences in the specific gravity of the atmosphere. Wren’s experiments led him to the same conclusion, and at a later period he and Robert Boyle continued them until they produced the barometer, though it was not used commonly as a weather-glass until a much later date. Pascal did not pursue his discovery, but was satisfied with having proved the point for which he was contending.

Though Wren and Pascal never met, some communication passed between them. Pascal, who was Wren’s senior by eleven years, propounded a problem, under the name of Jean de Monfert, to the mathematicians of England, adding a challenge to them to solve it by a given day. Christopher sent a solution, and in his turn propounded a problem which seems never to have been answered. Pascal is said to have considered Wren’s solution very carefully, but the promised prize of twenty pistoles was withheld by some trickery. Besides this, Wren wrote four mathematical tracts on the cycloid, and sent them to Dr. J. Wallis, who was publishing a book on mathematics. He corresponded with Pascal,[65] who was writing on the cycloid by the name of la Roulette, the problem being ‘to determine the curve made in the air by the nail of a coach wheel from the moment it rises from the ground, till the moment when the continual rolling of the wheel brings it back to the ground, after a complete turn, supposing the wheel a perfect circle and the ground perfectly level.’

Wren was engaged also in a series of observations on the planet Saturn. These pursuits were, however, interrupted by an event that convulsed all England. On September 3, 1658, during a fearful storm which swept over London, Oliver Cromwell died. Hume[66] gives a terrible account of the state of constant suspicion and fear of assassination in which Cromwell passed the last year of his life; the secret armour which he wore, his constant guard of soldiers wherever he moved, his fears on a journey, his habit of never returning the way he had come, nor by the direct road, seldom sleeping above three nights together in the same chamber, or in any he did not choose himself, or without sentinels. His body lay in state for a considerable time. The funeral, on October 22, Evelyn calls ‘superb.’ He says:—

Under the feeble rule of Richard Cromwell at first and then under the multiform tyranny of the reassembled ‘Long Parliament,’ every kind of disorder and oppression had free course. Monk grievously disappointed the Royalist hopes by proclaiming Richard Cromwell. The day of deliverance appeared more than ever distant.

The Gresham Professors were all driven out of the college except Dr. Goddard, Cromwell’s physician, and the place was garrisoned by soldiers, who did it great damage. Matthew Wren made an attempt two days after Cromwell’s funeral to enter the college, and sent a curious account to Christopher, who had returned to All Souls at Oxford. He writes:

Dr. Sprat[68] writes also to Christopher at about the same time:

APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION—DIFFICULTY OF PRESERVING IT—LETTERS FROM LORD CLARENDON—BISHOP WREN’S RELEASE—THE RESTORATION—CONVOCATION—SAVILIAN PROFESSORSHIP—ROYAL SOCIETY—‘ELEPHANT IN THE MOON’—PEMBROKE CHAPEL BEGUN.

All was confusion, doubt and anxiety in the country; the Royalist plots failed; the Parliament was powerless; no one knew whether Monk intended, as was still hoped by a few, to bring back the King, or to support the Parliament, or to make himself dictator; those were keen eyes which could discern through the darkness any ray of approaching light.

Nowhere perhaps did matters seem more desperate than in the Church. Her discipline and order, barely revived by the murdered Archbishop, had been for eighteen years trampled upon and neglected; ‘by the licentiousness of the times,’ many were growing up unbaptised and ignorant of Christianity. The number of bishops living was but small, many sees being already vacant when the Civil War broke out, and imprisonments and hardships had so reduced the Prelates that, in 1659, but ten survived, one of whom, Dr. Brownrigg, Bishop of Exeter, very soon died. Of the nine others, many were very old; the Bishop of London (Juxon) was very ill, and the Bishop of Ely was in prison. How was the succession to be preserved if the troubles of the times continued? The Scotch Church had been reduced by persecution; the Irish Bishops were in as evil a plight as their English brethren, and the difficulty of communication was great. There was then no daughter Church in America or in the Colonies to render back in time of need the grace they had themselves received. It was hardly possible for the English Bishops to meet for consultation; but the indefatigable Dr. Barwick was authorised[69]—

Great difficulties lay in the way of the first step—a canonical election—and in the face of the watchful enmity of the Church of Rome, no doubtful step could be taken; and even were this difficulty surmounted and three Bishops got together, the risk of imprisonment and death to both consecrators and consecrated needed no one to point it out. The two with whom Dr. Barwick principally consulted were the Bishops of Ely and Salisbury. Many letters passed between Dr. Barwick and Mr. Hyde,[70] at Brussels, in one of which, written on July 8, 1659,[71] the latter speaks of—

These letters, thirty-six in number, were transmitted in cypher, and with the utmost precaution and considerable delay in awaiting a safe opportunity; the one quoted from is endorsed ‘Received not till Aug. 29.’ Nor was the cypher, however carefully contrived, always a security when the letters fell into the wrong hands. Dr. Wallis, the mathematician, was a most skilful decypherer, and was the person who decyphered the King’s papers taken in his cabinet at Naseby, though the Royalists considered this a vain boast until Matthew Wren, the Bishop’s eldest son, obtained the proof of it from Dr. Wallis himself. One important letter from Dr. Barwick to Mr. Hyde fell into Dr. Wallis’ hands; Mr. Allestry his coadjutor coming from Brussels was seized and imprisoned as soon as he landed. Bishop Morton of Durham, the last surviving Prelate of the province of York, had died, as his epitaph says, ‘deprived of all his goods except a good name and a good conscience.’ The rising in Cheshire had been unsuccessful. Monk refused to give even his brother any hint of his intentions, and made no reply to the letter which King Charles sent to him from Breda. In short, matters were as adverse as it was possible for them to be, but yet Dr. Barwick was undiscouraged; with fresh precautions the correspondence with Mr. Hyde was resumed, and in truth the matter pressed; ‘for,’ says Dr. Barwick, writing in Sept. 1659, after mentioning his circuit among some of the surviving Bishops,[73] ‘I fear this winter will go hard with some of them that may worst be spared in the due performance of such a work.’ It is evident that Dr. Barwick was able to see and consult the imprisoned Bishop of Ely whenever it was needful. These hurried meetings, full of anxiety and peril as they were, must have been a great refreshment to the Bishop, who thus still took part in the work of the Church. He declined to send any list of names to the King, though he pressed Dr. Barwick to accept the Bishoprick of Man. Mr. Hyde[74] wrote a letter in September, which was not received till November 10, where he says:—

But little progress appears to have been made, since Mr. Hyde writes, Nov. 28:—

An entry in Evelyn’s diary shows the general state of affairs at this time:—

Evelyn was not slack in doing what in him lay towards this much-desired settlement:—

A fast was kept in secret, apparently about once a fortnight, by the Churchmen in London to pray ‘for God’s mercy to our calamitous Church.’

On February 3, 1660, Evelyn writes:—

Later in the same month Mr. Hyde wrote almost in despair to Dr. Barwick:[75]

The suspense which Evelyn describes had not long to be endured. On February 11, the very day after Monk had dismayed the city by breaking down its gates and allowing the soldiers to march about it in triumph, he turned out the Parliament then sitting at Westminster, and called together the former one, to the great joy of the people. From this moment all hearts and wishes turned to the exiled royal family as the one hope left of tranquillity and order; thus suddenly, when the royalist hopes were lowest, their hearts’ desire was given to them.

Monk, now in supreme power, did not forget the Bishop of Ely, whose fellow-captive he had been and who must have rejoiced to see Monk at last justify his confidence. On March 15 the lieutenant of the Tower received the order ‘That Dr. Wren, Bishop of Ely, be discharged from his imprisonment.’ Thus the eighteen years of captivity came to an end, and the Bishop came forth from the Tower, an old man of seventy-five, broken by many sorrows.

It cannot have been with unmixed joy that he once more trod another path than that wonted one on the leads of the Tower. True, the King was coming home in peace to a people longing to receive him. This return was a promise of deliverance for the Church, and an end to that difficulty of preserving the Apostolical Succession which had so nearly proved a fatal one. And yet, the flood, which in those eighteen years had passed over the land, had swept away many whom the Bishop loved well. The King might return in triumph, but he was not the sovereign whom, from his youth, Bishop Wren had loved and served. The primate with whom he had worked, had been cruelly murdered; and none could restore the wife and children who had pined and died during the long years of his imprisonment. The Church, however, remained, and for her Bishop Wren would work while life lasted. Part of his employment in the Tower had been the writing of treatises and sermons, one of which on the Scotch Covenant, from the text ‘Neither behave thyself frowardly in the covenant,’ he dispersed over the dioceses of Norwich and Ely, lodging the while where he could in London, as he was not yet allowed to go back either to Downham in Suffolk or to Ely House in Holborn. It appeared, as was truly said, as if he had not been ‘so much released as thrust out of prison.’

Homeless and penniless as he then seemed, Bishop Wren’s spirit was in no respect daunted; when he left in safety the Tower where he had once thought to lay his head on the block, he planned the thank-offering which he would make to God. His children, from whom he had been so long separated, who were scattered everywhere and had been reduced to the greatest straits, he with much difficulty gathered together again, and they awaited the event of Monk’s decision.

At length came that 29th of May so often described in history and fiction. Evelyn’s[76] account of it is interesting, as that of an eyewitness:—

By degrees, matters settled down to a more ordinary level. The Church Service was restored at Whitehall, and on June 28 Pepys mentions[77] ‘poor Bishop Wren going to chapel, it being a thanksgiving day for the King’s returne.’

The vacant sees were now filled up as speedily as possible. Bishop Juxon was translated to Canterbury, Sheldon succeeding him as Bishop of London; the northern province, then wholly without bishops, had its losses supplied.

The Prayer Book was not by any means commonly used again for some time. Pepys characteristically says—[78]

In the following November, to quote the same writer, ‘men did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer.’ Matters were really progressing, the cathedrals and the court chapels as well as those in the Bishop’s palaces setting the example. In February (1661) Evelyn heard ‘Dr. Baldero preach at Ely House on St. Matthew vi. 33; after the sermon the Bishop of Ely gave us the blessing very pontifically.’[79]

Ely House was an ancient possession of the see,[80] the gift of William de Ludd, who in the reign of Edward I. gave the house and endowed it with his manor of Ouldbourne, a name which soon grew into Holbourn. The garden and its strawberries are immortalised by Shakespeare. It was leased to Sir Christopher Hatton by Bishop Cox in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and a struggle between the Hatton family and the Bishops of Ely then began which lasted until 1772.[81] In Wren’s time, the Bishops had recovered some of the buildings, and he had lived here before the rebellion. During that time the house had been used as a prison for ‘malignant priests,’ especially those of the city of London, and he must have found the whole building sorely defaced and injured.

The chapel, dedicated to S. Etheldreda, is a beautiful piece of Gothic architecture; and there, when it had been cleansed and restored to some order, many of the new bishops were consecrated, and Bishop Wren assisted at that preservation of the Apostolical Succession which but two years before had seemed well-nigh hopeless.

Much was done at Ely House. In the May of 1661 the Convocation of Canterbury met in S. Paul’s, its marred, plundered condition not inaptly showing the adversities through which the Church of England had passed. The Convocation had much work before it, the most pressing being to prepare a service for the baptism of those of riper years and for May 29. In order to this a committee of both Houses of Convocation was formed, which met at Ely House, and of which Bishop Wren appears to have been the ruling spirit. Many were still half afraid of their true position and afraid of the Puritan party; eighteen years of confusion and persecution had slackened all discipline, and many things seemed natural to the new generation which neither Bishop Andrewes nor Archbishop Laud would have tolerated for a day. It is implied in Dr. Barwick’s Life that many of those who should have upheld the Church discipline were willing, from a mistaken notion of conciliation and peace, to let it go. Bishop Wren set his face resolutely against this doctrine.

In November the Convocation met again. Dr. John Barwick had been appointed to the deanery of S. Paul’s, and in spite of very failing health, had resumed the weekly Communions, daily prayers, and musical services of the cathedral, and had succeeded in making the choir, where the Puritans had stabled their horses, once more fit for Divine service. At this session of Convocation the Prayer Book was finally revised, after the Bishops had heard at the Savoy Conference all that the Puritans could urge against it. Bishop Wren had been actively engaged in this work, and suggested a considerable number of alterations and additions, many of which were adopted. A large number of grammatical errors had crept in to the old book: for example, ‘which’ instead of ‘who’ was in almost all the collects and the Apostles’ creed. It still, by some oversight, survives in the Lord’s Prayer.[82] ‘The altering whereof,’ says Bishop Wren, ‘if it may seem strange at first to unskilful ears, yet will it not be a nine days’ wonder, but for ever after a right expression in all our addresses unto God.’

Page after page he corrected with the utmost care, from the very title-page and calendar to the end. July has the characteristic note, ‘Out with Dog-days from amongst the Saints.’—A considerable number of his suggestions are part of the Prayer Book to this day. The final clause of the prayer for the Church Militant beginning ‘We also bless, etc.,’ though not Bishop Wren’s composition, as he intended to have replaced the Commemoration of the Saints and the Thanksgiving as it stood in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., is yet due to his suggestion. The whole series of notes and emendations is very interesting, though they are more than can be given here. Two things plainly appear: that he wished to return as nearly as possible to the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., as the one most closely resembling the offices of the Early Church; that he was very desirous to have the book made as full, as plain, and as clear as the English language could make it. He was anxious that no needless stumbling-blocks should remain in the path either of Churchmen or of Nonconformists, but at the same time he had no intention of bartering any portion of Church truth or discipline for the doubtful advantages of ‘comprehension.’

It is a proof that he was not, with all his high-minded firmness, the persecuting prelate of Puritan pamphleteers, or the sour and severe man which, in early days, Lord Clarendon thought him, that both in Norwich, his former diocese, and in the one he then ruled, most of the clergy renounced the Covenant.[83]

S. Bartholomew’s day, 1662, was the time fixed for those who refused to conform to the Church to resign their livings. It has been easy to represent this as a piece of cruel tyranny, as the turning out of a body of pious men who were labouring in the work which others neglected. In truth, as even Milton says, they were ‘time-servers, covetous, illiterate persecutors, not lovers of the truth, like in most things whereof they had accused their predecessors.’ To this grave indictment must be added that they were, in the strictest sense, intruders, thrust into charges by Cromwell’s authority, while the true priests were imprisoned, fined, forbidden to minister, or even to teach as schoolmasters, and literally left to starve.

One of the earliest appointments made at the Restoration was that of Dr. Bruno Ryves[85] to be Dean of Windsor and Registrar of the Garter. In the August of 1660, Christopher Wren went to Windsor, and solemnly delivered to the Dean the three registers and the note books of the Order of the Garter, which Dean Wren had, with so much difficulty, recovered and hidden carefully until, at his death, he transferred the charge to his son. Dean Ryves gave a written acknowledgment to Christopher that he had safely received the books, and the service his father had done in preserving them was fully admitted. Gresham College had been cleansed and set in order after the Restoration, and Christopher resumed his lectures there, which were largely attended.

After one of these lectures given in November, Lord Brouncker, Mr. Robert Boyle, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Dr. Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray and others withdrew with Wren to his room, where they discussed a project for a philosophical College or Society. It was not an entirely new idea, for it had been a favourite scheme of Evelyn’s, also of the poet Cowley’s.[86] It was not a matter to be arranged in one sitting, and accordingly they settled to meet weekly in Wren’s rooms after his lectures, and agreed that for incidental expenses each should pay down ten shillings and subscribe a shilling weekly. A list was made of between thirty and forty probable members, among them those previously mentioned, and Christopher’s old friend Sir C. Scarborough, Dr. Seth Ward, Matthew Wren, Cowley, Sir Kenelme Digby, Mr. Evelyn and others. Sir Robert Moray undertook to explain the project to King Charles, and brought back a gracious message that he well approved of it, and would be ready to give it every encouragement. One of the first orders of the Society was that Wren should at the next meeting of the Society bring in his account of the pendulum experiment, with his explanation of it: this experiment related to ‘the determination of a standard measure of length by the vibration of a pendulum.’[87] There followed experiments for the improvement of shipping, in which Wren worked with Dr. Petty and Dr. Goddard. It was a question to what mechanical powers sailing, especially when against the wind, was reducible; ‘he showed it to be a wedge; and he demonstrated how a transient force upon an oblique plane would cause the motion of the plane against the first mover. He made an instrument that mechanically produced the same effect and showed the reason of sailing to all winds.’

But to give all Christopher’s experiments would be to write over again the already well-told history of the Royal Society. It had few more assiduous members.

In 1661, Christopher resigned his Gresham Professorship, in order to accept the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy, at Oxford.[88] It had been held by Dr. Seth Ward, who was soon afterwards made Bishop of Salisbury in succession to Bishop Hyde. Shortly after his appointment, Christopher had a command from the King to make him a lunar globe, according to the observations made with the best telescopes. He constructed one ‘representing not only the spots and various degrees of whiteness on the surface, but the hills, eminences, and cavities moulded in solid work.’ This curious toy was highly admired, placed in the King’s cabinet at Whitehall, and esteemed a great ‘rarity.’

In this year Wren took his degree as Doctor of Civil Laws, Oxford, and received a similar honour from the University of Cambridge. King Charles purposed paying a visit to Oxford, and the Philosophical Society both there and in London resolved to give him an entertainment. Lord Brouncker wrote from London to Wren to consult him. Wren wrote back:—

He proposed to show an experiment with a ‘weather wheel to measure the expansions of air.’ Another—‘no unpleasing spectacle—of seeing a man live without new air as long as you please;’ this was to be effected by an instrument of Wren’s invention which cooled, percolated, and purified the air. Also ‘an artificial eye truly and dioptrically made as big as a tennis-ball.’

The King appointed Wren as assistant to Sir John Denham, the Surveyor-General of Works. Sir John had been appointed by Charles I., in reversion during the lifetime of Inigo Jones, surveyor at that time, and had succeeded, at Inigo Jones’s death, to what was then but a barren honour. Evelyn, who had a dispute with Sir John about the placing of Greenwich Palace in that very year, says: ‘I knew him to be a better poet than architect, tho’ he had Mr. Webb[89] (Inigo Jones’s man) to assist him.’ Of this Charles II. was probably aware, and anxious to supply his deficiency. That his choice should have fallen upon Wren, unless Evelyn’s friendship suggested it, is remarkable, as, until then, Wren seems to have made no special study of architecture. No doubt the practical experience learned in the details of the assistant-surveyor’s work was afterwards very serviceable to him. He appears to have had a most retentive memory as well as a very quick eye and power of apprehension. In spite, however, of these calls on his time he was assiduous at the Society’s meetings.

The death of Laurence Rooke, his friend and fellow-labourer, threw more work on his hands. Rooke was succeeded in the Geometry Professorship by Isaac Barrow, afterwards a well-known divine who, in his first Latin oration, eulogised the Savilian Professor as ‘formerly a prodigy of a boy, now a miracle of a man, and a genius among mortals. Lest I should appear to speak falsehood, it will be enough for me to name to you the most ingenious and excellent Christopher Wren.’[90] It was a high compliment, but Barrow knew that his audience would heartily re-echo it. It is to be hoped that Barrow’s lectures were somewhat shorter than his sermons, which, fine as they are, were not always listened to with patience.

On March 25, 1663, the Society was finally incorporated by a charter from the King, with a preamble written by Christopher Wren, explaining its objects. The style of the preamble is far more florid than is usual in Wren’s writing: it has in it the exultation of one who is accomplishing a long-cherished scheme. One paragraph is evidently intended as a defence against certain attacks which were made upon the English philosophers as they had been in past times against Galileo:—

King Charles, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert, always a lover of experiments, were among the first members of the Society, and its beginning was prosperous enough; but Court favour has always created some envy. It happened that in the self-same year Butler,[92] then secretary to Jeremy Taylor’s friend, Lord Carbery, published his famous ‘Hudibras.’ It created a great sensation; the Court read it, the town read it; Pepys, hearing ‘the world cry it up so mightily, tried twice or three times reading to bring himself to think it witty.’ It was in everyone’s mouth, and Butler naturally thought himself sure of promotion. None, however, came to him, and he directed his bitter wit against those more fortunate than himself, the members of the new Royal Society, and Bishop Sprat in particular, in a poem called ‘The Elephant in the Moon,’ which opened as follows:—

With sharp touches indicating the various Members of the Society the satire continues, telling how they see in the moon, through the telescope, marvellous things, and an appearance of an immense elephant; they agree that a record must be made, and during the discussion who is to write it, one of the servants peeping through the telescope discovers that a mouse has got in between the two glasses! It, and a swarm of small flies, are the causes of the mysterious phenomena, the vast beast, the marching and countermarching armies which have been so learnedly explained![93]

The Society does not seem to have paid much attention to the poet, and the experiments went on as usual. A different task was presently offered to Wren by the King. When he married Catharine of Portugal, he received Tangiers, Tripoli, and Bombay as part of her dowry. Tangiers was reckoned as a very important place to the English, whose sailors were still constantly harassed by the Moorish pirates, and the fortifications of the town were a pressing care. King Charles offered, through Matthew Wren, then Lord Clarendon’s secretary, a commission to Christopher Wren, as one of the best geometricians in Europe, to survey and direct the works at the mole, harbour, and fortifications of Tangiers, offering him an ample salary, leave of absence from his Professorship, and a reversionary grant of Sir John Denham’s office. Flattering though the offer was, Christopher declined it on the ground of his health, and begged the King to command his duty in England.

He no doubt judged wisely, and the refusal gave no offence at Court. Perhaps the leave of absence might not have been easily obtained, for the following letter from Dr. Sprat shows that Wren was already embarrassed by the difficulty of being in two places at once:—

Wren had also employment at Cambridge, of a kind he would have been loth to put in other hands. His uncle, the Bishop of Ely, had instantly on his release determined to give a chapel to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he had been a scholar under Launcelot Andrewes,[95] and he employed his nephew as his architect. Upon this work and its endowment the Bishop expended 5,000l., the first money he received after his release. His personal habits were austerely simple; for the last twenty years of his life he drank no wine, and only ate off a wooden trencher, practising fasting and abstinence with great strictness. He had never spent any of the revenues of his see upon his children, and now he made the chapel his heir, bestowing upon it an estate at Hardwick in Cambridgeshire.

The chapel, which has a peculiar interest as Wren’s first architectural work, is built in the classical style he was to make famous in England, and bears his mark in its beautiful proportions, the richness of its stucco ceiling and the pannelled wood-work. The plain glazing of the windows and a something of bareness about the whole, are probably to be accounted for by the necessity of limiting the expense to a fixed sum. Its first stone was laid May 13, 1663, by the Master, Dr. Frank, acting for Bishop Wren, who was not present.[96]

It was probably at the same time that Wren executed some repairs in Ely Cathedral which had suffered, like every other grand church, from the fury of the Puritans. Bitter indeed must have been the regret with which the surviving clergy returned to find the fabrics of their churches plundered and laid waste, and their flocks scattered or corrupted.

REPAIR OF S. PAUL’S—SHELDONIAN THEATRE—THE PLAGUE—A LETTER FROM PARIS—CONSECRATION OF PEMBROKE CHAPEL—FIRE OF LONDON—BISHOP WREN’S DEATH—HIS FAMILY.

The repairs of S. Paul’s Cathedral could not be delayed. Wren, as Sir John Denham’s assistant, was greatly occupied about the matter, which was one of no ordinary difficulty. The responsibility was really his, for Sir John went out of his mind, and though he recovered, probably did but little business.

When Inigo Jones built his portico, he cased the nave with Portland stone, and rebuilt the north and south fronts. In doing so he pared down the original pointed architecture, until little of its beauty or character remained. His work had in its turn been damaged by the Puritans, who set up booths in the portico, and dug sawpits in the cathedral inclosure. Besides these injuries Christopher Wren’s accurate eye detected graver faults in the original design, some of which he enumerates. ‘The pillars of the nave, though eleven feet in diameter, were only cased with stone, and filled up with rubbish inside. The roof was always too heavy for them, so that they are bent outwards on both sides, so that the roof already cracked will finally fall in.’ He proposed to substitute a roof[97] of ‘a light, thin shell of stone, very geometrically made.’ The tower leant much to one side, and was propped with arches and buttresses, so as to block the view from the west end. Upon this tower, which he despairingly calls ‘a heap of deformities,’ there had been formerly a tall, thin, wooden spire, which was destroyed by lightning. For this he wished to substitute ‘a dome or rotunda, and upon the cupola for outward ornament, a lantern with a spring top to rise proportionately.’ He hints that when the dome was finished the rest of the cathedral should be harmonised with it, almost impossible though the task appeared. He expected great difference of opinion, and that ‘some would aim at a greater magnificence than the age would afford, and some might fall so low as to think of piecing up the old fabric here with stone, there with brick, and covering all faults with a coat of plaster, to leave it still to posterity as an object of charity.’ The miserable state of the building is implied in the epitaph of its Dean, Dr. Barwick, who in 1664, ‘Inter sacras Ædis Paulinæ ruinas reponit suas (utrasque resurrecturas securus)’.[98]

Another work upon which Wren was engaged was the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. Sheldon, who succeeded Archbishop Juxon in the see of Canterbury in 1663, was determined to free S. Mary’s Church from the profane uses to which it was put when the various ‘Acts’ were kept there, and any kind of jesting and buffoonery was considered allowable. He had had experience of Wren in the discussions about S. Paul’s, and now engaged him as architect. The building is too well known to need a description; the roof was reckoned a triumph of skill because of ‘the contrivance of supporting the same without the help of any beam, it being entirely kept up by braces and screws; and is the subject of an excellent mathematical treatise by that prodigy of the age, Dr. Wallis.’[99] It was six years building, and cost 25,000l. Evelyn, with whom Wren had often discussed the plans, went to Oxford on purpose to be present at the opening on July 9, 1669.

Dr. Plot, the historian of Oxfordshire, who was a member of the Royal Society, in his quaint book gives a careful technical description of the construction of the theatre by Wren, and his assistant, ‘Richard Frogley, an able carpenter.’

During the years that the theatre was building Wren did not intermit his attendance at the Royal Society; amongst other inventions he produced a machine for drawing in perspective, which was exhibited at one of the meetings.

A frightful interruption came to these and to all other pursuits in London. In 1665, the plague, which had more than once afflicted England, broke out with fearful force in London, where the dark narrow streets with their houses meeting overhead, and the foul state of the entire town, gave every encouragement to its ravages. Pepys, who stayed in London all through the worst time of the plague, gives many a record of this visitation.[100]

So the days went on and the grass waved in Whitehall Court, and to quote Pepys again: ‘Lord! how everybody’s looks and discourse in the streets is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.’

None but those whom absolute necessity kept in London stayed in the infected air; the works at S. Paul’s were stopped; all meetings and lectures ceased, with good reason, since to gather people together was but to spread the infection.

Christopher Wren profited by the cessation of his London work, to travel abroad. Before going he had much to settle; to help Mr. Evelyn find a tutor, ‘a perfect Grecian and more than commonly mathematical,’ for his son. This youth went two years later, at the age of thirteen, to Trinity College, Oxford, ‘being newly out of long coates.’

Wren’s Oxford Professorship, and his works, both there and at Cambridge, required to be set in good order before he could go. At Oxford he was engaged on the repairs of Trinity College, for his friend Dr. Bathurst.[101] On June 22, 1665, Wren writes to them as follows:—

Some technical details for the builder follow, and then:

The College was repaired by Sir Thomas Pope, it having been left in a very ruinous condition, but the ornamental part is due to Dr. Bathurst, aided by munificent Archbishop Sheldon and other old members of the College.

He was making considerable additions to Trinity College at Cambridge: to this date belongs the library, which he added to the beautiful western Quadrangle known as Nevile’s Court.

Very full directions and six drawings follow, explaining the plan and its details.

It was not until midsummer that Wren was able to start on his journey: he went at once to Paris to the Earl of S. Albans, the English ambassador, to whom he had letters. Lord S. Albans had lived at Paris in great ease and luxury all through the Rebellion, far more so, Evelyn indignantly says, than had the King. He was supposed to be privately married to the Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria. He was what was then called a great virtuoso, a friend of Cowley and of other wits, and entertained Wren with much courtesy and hospitality. Wren’s name was, in itself, a sufficient introduction to the scientific men and philosophers of the city, in whose society he took great pleasure.

He had long been a Member of the Order of Freemasons, and had distinguished himself by the attention he gave to the lodges under his care: at the time of his journey to France he was Deputy Grand Master under Earl Rivers; no doubt he availed himself to the full of the opportunities which Freemasonry afforded him for observing the details of the work and becoming acquainted with the workmen, the architects, and the sculptors, whom Louis XIV. had brought in great numbers to Paris.

It would have been interesting had Wren left us a record of his impressions of Paris from a political point of view. It was the brief interval of peace between England and France before the war of the Netherlands. Louis XIV., climbing upwards to the zenith of his brilliant reign, keeping the supreme power in his own hands since Mazarin’s death (in 1661), with the wise Colbert for his financier, surrounded by all the great captains, statesmen, wits and artists who made up the ‘Siècle de Louis XIV.,’ must have been a very interesting subject for the observation of a philosopher like Wren, whose youth had been passed among terrible political storms. There is, however, but one slight hint in his journal, but one suggestion that he discerned the true value of much of the glitter and veneer of universal, if temporary, success. Pascal, with whom he had corresponded, and between whose brief career and his own there is a curious resemblance, had died three years before Wren took his one foreign journey.

The ‘Académie Royale des Sciences,’ which had just received the formal sanction of Louis XIV., had begun much like the English Royal Society, by small meetings and conferences at Paris amongst scientific men, and in these conferences, Pascal, while very young, had taken a brilliant place. His father, Etienne Pascal, when he found it a vain attempt to withhold mathematical science from his son, cultivated the boy’s genius to the utmost, beyond, perhaps, what the very feeble physical frame could bear.

One cannot doubt that Wren was introduced to this society, and took an interest in its discussions, though his attention seems most of all to have been given to architecture.

In a journal written for a Dr. Bateman, the friend who gave him the letters to Lord S. Albans, he says:

With the great men Latin was probably the common tongue, but with the artizans he must have talked in French, and have either possessed or acquired no small mastery of the language and of the technical terms of their various trades. The ‘observations’ were either never hammered into the shape Wren wished, or else were subsequently lost or copied by someone else, as frequently happened to one so careless of his own fame as was Wren. In January 1666, the English Ambassador was recalled from Paris, and the war began between England, and the Netherlands with France for their ally.

Pembroke Chapel was meanwhile completed, and

Bishop Wren must have looked with joy on the completion of his thankoffering, and may have guessed, as he surveyed its beautiful proportions, that he had set his nephew, its young architect, on the road to fame. Very little is told us of the latter years of Wren’s Episcopate; one or two stories are given in the ‘Parentalia’ and then contradicted, but it seems he kept his old firmness. In 1662 he held the second Visitation of his Diocese and the articles of inquiry and directions show no change in his opinions and no deference to Puritan notions. It was by a stretch of his power as Visitor that he admitted Dr. Beaumont to be master of Peterhouse, though the college had nominated two other deserving persons, of whom Cosin was one. The choice proved, in the end, a very wise one. He could be lenient also when he thought it right, and admitted several Fellows of Jesus College who came to him, in some fear of a refusal, for institution. He ‘was very fair and civil towards them, despatched them without the usual height of the fees and persuaded them to studiousness and peace against all animosities.’ So says a contemporary letter quoted in the ‘Parentalia.’

Wren had come home at Christmas to find London comparatively free from the plague, and people gradually returning. The Royal Society, whose meetings had of course ceased during the infection, busied themselves in investigations as to the plague, and the possible methods of preventing it. It still raged in the country, and especially at Cambridge, driving Isaac Newton from his lectures there to the garden at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, where the idea of the law of gravitation first occurred to his mind.

The repair of S. Paul’s was again discussed and commissioners appointed in 1666, among whom were Evelyn, Wren, Dean Sancroft, and the then Bishop of London, who was Humphrey Henchman, the early friend of George Herbert.

On August 27th they inspected the cathedral. Two of the commissioners, Mr. Chichley and Mr. Prat, evidently wished to do as little as possible, declaring, when the nave was proved to lean outwards on both sides, ‘it was so built for an effect of the perspective,’ and proposing to repair the steeple on its old foundations. Wren thought very differently, insisted on new foundations, renewed his former proposal of ‘a noble cupola’ which was strongly supported by Evelyn, who had never forgotten the grandeur of S. Peter’s just completed when he went to Rome as a young man in 1644. They retired to the Deanery to give their opinions in writing, promising to send estimates of the cost of their several plans. Six days later a new disaster overwhelmed London and solved the question of repairing the cathedral. On the night of September 2nd the Fire of London began; for three days and four nights it burned unchecked, having gained such strength during the first panic that it could not be beaten back, the sparks constantly kindling new centres of flame.

At last the people were roused to take some steps. King Charles, who showed on this occasion great courage and presence of mind, got by water to the Tower and insisted on the houses near being blown up so as to prevent the flames from reaching the powder magazine.

Pepys gives a vivid account of the dismay and confusion; the goods removed and removed again as the fire reached what had been thought to be places of safety; the rain of fire drops, and the ever-new places in which the fire broke out, and his own difficulties of getting anything to eat but the cold remains of his Sunday’s dinner! On September 17 he went by water to Greenwich—‘seeing the City all the way, a sad sight much fire being in it still.’ S. Paul’s suffered terribly; the Portico was split and rent, nothing but the inscription remaining, of which each letter was perfect. The heat had calcined the largest blocks of stone, the Portland stone flew off wherever the flames touched it; the lead roof (no less than six acres by measure[107]), melted and fell in, and carrying everything with it in its fall, broke into S. Faith’s, the crypt below the choir, where the books belonging to the Stationers’ Hall had been carried for safety. They caught fire and continued burning for a week. The altar and roof above it, though of lead, remained untouched, and one Bishop’s tomb.[108] When at length the fire burnt out, the city was a ‘ruinous heap,’ the air still so hot as almost to singe the hair of those who sought amongst the ruins for some remains of former wealth. In the fields all round were two hundred thousand people of all classes equally destitute, silent from the very greatness of their calamity and asking no relief. The King did his utmost for them, and a proclamation was made for the country to come in and refresh them. Most fortunately the weather was warm and fair.

For a few days their stupor lasted, when it was broken into by a general alarm that the Dutch were in the river burning all the shipping. When this was at length appeased, the people flocked back to what had been the city, and either set up little sheds where their houses had been or took refuge with friends whose dwellings were uninjured, so that in four days’ time of the hundreds who had thronged the fields not one remained. To rebuild the city was an urgent necessity, and while the flames were in parts still burning Wren and Evelyn had both made plans for a new city and presented them to the King. Wren’s was the first shown to King Charles, and though there is much resemblance between it and that of Evelyn, yet Wren’s is evidently the more useful, as well as the finer plan of the two, and was the one which the King accepted. All persons were agreed that to allow the old, narrow, filthy streets, with their magazines of oil and rosin, and their wooden houses touching each other overhead, to be put back was only to insure another plague and another fire, but the manner of rebuilding was in as great dispute as was the origin of the fire. Pepys believed that it was caused by the Dutch, who in the following year did venture into Chatham and burnt several men-of-war as they lay at anchor there; but the popular idea was that it was caused by the French and the Roman Catholics, and there were plenty ready to swear that they had seen foreigners kindling the flames in fresh places by throwing fire-balls into the houses. Some said it was done by the Puritans, and very few appear to have accepted the theory, probably the true one, that it was caused by the over-heating of a baker’s oven.

Christopher Wren began his work by having the ruins cleared away. It was no easy task, especially as every now and then the flames would break out anew when the air reached the cellars where they had been smouldering. But it was a mere matter of necessity, as until this was done it was not possible to pass to and fro or take the necessary levels and measurements. He also repaired a portion of the west end of S. Paul’s, which best permitted it, for divine service. It was employment enough for one man, but as the evenings grew longer, in the intervals of elaborating his plans for the new city, he returned to the Royal Society and attended all its meetings.

Improvements in building naturally occupied much of the Society’s attention. Mr. Hooke produced a scheme for a better method of brick-making;[109] new models for the London granaries were required, and Wren gave an account of those at Dantzic.

On April 24, 1667, his uncle, the Bishop of Ely, died, at the age of eighty-one, at Ely House, in Holborn, which had probably been his chief abode, though he left it on occasions for the work of his diocese and for the consecration of the chapel at Pembroke Hall. Back to his well-loved University, and to the resting-place he had prepared for himself underneath the altar of the chapel, the Bishop’s remains were slowly borne during the first bright days of May, attended by ‘his children, his alliance, and his family.’ The Heralds’ College conducted the funeral with full dignity and solemnity. When they reached Cambridge the Vice-Chancellor and the whole university met the procession, which was headed by Rouge Dragon, Pursuivant-at-arms, carrying the silver-gilt Crozier, and Norroy, King-at-arms, carrying the silver-gilt Mitre, both of which, as well as a pair of massive silver altar candlesticks, the Bishop had provided a year before. On May 9, with the same attendance, which included ‘twenty-four scholars of S. John’s, Peter House, and Pembroke who were his relations,’[110] the coffin was borne to Pembroke Chapel from the Registry, at the end of the Regent’s Walk, where it had lain in state for two days, and after Evening Service had been said was laid in a ‘coffin of one fair whole stone,’ in the vault of the chapel. Dr. Pearson pronounced a Latin oration over it, recalling the chief events of the Bishop’s long and troubled life, describing his high-minded character, his resolute self-denial, and contrasting his conduct in never seeking, or by the least word asking, for promotion, but rather being besought to accept it, with those who gaped for church preferment, and rather snatched honours than received them. Dr. Pearson dwelt on his liberality to the University, on his never enriching his family out of the revenues of the sees he had ruled; and paid a warm tribute to the courage and faith with which he had fought for the Church, and either alone, or amongst very few, had understood her discipline and dared to revive it.

Of the four sons who survived the Bishop, Matthew, the eldest, early attracted notice by an answer to Harrington’s ‘Commonwealth of Oceana’ and by a pamphlet ‘Monarchy asserted,’ a vindication of a former work written in 1659. He was highly thought of by the Royalists, and was a member of the Parliament which met in 1661. He was Lord Clarendon’s secretary, remained loyal to him during his unmerited disgrace, and was then taken by the Duke of York as his secretary. Matthew remained with the Duke until 1672; when he died and was buried in the vault at Pembroke Chapel. He had taken a share in most of the political events of his day, always with honour and credit. Thomas, the next brother, left the profession of medicine, received holy orders, and was given the Rectory of Littlebury in Essex by his father; a preferment that he held until his death in 1680. Bishop Wren also made him Archdeacon of Ely. He was a great musician and a member of the Royal Society. The two younger sons, Charles and William, were both Oxford scholars, and received degrees at the Restoration. Charles sat for Cambridge in the Parliament of 1685, called by James II. on his accession. All these three younger sons received degrees in 1660, with many others who had been ejected by the Parliamentary Visitors in 1648–9. William Wren, who was made a knight, was a barrister of the Middle Temple, and enjoyed the questionable advantage of Judge Jeffreys’ acquaintance. Jeffreys, then Lord Chancellor, writing to Pepys[111] in 1687, says:—

William Wren died in 1689 and was buried in the Temple Church. There is no mention of the marriage of any of the Bishop’s children, and respecting the daughters I can find no record whatever, so it seems that that branch of the Wren family died out. Captain Wren was probably one of the Durham Wrens, or of those who lived at Withibrook in Warwickshire and are mentioned by Dugdale.

PATCHING S. PAUL’S—SANCROFT’S LETTERS—WREN’S EXAMINATION OF S. PAUL’S—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL—LONDON AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN—LETTER TO FAITH COGHILL—WREN MARRIES HER—TEMPLE BAR—S. MARY-LE-BOW—ARTILLERY COMPANY—GUNPOWDER USED TO REMOVE RUINS.

After the death of Bishop Wren, Christopher was a frequent attendant at the Royal Society, where several experiments were made of raising weights by means of gunpowder, a matter which Wren was anxious to investigate before trying to remove the mass of ruins which had been S. Paul’s. Much very tedious work of carting away rubbish and opening roadways still pressed on Wren and his assistants before even the necessary levels could be taken and adjusted or any building could be begun.

In spite of Wren’s previous statement, and that of Evelyn and Sancroft, in spite of the immense additional damage which the conflagration had caused, attempts were still made to patch up the remains of S. Paul’s Cathedral.

As has been said, something was done in order to make it possible to hold Divine Service in the ruins, and there Sancroft ministered, and there possibly he preached before the King on the occasion of the solemn fast held for the fire on October 10, 1666.[112] Parts of the sermon rise to real eloquence, and he admonishes King Charles and his luxurious Court with singular courage and directness. So matters remained with the Cathedral until the spring of 1668.

Wren was at Oxford, delivering his Astronomy Lectures, when he received the following letter from the Dean of S. Paul’s:[113]

Wren seems to have been unable to come up to London, and to have written an answer to Dean Sancroft reiterating his opinion, while the attempt at repairs continued.

At the beginning of July Sancroft wrote to him again:—

Wren obeyed this intreaty, came up from Oxford, made a thorough examination of the Cathedral, and wrote a report for the commissioners.

He enumerates the various ‘decays’ of the building from the date of the fire in Queen Elizabeth’s reign which burnt the whole roof and caused ‘the spreading out of the walls above ten inches from their true perpendicular’—up to the last fire, of which he says—

Then follows an account of the injuries to the rest of the building, but as they have been already touched on in the extracts from Evelyn’s Diary and Sancroft’s letters, they shall not be repeated here.

The only part of the cathedral where this could be safely and easily done was at the eastern end of the nave:—

Many meetings and much discussion ensued, and Wren’s opinion at last prevailed; the King issued an order in council for taking down the walls at the east end, the old choir, and the tower, and for clearing the ground in order to lay a fresh foundation. While this was being done, Wren prepared sketches and designs for a new S. Paul’s. He had also an engagement out of London: his friend Dr. Seth Ward, the Bishop of Salisbury, an active member of the Royal Society, asked Wren to survey his beautiful cathedral, which had suffered much in the civil wars, and lately by lightning and tempest.

Though the architecture of the cathedral was not of the kind which he considered the best, Wren had too fine a taste, too quick an eye for beauty of form, not to admire it heartily, and in his report he pronounced that ‘the whole pile was large and magnificent, justly accounted one of the best patterns of the age wherein it was built.’ He praised the pillars and mouldings, ‘the stately and rich plainness’ to which the architect had trusted. He made a thorough examination of the whole, especially the spire, which had declined to the south-west, and had caused great alarm. Wren was of opinion that the architect had not laid as sufficient foundations, especially under the pillars, as he should have done, considering the marshy nature of the soil, the frequent inundations, the great weight that the pillars had to bear, and that they themselves were too slight, particularly those under the spire.

To prevent further mischief to the spire, he ordered some timbers in it, and in the tower, to be cut away, and put in bands and braces of iron wrought by anchor smiths who were accustomed to great work for ships. He then had a plummet dropped to the pavement, from the highest possible part of the spire, the height of which he reckoned at 404 feet from the ground, to see exactly what the decline was, and ordered this trial to be repeated at certain times to see if the decline increased.

When, nearly 200 years later, Mr. Wyatt made the trial, he found that the decline was unaltered, so true had Wren’s science proved.

Both this year and the previous one had, so far as London was concerned, been taken up by the business of levelling, marking out streets, and adjusting the claims of such as had had houses in the city before the fire. Wren had laid before the King and Parliament a model of the city as he proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the design; the model probably does not exist, but the ground-plan has been preserved, and suggests a London very different to the present one.

The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the confined, winding approach to S. Paul’s that it now is, even its crooked picturesqueness marred by the viaduct that cuts all the lines of the Cathedral, gradually widened as it approached S. Paul’s, and divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least, which ran on either side of the Cathedral, leaving a large open space in which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to which ten streets, each sixty feet wide, converged, and around which were placed the Post Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths’ Hall, and the Ensurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest streets were to be thirty feet wide, ‘excluding all narrow, dark alleys without thoroughfares, and courts.’

The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal thoroughfares, and to be ‘designed according to the best forms for capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All churchyards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.’

He intended that the churchyards should be carefully planted and adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials within the walls of the town he strongly objected, and the experience derived from the year of the plague confirmed his judgment. No gardens are mentioned in the plan, for he had provided, as he thought, sufficiently for the healthiness of the town by his wide streets and numerous open spaces for markets. Gardening in towns was an art little considered in his days, and contemporary descriptions show us that ‘vacuities’ were speedily filled with heaps of dust and refuse.

The London bank of the Thames was to be lined with a broad quay, along which the halls of the city companies were to be built, with suitable warehouses in between for the merchants, to vary the effect of the edifices.

The little stream whose name survives in Fleet Street was to be brought to light, cleansed, and made serviceable as a canal one hundred and twenty feet wide, running much in the line of the present Holborn Viaduct.[116]

These were the main features of Christopher Wren’s scheme, and had he been allowed to accomplish it, we can imagine what the effect of London might have been without its noisome smells, without its dark crooked lanes, without its worst smoke, its river honoured not only with the handsome quay it has at length obtained, but with a line of beautiful buildings and fair spires, and above all S. Paul’s, with an ample space around it, giving free play to its grand proportions. Wren, with a perfect knowledge of his own powers, which he considered as dispassionately, and knew as accurately as any matter of mathematical science, was ready to undertake and perform his scheme to the uttermost.

The difficulties were however considerable: there were the endless quarrels about property, the reluctance to part with an old site, and, chief difficulty of all, the utmost hurry of rebuilding in order to house the people before the approaching winter.

Pepys[117] says that in April 1667:—

Thus Wren had by no means clear ground on which to work, and an opportunity was forfeited, which, absit omen, may never recur, of making London one of the beautiful cities of the world.

Important sanitary improvements were, however, made: the houses were not built of wood; the principal streets were less narrow; and, above all, the lingering contagion was burnt away. Nothing less would probably have availed; but the fire was a cleansing one, and left behind it this blessing, that though more than two hundred years have elapsed the plague has not, as yet, reappeared.

The Custom House of London was one of the first buildings to be restored, and Wren began it in 1668. It was a stately stone edifice, built in three sides of a square, with an open court in front. The same fate befell this building which had overtaken its predecessor; in 1719 it was burnt down.

Besides all these architectural and scientific cares, Wren had business of his own on hand, and was at this time engaged to be married to a lady four years younger than himself, whom probably he had known for some time. His bride was Faith, daughter of Sir Thomas Coghill and Elizabeth his wife, who lived at Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire. Sir Thomas was sheriff of the county in 1633, and was knighted at Woodstock in that year, the same in which King Charles was crowned in Scotland. Sir Thomas was a grandson of Marmaduke Coghill,[118] of Coghill, Knaresborough. He married, in 1622, Elizabeth Sutton, the heiress of Horsell and some lands in Surrey. Faith, their daughter, was born on March 17, 1636, and baptized in the same month at Bletchingdon by her relation the Rev. John Viell, the then rector. It seems likely that Wren made her acquaintance while both were children when staying with his sister Susan and her husband, Dr. William Holder, at Bletchingdon Rectory. It may have been Faith who comforted him when, on June 3, 1656, they laid Dean Wren in the chancel of Bletchingdon Church.

One letter to Faith Coghill from her lover, exists among the curious autographs of the ‘Parentalia,’[119] its delicate, finished and yet firm writing, eminently characteristic of Christopher Wren: it is as follows—

On December 7, 1669, Christopher Wren and Faith Coghill were married in the Temple Church in London. Of their married life there is absolutely no record; they probably lived chiefly in London, as Wren had a house in Scotland Yard, which went with the office of Surveyor-General.

One of Wren’s early works was the rebuilding, on a somewhat larger scale, of the Royal Exchange. ‘Charles II. went to the Exchange with his kettle-drums and trumpets to lay the first stone of the new building of the Exchange on the 23rd of October 1667.’[120] Wren’s own wish had been, as has been said, to make it the nave or centre of the town, in which case he meant to contrive it after the form of a Roman Forum with double porticoes. Thwarted in this, he restored it as much as possible to what it had previously been, replacing the statue of Sir Thomas Gresham, the only thing in the building uninjured by the Fire. It is curious that this restoration should have begun just a hundred years from the time when Queen Elizabeth was feasted by Sir Thomas Gresham at his house, visited the new building, and caused it to be proclaimed ‘the Royal Exchange’ by the sound of the trumpet.

The rebuilding was very quickly performed, though at considerable cost.[121] Readers of the Spectator[122] will remember Addison’s fine description of the Exchange, and ‘the grand scene of business which gave him an infinite variety of solid and substantial entertainments.’

Next came Temple Bar, which was begun in 1670, and finished in 1672. It was built of Portland stone, and had in its four niches statues of James I. and Anne of Denmark on the west side, Charles I. and Charles II. on the other.[123] Blackened and defiled as it was, and disfigured by the neighbouring houses, it was one of the picturesque, characteristic buildings of London, now disappearing with alarming rapidity, and had seen many a generation pass in triumph or in sorrow under its archway. The thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales’s recovery (1872) was the last historical spectacle with which Temple Bar was connected. On that occasion the City was moved to wipe off some of the smoke of two hundred years, and to let Temple Bar be seen somewhat as it must have been when the great architect finished it, as the entrance to a city which, in spite of all drawbacks, might be fairly called his creation.

Wren attempted to prosecute his design for the quay along the northern bank of the Thames, but the ground was being rapidly encroached upon by buildings, some few of which were tolerable, but the greater part unsightly. Various interests;—the immense water traffic, doubled, one can believe, at a time when the city streets were still impassable; the uncertain support given by the King—all combined to defeat his plan. Could he now walk along that glorious achievement the Embankment, what would not his feelings be on seeing the hideous buildings which it has revealed!

The Surveyor-General’s office was one which entailed endless work. There was not a street laid down, hardly a house built, in any part of the town, without the surveyor being first consulted;—now about ‘a parcel of ground bought by Colonel Panton’ (the present Panton Street, S.W.); now about the houses pulled down for the safety of Whitehall during the Fire.—Into every case Wren made careful inquiry, visiting the places himself, and insisting on the buildings being of stone or brick, with proper paving in the streets, and having a due regard to health.

In spite of his care several wretched buildings were put up in places which, as a few surviving names testify, were then fields near the City.

When Wren found that the owners persisted in erecting such shabby buildings he presented a petition to the King, as follows:—

The petition was considered by the King in council, a proclamation was issued, and full powers were given to the surveyor, backed by commands that he should take effectual care that the proclamation was obeyed. This Wren was very ready to do: with all his gentleness and courtesy he had inherited much of Bishop Wren’s firmness, and had no intention of swerving from his point.

The churches of the City began to rise gradually. Pepys says:[125]—

There has been much dispute as to whether or not Wren repaired S. Sepulchre’s Church. Mr. Elmes and others declare that he repaired it in 1671, but Mr. Hoby, one of its churchwardens, who made a careful study of all the parchments and papers belonging to S. Sepulchre’s, gives it as his deliberate opinion that—

As has been said, such unauthorised building and patching took place pretty frequently, and all that recent researches have brought to light goes to prove that Wren had very little to do with S. Sepulchre’s.

S. Mary le Bow, with its proverbial bells,[127] was begun in this year and finished five years later, on a very old foundation. The first S. Mary’s was built by William the Conqueror,[128] on marshy land, and stood upon arches of stone, whence the church took the name of S. Maria de Arcubus or le Bow. The ‘great bell of Bow’ was, in 1469, ordered by the common council to be rung at nine o’clock every evening, and money was left for this object; when the church was burnt in the Great Fire it had twelve very melodious bells hung in its steeple. When Sir Christopher came to rebuild the church he found an older foundation to work upon than even that in 1100. In clearing the ground he came upon a foundation firm enough to build upon, which on examination proved to be the ‘walls, with windows and pavement, of a Roman temple.’ Upon these walls he built the body of the church, but for its beautiful steeple it was necessary to buy the site of an old house and to advance about forty feet to the line of the street. Here the workmen dug through about eighteen feet of made earth, and then, to Wren’s surprise and their own, came to a Roman causeway of rough stone firmly cemented, about four feet thick, underneath which lay the London clay.

With this foundation Wren was content and built up what has ever ranked as one of his finest churches. A good judge of architecture has pronounced that the steeple is ‘beyond all doubt the most elegant building of its class erected since the Reformation ... there is a play of light and shade, a variety of outline, and an elegance of detail, which it would be very difficult to match in any other steeple.’[129]

The Arches Court of Canterbury derived its name from this church, where, until the fire, its sittings were held. The court then sat at Exeter House in the Strand, then at Doctors’ Commons, and finally in Westminster Hall.

The vane which completes the spire is the City dragon, with a cross on either wing, curiously chased in gilt copper.

The ancient Church of S. Christopher le Stocks in Threadneedle Street suffered severely in the Fire, only the mere shell of the building remaining; it had been made a storehouse for a quantity of papers hastily rescued from some merchant’s office and placed in S. Christopher’s, where they perished and greatly damaged the church. It had been lately repaired and was endowed with 20l. in trust ‘for a minister to read divine service there daily at 6 o’clock in the morning for ever. 50s. each yearly to the clerk and the sexton for their attendance, and 5l. yearly to provide for lights in winter time.’ In 1671, Wren finished the repairs of the church, carefully preserving its pinnacled Gothic tower; in 1696 he further adorned the interior. It is curious that the first church which came under Wren’s hands should have been one dedicated to his patron saint; curious also that this should have been the first of the churches destroyed by those who should have been their guardians. S. Christopher’s was literally sacrificed to Mammon; it was destroyed for the enlargement of the Bank of England in 1781.

In 1669 Wren appears in a new character as a member of the Honourable Artillery Company. He was admitted at their festival on August 17, when the company marched in state to a church in Broad Street, probably one of the many temporary ones put up after the Fire, and rewarded Dr. Waterhouse for his sermon with three of the newly-coined guinea pieces. A great banquet in the Clothworkers’ Hall in Mincing Lane, where the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many other distinguished persons were present, concluded the festival.[130] It is hardly conceivable that Wren could have found time to be more than an honorary member, but scattered notices here and there of observations made when ‘firing off my piece’ seem to point to his having attended the drills of the company.

One wishes there was a portrait extant of Sir Christopher in his uniform, wearing the red-plumed high hat which appeared on gala days!

In 1673 Wren resigned the Savilian astronomy professorship, to which the pressure of his architectural work made it impossible he should any longer attend. No doubt it was with great regret that he gave up the post, with all its curious speculations, its boundless possibilities of discovery, and turned himself from the study of the heavens to the dust and turmoil, the endless difficulties and petty quarrels, which thwarted him at every step of his London labours.

In truth, the pressure of business was enormous. Not a moment could be spared while the population of the City had neither churches, places of traffic, nor houses to dwell in; and the architect, whose plan had been marred, had to do the best he could in the midst of every kind of incongruity.

The futile attempts to patch up S. Paul’s were in 1673 at last abandoned, and Wren ordered the ground to be cleared that new foundations might be laid. A great mass of material for building had had to be disposed of while the repairs were going on.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Winchester, and Oxford, and the Lord Mayor, were commissioners for the repair of S. Paul’s; from them Wren obtained an order that—

The money thus collected was put aside for the fabric of the Cathedral.

Though much of the old material was removed in this manner, and yet not diverted from its proper purpose, the ground was by no means clear. Wren, appointed under the Great Seal, architect of S. Paul’s, and one of the commissioners in the new commission for its rebuilding, had to take down by degrees what portions of the old building were still standing.

Warped and cracked as they were, the walls, eighty feet high and five thick, were yet strong enough to make the process of pulling down both difficult and tedious. Wren determined to avail himself of the knowledge he had acquired in the Royal Society’s recent experiments in raising weights by means of gunpowder. Houses, it is true, had been blown up in several places during the Fire in order to protect the Tower of London and Whitehall, but the use of gunpowder to raise a definite weight, and throw it a fixed distance and no farther, was a novel experiment. When the labourers reached at last the old central tower, the walls of which were two hundred feet high, they were afraid to go up to the top, as they had done elsewhere, and work with their pickaxes, while those below shovelled away the stones and mortar that they threw down into separate heaps.

This was the time for Wren’s experiment.

With great precautions, and the use of eighteen pounds of gunpowder only, he blew up the north-western angle of the tower, so contriving it that, while he raised more than three thousand tons weight, it was not scattered and no damage was done, though the shock made the neighbours imagine it to be an earthquake.

Encouraged by this success, Wren had another mine prepared, but unluckily was obliged to go out of town himself and to leave it in the charge of his next officer.

The man, thinking to improve upon his master, increased the quantity of powder, caused an explosion which shot stones far and wide, and though no lives were lost, terrified the City, all the more that an old superstition declared that the tower of S. Paul’s and the City of London would fall together.

Forbidden, owing to the panic thus caused, the use of this modern method, Wren betook himself to ancient times, and devised a gigantic battering ram, with a great spike at one end. Thirty men, fifteen on each side, worked the ram against one place in the wall, Wren watching and encouraging them when, disheartened by a day’s work without visible result, they were ready to give up in despair. On the second day the wall fell.

Wren made great use of this machine and ‘pleased himself that he had recovered so notable and ancient an engine.’

BIRTH OF HIS ELDEST SON—S. STEPHEN’S, WALBROOK—S. BENNET FINK—PLANS FOR S. PAUL’S—THE EXCAVATIONS—SON CHRISTOPHER BORN—DEATH OF FAITH, LADY WREN—SECOND MARRIAGE—CITY CHURCHES—THE MONUMENT—TOMB OF CHARLES I.—REMAINS OF THE LITTLE PRINCES IN THE TOWER.

Early in October, 1672, Christopher Wren’s eldest son was born, and baptized by the name of Gilbert, at S. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a very different-looking building from the present S. Martin’s with its stately portico. Wren and his wife lived in the house in Scotland Yard, and, avoiding the uneven, difficult streets, could daily go by water, then the favourite way of transit for a Londoner, to examine and superintend his works in the city. Later on Wren built himself a little house of red bricks in the yard of the Falcon Inn at Southwark, and watched from its window the progress of S. Paul’s and of his other buildings in the city.

Besides the churches already begun, three new ones were taken in hand that year. S. Mary-at-Hill[131] was only partially destroyed by the fire. Upon it Wren first tried his plan of a domed roof, and succeeded in making it, at any rate within, a beautiful little church. S. Michael’s, Cornhill, of which only the tower was left standing, was rebuilt that year; its situation threw a great difficulty in the architect’s way, as it could only be lit from one side; this difficulty Wren overcame and produced an interior[132] equally light and good. The tower was taken down in 1722, and rebuilt from designs of Wren’s. These designs were taken from the tower of Magdalen College at Oxford, and instance Wren’s power of producing a bold, rich effect in a style of architecture altogether foreign to his taste.

Perhaps the most beautiful of all Wren’s churches is S. Stephen’s, Walbrook, begun at this same time, and finished seven years later. The outside, cramped by its situation, and overshadowed by tall houses, is not handsome, but within, the church is as original as it is graceful and beautiful:—

So great was the fame, and such the charm of the building that when the great sculptor Canova[134] visited England, and was asked should he ever wish to return to the country? he answered, ‘Yes, that I might again see S. Paul’s Cathedral, Somerset House, and S. Stephen’s, Walbrook.’

In the midst of so much work it is not wonderful that, for the moment, Wren’s diligent attendance at the Royal Society slackened somewhat, though at the end of 1672 his name occurs among those of the Society who cordially welcomed Isaac Newton to their fellowship. Wren bestowed especial praise on Newton’s invention of a refracting telescope. Friends they appear always to have remained, and their dispositions were not unlike, though the travels and varied experiences of Wren’s early years had quickened his faculties, and prevented that entire absorption in one idea which is evident from many stories about Isaac Newton. As, for instance, when one of Newton’s philosophical friends abroad—

The Royal Society was at this time put to serious inconvenience, as more than half of the members failed in paying their weekly money. Wren, who, as might be expected, was one of those who paid most punctually, was re-elected a member of the council, and agreed to serve on a committee for this special matter.

The death of his friend and cousin, Matthew, in the summer of 1672, was a grief to him, as well as a loss to the Royal Society, of which he had been a member from its beginning. On the 20th of November, 1673, Wren received the well-earned honour of knighthood from King Charles at Whitehall. No details of any kind respecting the ceremony are to be found in the chary family record.

S. Bennet Fink, a very graceful and original composition despite the corner into which it was squeezed; and S. Olave’s, Jewry, built of brick and stone with a good pinnacled stone tower, were begun at this period, and finished three years later. S. Dionysius, or, as it was commonly called, S. Dionis, Back Church Street, was one of the first completed; its Ionic eastern façade was in Wren’s most classical style; the pulpit was carved by Grinling Gibbons. Its tower and steeple, according to a frequent custom of Wren’s, were added some years later. S. Dionis has, alas! now been swept away, and its site, where the original church was consecrated in 1288, desecrated.[136] The beautiful little S. Bennet’s has shared the same unholy fate. S. George’s, Botolph Lane, built also in 1674, a handsome stone church with a vaulted roof and good oak fittings, though threatened, still fortunately survives.

Grinling Gibbons, whom Wren continually employed, was introduced to him by Evelyn, who found the young man in a cottage at Deptford carving a copy of Tintoretto’s beautiful Crucifixion. Evelyn showed Wren the carving and besought him to give some employment to a man of such genius. This he gladly promised, and accordingly, many a little known city church is adorned with carvings so light and so graceful that it is hard to believe that they are cut out of wood.

Some works in stone Gibbons also did for Sir Christopher, but wood appears to have been the material he preferred. In 1674 Wren had the satisfaction of restoring Le Soeur’s[137] beautiful statue of King Charles to its place at Charing Cross. In the Rebellion it had been overthrown by order of the Parliament, who directed that it should be broken up. John Rivet, a brazier in Charing Cross, purchased it, hid it in the vaults of S. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and, to divert suspicion, sold bronze medals and knife-handles, professedly made from its metal. After the Restoration, he produced it intact, and, under Wren’s direction, it was placed on its present pedestal, which was carved by Gibbons, whose handywork is easily recognised in the free, flowing lines of the deeply-cut carving, much as time, aided by London atmosphere, has eaten the very stone away. The poet Waller wrote an epigram[138] on its restoration, which, besides its intrinsic merit, is interesting in connection with the statue:—

It was about this period that Wren rebuilt the theatre in Drury Lane, which had fallen a prey to its usual enemy, fire. It was reopened in 1674 with a play whose epilogue was written by Dryden. The ‘old theatre in Salisbury Court,’ as Horace Walpole calls it, was also built by Wren. During this time Sir Christopher, now formally appointed architect of S. Paul’s with a modest salary of 200l. a year, had busied himself in designs for the future cathedral. Everyone, whether qualified or not, gave their opinion about the designs. The first, which was ‘a fabrick of moderate bulk, but of good proportion, a convenient quire with a vestibule and portico, and a dome conspicuous above the houses,’ was planned by Wren at a time when the Cathedral fund was very small, and the chances of increasing it appeared but slender. This design was rejected as deficient in size and grandeur. After this, in order to find out what style of building was really desired, Wren made several sketches ‘merely for discourse sake,’ and perceiving that the generality had set their hearts upon a large building, he designed one with which he was himself satisfied, considering it ‘a design antique and well studied, conformable to the best style of Greek and Roman architecture.’ The design was greatly admired by those who understood the matter, and they begged Sir Christopher to let them see it in a model.[139] Wren accordingly made a large one, apparently with his own hands, in wood, with all the intended ornaments properly carved. Its ground plan was that of a Greek cross, the choir was circular, it had a very short nave, and no aisles. Externally there was a handsome portico, one small dome immediately behind it, and over the centre of the cross a larger dome. Within it would have been as beautiful as it was original, with the eight smaller domes, not seen outside, encircling the central dome. The Duke of York on seeing the plan complained much of the absence of side oratories, such as are common in most foreign cathedrals, and insisted upon their being added. Sir Christopher knew that such a change would cramp the building and break the beauty of the design to a degree that went to his heart. He shed tears in attempting to change the Duke’s opinion. The latter was, as ever, obstinate, and the change had to be made.

The outside, with the two hollow curves joining the transepts with the nave, and the two different-sized domes, would probably have been disappointing; but one speaks with diffidence, for this was Sir Christopher’s favourite design, the S. Paul’s which he told his son he would most cheerfully have accomplished. When the time came for working out the design, it is very likely that he would have remedied many of the defects which critical eyes now see in the model; but no such opportunity ever came. Preparations were indeed made, in May 1674, for a building after this design; but the clergy were startled by the novelty of the plan, the circular choir, and the absence of aisles, and the architect was compelled to give up his cherished scheme. Several designs, none equal to the first, were produced by Sir Christopher, the large central dome appearing in each of them. Upon this feature he had determined, even in the days before the fire, when the old pointed choir still stood.

At length Wren grew weary of criticism and showed his designs no more to the public. King Charles decided on one,[140] and issued a warrant for its erection, stating that the duty on coal[141] amounted to a considerable sum, and saying:—

The east end was to be begun first. Liberty was left to Wren ‘to make some variations rather ornamental than essential as from time to time he should see proper,’ and the whole was left to his management.

This design is wholly unlike the present Cathedral, and is inferior to any of Wren’s other buildings. ‘Artificial’ in the modern sense of the word, it undoubtedly is. The west end much resembles old S. Paul’s as Inigo Jones left it, and is poor and flat; there is a low flat dome, then a lantern with ribbed vaulting, surmounted by a spire something like S. Bride’s, but thin and ungraceful. One feels that Wren must have been disgusted with the design when finished, and could only have done such a thing at a time when his genius was rebuked and harassed by vexatious limitations and interference. Accepted, however, the design was, and Wren, provided with funds and ordered to begin, shook off the fetters which had so cramped him, and by a series of alterations, which certainly reversed the King’s order, being essential rather than ornamental, he by degrees worked out the plan of the beautiful S. Paul’s which is the crown of London.

No objection seems to have been raised to these changes.

He had a large staff of workmen under him, and an assistant surveyor, John Oliver, who directed the workmen, measured the masons’ work, bought in materials, and examined the accounts; a clerk of the works, Laurence Spenser, who overlooked the men, saw that they did their work as directed, and made up the accounts; each of these was paid 100l. a year, half as much as the salary of the architect himself; a clerk of the cheque, Thomas Russell, who called over the labourers three times a day, and kept them to their business. Besides these, there was the master-mason,[142] Thomas Strong, the master-builder of S. Stephen’s, Walbrook, frequently employed by Wren, and the master-carpenter, Richard Jennings; all were carefully chosen, and were devoted to Sir Christopher, whose great genius, gentle disposition, and steady equable mind made him much beloved and respected.

On June 21, 1675, the first stone of S. Paul’s was laid by Sir Christopher and his master-mason, not by King Charles, as is sometimes said.[143]

In the previous year Wren had lost his son Gilbert, who was buried in S. Martin’s on March 23. In the February following another son was born and baptized by the name of Christopher. This son survived his father and began the collection of letters, papers, and miscellaneous facts about the Wren family which was afterwards published under the name of ‘Parentalia; or, Memoirs of the Wrens.’ It is, in truth, little but a heap of materials amongst which each fact has to be sought for and its proper place ascertained.

It has been truly said that the accounts of the building of S. Paul’s are meagre in the extreme. A little is, however, known. As Wren had foretold, there was much ‘to be done in the dark;’ the old foundations were not to be trusted, and immense excavations had to be made. In the course of this work, he discovered ‘graves of several ages and fashions, in strata or layers of earth, one above another, from the British and Roman times.’ The ‘Parentalia’ describes

Below this was hard ‘pot-earth,’ which Wren thought would be sufficiently firm to bear the great weight about to be laid upon it, but to ascertain its depth he had dry wells dug, and found it very unequal, in one place hardly four feet; he searched lower and found loose sand, then sand and shells; he speaks of them as sea shells, but it is now thought that they were probably river; below this again hard beach, and then London clay. He took great precautions when he laid any foundations here, fearing lest the sand should slip. The bed of sand is a danger still, for if pierced by a drain or other underground works the sand might run off, leaving a hollow under the pot-earth. The Cathedral authorities are accordingly wisely jealous of any excavations near S. Paul’s. When the north-east portion of the choir was reached, in digging the foundations a pit was found, from which all the pot-earth had been taken, containing many fragments of vases and urns, all of Roman pottery. This pit was a very serious difficulty, occurring as it did at the very angle of the choir.

Sir Christopher’s assistants suggested to him to drive in piles of timber; but he knew that, though timber lasted well under water, yet in this case, where it would be half in dry and half in wet sand, it would rot in the course of time, and ‘his endeavours were to build for eternity.’ He dug down more than forty feet, till he came to the hard beach, below which was the London clay, and upon the beach built a pier of solid masonry ten feet square, till within fifteen feet of the ground, and then by turning an arch brought it level with the rest of his foundation.

The theory commonly received was that a temple of Apollo stood where Westminster Abbey now stands, and that the site of S. Paul’s Cathedral was occupied by a temple of Diana. Wren, however, believed in neither legend. The temple of Apollo he thought was invented merely that the monks of Westminster might not be behind the Londoners in antiquities. In spite of the horns of stags, tusks of boars, and the like, said to have been found during former repairs of S. Paul’s, in spite of an image of Diana dug up hard by and in the possession of Dr. Woodward,[144] he wrote to Bishop Atterbury[145] that he ‘changed all the foundations of old S. Paul’s, and rummaged all the ground thereabouts, and being very desirous to find the footsteps of such a temple, I could not discover any, and therefore can give no more credit to Diana[146] than to Apollo.’

In the September of 1675, when the work with which her husband’s name is for ever connected was but little advanced, Lady Wren died, and was buried, as her son Gilbert had been, in the chancel of S. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, leaving her husband with a baby son hardly seven months old. The ‘Parentalia,’ with characteristic carelessness, gives neither the date of her death nor the place of her burial.

No hint even is to be found of how this loss affected Sir Christopher, but whether it was from the desolate state of his home, or the helplessness of a widower left with an infant son, or from other causes, he was not long in marrying again. His second wife was Jane Fitzwilliam, daughter of the second Baron Fitzwilliam, her mother was an heiress, the daughter of Hugh Perry alias Hunter, a sheriff and alderman of London. Lord Fitzwilliam died in 1643, the same year that he had succeeded to his father, and the widowed Lady Fitzwilliam died twenty-seven years later at ‘Dutchy House in the Savoy,’ the family house; so Jane Fitzwilliam had been some years an orphan when she was married to Sir Christopher in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, on February 24, 1676–7.

In this year Wren rebuilt S. Magnus, London Bridge,[147] which having escaped one ‘most dismal fire’ in 1633, was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. Sir Christopher rebuilt the church with Portland stone and oak timber, adding to it a picturesque tower with a cupola and a peal of ten bells. London Bridge, then covered with little houses and shops, would, Sir Christopher foresaw, require alteration, and he, anxious that S. Magnus should not suffer when the time came, proposed to leave space by it for a footway. The churchwardens overruled him. The improvement Wren expected has since been made, and when the workmen came to make a pathway under the portico they discovered to their great surprise that Sir Christopher had made the necessary arches, though bricked up, and left them to be in readiness for the change which he foresaw, though the churchwardens of S. Magnus did not. The state of London Bridge was very unsatisfactory; constant repairs were needed, and to shoot the narrow arches and not be swamped by the fall of the water was no easy feat. Wren had a plan for saving repairs and improving the water way by wide Gothic arches, taking away every other arch, and making the two into one, which would reduce the fall to nine inches at the most. This seems to have remained a scheme only.

S. Mildred’s in the Poultry was also begun in this year, a small stone church with a tower and cupola. It was destroyed in 1872,[148] and the details of its removal are instructive as well as painful, and may well be contrasted with the account of the manner of removing the remains of old S. Paul’s.[149]

S. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, on the site of an old Jewish synagogue, is of the same date; it is a neat small church mostly built of stone, with a curious old stone carving, in high relief, of the Last Judgment, over the door leading to the churchyard.

S. Lawrence, Jewry, ‘that new and cheerful pile,’[150] is a large well-proportioned building in the Corinthian style, with a tower and spire, built in the following year. It had been repaired by the parishioners in 1618, and boasted among its vicars three who had become bishops: Edward Reynolds, Bishop of Norwich, one of those who, during the Rebellion, sided strongly with the Presbyterians, and conformed at the Restoration; Dr. Seth Ward, Bishop of Exeter and Salisbury, who has been mentioned before; and Wren’s other scientific friend, Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who was buried in the chancel of S. Lawrence’s Church in 1672.

S. Lawrence’s possesses some excellent stone carving of fruit, possibly from Gibbons’ chisel.

S. Nicholas, Coleabbey, was built this year by Sir Christopher on the site of a church so ancient that it stood some feet below the street, and was entered by steps descending down to the floor; its most recent addition was in Richard II.’s reign, though the whole building was repaired in 1630. Wren’s is a well-proportioned brick and stone church with a square tower and short fat steeple. S. Mary’s, Woolnoth, was only repaired by Sir Christopher; it was afterwards rebuilt entirely by his clerk and pupil, Nicholas Hawksmoor,[151] in 1719. S. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, a fine bold stone church, its nave and aisles divided by well-sculptured columns; and S. Michael’s, Queenhithe, belong also to this busy year. S. Michael’s, standing close to the river, built of stone with plenty of space and room in it; its slender graceful spire ever beckoning to the swarming river and riverside population, might, one would have imagined, have been invaluable in zealous hands, but it has been swept away and the opportunity is lost.

It was also in 1677 that Sir Christopher completed the column generally known to Londoners as ‘the Monument.’ He began it in 1671; but the work had been much hindered by the difficulty of getting blocks of Portland stone of sufficient size. There had been great debate about the ornament for the summit. Wren wished it to be a large statue, as ‘carrying much dignity with it, and being more valluable in the eyes of forreigners and strangers.’ It was to be fifteen feet high, cast in brass, at a cost of 1,000l. The expense was one reason why this was given up, and the present ornament, a flaming vase of gilt bronze, substituted. Cibber[152] carved a basso-relievo on one side, representing King Charles in a Roman costume, protecting the ruined city. The four dragons at the base were carved by Edward Pierce,[153] a sculptor and architect who frequently worked for Wren. The other three sides have Latin inscriptions, of which one is an account of the fire, accusing the furor Papisticus as its cause; a brief inscription in English, lower down on the pedestal, repeats the same charge against the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction.’ Sir Christopher had written a Latin one for the column, which spoke of the fire as originating in a humble house, and briefly recounted its ravages; he added, as he was well entitled to add, that the city was rebuilt ‘not with wood and mud as before, but with edifices, some brick and some stone, and adorned with such works that it was seen to rise fairer from its ruins far than before.’ As he wrote, he must have given a sigh of regret to the perfection of his unused plan.

The accusation against the Romanists appealed powerfully to the inveterate prejudices of the multitude. It was accordingly insisted upon and ordered to be put up. James II. had the inscription effaced, but in William III.’s reign it was re-cut deeper than before, and so remained to justify Pope’s well-known lines:—

It is a curious retribution that the Monument designed by so great an architect as Wren, to commemorate such an event as the burning of London, and the singular courage and energy of its citizens, is now more generally connected in men’s mind with falsehood and calumny than with a great historical event.

The column was at first used, as Wren had intended it should be, as a place for certain experiments of the Royal Society; but the vibration of the column during the ceaseless traffic of London proved too great to allow of the experiments being successfully carried on. Evelyn, with much sense, wished that the column had been placed where the fire ended, and a ‘plain lugubrious marble’ where it began; and says:—

The King had proposed to Sir Christopher a very congenial piece of work. The remains of Charles I., which had been hastily buried in S. George’s Chapel at Windsor, were to be removed to what was known as the tomb-house at the east end of the chapel, re-interred there with the solemn service that had been denied to them before, and a grand tomb built over them. Lord O’Brien proposed in the House of Commons a grant of money for the purpose, and the House voted 70,000l. to be raised by a two months’ tax. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, preaching before the Commons on the following day, the anniversary of King Charles’s death, alluded to the tardy honour done ‘by that much-desired, long-expected vote.’ Sir Christopher prepared designs for a splendid monument.

It was to take the form of a Rotundo with a beautiful Dome and Lantern, and a Colonnade without, like that of the Temple of Vesta at Rome. Mosaic work was to be freely used, black and white marble and gilded brass; the cupola was to be painted in fresco. In the central niche fronting the entrance was the King’s monument. Four statues, emblems of heroic virtues, standing on a square plinth, and pressing underneath the prostrate figures of Rebellion, Heresy, Hypocrisy, Envy and Murder, support a large shield, on which is a statue erect of King Charles in modern armour, over his head a group of angels bearing a crown, a cross, and branches of palm. Two designs were made, one for brass work, one for marble: one design is drawn by Grinling Gibbons, whom Wren meant to employ for the carving. The other is by Wren himself, drawn with extraordinary care, in delicate pen and ink, and they yet remain with his note upon them. ‘Alas! for the state of the times!—not yet erected.’ The failure of his design was a great annoyance to Wren, who was most anxious to have paid this tribute to the King’s memory.

Why the plan was never executed it is hard to say. Charles II. kept the designs for some time and then returned them, begging Wren to keep them carefully; but the moment for their use never arrived.

Though he was not allowed to honour King Charles, curiously enough, it fell to Wren’s lot to provide a tomb for two other murdered Princes of England.

Some repairs were being made in the Tower of London under the orders of Wren, who was at that time repairing what is known as the White Tower, one of the oldest parts of the fortress. As the workmen were removing some stairs which led from the Royal lodgings to S. John’s Chapel, they came upon a wooden chest, which proved to contain the remains of two children, exactly corresponding in age and state of decay with the date of the murder of Edward V. and his brother Richard Duke of York in 1573. The place also corresponded in every respect with the traditions respecting the murder:[156] it was said to have been done in the Bloody Tower—the spot where the bones were found is but seventy yards distant; they were always said to have been buried in consecrated ground by the Priest of the Tower—the place where the remains were was just within S. John’s Chapel. The discovery caused considerable interest, and was fully represented to the King, who desired that the bones should be laid, under the Surveyor’s directions, in Henry VII.’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey in a white marble coffin with a suitable monument. Wren designed a pedestal and urn of white marble surmounted by twin crowns and palms. No doubt the monument accords better with the taste of the age in which it was erected than with that of the building in which it is placed, but it has an interest of its own. By the King’s wish a mulberry-tree was planted on the spot where the bones were discovered, but subsequent buildings at the Tower destroyed the tree, and even its stump has perished.

EMMANUEL COLLEGE—GREENWICH OBSERVATORY—BIRTH OF JANE AND WILLIAM WREN—S. BARTHOLOMEW’S—PORTLAND QUARRIES—DR. AND MRS. HOLDER—DEATH OF JANE, LADY WREN—POPISH PLOT—PAPIN’S DIGESTER—SIR J. HOSKYNS—ALLHALLOWS, BREAD STREET—PALACE AT WINCHESTER.

Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?—Pope, Moral Essays.

Great as was the pressure of Wren’s London work, he did not confine himself to that city alone, but in 1677, we find him at Cambridge, busied with buildings there. The beautiful chapel of Emmanuel College, which still stands unaltered as he left it, was Sir Christopher’s work in that year. More than thirty years before, Bishop Wren, when Bishop of Ely, had instanced amongst the irregularities to be amended at Cambridge the absence of a chapel at Emmanuel College,[157] and it well became his nephew to supply this lack. Sancroft had first set the plan on foot, and when he was removed in 1665 to S. Paul’s—a removal so costly that, little knowing, he consoled himself by thinking the next would be to his grave—his successor, Dr. Breton, continued his work.

A picturesque cloister runs north and south across the façade built of stone instead of the brick with stone dressing as Wren at first intended; within the chapel the rich stucco ceiling, the pannelling and wood carving, the tall columns which support a pediment behind the altar, as well as the bold metal scroll-work of the altar rails, all show Wren’s hand and eye. In the manuscript list of Wren’s architectural works in the ‘Parentalia’ the Chapel of Queen’s College at Oxford is assigned to him as built at about this time; but it does not appear in the more accurate printed list, and is not generally reckoned amongst his works.

The Observatory at Greenwich, known by the name of Flamsteed House, was being completed. It was built at the suggestion of Sir Jonas Moor, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, for the purpose of ascertaining the motions of the moon and the places of the fixed stars, in order, if possible, to discover accurately the longitude at sea.[158] Wren, confessedly one of the best astronomers in England, was on the commission for building the Observatory, and was its architect. Greenwich was chosen as the site at his suggestion; the King, who took a great interest in the project, allowed 500l. towards it, and Sir Christopher used in the work some spare wood, iron, and lead from the Tower Gatehouse, and the bricks taken from Tilbury, the fort built by Elizabeth to repel the Spanish Armada.

The Observatory was begun in June, 1675, and roofed in at the Christmas of the same year, and Flamsteed shortly afterwards installed there.

The Museum at Oxford, known as the Ashmolean, was Sir Christopher’s work in 1677. It contained a collection of objects of natural history which was then reckoned a very good one: it had been collected by John Tradescant, and bequeathed by him to Mr. Elias Ashmole, the historian of the Order of the Garter, who made the whole over to the University, endowing a lecture upon them.

The collection contained several curious specimens of Roman, Indian, and other weapons, some clothing made of feathers; among other ‘rarities,’ a ‘toad included in amber,’ and a ‘habit of feathers from the Phœnix wing as tradition goes.’[159] Ashmole was of the Royal Society and a student of astrology.

In the November of this year, Sir Christopher’s only daughter Jane was born, and was baptized at S. Martin’s, probably by the Rev. William Lloyd, then the vicar, who bore the high character of ‘an excellent preacher, a man of great integrity and piety, one who thoroughly understood all the parts of his function and had a mind fully bent to put them in execution.’ Wren’s fourth and youngest child was born in June, 1679, and baptized, also at S. Martin’s, by the name of William. Sir Christopher’s good friend Evelyn was one godfather, the other was Sir William Fermor, the head of an old Cavalier family of Northamptonshire, whose father, all but ruined in the civil wars, survived to attend as one of the Knights of the Bath at Charles II.’s coronation. Sir William, who was by his mother’s side first cousin to Lady Wren, was a friend of Evelyn’s, whose tastes he shared. He was created Lord Lempster[160] by William and Mary. The other sponsor was Lady Newport, daughter of the Earl of Bedford, and wife of the Lord Treasurer, Lord Newport, who, greatly distinguished by his loyalty and his suffering in the Civil War, was made Comptroller of the Household, and in 1672 Lord Treasurer, an office which he held under the two succeeding monarchs.[161] Lord Newport was a friend both of Wren and of Evelyn, and entertained them, Prince Rupert, and others at his house, where he had a fine collection of pictures.

Wren began five of his churches in this year: one was the little square church of SS. Anne and Agnes, Aldersgate, with its four Corinthian columns and decorated ceiling.

‘There is a constant tradition in the parish that SS. Anne and Agnes were two sisters who first built this church at their own charge,’[162] but at what date is not said. It once bore the name of ‘S. Anne-in-the-Willows,’ from the willow-trees that grew hard by.

S. Bartholomew’s, Bartholomew Lane, near the Exchange, had been consumed all but its old square tower, which must have been a striking object standing up tall and fire-scathed amongst the ruins. To this tower Wren added a sort of crown of open arches, but he carefully preserved the tower, itself a curious relic of London before the fire. Internally it was a handsome basilican church, effective from the good keeping and harmony of all its parts. Its date of consecration went back to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Bishop Miles Coverdale[163] was buried there. Alas! that all must be written in the past tense! The church has been destroyed because its site was wanted for the Sun Fire Office! It is a cruel fate, having been rebuilt after the Great Fire to be destroyed for a Fire Insurance Office.

S. Michael’s, Bassishaw, or Basinghall, taking this name from the great merchant family of Basing, several of whom were sheriffs, and others lord mayors of London, was rebuilt of brick and stone with a curious little stone spire.

S. Swithin’s in Cannon Street is reckoned a model of excellence in construction; it is of stone with a tower and spire, and domed roof; the curious relic known as ‘London Stone,’ is built into the church wall; it was formerly fixed in the ground in the street. Many different opinions have been advanced about it—that it was the centre of the City, which however it was not, being too near the river; that it was a place for tendering money before the Exchange existed; and, most prosaic of all, that it was set up by one named London Stone who lived there![164] All agreed that it had been there since the time of the Saxon kings.

S. Bride’s, Fleet Street, was begun in this year, but not entirely finished until twenty years later; on it Wren lavished considerable care and skill, securing a spacious handsome interior, and a richly carved oak altar-piece. The bold tower and steeple,[165] with its graceful diminishing circles with their open arcades, are thought to rival S. Mary’s, Bow, but the latter is perhaps the more poetical of the two.

The great work at S. Paul’s was the while proceeding. In 1676 Compton, Bishop of London, issued an Address, urging the claims of the Cathedral, not on the citizens alone, but upon the country at large; he insisted with some eloquence that all churches should as much as possible imitate the ‘exceeding magnifical’ temple of Solomon in their beauty and grandeur, and especially the cathedral of wealthy London. His address, his warm interest in the work, and that of Dean Sancroft, who was a contributor until driven from his archbishopric, brought many contributions: among them may be mentioned Morley, Bishop of Winchester, who gave 1,800l.; Dr. John Fell, who gave 100l., ‘in lieu of his consecration dinner and gloves’ when consecrated Bishop of Oxford, 1680; Bishop Ken, who gave the same sum at his consecration, 1685, also in lieu of the dinner and gloves; Bishop Wilson, of Sodor and Man, who gave from the quarries of the island the dark stone steps which lead to the west doors. Though hampered often, the architect was never actually stopped by lack of money. He himself out of his scanty salary gave 50l. towards the expenses.

In a letter speaking of his progress in building S. Paul’s he says, ‘I have received a considerable sum, which, though not proportionable to the greatnesse of the work, is notwithstanding sufficient to begin the same—and with all the materials and other assistances which may probably be expected, will put the new quire in great forwardness.’ The materials referred to are probably such parts of the old building as it was possible to use again; and it may here be said that Wren had the control of the quarries of Portland stone.[166] In 1669, King Charles issued a proclamation that—

Wren must have commanded an army of quarrymen in the little island, not then grim with convicts and with a prison; but nevertheless he had, as in the case of the Monument, not seldom to pause in his work before he could get blocks of the size he required. As the choir rose the time came in which the space for the great Dome was to be marked out. The architect stood watching with some of his friends, and called to one of the workmen to bring him a stone to mark a special spot; when the man obeyed, Wren saw that the stone thus brought had an inscription upon it—the single word ‘Resurgam.’[167] It was looked upon by Sir Christopher as a singularly happy omen, and he took great pleasure in telling the anecdote.

In the meantime a sharp controversy was going on within the Royal Society between Dr. Wallis and Sir Christopher’s brother-in-law, Dr. Holder. Dr. Holder had a living in Hertfordshire and had received from Bishop Henchman a canonry in S. Paul’s. In 1678 he brought out a book called ‘The Elements of Speech’ with an appendix concerning ‘Persons deaf and dumb.’ In this book he described the cure he had himself performed when at Bletchingdon of a young gentleman, Mr. Alexander Popham, the son of a certain Edward Popham, admiral in the service of the Long Parliament, whom, though born dumb, he had gradually taught to speak. The youth, taken away before the cure was quite finished, lost the lately acquired power of speech, but on being sent to Dr. Wallis recovered it; thereupon Dr. Wallis claimed the entire credit. In his book Dr. Holder took occasion to speak of the Royal Society as originating in meetings held at Oxford.

Upon this Dr. Wallis wrote a pamphlet entitled ‘A Defence of the Royal Society in reply to some cavils of Dr. W. Holder.’ The quarrel appears to have been a hot one, turning chiefly on the credit of curing Alexander Popham.

Wood, the antiquary,[168] speaks of Dr. Wallis ‘as one that can make black white, and white black, for his own ends, and hath a ready knack of sophistical evasion (as the writer of these matters doth know full well),’ and gives the credit to Dr. Holder. Wallis was little loved by any royalist because of his conduct in decyphering King Charles I.’s papers at Naseby.[169] In the ‘Parentalia’ are two finger alphabets, with two hands drawn in Indian ink, the fingers of which have different letters assigned to the different joints; one is an ordinary and simple way, the other, more elaborate, is entitled ‘An arte to make the Dumbe to speake, the Deafe to heare. To speake amongst others unseen and unhearde. Learned in an howre.’ Minute directions are given, but the system is so elaborate that it is very sanguine to think it could have been ‘learned’ under several hours. The writing is not like Christopher Wren’s, and I think it must belong to Dr. Holder’s scheme.

Mrs. Holder went on in her tranquil course, ministering to the poor around her. In early days she had made a careful study of such medical science as was then known. Barbarous as the surgery was, the remedial part of medicine appears to have been somewhat better understood. The circulation of the blood had very lately been discovered by Harvey; and whether it was the efficacy of the herbs and simples used, or the faith of the patients, or both, it is certain that many cures were made and much suffering alleviated. It is said of Mrs. Holder that ‘she happily healed thousands.’ She cured Charles II. of a hurt in his hand, whether in his early days of peril and wandering, or in later life, is not said. After the Restoration she was connected more or less with the Court, as her husband was subdean of the Chapels Royal, and she healed Queen Catharine and many of the Court. When one reads in Evelyn’s or in Pepys’ diary of the frightful remedies used: the ‘hot fire pans’ applied to the head in cases of apoplexy, the constant bleeding, the roughness of the entire treatment, one is thankful to think that they were occasionally ministered to by the gentler hand of a woman.

A taste for the science of medicine seems to have been common in the Wren family. Sir Christopher studied it at Oxford under Sir Charles Scarborough and drew the plates for Dr. Thomas Willis’ ‘Cerebri Anatome,’ which was in great repute. His cousin, Thomas Wren, made it a matter of serious study, probably living by it as a profession at the time when Bishop Wren’s imprisonment left his younger children penniless. The same honourable calling was chosen by Sir Christopher’s grandson, Stephen Wren. Among all the patients whom good Mrs. Holder tended and cared for, in none could she have taken more pride than in the brother over whose sickly childhood she had watched, and whose fame she saw daily increasing. Nor was there any drawback to her delight: loving, gentle, modest, and courteous he had been as a boy, and the famous successful architect possessed those qualities still. In a corrupt age, all testimony leaves him spotless; in positions of great trust and still greater difficulty his integrity was but the more clearly shown by the attacks made against him; among the foremost philosophers of his age, he was a striking example that ‘every good gift and every perfect gift is from above;’ no child could hold the truths of Christianity with a more undoubting faith than did Sir Christopher Wren.

His personal appearance is only known to us from pictures: it seems he was ‘thin and low of stature,’ and it is recorded that when he was building a hunting palace at Newmarket for Charles II., the King came to see it, looked round, and was well satisfied with the general effect, but said he thought the rooms were too low. Wren, who knew the King well, and could hold his own when needful, looked up to the ceiling, and said quietly: ‘Sir, I think they are high enough.’

On hearing this, King Charles stooped till he was the architect’s height, crept about the room in this attitude, and said laughing, ‘Ay, Sir Christopher, I think they are high enough.’[170]

The beautiful S. Stephen’s, Walbrook, was finished in 1679, and the parishioners, aware that their church was a gem of no common order, offered ‘a purse of twenty guineas to the Lady of Sir Christopher Wren, as a testimony of the regard that the parish has for the great care and skill that Sir Christopher Wren showed in the rebuilding of our church.’[171] Lady Wren did not long survive to share in her husband’s fame and to sympathise in his work.

Early in October she died and was buried in S. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, where Dr. Thomas Tenison[172] had succeeded Dr. Lloyd, when the latter was made Bishop of S. Asaph. He, too, was a hard-working parish priest, though neither so zealous nor so whole-hearted a churchman as the former vicar. He communicated to Evelyn[173] his plan ‘of erecting a library in S. Martin’s parish for the public use, and desired his assistance with Sir Christopher Wren about the placing and structure thereof.’ Dr. Tenison said that he had ‘between thirty and forty young men in orders in his parish either governors to young gentlemen, or chaplains to noblemen, who being reproved by him on occasion for frequenting taverns or coffee-houses, told him they would employ their time better if they had books.’ Wren fell readily into a scheme so congenial as this, and in a very few days the two friends were together at Dr. Tenison’s making a drawing and estimate of the library to be begun in the spring of that same year.

In 1678, the nation was excited to absolute frenzy by the declarations of the infamous Titus Oates concerning the ‘Popish Plot.’ In the same spirit as that in which they had laid the burning of London at the door of the Romanists, the mob lent greedy, credulous ears to the tales of Oates, and were encouraged by Lord Shaftesbury and his party, who made political capital out of this madness. Looking back, it is difficult to understand how such manifest falsehoods could have obtained credit; but it should be borne in mind that only seventy-three years had passed since the Gunpowder Plot had all but succeeded, and despite its failure left a mark in popular feeling which, however obscured and travestied, remains to this day. That it was fresh in the minds of the Members of Parliament may be seen from their insisting that a guard should be placed in the vaults over which they sate.

Bedloe, Oates’ villainous ally, having declared that an army of thirty thousand pilgrims was coming from Spain to join forty thousand who were ready to rise in London, the House of Lords insisted that a communication between the Spanish ambassador’s house and that of his neighbour Mr. Weld should be secured. No less a person than Sir Christopher himself was to be despatched by the Lords’ committee to see to this matter. Wren took the matter quietly enough; went with Mr. Edward Warcup, one of his assistants, and sent in a report stating that they had caused ‘padlocks to be hung on all such dores as open out of Mr. Weld’s house into the Spanish Embassador’s house;’ had then ‘acquainted his Excellency Count Egmont, who with great civility gave permission for all things necessary to be done on his side.’ They locked the doors on his side, barred some with iron, and handed over the keys to the Clerk of the Parliament, which no doubt felt itself more secure after this precaution.

Evelyn, it is plain from passages in his diary, disbelieved and distrusted Oates, and Wren, who gave no heed to panics, was probably of the same opinion. One wishes that Pepys had not been compelled in 1669, by failing eyesight, to give up keeping his most amusing diary, that he might have recorded his impressions of this time of frenzy. He, however, was a sufferer by it, being clapt into the Tower on a charge of ‘Popery, felony, piracy, and treason,’ in 1679. The ‘treason’ charged seems to have been that he sent information to the French Court about the state of the English navy. The ‘Popery,’ from which he was certainly free, was probably thrown in to give a flavour suited to the times. It is an incredible charge, and Pepys, who defended himself in a spirited letter to the Duke of York, was discharged in the following February.

The Royal Society, despite all these storms, kept its even course. Wren, who had been Vice-President, was elected President in 1680. With all his work, he contrived to take the Chair frequently at the meetings. Their discussions were very varied:—observations with the barometer, ways of sounding the sea, the curve described by a granado shot into the air, an account of the anatomy of the otter, and its power of diving;—Sir Christopher hereupon described the seal which was in S. James’s Park, as having muscles by which it could contract and dilate its nostrils, and by such means sink itself and lie at the bottom of the pool made for it, for a great while together, and that it ate its food at the bottom of the river.

A new discovery by a French doctor named Papin[174] of a ‘digester’ for softening bones, caused much discussion at the Society. Wren inquired whether a contrary process to M. Papin’s could not be devised to harden bones, but Papin could give no answer. Two years later M. Papin gave a supper to which several of the Society went. Evelyn says, it was[175]—

The Royal Society had another foreign visitor, M. Chardin,[177] the Persian traveller. Sir Christopher, Sir John Hoskyns, and Evelyn[178] went to visit him when he arrived in England in 1680, and invited him to honour the Royal Society with his company. They found him dressed in his Eastern habit, speaking Latin, and understanding Greek, Arabic, and Persian from his eleven years of travel in those parts. He was a well-bred, modest man ‘not inclined to talk wonders.’ Chardin was a fair draughtsman and had besides taken two artists with him to draw landscapes, to measure and design the palaces and temples burnt at Persepolis. He was then on his way to France, but on his return promised to show the drawings. He returned, finding the persecution of the Protestants still hot in France, and Sir Christopher proposed him as a member of the Royal Society. His book, ‘Travels of Sir John Chardin,’ was published in London and is still in high esteem both for its special interest and the accuracy of its statements. Evelyn assisted him in engraving the plates and in the translation of the book. Charles II. made him a knight, and he was employed in Holland as the agent of the English East India Company.

At the meeting of the Royal Society on November 30, 1681, Wren was re-elected President and chose Sir John Hoskyns as Vice-president.[179] Sir John Hoskyns, who, like Wren, had been educated at Westminster, was a Master in Chancery highly thought of for his legal attainments and his integrity; he and Wren appear always to have been friends; and when Wren resigned the presidency, Sir John succeeded him. Tradition[180] says that Sir John

The great western front of Christ Church, Oxford, was at this time occupying Wren’s attention. Wolsey had laid the foundations of the gateway, but it had been left unfinished until Wren took it in hand and built the grand gateway and noble tower which are among the features of Oxford.

The churches which at this time were building in London were All Hallows, Bread Street; the original church dated back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. Lyndwode, the author of the ‘Provincial Constitutions,’ was rector there in 1418. The poet Milton was baptized there December 20, 1608. An inscription on a tablet at the west end of the church recorded this, and also Dryden’s lines:—

Here also it is supposed that Sir Isaac Newton was buried, though the exact spot was not known.

Wren built on the old site a stone church of considerable beauty, whose tall pinnacled tower had a singular grace of its own. All, alas! destroyed, the ancient site desecrated, and the materials sold, no matter for what purpose.

S. Peter’s, Cornhill, a small compact brick and stone church with a low tower and a key for its vane and camerated roof, was rebuilt in this year. Several small charitable legacies belong to this church: Sir B. Thorowgood settled three shops, at the west end of the churchyard, upon the parish for the maintenance of an organist to play on Sundays and Holydays for ever. In 1700 these shops were all three let for 24l.!

S. Clement Danes in the Strand, which had been patched up in 1674, was taken down and rebuilt, being finished in 1682. Sir Christopher, who received the moderate salary of 100l. for the rebuilding of the City churches, had nothing necessarily to do with S. Clement’s, but yet, as is recorded on a marble slab on the north side of the chancel, he ‘freely and generously bestowed his great care towards the contriving and building.’ It stands in too frequented a place and is too well known to need description, and will, I think, be readily admitted to bear Wren’s mark. Evelyn calls it ‘that pretty and well-contrived church.’ The steeple surmounting the tower was added by Wren’s pupil Gibbs[181] in 1719. S. Antholin’s, Watling Street, was entirely consumed by the fire, so that all its registers perished, a misfortune which happened to but few of the churches. Sir Christopher spent especial care upon it. The roof was a cupola adorned with rich festoons; the octagonal spire was built of freestone, with three circles of windows and considerably ornamented, was the chief feature of this beautiful little church. At the time of its building the spire was much remarked, and must have formed a pleasant contrast to the little neighbouring church of S. Augustine in the same street, with its tower cupola and small steeple, which was added in 1695. This church was finished in 1683 and survives S. Antholin’s, which has shared the evil fate of All Hallows, Bread Street.

The hunting palace at Newmarket, of which mention has been made, was accidentally burnt down, and this made King Charles more anxious to have a palace in the ancient city of Winchester. Lands were bought for a park, a river was to have been brought from the downs with a thirty-foot cascade in the park, and a broad street planned to lead to the cathedral from the future palace. Wren designed a magnificent palace,[182] with a great cupola which would have been seen far out at sea, and laid the first stone on March 23, 1683. The work was much pressed forward both by King Charles and by the Duke of York, who frequently stayed at Winchester for a considerable time watching the progress of the building, and hunting in the forest. At such times the King was lodged in the Deanery and his train in the houses of the close, where most of them were sufficiently incongruous inmates. Ken, then a prebendary of the Cathedral, utterly refused to give a lodging in his house to the notorious Nell Gwynne.

Winchester had many associations for Wren, to whom the name of Lancelot Andrewes must have been a household word from childhood, and it is pleasant to think that he at this time became acquainted with the saintly Ken. The palace, which was finished as far as the shell in 1685, was never used either by Charles II. or his successors, though Queen Anne made one visit to Winchester, and was so much struck with the situation and the shell of the building as it stood awaiting completion, the marble pillars sent by the Duke of Tuscany for the great staircase lying on the ground, that she resolved to finish it as a jointure house for Prince George, but his death and the cost of the great war made her give up the scheme. Sir Christopher seems to have hoped that George I. might finish it. It is, however, now used as a barrack.

Dr. Morley, Bishop of Winchester, had also engaged Sir Christopher’s assistance; and having pulled down a part of the old episcopal palace, he began to build another; he died when but one wing was erected and left sufficient money to finish it. Bishop Mew, his successor, as the ‘Parentalia’ says, ‘never minded it;’ but it was finished, apparently not under Wren’s auspices, by Sir Jonathan Trelawney. He became Bishop of Winchester in 1707; as Bishop of Bristol he was one of the famous ‘Seven Bishops.’

CHELSEA COLLEGE—S. JAMES’S, WESTMINSTER—A HARD WINTER—CHICHESTER SPIRE—AN ASTRONOMICAL PROBLEM—A SEAT IN PARLIAMENT—MORE CITY CHURCHES—A CURIOUS CARVING.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.—Merchant of Venice, act i. scene ii.

Charles II.’s gift of Chelsea College to the Royal Society had proved a gift of greater magnitude than they had been able to deal with, and the building had remained unused since 1669. Nor did their funds allow them to make use of Mr. Howard’s donation of a piece of land, though the ever-ready Sir Christopher produced a design for it of some size, on the principle ‘that a fair building may be easier carried on by contribution with time, than a sordid one.’ At last, in 1681, he proposed the sale of Chelsea College back again to King Charles, and Wren and Evelyn undertook to manage what must have been rather a delicate transaction. During the negotiation Sir Stephen Fox came to Evelyn and proposed that the King should buy it, and build there a hospital for soldiers. The proposal came well from Sir Stephen, who, originally a chorister of Salisbury Cathedral, by the favour and help of Bishop Duppa first, and then by that of the King, and most of all by his own honesty and dexterity, became paymaster to the whole army and acquired an honest and unenvied fortune. The King agreed to the plan, and the matter was arranged by Wren, Evelyn, and Fox, who was a liberal benefactor to the college. The three men went across to Lambeth to their old friend Sancroft and acquainted him with the plan, and received his approval.

Wren set instantly to work, and in August 1682 the foundations were being laid; the whole building was not completed until William and Mary’s reign; but during all that time Wren’s energy and care never flagged, but were extended even to the minutiæ of the regulations, all of which he drew up, for the health, comfort, and economy of the building. As architecture the building has been severely criticised; but when the worst is said, it still remains picturesque, cheerful and spacious, and a beautiful object as seen from the Thames.

The Royal Society continued its meetings at Gresham College, which it did not quit until, in 1710, the members purchased a house in Crane Court, which has only very lately been pulled down. The next year saw many of Wren’s churches finished.

All Hallows the Great, in Thames Street, a plain brick and stone edifice with a strong square tower, was then completed: it, like by far the greater number of the City churches, had been repaired and beautified under the vigorous rule of Laud while Bishop of London. Thomas White, who came into the living a few months only before the Fire, was afterwards as Bishop of Peterborough one of the famous ‘Seven Bishops.’ At the time when Wren rebuilt the church the living was held by the learned church historian, Dr. William Cave.[183]

S. Mildred’s, Bread Street, is another church belonging to this date. It is so hidden by the tall warehouses that have sprung up round it that it is but little known; but its red brick tower, tall spire, and, above all, its most light and graceful dome, are all after Wren’s best manner. The destruction of this beautiful little church has actually been threatened, but it has been ably defended, and it is to be hoped it will not add another name to the black list of desecrated City churches.

A third church belonging to this year is S. James’s, Westminster, then called ‘in the fields,’ from the large parish of S. Martin’s, out of which it was taken. It was built principally at the expense of Henry Jermyn, Earl of S. Albans, Wren’s Paris friend, who gave his name to Jermyn Street, where the church stands.

The proportions of S. James’s and the technical skill displayed in building it, especially the construction of the roof, have been always admired. Wren, who was allowed but a moderate sum to expend upon it, was proud of having combined beauty with ‘the cheapest of any form I could invent.’[184] When the church was newly done, with its bricks red instead of darkly grimed with smoke, with the handsome pillared entrance to the south aisle, a flight of steps leading up to it, which have vanished, leaving only as a mark the closed iron gates in the railings, without the strange excrescence that now does duty as a porch—its exterior must have been far more attractive than it is now; the little pinched steeple[185] is said, as indeed one would imagine, to be no building of Wren’s. Within, Evelyn[186] gives us his description of the effect.

The font, now well placed in a baptistery beneath the tower, is one of Gibbons’ few works in marble. It represents Adam and Eve, two detached statuettes standing on either side of the Tree of Knowledge, the branches of which support a bowl whereon are finely cut in low relief the Ark of Noah, and the baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch. With all this, and without the high, stiff indevout pews which now disfigure the church—pews that Sir Christopher did not put there, and to the presence of which in any of his churches he always strongly objected, it must have been a decidedly handsome edifice. The organ, built by Renatus Harris, was made for James II.’s timber chapel at the camp on Hounslow Heath; after the King’s flight Wren obtained the organ from Queen Mary for S. James’s Church.

Dr. Tenison, who then held S. James’s jointly with S. Martin’s, obtained the timbers of the chapel and used them in erecting the chapel of the Holy Trinity in Conduit Street,[187] which was also included in the enormous parish of S. Martin. S. Bennet, Paul’s Wharf,[188] was finished in this year; picturesque and characteristic in its red brick, stone carving, well suited to its situation, then less cramped and overshadowed than it is now.

Its rector, Mr. Peter Lane, had experienced all the greater perils that had lately befallen the City; presented to the living in 1662, he steadily ministered there through the terrible time of the plague, and was then burnt out by the Great Fire. He lived, however, to return and to minister for five years in the new church built by Sir Christopher. In this church Inigo Jones was buried, in the darkest days of the Rebellion.

The handsome Church of S. James’s, Garlickhithe, with its curious columnated steeple, and its projecting clock surmounted by a figure, is also of this date.

It was well that Sir Christopher had been able to get even this much of his numerous works finished, for the winter of 1683–4 was of exceptional severity. On December 23 the Thames was frozen over; on January 9, Evelyn[189] ‘went crosse the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to beare not only streetes of booths in which they roasted meate and had divers shops of wares, quite acrosse in a towne, but coaches, carts, and horses passed over.’ Evelyn himself drove across it to Lambeth to dine with Archbishop Sancroft, who had succeeded Sheldon in 1677. ‘London,’—says Evelyn a few days later in words which, alas, still describe but too vividly a genuine ‘London fog,’—

In addition to this dismal state of things ‘the small pox was very mortal.’

For eight weeks no foreign posts reached the city, for ‘the very sea was so locked up with ice that no vessell could stir out or come in.’ It was not until April was advanced that there was any sign of spring. It was certainly no building weather, and must have sharply tried the rising Choir of S. Paul’s. Sir Christopher made a journey to Chichester on the invitation of the old Bishop, Guy Carleton, to examine the spire of the Cathedral. The whole building had suffered terribly under the wanton sack of Sir William Waller and his men, and required extensive repair.

Sir Christopher

He next examined the beautiful spire, well known as a landmark to sailors in the channel, sister spire to that most perfect one at Salisbury which he has preserved to this day. He adopted a different plan with the Chichester spire to that which he had formerly pursued, for he took down the top of the spire, and fastened to the finial within an immense pendulum of yellow fir wood, which in great gales preserved exactly the balance of the spire. This lasted till 1813, when the pendulum was repaired by Mr. Elmes, and so remained until, after a great gale in 1861, the spire fell in; it has since been rebuilt, and is now rather higher than it was formerly. The other part of Wren’s scheme was not acted upon. At this time he built Fawley Court in Oxfordshire: the place had lain in ruins since the civil war, when it suffered, though the property of Sir Bulstrode Whitelock, even more from Cromwell’s troops than from those of Prince Rupert. Sir Bulstrode’s descendants sold the property to Mr. William Freeman, who pulled the ruins down and got Sir Christopher to build the present Court, with its four fronts, handsome hall, and characteristic festoons of flowers in the ceiling.

In this same year Wren was made Controller of the Works, for which he received a salary of 9l. 2s. 6d. a year; not a very magnificent sum considering that a good deal of petty work and cares went with the office. It was necessary to see that this person had not incroached on the castle stables, or that person on the castle ditch; to measure and plan, and settle little quarrels and disputes in a way infinitely tormenting, one would think, to a man who had already such enormous works to consider. But Wren’s genius was a patient one, and had a great grasp of details; he dealt with point after point as it arose, and no one seems ever to have complained of his breaking an engagement or neglecting to settle their difficulties.

While this work was going on all London was startled by the tidings of Charles II.’s sudden illness and death, when all the luxury of the Court was at its height. With all his grave faults, the King’s death caused considerable grief throughout England; to both Wren and Evelyn he had been always kind and friendly, and both looked with great anxiety to the reign of his successor.

The Royal Society certainly lost a steady friend in Charles II. and was soon to see its court favour fade away. It was, however, much occupied with a discussion between Newton and Robert Hooke concerning the planetary motions. The question was one which deeply interested Wren, and which hitherto he had not been able to answer. As he and Hooke were walking together—Wren, whom one can never imagine but with all the courtesy and refinement of a finished gentleman, and Hooke half a miser, utterly slovenly, and jealous of any rising fame—they were met by Dr. Halley, an astronomer of some note even then, who was struggling with this problem and confessed that he had hitherto failed.

Wren promised a book worth forty shillings to whoever should solve the problem, whereupon Hooke declared he understood it from Kepler’s ‘Law of Periods and Distances,’ and would show his solution some day to Wren; this he never did, and very soon Newton published his ‘Principia,’[191] in which he solved this problem, acknowledging freely that Wren and Halley had independently deduced the law of gravity from Kepler’s second law. He had a great quarrel with Hooke, the less to be wondered at, as, excepting Sir Christopher, Hooke quarrelled with everybody and was a philosopher of the sourest type. In 1685 Sir Christopher was returned to Parliament for the borough of Plympton S. Maurice, in Devonshire, a Parliament in which his cousin Charles also sat. The elections in Devonshire are supposed to have been specially influenced by the Court.

The ‘Parentalia’ gives no hint even of what his politics were, whether he spoke often or how he voted. And yet it was a stormy time. The Parliament had not sat a month before Monmouth’s brief rebellion began, to be bloodily quenched; public feeling was in a state of irritation and suspense, no one feeling sure what King James might not do. He did continue Wren unmolested in the S. Paul’s commission, and the progress of the building was steady, though probably its architect thought with no light anxiety that it might be used for services other than those for which it was designed.

The same doubt may have clouded his satisfaction in the many churches which were finished in this and the immediately following years. S. Martin’s on Ludgate Hill, closely wedged in by the neighbouring houses, with its little tapering spire, of which that of S. James’s, Westminster, appears a caricature, should have had its place among the churches of the previous year. It harmonizes beautifully with the great dome of S. Paul’s. Sir Christopher bestowed on the inside much of the ornament, the festoons and the carving, which its situation did not allow him to bestow on the outside; in those days it had daily services and may well have stood open, offering ‘a shadow from the heat’ to the incessant passers-by.

S. Alban’s, Wood Street, is in the pointed style of architecture in which Wren’s genius generally felt fettered, though, as in the case of S. Michael’s, Cornhill, he sometimes dealt very successfully with it.

S. Mary Magdalene’s, Fish Street,[192] is more after Wren’s usual manner, with its good proportions, its highly ornamented round-headed windows, its stone balustrade and solid square stone tower, with the little steeple rising from it on seven steps. Within, carving in ‘right oak’ was bestowed with no sparing hand, especially in the altar-piece. And here one may say that, while defects in church arrangement, such as galleries, pews, and the like, are invariably laid on Sir Christopher and said to be the inevitable concomitants of his style, it should be borne in mind that in many and many an instance the churchwardens during the eighteenth century repewed and ‘beautified’ the churches which Wren had left as completed; in what style, and on what principle one can readily guess. It should be remembered also that an ‘altar-piece,’ as the old books call it, was an invariable part of his design. If there was rich carving, if there was black and white marble, he placed it there; the altar was the principal part of the church in his eyes, even though he did not often avail himself of the dignity given by a flight of steps. The close altar rails which are now not admired, were, it must be remembered, ordered by Archbishop Laud to protect the Holy Table from profanation, and were always so placed by Wren.

S. Mary Magdalene’s included the parish of S. Gregory, the little church which nestled by old S. Paul’s, so that Fuller described the Cathedral as ‘the mother church, having a babe in her arms.’[194]

S. Bennet’s, Gracechurch Street, or Grasschurch Street, as it was really named, from a herb market formerly held hard by, is, or rather was, of the same date. It was well placed at the corner of two streets, and stood boldly out with a tall tower crowned with a cupola and slender spire; the interior was full of carving and ornament. S. Bennet’s is, however, a thing of the past; the building is gone, the site desecrated, and the memory of such an edifice alone survives in the names of the streets which formerly led to and now usurp its place.

The little plain Church of S. Matthew, Friday Street, close pressed by neighbouring houses, is the last completed in this year. Obscure as the street where it stands may have been, it was full of associations for Wren. In Friday Street was the house where his aunt Anna lived, and where his uncle Matthew ‘lay,’ when summoned to that memorable conference with Bishop Andrewes. Hard by in the parish of S. Peter’s, Eastcheap, now incorporated with that of S. Matthew, Christopher’s merchant grandfather had lived and died, and there his own father had been born. S. Peter’s churchyard was preserved, and its single plane-tree is carefully protected.

S. Matthew’s has a less pleasant association: the living was for a time held by the notorious Henry Burton,[195] the friend and ally of Prynne. Burton was at first designed to accompany the Prince of Wales to Spain, but doubts of his principles arising, he was rejected and dismissed from his attendance as the Prince’s chaplain. This formed one strong motive for the bitter spite he bore to the church of his ordination. It is likely also that he stirred Prynne’s malice against Bishop Wren, who appears to have been Burton’s successor in the vacant chaplaincy.

The lesser details of the Surveyor-General’s work must this year have been a burden. There were complaints from Winchester, where the sudden stoppage of the buildings and plans for the palace caused great inconvenience; a complaint from Catherine Barton, the beautiful niece of Sir Isaac Newton, widow of Colonel Barton, who sold her farm to Charles II., and by the trickery of the agent never received her money; and a complaint of the same kind from Sir Richard Tichbourne’s son. Sir Christopher examined both these cases carefully, and compelled the agent to submit, and to satisfy the parties. Then there were troubles with the Duke of Buckingham and the ‘chaos’ he had made in Spring Gardens, that chaos so vividly described in ‘Peveril of the Peak.’ Nobody but Wren could give the estimates for the new stables at S. James’s Palace, or order the new planting at Hampton Court and in Greenwich Park, or secure the proper tithes for the Rector of S. Thomas’s, Winchester.

Again, there was Verrio the painter’s account for work done at Whitehall and Windsor to be examined. For the chapel at Whitehall Verrio demanded 1,250l., and, says Wren, ‘I suppose when the rest of the ceiling and walls are finished, as they ought to be, it may fully deserve it.’ The whole bill was 2,050l., of which Verrio had received already more than 1,400l., so that he may be reckoned as fortunate.

It is not wonderful that in 1686, Wren attended no meeting of the Society. Two churches were finished this year: S. Clement’s, East Cheap, and S. Mary’s, Abchurch, in Cannon Street.

S. Clement’s, with its square tower and balustrade, has within a great deal of fine oak carving, and its ceiling adorned with one great circle with an outer line of curious fretwork. Bishop Pearson was rector before the Fire, and the famous treatise on the Nicene Creed is dedicated to his parishioners there.

S. Mary’s, with its quaint little round windows and flat-topped roof, is not externally beautiful, but within it is one of the gems which Wren bestowed on out-of-the-way nooks: its cupola[196] is gracefully supported on eight arches and pendentives, the east end is rich with Gibbons’ carving of festoons of fruit, palm leaves and a pelican in her piety. Much handsome work has also been bestowed on the inside doorcases.

Wren’s promise to Evelyn to employ Gibbons was certainly redeemed; for, besides the works which have been glanced at, Gibbons was busied on the stalls of S. Paul’s choir, where, darkened but uninjured by time, his work stands out in all the peculiar grace and tenderness which his chisel could give to wood. The angels which cluster beneath the great organ seem themselves to be taking part in the music which flows from it, and are as unlike as possible to the lumps of marble or wood with which other hands too often deform a church, and which the old guide-books term ‘Cupids’!

Still, it is a physical impossibility that all the work which bears Gibbons’ name is by him and him only.

The fame of the Cathedral, its architect, and its carvings, was widely spread, and brought many from the country to seek for work on the new building. Of one of these a curious account remains.[197] A young man, named Philip Wood, of Sudbury, Suffolk, who had great skill in carving, came up to London to make, if he could, sufficient fortune to enable him to marry the daughter of his patron, a retired London merchant named Haybittle. After long waiting in London, without work, till his money was all but spent, he, remembering the rich wood work which abounded in the churches of his native Suffolk, bethought himself that in the Cathedral, whose progress he daily watched, ‘they would surelie put carvings.’ The foreman to whom he spoke repulsed him, saying ‘We want no carpenters here.’ Undiscouraged, the young man came again day after day for a week, till at length Sir Christopher noticed him, and learning from the foreman that he was ‘a country fellow who troubled them to give him some of the carving to do,’ beckoned to Wood to come and speak to him. As the young man approached full of hope, he said, ‘Friend, you want carving work—what have you been used to carve?’ At this critical, long-desired moment the poor youth lost his presence of mind, and instead of mentioning the ‘sundry figures of lions and elephants’ that he had carved for Mr. Haybittle’s house, stammered out, ‘Please your worship, I have been used to carve troughs.’ ‘Troughs!’ said Sir Christopher; ‘then carve me as a specimen of your skill, a sow and pigs (it will be something in your line), and bring it to me this day week. I shall be here.’ So he went away, with a smile at the presumption which could aspire to step straight from such work to that of adorning S. Paul’s.

Distracted at his own folly and the loud laughter of the workpeople, Wood rushed back to his lodging, and but for the kind advice of his Quaker landlady, would have given up all for lost. She wisely told him to take Wren at his word and carve the best sow and pigs that he could make.

He obeyed her exactly, spent his last guinea on a block of pear-wood, and wrought with all his might to get it ready by the appointed day. Sir Christopher was showing the building to a party of friends, but as soon as he saw Wood with his carving hidden in an apron, he beckoned him forward. Wood produced his carving; Wren looked at it a moment in silence, and then said, ‘I engage you, young man; attend at my office to-morrow forenoon.’ Shortly afterwards he came to Wood again and said, ‘Mr. Addison[198] wishes to keep your carving, and requests me to give you ten guineas for it;’ then with his gentle courtesy, he added, ‘Young man, I fear I did you some injustice, but a great national work is entrusted to me, and it is my solemn duty to mind that no part of the work falls into inefficient hands. Mind and attend me to-morrow.’ Wood was employed for seven years in the Cathedral, and received considerable sums of money; and it is pleasant to know that he did marry Hannah Haybittle.

Thus some of his work is in S. Paul’s, and to him London streets were indeed paved with gold. Yet one cannot but think sadly, for one who thus succeeded, what numbers then and now come full of hope, to the great city, and without help or friends lose their all, and are left without even the means of returning. To the number of these the House of Charity, which occupies one corner of Wren’s once handsome Soho Square, can bear but too true a testimony.

PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED—CHURCH BUILDING—ACQUITTAL OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS—JAMES II.’S FLIGHT—WILLIAM AND MARY—COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS—HAMPTON COURT—GREENWICH HOSPITAL—RICHARD WHITTINGTON—S. PAUL’S ORGAN.

Wren’s parliamentary career was soon interrupted, for King James dissolved, in 1687, an assembly which had done so little to forward his views.

Church building went on apace. S. Andrew’s, Holborn, which, though the fire had not reached it, was in a ruinous state, was rebuilt and made a large handsome stone church, with an interior very like that of S. James’s, Westminster. The tower was merely repaired and not rebuilt.

Christ Church, Newgate, on the site of the old Franciscan Monastery of Grey Friars, had formerly been a magnificent edifice: the choir only was rebuilt by Wren, and sufficed to make a large parish church, which was filled with handsome carving; a graceful pillared steeple was added in 1704.

S. Margaret Pattens,[199] in Rood Lane, was finished in 1687: built of brick and stone with a tall tower and graceful spire, and much enriched by carving within. Its existence has been threatened, but it stands out an honourable, though fortunately not at all a solitary example, of a well-worked, and therefore well-filled, City church, and it is to be hoped may defy its threatened destroyers.

Early in the following year came the trial of those Seven Bishops who refused to publish in church the King’s declaration of liberty of conscience.[200]

It was perhaps the most unwise thing that James II. ever did, and as the Bishops passed to the barge that was to take them to the Tower, rank upon rank of kneeling people besought their blessing. It was an event to move Wren greatly: he could remember when a child hearing of Archbishop Laud’s imprisonment, and the long years of Bishop Wren’s captivity were frequently cheered by his nephew’s visits to the Tower. Most of those who now passed to that ill-omened abode were his friends or acquaintance. Bishop Turner of Ely was on the S. Paul’s Commission; Bishop Lloyd of S. Asaph while rector of S. Martin’s had baptized Wren’s daughter and youngest son; Bishop White he had known in the days when he was rector. Bishop Ken at Winchester, and Archbishop Sancroft had been for years his steady friends. If he failed in dignity at one crisis, there is abundant material in Sancroft’s letters, and in the rest of his life, to show he must have been a charming companion and capable of inspiring sincere affection.

They remained in the Tower about a week, and on June 29 were triumphantly acquitted. The story of their acquittal has been told once for all by Lord Macaulay and need not be re-told here. London was full of illuminations, the favourite device being seven candles—the tallest central one representing the arch-bishop—and all the newly-hung bells of the city were set ringing. Wren had private sorrows to hinder him from entering into the public rejoicing: his only surviving sister, Susan, died just at this time, and Wren must have been watching by her on the very day of the Bishops’ acquittal. A little later, he, and her husband, Dr. William Holder, brought her body to the crypt of S. Paul’s and laid her there. The epitaph, on a marble monument, is written with all the diffuseness of style common to those of that time, but is touching from its real affection.

The crypt of S. Paul’s was of course the part of the building first finished. Long ago Wren had spoken of ‘the quantity of work to be done in the dark,’ and it certainly proved enormous. The crypt of S. Paul’s is one of the largest and most intricate that exists, extending under the entire church, not the choir only, as is the case in S. Peter’s at Rome. The dimness of a London atmosphere renders it hard to get much effect of light and shade, but on a clear day the curious twilight effect is striking. There are all the tombs which were preserved from the old cathedral, there are now the remains of some of our greatest dead, and there is the Church of S. Faith, the floor of which is now being slowly covered with a beautiful mosaic.[201]

When, however, Sir Christopher laid his sister there, all was empty and not fully complete; the cluster of pillars and arches that sustain the great dome with their massive strength must have been but newly finished.

Only one church was completed by Sir Christopher in this troubled year, that of S. Michael, Crooked Lane; a handsome stone church with a stately tower and spire. It contained the tomb of a famous city worthy, Sir William Walworth:

This association had no value in the eyes of the Corporation of London, with whom it might have weighed: they were as indifferent to this lesser reason as to the infinitely higher claim of consecrated ground, and in 1830 the church was swept away for the new London Bridge.

All through the year the relations between King James and his people were growing more and more strained. Messages were passed and repassed between many of the high officials and the Prince of Orange, and in their dread of the Church of Rome, the people forgot what they had suffered under the tyranny of the Puritan sects. Hurry and confusion were everywhere; as the year advanced the Prince of Orange’s landing was hourly reported on all parts of the coast. Too late King James took some of the measures which, taken earlier, might have saved all; and on November 5, 1688, the Prince landed at Brixham in Torbay.

For some time all was confusion and all private business was suspended. Early in the next year a convention was called of the Lords and Commons, and the crown offered to William and Mary. The Queen’s behaviour, the absence of even the show of feeling for her father, were much remarked on at the time and are a great stain on her memory. A Parliament was called on the 13th of February, to which Sir C. Wren was returned for the borough of New Windsor. His election was set aside for a technical error in the manner of his return, but he was instantly re-elected. It is evident from this that he took the new oath of allegiance, probably holding, with Evelyn and other honourable men, that King James had abdicated and that therefore the throne was vacant. The S. Paul’s commission was renewed, and amid all the changes the work there went on; making in its steady, undeviating progress, its unity of design, a fair type of the growth of the spiritual church, despite the sharp contrast apparently existing between the peaceful, regular growth of the material edifice, and the hindrances and trials that beset the spiritual one. Those were the days when some of the best and most learned churchmen, unable to reconcile the contradiction of the two oaths, lost high office, honours, and all prospects of worldly success by becoming ‘non-jurors.’ It should be borne in mind that it was on no doctrinal ground that they left the Communion of the Church in England, but simply because, considering James II. still as King, they could not honestly take an oath of allegiance to William as his successor, or attend services where an usurper was prayed for as the rightful sovereign.

It was a most grievous blow to the Church, by no means recovered from the struggle with Puritanism or from the semi-Puritan clergy she had been constrained to accept. Yet, in the midst of all these misfortunes, thus much at least was gained; men were forced to understand the true grounds of their position and to learn, as the Church in Scotland learnt by a sharper lesson, that State aid, and State protection, are not among the essentials of the Church. The misfortune of so many friends, and especially that of good Archbishop Sancroft, must greatly have moved Wren, and it is provoking that his grandson has given no intimation of his ancestor’s views, not even saying on which side he voted in the Convention Parliament, which offered the crown to William and Mary.

Wren certainly knew how to manage his Windsor constituents. He had erected from time to time several buildings there, among which was the Town Hall, built upon arches, with a wide vaulted space below, which is now used as the Corn Exchange.

When all was finished, the mayor and corporation came in state to inspect the new building, and to stamp with their approval another of the great architect’s works. Much seems to have been approved of, but one member of the municipality declared in alarm that the room above the vaulted space was inadequately supported and would one day fall in.

In vain Wren, who had built vault after vault and knew to a nicety what weight each of his arches would bear, explained the perfect security of the upper room; the anxious man could not be pacified and the architect promised to put two columns below. He did so, and the alderman was calmed, little knowing that Sir Christopher’s columns when complete had about half an inch of space between themselves and the ceiling they were supposed to support! Wren must many a time have laughed to himself when he passed that way.

Two other buildings of his, one of which is called ‘the Bank House,’ stand in Windsor not far from what are known as ‘The Hundred Steps.’ There is another house there of his design, now used by the freemasons and the volunteers. Wren sent his eldest son to Eton, where the boy was at this time, and afterwards to Pembroke College, where his name alone was a recommendation.

In 1689 Wren finished building the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane; as far as the confined space would admit, the front was handsome, but the dome and its ornament provoked the satire of Garth in the opening lines of his ‘Dispensary’:[203]

Whatever its exterior defects may have been, the theatre within was arranged with masterly skill so as to enable all the students to see and hear during the lectures and demonstration. The difficult science of acoustics was one to which Wren gave much attention, and his churches are, in this respect, very successful. The Physicians retained the college Wren built for them until very recent times, when they moved into the present building which does not adorn Trafalgar Square.

Not all the Halls belonging to the City Companies perished by the fire, though many suffered severely. Wren, and Jarman, the City Architect, rebuilt and repaired some seventy-nine of them.[205]

Of these, a large number have been altered or pulled down, but a few may be mentioned.

The Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside; the Grocers’, a portion of which was long used by the Bank of England; the Haberdashers’, where the rich ceiling was its great ornament; the Tallow Chandlers’, with its interior colonnade and its fountain; the Apothecaries’, one of the largest in the City; the Stationers’; and, last but not least, the Alderman’s Court adjoining Guildhall, rebuilt almost immediately after the fire; a very handsome room, rich in carving, and finely proportioned.

S. Edmund the King, in Lombard Street, was finished this year. The necessities of the site caused Wren to build it north and south, the altar being at the north end. The front to Lombard Street, the only part of the outside visible, is of stone and very picturesque with its belfry and little domed spire. The interior has been lately re-arranged with a wise treatment of the old work and carving. The ‘marble font possesses, like that of S. Mary Abchurch, a very beautiful canopied cover; it is in two stages, the lower being domed, and above are four seated figures of the Cardinal Virtues; it is railed in and is on the west side of the church.’[206]

S. Margaret’s, Lothbury, belongs to the same date, and was rebuilt of stone. Some years later Wren bestowed much rich wood carving on the interior. He chose the Corinthian style for this building and handled it with considerable skill.

Queen Mary, who had the Stuart love for genius, was invariably gracious and even friendly to Wren, with whom she held many a conversation on matters of art and science. He considered her to be very well versed in all these subjects and enjoyed discussing them freely with her. Queen Mary was much charmed with the situation of Cardinal Wolsey’s old palace of Hampton Court, and engaged Wren to make alterations there. The old buildings were accordingly in part pulled down and two sets of royal apartments built; Queen Mary, though she amused herself with planning the gardens and making suggestions, had yet the wisdom to defer to Wren’s better taste and knowledge. Her husband, with characteristic obstinacy, insisted on his own ideas, thereby dwarfing the cloisters and marring much of the architecture. It is, however, fair to say that King William always owned that the defects[207] were his, the merits, Wren’s; and these merits are very great, as anyone who knows the fine old palace with its rich red brick, its arcades, and the quaint formal gardens will readily allow. He built, at about the same time, the Pavilion and Ranger’s House in Bushey Park.

Kensington Palace was also under Wren’s hands. It had been the property of Lord Chancellor Finch, and was sold by his son to William III. Wren added another story to the old house, which forms the north front of the palace, and also built the south front. The defect of the building as seen at the end of the long avenue of Kensington Gardens is its want of height, but on a nearer approach this fault is much diminished. King William was in the midst of his Irish campaign while the work went on, but found time to send back repeated inquiries as to its progress, and complaints when that did not answer his expectations. There, five years later, Queen Mary died, to the regret of all her subjects, and even of her cold-hearted husband.

Nor were these the only palaces which Wren contrived for Queen Mary. That of Greenwich had been begun by Inigo Jones for Henrietta Maria, and a wing had been built for Charles II., but it had been left unfinished. Wren, who knew Greenwich well from his visits to the Observatory, and who took a great interest in sailors, observing the entire lack of any refuge for them in illness, proposed to Queen Mary the magnificent plan of making the palace into a seaman’s hospital. The Queen willingly entered into the idea, and proposed to add to the Queen’s House, as it was called, so as to make it a dwelling for herself, at the same time. Evelyn, Sir Stephen Fox and others, came readily into the scheme and contributed liberally. Wren’s contribution, though not in money, was a liberal one also; for he gave his time, labour, skill and superintendence, despite his innumerable other works.

The plans were prepared and money collected, but nothing was actually done until some years later.

Wren’s eldest son had in the meantime finished his Eton and Cambridge career and had obtained, by his father’s interest, the post, which must surely have been a sinecure! of Assistant Deputy Engrosser. He does not seem to have inherited any of the brilliant genius of his father, though apparently of very fair abilities and with much taste for antiquities. Far more like Sir Christopher was his daughter Jane, who shared his tastes and studies and took a vivid interest in his work. She added to her other accomplishments that of being a very skilful musician. She was never married, but remained all her life her father’s affectionate companion.

Wren’s old friend, Dr. Bathurst of Trinity College, Oxford, appealed to him, in the spring of 1692, for help in the buildings which were still going on there.

Wren’s answer comes promptly, and shows his generous readiness to help the schemes of others, no matter how pressing his own work was.

In the same year the Church of S. Andrew by the Wardrobe[209] was finished; recent alterations in the city have benefited this building; it now stands well above a flight of steps, with its square tower, and the red brick which contrives to be red and not black, and stone dressings.

Two years later Wren rebuilt All Hallows, Lombard Street, on an ancient foundation: outside it is one of his plainest and most solid churches, inside he spent upon it much rich work and curious carving both in stone and wood.

S. Michael Royal, College Hill, belongs to this same date, and was built under Wren’s directions by Edward Strong, his master-mason. It is a well-lit, handsome church with a tower at one corner, and contains an altar-piece of singular beauty, carved by Grinling Gibbons in ‘right wainscot oak.’ The old church was founded and made a collegiate church of S. Spiritus and S. Mary by no less a person than Sir Richard Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London (1397, 1406, 1419), whose fame, with that of his cat, survives in the well-known story. He founded also another college, known as the Whittington College, and endowed it with a divinity lecture ‘for ever.’ Edward VI., however, suppressed both the colleges and the lecture, though the Whittington College was allowed partially to survive as almshouses for poor men. Whittington[210] was buried in this church, but his monument perished in the Fire.

In the following year Wren added a well-proportioned, peculiar steeple, the gift of the parishioners, to the little stone Church of S. Vedast[211] in Foster Lane, a church to which a painful interest now attaches from the recent persecution and imprisonment of its rector, the Rev. T. P. Dale.

The church was decorated, as was Wren’s custom, with fret-work, carving, and stucco, but is not otherwise remarkable.

S. Mary’s, Somerset, or Somers’hithe, was likewise finished in this year: a stone church with two aisles surmounted by a handsome cornice and balustrade; its great feature was the beautiful pinnacled tower, which, though the church is gone, still stands a perpetual memorial of that reckless disregard of God’s honour, which has counted any common want, any farthing of money, of more importance than the claims of His service, or than gifts solemnly offered to Him.[212]

The Cathedral meanwhile grew slowly, though many a hindrance annoyed its architect. The Parliament took part of the fabric money and applied it to the expenses of King William’s wars, so that, as Sir Christopher complained, his wings were clipt and the Church was deprived of its ornaments.[213] The organ was another annoyance. Sir Christopher’s wish and intention was to place the organ where it now is, on either side of the choir, in order to leave the vista clear from the west door to the altar, which in his design stood grandly raised under a handsome canopy. This was overruled, and the organ was to be placed in a gallery cutting right across the entrance of the choir. With his wonted philosophy, Wren bent his mind to reducing as much as possible the injury to the architectural effect, by keeping the pipes as low as he could. But in the builder of the organ, Bernard Smith, or ‘Father’ Smith, as he is called, Wren had a difficult person to deal with. Far from lowering the pipes, Smith made them higher than in his estimate, so that the case and ornaments had to be enlarged, and Sir Christopher complained bitterly that the Cathedral ‘was spoilt by that box of whistles.’ The rival organ builder, Renatus Harris, if indeed he was the author of an anonymous paper, called ‘Queries about the S. Paul’s Organ,[214] was not sparing in his criticisms. One query asks

This question is easy enough to answer, and fortunately Wren’s wishes have been at last fulfilled by that division of the organ, which now leaves the desired clear view from the great western doors to the altar. Harris, in 1712, proposed to erect a great organ over the west doors of the Cathedral,

Alas! at that time Wren’s approval was enough to determine the majority of the commission to reject any plan thus sanctioned, and Renatus Harris’s grand design survives on paper alone.

OPENING OF S. PAUL’S CHOIR—A MOVEABLE PULPIT—LETTER TO HIS SON AT PARIS—ORDER AGAINST SWEARING—PETER THE GREAT—S. DUNSTAN’S SPIRE—MORNING PRAYER CHAPEL OPENED—WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

One serious trouble and hindrance in all public works was the state of the coinage. The money had been so clipped and defaced, that no coin was worth its professed value, and for some time the expedients used by the Government failed to lighten the pressure. In paying such an army of workmen as those employed about S. Paul’s, the inconvenience must have amounted to positive distress. Scattered here and there through Evelyn’s diary are many references to the ‘great confusion and distraction’ it occasioned.

A sudden subsidence of a large part of the ground at Portland, close to the quarries set apart for Wren’s use, caused an inconvenient delay in bringing the stone to London, but yet the work progressed, and on December 2nd, 1697, the choir was opened for service.

It was the occasion of the thanksgiving for the peace of Ryswick, which, though it brought little glory to England, was yet heartily welcomed as the close of a long and exhausting war.

King William went to Whitehall, and heard Bishop Burnet’s flattering sermon, while Bishop Compton preached for the first time in the new S. Paul’s. No report of his sermon has come down to us. The choir was not yet enriched with the carvings of Gibbons; but the pulpit appears to have been very remarkable in its way: Sir Christopher had placed it on wheels, perhaps with a design of using it afterwards, for services under the dome, not unlike those we are now familiar with.

A pulpit on wheels was a novelty, which gave rise, we can well believe, to many squibs, one of which has been preserved.

A faithful copy of the Verses, lately fastened upon the pulpit of S. Paul’s Choir.

TO THE ARCHITECT UPON HIS HAPPY INVENTION OF A PULPIT ON
WHEELS FOR THE USE OF S. PAUL’S CHOIR.

It hardly needs the hint that these lines were affixed to ‘the Dean’s side of the pulpit,’ to read in them a bitter satire on Dean Sherlock, whose sudden change of front relative to the non-jurors, and acceptance of the Deanery of S. Paul’s, laid him open to the grave suspicion of having acted from interested motives, and stirred up much vehement animosity. A spirited, if not an impartial, account of this controversy, is given by Lord Macaulay.[216]

Sir Christopher’s remarkable invention appears to have survived the laughter against it, and to have remained in the Cathedral until 1803.

The vaults of S. Paul’s were opened shortly after this thanksgiving to receive the body of Dr. White, the non-juring Bishop of Peterborough, whose funeral was attended by Bishop Turner, Bishop Lloyd and forty nonjuring clergymen.

At the beginning of the following year, as soon as travelling was possible, Wren sent his son Christopher to Paris; not indeed with the intention of his making that grand tour which a few years later was supposed to finish a young gentleman’s education, but that he might acquire a little experience and knowledge of the world. The young man, evidently, had other ideas, spent a good deal of his money, and then wrote home to his family a letter complaining in true English fashion, of the climate and the cookery of France, and asking leave to continue his journey to Italy. Sir Christopher’s reply has been preserved; and in its folio sheet and brown ink exists in the ‘Parentalia.’ It is, I think, so charming as to double one’s regret that so very few of his letters have been preserved.

What answer the younger Christopher sent does not appear; but his father did not ‘discontent’ him; the young man did make the journey to Italy, then such a formidable undertaking, and was ever after reckoned a very accomplished and travelled gentleman. ‘Young Mr. Strong’ must have been the son of Sir Christopher’s faithful master-mason, Edward Strong, one of a great family of builders and stone-cutters; I suppose the ‘poor Billy’ of the postscript to have been the writer’s youngest son, then nearly nineteen, who however recovered and outlived his father by about fifteen years.

The Royal Society had sustained a severe loss by Charles II.’s death, and if King James took little interest in their discussions, William III. was utterly indifferent. Still it had won a certain position of its own, and was able to keep its steady course. Wren remained one of the members who attended most regularly and contributed to discussions on a variety of subjects, though not perhaps on the ‘jessamine-scented gloves,’ which figure so often in Pepys’ diary, the secret of whose perfumery Wren once undertook to find out. He was again chosen Grand Master of the Freemasons, and continued in that office until 1702.

His friend and fellow-member in the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, had written a book called ‘A Free Discourse against Swearing,’ which was published after his death. Wren followed this up by an order which he had affixed in many parts of S. Paul’s, while the building went on:—

Such was Sir Christopher’s care for his grand work: it was intended for the service of God, and therefore was to have no blemish which Wren’s diligence could avoid. He was constantly there and shrank neither from fatigue nor from risk. The famous Duchess of Marlborough, in her quarrels with Vanbrugh over the building of Blenheim, complained bitterly that he asked 300l. a year for himself and a salary for his clerk, ‘when it is well-known that Sir Christopher Wren was content to be dragged up in a basket three or four times a week to the top of S. Paul’s, and at great hazard, for 200l. a year.’ Probably it was because her Grace considered his charges so moderate that, after her last quarrel with Vanbrugh, she engaged Sir Christopher to build Marlborough House, at the corner of Pall Mall. The site presented great difficulties, but the building in red brick and stone was a handsome one, and lately has been much enlarged. Vanbrugh’s first start in life was his being engaged by Wren to act as clerk of the works to the buildings at Greenwich. Gibbs and Hawksmoor were also pupils of Wren’s, and worked under him at some of the innumerable works on which he was engaged. The building of Greenwich was vigorously continued, and in 1705,[219] ‘they began to take in wounded and worn-out seamen, who are exceedingly well provided for.’

At the beginning of 1698, Peter the Great made his extraordinary voyage to England and took possession of Evelyn’s house, Sayes Court, at Deptford, in order to be near the dockyard and inspect the ship-building. He was anything but a desirable tenant. ‘There is a house full of people and right nasty,’ wrote Evelyn’s servant.

The Czar’s three months’ occupancy of Sayes Court left it a wreck, and Evelyn got Sir Christopher, and the Royal gardener, Mr. Loudon, to go down and estimate the repairs which would be necessary. They allowed 150l. in their report to the Treasury, but could not by any money replace the beautiful holly hedge through which Peter the Great had been trundled in a wheel-barrow, or repair the garden he had laid waste.

In 1699, Wren finished the last of those City churches which the Fire had injured or destroyed. S. Dunstan’s in the East had suffered severely by the Fire: the walls of the church had not fallen, but the interior had been much damaged and the monument to the famous sailor and discoverer, Sir John Hawkins, who was buried there, perished. The old church had a lofty wooden spire cased with lead, which of course fell and was consumed. When Sir Christopher had repaired the body of the building the parishioners were anxious to have back the spire also, and Dame Dionis Williamson, a Norfolk lady, who had been a great benefactress to S. Mary’s, Bow, gave 400l. towards this object. It is one of the most curious of all Wren’s spires, as it rests on four arches springing from the angles of the tower. Three more such spires exist, two in Scotland and one at Newcastle. Tradition says that the steeple of S. Dunstan’s was the design or the suggestion of Wren’s daughter Jane. Perhaps, like the leaning tower of Pisa, it is more wonderful than satisfactory to the eye, but Sir Christopher was certainly proud of it and confident in its stability. Great crowds assembled to see the supports taken away, and Wren watched with a telescope, says the story, on London Bridge for the rocket which announced that all was safely done, but it is hardly probable that he was anxious about the result.

Four years later, when the tempest known as the ‘great storm’ raged in England, destroying twelve ships in the Royal navy, many merchant vessels, and a great number of buildings, some one came with a long face to tell Sir Christopher, that ‘all the steeples in London had suffered;’ he replied at once, ‘Not S. Dunstan’s, I am sure.’ He was perfectly right, and the account given of the others was an exaggeration.

On February 1, 1699, the Morning Prayer Chapel of S. Paul’s was opened for service. Later in the same month, a fire broke out at the west end of the choir, where ‘Father Smith’ was still at work. It caused considerable alarm, and was got under with some damage, especially to two of the pillars, and to a decorated arch. The gilding also lost some of its brightness. A nameless poem[221] fixes the date of this fire, which has been much disputed. It may have been in consequence of this alarm that Sir Christopher covered all the woodwork of the upper parts of the Cathedral with ‘a fibrous concrete’ said to resist fire so well that faggots might be kindled below it with impunity.

While S. Paul’s was thus advancing towards its full beauty, the care of Westminster Abbey was assigned to Wren. Little or no attention seems to have been spent on it between the time of Charles I.’s reign and that in which it was handed over to Wren.

With the energy which his sixty-seven years had not checked, he examined the grand building where he had worshipped as a schoolboy, and instantly ordered some of the most needful repairs.

In 1713 he sent in a statement to Dr. Atterbury, who was both Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, having in that year succeeded to Wren’s old friend, Bishop Sprat: from this paper, though it is anticipating the date, some extracts are here given.

Wren laments over the mixture of oak with the less-enduring chestnut wood in the roof of the Abbey, and the use of Rygate stone which absorbed water, and in a frost scaled off. He says he cut all the ragged ashlar work of Rygate stone out of the east window, replacing it with durable Burford stone, and secured all the buttresses on the south side. The north side of the Abbey is so choked up by buildings, and so shaken in parts by vaults rashly dug close to its buttresses, that he can do little.

The most necessary outward repairs of stone-work, he says, are one-third part done; the north front, and the great Rose Window there are very ruinous; he has prepared a proper design for them. Having summed up the repairs still essential for the security of the building, he proceeds to state what are, in his judgment, the parts of the original design for the Abbey still unfinished.

With this, still unfulfilled hope, Wren’s interesting paper closes. Nine years afterwards he did, however, finish the north front, commonly known as Solomon’s Porch.

Wren is so commonly spoken of as having built—and spoilt—the western towers, that it is well here to mention that his share in them is very small; he only restored with a careful hand the lower portion of the towers then standing.[222] They were continued by Hawksmoor after Wren’s death, and by two other architects in succession after the death of Hawksmoor in 1736. No one of these had, as Wren had, the high-minded desire to do justice to ‘the original architect without any modern mixtures of my own.’

MEMBER FOR WEYMOUTH—RISING OF THE SAP IN TREES—PRINCE GEORGE’S STATUE—JANE WREN’S DEATH—THANKSGIVING AT S. PAUL’S—LETTER TO HIS SON—SON MARRIES MARY MUSARD—DEATH OF MR. EVELYN—QUEEN ANNE’S ACT FOR BUILDING FIFTY CHURCHES—LETTER ON CHURCH BUILDING.

In 1700 Wren was returned by the boroughs of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis to a somewhat stormy Parliament.

He was finishing several of the City churches by the addition of towers to some, where, as at S. Magnus, London Bridge, and S. Andrew’s, Holborn, the main parts had been previously built.

He gave a design for All Saints’ Church, Isleworth; it was, however, reckoned too costly, and nothing was done until, in 1705, Sir Orlando Gee left a legacy of 500l. towards the rebuilding of the church, when Wren’s design was partially adopted, and the work done by his faithful master-mason, Edward Strong.[223]

With all this work, Wren yet found time to write a treatise on ‘The rising of the sap in trees.’ It is a short treatise, evidently copied by a copyist, though a little indian-ink drawing at the side is probably Wren’s own. The question in dispute seems to have been whether this natural rising of the sap contradicted the newly discovered law of gravity.

After some discussion of various theories, he proceeds to show by the help of the little drawing, ‘that the onely Vicissitudes of heat and cold in ye aire is sufficient to raise the sap to the height of the loftiest trees.’ Then follows the proof of this by mechanics refuting the notion of

Another paper of the same date was written ‘On the surface of the terrestrial Globe,’ but this does not appear to have been preserved. Many of Sir Christopher’s writing’s and many also of his inventions were lost by Mr. Oldenburg, the Royal Society’s secretary, of whom Wren frequently complained that he not only neglected to enter them on the Society’s Register, but conveyed them to France and Germany, where they appeared, attributed as inventions to those who had stolen them.

One cannot but admire the versatility of mind which enabled Wren, in the midst of great architectural works, and endless business details, to write papers such as these, and to digest and decide upon Flamsteed’s long letters on the Earth’s motion, his quarrels with Mr. Halley, and his measurement of the height of the Welsh hills.

The progress of Greenwich and Chelsea Hospitals, the growth of his beautiful S. Paul’s, the repairs of the Abbey, were now the absorbing interests of Wren’s life. From the house in Whitehall which he occupied with his daughter he could easily reach the two former by water, or the latter on foot. Two most interesting pictures by Canaletto,[224] giving a general view of the city and of Westminster, enable us to realise what the whole effect must have been in an atmosphere far clearer than at present, before the river was cut by iron bridges, or the city robbed of steeple or tower. The death of King William and the accession of Queen Anne in the spring of 1702 made little difference to Wren, except to his advantage. He appears to have been on very good terms with her, and with her Danish husband. He is said to have built S. Anne’s, Soho,[225] and to have made it externally to resemble a Danish church as much as he could, out of compliment to Prince George. He also gave to the Town Hall of Windsor, a statue of Prince George, to correspond with that of Queen Anne. The Prince is dressed in a Roman costume, and the pedestal has the following inscription:

SERENISSIMO PRINCIPI
GEORGII PRINCIPI DANIAE
HEROI OMNI SAECULO VENERANDO
CHRISTOPHORUS WREN, ARM:
POSUIT MDCCXIII.

One marvels how ‘Est-il possible’ came to merit such an inscription as this!

In 1702 Sir Christopher suffered a grievous loss by the death of his only daughter, Jane, on the 29th of December. She was laid in the vault of S. Paul’s close to the graves of Dr. and Mrs. Holder,[226] and her father wrote the short Latin inscription which records her virtues, her skill in music, and implies how loving and how congenial a companion he had lost in her. She was but twenty-six when she died. The sculptor, Bird,[227] of whose power Wren had a good opinion, carved a monument in low relief, representing Jane Wren playing on an organ; a harp and a spinnet are beside her, and a group of angels in the clouds above, one of whom holds the music. It is but an ordinary piece of monumental sculpture, now much obscured by dust. Jane Wren’s death must have left a great blank in the life of the father whose interests and pursuits she had shared, and one wishes she could have lived long enough to see the top stone laid on the dome of S. Paul’s. The Duke of Marlborough’s brilliant victory at Blenheim, on Aug. 13, 1704, brought Queen Anne and all her court in their utmost splendour to a thanksgiving at S. Paul’s on the 7th of September.

No doubt it was a splendid pageant, the grandest that had been seen since those which celebrated the Restoration, and S. Paul’s, despite the scaffolding still round the dome, must have looked magnificent. In 1705, Sir Christopher’s eldest son went abroad again, travelling this time to Holland, where in the excitement of Marlborough’s brilliant campaign he very nearly joined the army as a volunteer.

A letter[229] to him from Sir Christopher is extant; the handwriting is not quite so steady as in the former letter, but still clear.

I suppose the mention of ‘both houses,’ and the hint of happiness being contrived, refer to young Christopher’s marriage, which took place in the following year. He married Mary,[233] daughter of Mr. Philip Musard, jeweller to Queen Anne, by whom he had a son, a fourth Christopher Wren.

Wren lost a faithful and valued friend in Mr. Evelyn, who died in the February of 1706, at the age of eighty-five. If Evelyn’s diary, of which such frequent use has been made in these pages, is not the same entire revelation of the man himself as is the diary of his friend Pepys, it yet possesses a singular charm in its refinement of thought, and, when the veil is raised, shows us a gentleman and a Christian to be respected as well as loved. He had kept up a steady friendship with Sir Christopher since the day when they first met at Oxford, and had the highest opinion of his powers: ‘an excellent genius had this incomparable person,’ is his remark after a conversation with Wren. Evelyn was on the S. Paul’s Commission from the first, and Wren was destined, a few years later, sorely to miss the support of this constant friend.

The needful sum for covering in the dome of S. Paul’s was voted by Parliament in 1708. The question of using copper or lead was greatly discussed; lead was finally chosen; it does not clearly appear which way Sir Christopher’s judgment inclined. Probably to the lead, as he considered it susceptible of much ornament, and the lead covering of S. Paul’s dome is peculiarly beautiful. Bird in this year finished the statue of Queen Anne, which is in the fore court of the Cathedral, and is not without merit. He also carved the relief of the Conversion of S. Paul above the western portico: the height is too great for it to be possible to judge of the goodness of the sculpture.

The Act known as ‘Queen Anne’s Act for building Fifty New Churches’ was passed in this year, and Wren was of course one of the commissioners. At the age of seventy-six he could not undertake the designing of these new churches. They were principally built by Gibbs, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and others. S. George’s, Hanover Square, S. Anne’s, Limehouse, S. George’s, Bloomsbury, S. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, are some of those built under this Act. Perhaps the best specimen is the beautiful S. Mary-le-Strand, built by Gibbs, on an old site stolen from the Church by the Duke of Somerset in the reign of Henry VIII. Recent careful painting and gilding and the removal of pews have made S. Mary’s a charming example of the amount of decoration which can be advantageously bestowed on a Paladian church.

Wren wrote on this occasion a letter to a friend on the Church-building Commission in which he gives the result of his great experience in building town churches. The letter is given with a few omissions. I fear that few of the Queen Anne churches were built strictly on the principles he here lays down; certainly the hint as to pews was disregarded, and grievous indeed have been the results of such disregard. It has been a common fallacy that all Wren’s churches were built for pews, and that anything but high pews would ruin the architectural effect. What was Wren’s own opinion is manifest from the letter; the actual effect can be seen, for instance, in a print of S. Stephen’s, Walbrook, where this gem of all his churches is represented, just after its completion, with the area clear; or in S. Mary’s, Bow, where the pews have lately been diminished into just such ‘benches’ as the great architect desired.

PRIVATE HOUSES BUILT—QUEEN ANNE’S GIFTS—LAST STONE OF S. PAUL’S—WREN DEPRIVED OF HIS SALARY—HIS PETITION—‘FRAUDS AND ABUSES’—INTERIOR WORK OF S. PAUL’S—WREN SUPERSEDED—PURCHASE OF WROXHALL ABBEY—WREN’S THOUGHTS ON THE LONGITUDE—HIS DEATH—BURIAL IN S. PAUL’S—THE END.

The year 1709 passed in steady work, and has little but finishing touches to the churches to be recorded, unless some of the various private houses built by Wren belong to this period. A house for Lord Oxford, and one for the Duchess of Buckingham, both in S. James’s Court; two built near the Thames for Lord Sunderland and Lord Allaston; one for Lord Newcastle in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury; and a house, so large and magnificent that it has been divided in late years into four, in Great Russell Street. This house was afterwards occupied by Wren’s eldest son, and in turn by his second son Stephen.

Sir Christopher himself, while keeping the house in Whitehall from which his letters are dated, had received from Queen Anne the fifty years’ lease of a house at Hampton Green at a nominal rent of 10l. a year;[234] he must have found great refreshment in going there occasionally by the then undefiled Thames, to country rest and quiet. Queen Anne was uniformly gracious and friendly to her Surveyor, and presented him with a buhl cabinet inlaid with red tortoiseshell of remarkably handsome work and design.[235]

The following year saw the crown put to the labour of thirty-five years. Mr. Christopher Wren, who had been a year old when the first stone was laid, now laid the last stone of the lantern above the Dome of S. Paul’s in the presence of his father, Mr. Strong the master-builder, his son, and other free and accepted masons, most of whom had worked at the building. The scene could hardly be better painted than in the words of Dean Milman:[236]

There then the Cathedral stood, complete externally in its stately beauty, the work of one man, who, it has been truly said, ‘had the conception of a painter as well as an architect.’ View the Cathedral when and where we will, with every disadvantage of smoky atmosphere and lack of space, it yet fascinates the eye by the perfection of its lines and the majesty of the whole effect, so as to leave no power of criticising petty defects. Such was the triumphant success achieved by Wren’s patient genius, but

Envy will merit as its shade pursue;

and a series of troubles fell upon him.

There will always be a number of people who imagine that anything can be procured by money, and that for the sake of money anything and everything will be done. People of this mind considered that Sir Christopher Wren prolonged the process of building S. Paul’s in order to prolong his own enjoyment of the 200l. a year which was the salary he had himself chosen, though it was considered utterly inadequate by the Commissioners when first the work began.

Accordingly in 1696–7, a clause was inserted in the Act ‘for the completing and adorning S. Paul’s’ ‘to suspend a moiety of the Surveyor’s salary until the said Church should be finished; thereby the better to encourage him to finish the same work with the utmost diligence and expedition.’[237]

No doubt they considered that the Cathedral could be finished off regardless of details, and so left like the shell of an ordinary house to be adorned by any chance person; and to this end they offered their grim ‘encouragement’!

It was an insult to a man like Wren, who had again and again—as in the case of Greenwich—given his skill for nothing, and it was doubly unjust because, what delays there were, sprang from the conceit and ignorance of the S. Paul’s Commission. Wren protested, but took no active step until he had seen the Dome of his beloved Cathedral completed.

Then he sent in a petition to Queen Anne as follows:—

This petition was sent to the Commissioners, whose reply was, that when Sir Christopher had acted without their approbation his performances had proved very faulty;(!) they then digressed into remarks on their own devotion to the Queen’s service, and into a series of petty charges against some of the workmen employed in the Cathedral, especially the bell-founder, Richard Phelp, and Richard Jennings the master-carpenter, whom they charged with a variety of frauds and abuses, and begged should be at once dismissed; they also venture to assert that ‘Sir Christopher, or some employed by him, may be supposed to have found their advantage in this delay.’ There is little attempt at proof in this reply of the Commissioners, but much supposition and conjecture. A pamphlet, ‘Frauds and Abuses at S. Paul’s,’ published anonymously at this time, sets out all their suspicions in detail. Sir Christopher replied in a pamphlet entitled ‘An Answer to Frauds and Abuses in S. Paul’s,’ and laid a petition before the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, in which he sets out his grievances, how little power had been really given to him and how far he had ‘been limited and restrained.’

He then asks them for their warrant for the payment of the arrears, amounting to more than 1,300l., which were due to him, and says he will ever be ready in the future, to give his advice and assistance in anything about the said Cathedral. Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Compton laid Wren’s petition before the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Northey, who pronounced ‘that Sir Christopher Wren’s case was very hard, but that the terms of the Act were so positive that it could not be overridden, but the Commissioners ought in justice to find some remedy.’

Wren then addressed the House of Commons in a petition in which he repeats that his ‘measures for completing the Cathedral are wholly over-ruled and frustrated.’

The House considered the matter, and cut the knot by declaring the Cathedral to be finished, and directing the payment of all the arrears of the architect’s salary.

Their prompt decision gratified Sir Christopher, who contrasts it with the conduct of the Commission, ‘which was such as gave him reason enough to think that they intended him none of the suspended salary if it had been left in their power to defeat him of it.’

The attacks on Jennings, whom Wren firmly defended, fell to the ground: they probably had as little foundation as the ‘Screw Plot,’ by which at a Thanksgiving, by one man’s moving a few of the bolts and screws, the whole dome was to fall in.[238] The bell-founder Phelps, who had removed the faulty bell put up by Wightman under the direction of the Commissioners, also triumphed: he offered to give a bond to the Dean and Chapter to recast the bell at his own expense if, after a year’s trial, they were dissatisfied with it: as this offer was never claimed, Wren justly says that they were either content with the bell or else showed great neglect. Until the last few years it was the only bell possessed by the Cathedral.

To perfect S. Paul’s some things had still to be done, and, rather than these should suffer, Wren was willing still to undergo the slights and annoyances of the other S. Paul’s Commissioners, amongst whose names one wishes that of Sir Isaac Newton did not appear, without clear evidence that he stood by his early patron and friend. One hopes it may have been so, certainly he was not a frequent attendant at the meetings.

Within the Cathedral there was some important work to do. Gibbons’ carving had to be completed, and the beautiful iron-work gates on either side of the choir had yet to be set up. For this work Wren employed a M. Tijou, at that time a famous worker in iron, though no account of him is to be obtained at the present day. Possibly he was one of the French refugees. Wren saw both the carving and the gates successfully finished. But for the east end of the Cathedral he had a magnificent design which is unfulfilled to this day. He intended to inlay the columns of the apse with rich marble, to use a considerable amount of colour and gilding, and to place over the Altar a hemispherical canopy supported on four writhed pillars of the richest Greek marbles, with proper decorations of architecture and sculpture: he had prepared his model and the needful drawings, Bishop Compton had even received some specimens of marble from a Levant merchant in Holland, but unluckily the colours and the class of marble were not what Wren desired, and the plan waited for a better opportunity, which, in Wren’s lifetime, never came. Thus, of all this grand design, the only trace is the painting of the apsidal pillars, in imitation of lapis lazuli, which was meant as a temporary experiment, and the model of the canopy in the possession of the Dean and Chapter. Hardly anything could be done which would more enhance the interior beauty of S. Paul’s than the erection of this canopy.

Besides the adornment of the east end of the Cathedral there was also that of the dome to be accomplished. The decoration of S. Paul’s is so vexed a question that one almost fears to touch upon it, but the statement in the ‘Parentalia’ is explicit.

In weighing the value of this evidence as to Sir Christopher’s views, it is important to remember that the ‘Parentalia’ was, though edited by Stephen the grandson, actually written by Christopher, the son who was constantly with his father and shared in his interests, and had himself seen, and no doubt described to Sir Christopher that very cupola of S. Peter’s, of which he speaks.

The question of the iron fence round the Cathedral, of which Wren made mention in his petition, was much in his thoughts; he wished it to be low, and made of hammered iron, the Commissioners were determined that it should be high, and made of cast iron.

Wren, who doubtless intended to employ Tijou, and have a low, graceful railing which would throw up the height and solid grandeur of the Cathedral, repeatedly expressed his opinion; but the majority overruled him, and the Cathedral was imprisoned by a high, heavy, clumsy fence, the gates of which were sedulously closed, and were but too apt an emblem of the manner in which the Cathedral was soon shut off from its true uses. A century later, and Bishop Blomfield could say, ‘I never pass S. Paul’s without thinking how little it has done for Christianity.’ Now the iron fence has departed,[239] and with it all possibility of such a reproach.

During all this time Wren was engaged on the Abbey repairs and the affairs of Chelsea College. The Duke of Ormonde sends him a summons in November, 1713, the more pressing, as several Commissioners are out of town, to meet him ‘at twelve of the clock at his Grace’s house at the Cockpitt, in order to give directions for the cloathing of the Invalide Companys who are in a perishing condition for want thereof, not having been cloathed for near these three years past.’ The death of Evelyn and that of Sir Stephen Fox had lost to Chelsea Hospital its two best friends, but doubtless the Duke and Sir Christopher were able to provide for this emergency.

We hear of Wren at this time busied as of old for the Royal Society, going, with his son and Sir Isaac Newton, to inspect a house in Crane Court,[240] and finally buying it as a residence for the Society.

Again he appears with Newton, and the son who seems to have been his constant companion, going down to Greenwich as visitors of the Royal Observatory there and making their report upon it. As Flamsteed hated Newton, and greatly resented any formal visitation, the expedition must have taxed even Wren’s peace-making powers, but Flamsteed never seems to have quarrelled with him.

In the summer of the following year ‘good Queen Anne’ died, and with her all real chance of the return of the Stuart family, despite the gallant and devoted attempts made for ‘Prince Charlie’ in ‘the ’15’ and ‘the ’45.’ The sixth and last English reign which Wren was destined to see began in 1714 with the accession of George I.

The S. Paul’s Commission was renewed, with, of course, Wren’s name upon it, but the annoyances of his position increased.

In his design, S. Paul’s stood complete with a plinth over the entablature, and with statues on the four pediments only. The Commissioners took it into their heads that a balustrade with vases was greatly needed, and that it should be put up, unless Wren could ‘set forth in writing, under his hand, that it is contrary to the principles of architecture and give his opinion in a fortnight’s time.’ This looks very like a device for tormenting the old man of eighty-five, and revenging themselves for their previous defeat. Exactly within the fortnight Wren sent an answer which certainly shows no trace of failing powers.

The technical reasons are given, and he adds:

Nothing daunted, either by Wren’s reasons or his sarcasm, and regardless of their implied promise, the wise Commissioners of the Cathedral set to work on their balustrade.

This transaction belongs to the autumn of 1717. In the April of the ensuing year, George I., who cared nothing about art or architecture, and who only wished to gratify his German favourites, was easily prevailed upon to dismiss Sir Christopher Wren from that post of Surveyor-General which he had held for forty-eight years, and to bestow it upon William Benson, a favourite’s favourite, as ignorant and incapable as he was grasping and unscrupulous. There was probably but little outcry, for, as Steele[241] had truly said,

The person least disposed to make a complaint was Wren himself. Finding his patent superseded, he quietly retired to his house at Hampton Court, saying, ‘Nunc me jubet Fortuna expeditius philosophari.[242] One other comment he made, as a note to the date (April 26, 1718) of this dismissal: ‘Ὁτι ἀνέστη Βασιλεύς ἕτεπος ὃς οὐκ ἤδει τὸν Ἰωσήφ: καὶ οὐδὲν τούτων τῷ Γαλλίωνι ἔμελεν.✠’[243]

It is some satisfaction to know that Benson so disgraced himself as in five years’ time to be dismissed, and narrowly escaped a prosecution by the House of Lords. Pope held him up to deserved scorn in the ‘Dunciad,’ where he also says:

While Wren with sorrow to the grave descends,

but this, one is glad to think, tells rather what might have been Sir Christopher’s state of mind than what it really was.

Wren had had the interest of watching his eldest son’s career in Parliament as member for that borough of Windsor which he had himself represented.

This son’s wife had died, and in 1715 he married again. His second wife was Constance, daughter of Sir Thomas Middleton, and widow of Sir Roger Burgoyne; by this marriage he had another son, named Stephen. On this occasion Sir Christopher bought the estate of Wroxhall Abbey[244] in Warwickshire, which had belonged to the Burgoynes and was heavily encumbered. Sir Christopher is said to have stayed at the Abbey occasionally, and to have designed the kitchen garden wall which is built in semicircles. It was probably when he thus became a Warwickshire Squire that he gave the designs for S. Mary’s Church at Warwick, designs entirely different from those adopted in the present building, which is said to have been designed and built by one Francis Smith, a mason in the town.

But the greater part of Wren’s declining years was spent at Hampton Court, from which he went up to London to watch the progress of the works at Westminster Abbey, the surveyorship of which he still kept. A report was spread that the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre, in which, as a piece of mechanical construction, Sir Christopher took great pride, was giving way. Careful examination proved this to be a perfectly groundless rumour, and no further annoyance arose to disturb the calm evening of the old man’s life. To be ‘beneficus humano generi,’ as he said, had ever been his aim and wish. He now employed his leisure in looking over old papers on astronomy and mathematics and the method of finding out the longitude at sea. It had been long considered by the general world as impossible to find out as was the secret of perpetual motion, and the attempt at either discovery was treated with equal ridicule. The merchants, and captains of merchant ships were, however, from bitter experience of vessels and crews wrecked or lost, aware of the immense importance of the discovery of the longitude, if it could be made. They presented, in 1714, a petition to Parliament, begging that a reward might be offered ‘for such as shall discover the same.’ This, after due consideration, was done by a Bill, passed rapidly through both Houses, offering a reward of 20,000l.. for the discovery.[245]

The subject was one which greatly occupied Wren, who all his life had been interested in sailors and sea matters. He amused himself by throwing his latest thoughts on the longitude into the form of three cryptographs:[246]

1. OZVCVAYINIXDNCVOCWEDCNMALNABECIRTEWNGRAMHHCCAW.

2. ZEIYEINOIEBIVTXESCIOCPSDEDMNANHSEFPRPIWHDRAEHHXCIF.

3. EZKAVEBIMOXRFCSLCEEDHWMGNNIVEOMREWWERRCSHEPCIP.

A copy, signed by Halley as a true one, of this cipher was sent to the Royal Society in 1714 by Wren’s son. Probably Sir Christopher had not perfected his instruments sufficiently to proclaim his discovery, and did not wish either to lose his idea, or, when later on he disclosed it, to appear as a plagiarist in case a similar method had suggested itself to anyone else. Old age had weakened Wren’s limbs, but had had little effect on his clear understanding; his scientific pursuits interested him still, and were among the employments of those few leisure years which closed a life of incessant work. He gave, however, the greater part of his time and care to the diligent study of the Holy Scriptures, which all his life he had loved; and thus, serene and gentle as ever, waited for his summons.

Once a year it was his habit to be driven to London, and to sit for a while under the dome of his own Cathedral. On one of these journeys he caught a cold, and soon afterwards, on February 25, 1723, his servant, thinking Sir Christopher slept longer after dinner than was his wont, came into the room and found his master dead in his chair, with an expression of perfect peace on the calm features.

They buried him near his daughter in the south-east crypt of S. Paul’s, by one of the windows, under a plain marble slab with this inscription: ‘Here lieth Sir Christopher Wren, the builder of this Cathedral Church of S. Paul, &c., who died in the year of our Lord MDCCXXIII., and of his age XCI.’

The spite of those who had hampered his genius in life showed itself again after his death. The famous inscription, written by his son:—‘Subtus conditur hujus Ecclesiae et Urbis Conditor Christophorus Wren, qui vixit annos ultra nonaginta, non sibi, sed bono publico. Lector, si Monumentum requiris circumspice.’[247]—was placed in the crypt, and in the Cathedral itself there was nothing to preserve the memory of its architect.

This has in later years been remedied and the inscription is now in gold letters over the door of the north transept. Some of Sir Christopher’s plans have, as has been shown, been executed; and further, the Cathedral has been set in green turf, and all around it is cared for instead of neglected, the once empty campanile is filled by twelve bells, whose music floats down over the roar of London, as if out of the sky itself, and the Dome is filled by vast congregations in the way which Sir Christopher almost foresaw.

In the Cathedral his memory is cherished; but in the city of London, which he rebuilt from its ashes, no statue has been erected to him, no great street has been honoured by taking as its own the name of Christopher Wren, though a name

On fame’s eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.

REVERENDO PATRI DOMINO CHRISTOPHORO WREN, S.T.D. ET D. W. CHRISTOPHORUS FILIUS HOC SUUM PANORGANUM ASTRONOMICUM D. D. XIII. CALEND. NOVEM. ANNO 1645, p. 73.

CHURCHES, HALLS, COLLEGES, PALACES, OTHER PUBLIC BUILDINGS, AND PRIVATE HOUSES, BUILT AND REPAIRED BY SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN.

Churches.

* Signifies that the church has been destroyed.

Halls.

Many of these buildings have been considerably altered since Wren’s time, and many are now let as warehouses, or turned to other uses.

Colleges.

Palaces.

Other Public Buildings.

Private Houses.

This list, which is, I fear, imperfect, only professes to give such buildings as were actually built or repaired; there are, besides, a large number of unexecuted designs.

* Signifies that the building has been destroyed.

Sir Christopher Wren left the rough drafts of four tracts on architecture, which are printed in the ‘Parentalia,’ and a few notes on Roman and Greek buildings, some of which Mr. Elmes transcribed in his ‘Life;’ they are for the most part very technical and are incomplete. The copy of the ‘Parentalia’ now in my hands contains the autograph draft of a Discourse on Architecture, which, as I think, has never been printed; it appears to me to be of great interest. It is therefore given entire, though I regret I cannot give the quaint prints of Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, Babylon, &c., with which the original is illustrated. The two former prints tally so exactly with the descriptions in the ‘Discourse’—the print of the ark containing a small section, an elevation, and a vignette of a man feeding one of the creatures, besides a large drawing of the floating Ark—that I incline to think they were engraved, either by Wren himself, or from his drawings. Engraving was an art he well understood. He divides with Prince Rupert the honour of the invention of mezzo-tint. The prints are numbered Pl. IV. and V. respectively, and have no signature.

Discourse on Architecture.

Whatever a man’s sentiments are upon mature deliberation, it will be still necessary for him in a conspicuous Work to preserve his Undertaking from general censure, and so for him to accomodate his Designs to the gust of the Age he lives in, thô it appears to him less rational. I have found no little difficulty to bring Persons, of otherwise a good genius, to think anything in Architecture would be better then what they had heard commended by others, and what they had view’d themselves. Many good Gothick forms of Cathedrals were to be seen in our Country, and many had been seen abroad, which they liked the better for being not much differing from ours in England: this humour with many is not yet eradicated, and therefore I judge it not improper to endeavour to reform the Generality to a truer taste in Architecture by giving a larger Idea of the whole Art, beginning with the reasons and progress of it from the most remote Antiquity; and that in short touching chiefly on some things, which have not been remarked by others.

The Project of Building is as natural to Mankind as to Birds, and was practised before the Floud. By Josephus we learn that Cain built the first City, Enos, and enclosed it with Wall and Rampires; and that the Sons of Seth, the other son of Adam, erected two Columns of Brick and Stone to preserve their Mathematical Science to Posterity, so well built that thô ye one of Brick was destroy’d by the Deluge, ye other of Stone was standing in ye time of Josephus. The first Peece of Naval Architecture we read of in Sacred History was the Arke of Noah, a work very exactly fitted and built for the Purpose intended.

It was by measure just 6 times as Long as Broad, and the Heighth was ⅗ of the Breadth. This was the Proportion of the Triremes afterwards. The Dimensions, and that It was 3 Stories high, and that It had a Window of a Cubit Square is only mention’d; but many things sure were of necessity to be contrived for Use in this Model of the Whole Earth.

First, One small Window was not sufficient to emit the Breath of all the Animals; It had certainly many other Windows as well for Light as Air. It must have Scupper-Holes and a large Sink and an Engin to Pump It; for It drew, as I compute, with all its Cargo and Ballast, at least 12 foot Water. There must be places for Insects the only Food of some Birds and Animals. Great Cisterns for Fresh Water not only for Land Animals, but for some Water fowl and Insects. Some Greens to grow in Tubs, the only food of Tortoises and some Birds and Insects; since we certainly have learnt that nothing is produced by Spontaneous Generation, and we firmly believe there was no new Creation. I need not mention stairs to the several Stories, with many other things absolutely necessary for a year’s Voyage for Men and Animals, thô not mention’d in the Story, and Providence was the Pilot of this Little World, the Embrio of the next.

Most certainly Noah was divinly qualified not only as a Preacher of Righteousness but the greatest Philosopher in the ‘Historia Animalium’ that ever was; and it was Work enough for his whole Family to feed them, and take care of the young Brood; for in a year’s time there must be a great increase in the Ark, w^ch was food for the Family, and the Beasts of Prey.

The first Peece of Civil Architecture we meet with in Holy Writ is the Tower of Babel. Providence scatter’d the first Builders, so the Work was left off, but the Successors of Belus the son of Nimrod probably finished It and made it His Sepulchre, upon his Deification.

It was built of Burnt Brick Cemented with Bitumen.

Herodotus gives us a surprizing Relation of it w^ch being set down by measure is not beside our subject to observe. It consisted of Eight several Stories; the First was one Stade, or 625 foot square, and of the same measure in Height upon which were rais’d seven more, w^ch if they were all equal with the First would amount to 2,500 foot, which is not credible: the Form must be therefore Pyramidal and being adorn’d on the outside with Rows of Galleries in divers stories diminished in Height in Geometrical Proportion; so the whole Mass would have the Aspect of Half an Octaedron, which is that of all the Egyptian Pyramids.

These Corridors being Brick wasted in more than 1600 years: and it was these which Alexander actually began to Repair, not the whole Bulk, as I suppose.

How Herodotus had his measures I question, for He flourish’d but 100 years before Alexander’s Conquests of Babylon, so it was then 1500 years Old.

I proceed next to those mighty Works of Antiquity the Wonderful Pyramids of Egypt yet remaining without considerable decay after almost 4000 years: for 2000 years agoe, they were reckon’d by Historians of Uncertain Original.

I cannot think any Monarch however Despotick could effect such things meerly for Glory; I guess there were reasons of State for it.

Egypt was certainly very early Populous, because so Productive of Corn by the help of Nile, in a manner without labour. They deriv’d the River when it rose, all over the Flat of the Delta; and as the People increas’d, over a great deal of Land that lay higher. The Nile did not always Flow high enough for a great Part of the then inhabited Country, and without the Nile, They must either Starve or prey upon those who had Corn; This must needs create Mutiny and Bloodshed, to prevent which it was the Wisdom of their ancient Kings and Priests to Exact a certain Proportion of Corn, and lay it up for those who wanted the benefit of the Rivers when it disappointed their sowing.

Thus Joseph lay’d up for seven years, and sur’ly He was not first: this Provision being ever so essentially necessary to support the Popularity and consequently the Grandure of the Kingdom; and continued so in all Ages, till the Turks neglected all the upper Canales except one which still suppli’d Alexandria. Now what was the consequence? It was not for the Health of the Common People nor Policy of the Government for them to be fed in Idleness: great Multitudes were therefore imploy’d in that which requir’d no great Skill, the Sawing of Stone Square to a few different scantlings, nor was there any need of Scaffolding or Engines, for hands only would raise them from step to step: a little teaching serv’d to make them set Line: and thus these great Works in which some Thousands of hands might be imploy’d at once, rose with Expedition: the difficulty was in mustering the men to move in order under proper Officers, and probably with Musick, as Amphion is said much about the same Age to have built the walls of Thebes with his Harp; that is Musick made the Workmen move exactly together without which no great weight can be moved, as Seamen know, for the Sheet Anchor will by no means be moved without a fiddle to make men exert their United force in equal time: otherwise they pull one against another and lose great part of their force.

The next observable Monument of great Antiquity which yet remain is the Pillar of Absolom.

By the description given of it, and what I have learnt from Travellers who have seen it, we must allow it to be very Remarkable though not great.

It is compos’d of seven Pillars six about in a Hexagon, and one in the middle and the Tholus solid, a large Architrave, Frize and Cornice lie upon the Pillars which are larger in proportion to their height then what we now allow to the Tuscan order, so likewise is the Entablature larger.

This whole composition though at least 30 foot high, is all of the one Stone, both Basis, Pillars and Tholus cut as it stood out of the adjacent Cliff of white Marble.

I could wish some skilful Artist would give us the exact dimensions to inches, by which we might have an idea of the Antient Tyrian manner; for it was probable Solomon by his correspondence with King Hiram employ’d the Tyrian Artists, in his Temple; and from the Phœnicians I derive as well the Arts as the Letters, of the Graecians, thô it may be, the Tyrians were Imitators of the Babylonians, and they of the Egyptians. Great Monarchs are ambitious to leave great Monuments behind them, and this occasions great Inventions and Mechanick Arts.

What the Architecture was that Solomon used we know little of, though Holy Writ hath given us the general dimensions of the Temple, by which we may in some manner collect the Plan but not of all the Courts.

Villapandus hath made a fine Romantick Piece after the Corinthian Order, which in that age was not used by any Nation: for the First Ages used grosser Pillars then Dorick. In after Times they began to refine from the Dorick, as in the Temple of Ephesus (the United Work of all Asia) and afterwards improved into a Slenderer Pillar, and Leavy Capital of various inventions which they called Corinthian. So that if we run back to the Age of Solomon, we may with reason believe they used the Tyrian manner, as gross at least as the Dorick, and that the Corinthian manner of Villapandus is meer fancy: Nay when long after Herod built the Atrium Gentium, he that carefully considers the description in Josephus will find it to be a Tripple Portico, and thick Pillars of the grosser Proportions which being whole stones of an incredible Bulk—our Saviour’s Disciples admired them: Master, said they, see what stones are here! Titus would have sav’d this noble structure, but a soldier throwing a torch upon the Roof which was Cedar planks covered with Bitumen, it easily took Fire and consumed the whole Building. All the City was thus covered flat with Bitumen (easily gathered from the Lake of Sodom) and upon the flat roofs the Jews celebrated under Palm-boughs the Feast of Tabernacles.

The Body of the First Temple was gilt upon Bitumen, which is good Size for gilding and will preserve the timber. The Roof and Cedar Wainscot within being carved with Knotts was gilded all over with a thick Leaf, so I understand the word Overlay’d; for if it was cover’d with plate apply’d over the knots and Imbossments the gold nails to fix it on would have increased the Weight of the plate, whereas the quantity of the Nails is reckoned but small in Proportion. The Doors might be plated over and nail’d, and the Hinges and Bars, called Chains, might be solid; for these were afterwards stripp’d when the Egyptians pillaged the Temple in the Reign of Rehoboam.

That Herod did more than the Upper Portico doth not appear, for the substruction under the Portico was certainly Solomon’s Work. The whole Hill Moriah was wall’d upright by him from the bottom of the Valley which render’d a broad Area above for all the Buildings of the Courts. This is the work in which were us’d stone of 10 and 12 Cubits, call’d as well they might Costly Stones.

Now it may well be inquired how in an uneven craggy Country, as it is about Jerusalem, such mighty Loads of Stone could be brought. I shall give my thoughts.

Solomon had an Army of Labourers in his Works; now suppose 12 Cubits long and 2 broad, and 1 thick, this would amount to 648 of our solid feet, which in marble would be 64 Tuns and more. Eight men can draw a Tun, but the ground being hilly, we will allow 10 men to a Tun which would be 640 men. Now how all these men can be brought to draw together I show as follows. First, 10 men draw in a Rope (as bargemen with us) at the end of this Rope is a Spring-tree (as our Coachmen use for ye two fore Horses) to each end of which is a rope so 20 men can draw in the second rank; each rope hath again its Spring-tree, and so on to a sixth rank each rank doubling the number and supposing 10 men to govern the rest (possibly with Musick) makes the number 640 men; and this will be found readier than capsterns, and by this means much vaster stones may be mov’d and even by Barbarous People without Engins. I cannot otherwise see what need Solomon had of such great multitudes of Labourers as Threescore and ten Thousand Bearers of Burdens, and Fourscore Thousand Hewers of stone in the Mountains, &c. Probably too they were employ’d by Months, and the rest were by turns to till the ground and bring food for the Labourers that the Country Work might proceed.

The Walls of Babylon were most stupendious Works, built with Brick and Cement with Bitumen; the Height of them, according to Herodotus, was Two Hundred Royal Cubits, and the Breadth Fifty; which in our measure (reckoning every Royal Cubit with Herodotus 1 foot 9 inches which is 3 inches above the common cubit measure) makes the Height 375 foot and the Breadth 93 ft. 9 in.

In these Walls were one hundred gates of Brass with Ornaments in Architecture of the same metal. Besides the first Wall, (which was encompassed with a wide and deep Foss always supply’d with water the sides of which were Lin’d with Brick) was an inner Wall built of near the same strength, thô not altogether of the same Breadth.

The extent of the City must add to the Surprise which being a Square contained a Front on every Side of one hundred and Twenty Stadia, that is Fifteen of our miles, and makes up in the whole Threescore miles.

Another stupendious Fabrick of I think also Tyrian architecture, was the monument of Porsenna, King of Etruria. This Sepulchre we have describ’d by Pliny, with the particular Dimensions in Feet which I have accordingly Delineated.

First, a Basis of squar’d stone fifty foot high rais’d the Pile above any vulgar contiguous Buildings which being solid only in those Parts that bore weight was so contriv’d within-side as to form a very intricate Labyrinth, into which whoever enter’d without a clew of thread would not be able to find the way out. Upon this Basis stood five Pyramids of 150 foot high; Four in the Angles, and one in the Centre; Bodies call’d Pyramids thô it is manifest they must have been so cut off as to have a large space on the Top to carry a Second Story of Four more lofty Pyramids of 100 foot high; and over them a third Order of Five more. Now how these could be borne is worth the consideration of an architect. I conceive it might be thus perform’d securely.

Set half Hemispherical Arches, such as we make the heads of Niches, but lay’d back to back, so that each of these have its Bearing upon three Pyramids of the Lower Order, that is two angular ones and the middle Pyramids; and these cutting one another upon the Diagonals will have a firm bearing for all the Works above.

Pliny mentions a Brass Circle and Cupola, lay’d upon the Five Lower Pyramids, not I suppose to bear anything, but chiefly for Ornament, and to cover the stone work of the Arches upon the strong Spandrells of which if another Platform were rais’d upon that might the upper structure be built and the whole have a stupendious effect, and seemingly very open. Pliny took his Description of this extraordinary Pile from the Measures set down by Varro, a diligent and therefore credible author, who probably might have taken his Dimensions when it was standing before the absolute conquest of Etruria by the Romans; the summary then of this prodigious Edifice (erected to show the Vanity of the Eastern Monarchy could be exceeded by the Italians) may be thus compriz’d.

The Basis of the whole was 300 ft. square, and 50 ft. high; upon which stood Five Pyramids each of 75 ft. square at 150 ft. high; upon which rested the Brazen Circle and Cupola, stil’d by Pliny Petasus, (which I take to be a Brass Covering securing the Arches) from which hung little Bells by Chains, which sounded as they mov’d by the Winds.

The Four Pyramids of the Second Order of 100 ft. high standing upon the Circle or Brim of the Petasus as upon an Entablature, were evidently the Four First Angular Pyramids continu’d to an Apex, or near to a Point, so each will be in all from the Basis 450 ft. high, and rise as high as the Petasus; above which was again a Platform containing the Third Order of Five more Pyramids, of which the four angular Pyramids rested firmly upon the keys of the Diagonal Sections of the half Hemispherical Vaultings, which were called by the Ancients Conchae resembling the heads of Niches joyn’d back to back. This Platform I take to have been round as being the Horizontal Section of the Petasus; and the Bases of the Five Upper Pyramids would be contiguous, and thus would be of the same shape and as high as the same below, as Varro asserts with some suspicion, fearing how they would stand, but I with confidence, the Proportions persuading, which indeed are very fine.

The Heighth to the Breadth of the Basis is 6 to 1. The Heighth of the Pyramids to the Brass Petasus is 2 to 1, but taking in their whole heighth it would have 4 to 1, but allowing the Point of the Pyramid to be taken off (as it ought) and allowing for the Brasen Brim and Bells it will be 250 foot, above which was the Floor that bore the Five upper Pyramids of 4 to 1, so the Heighth is 550 foot as 6 to 11.

I have ventured to put some Ornaments, at ye Top belonging to the Tuscan superstition, (They then us’d not Statues) They are Golden Thunderbolts, so the whole will be 600 foot high, that is double to the Basis and the Heighth to the Brass circle will appear half the Face, or like the Façade of a Tuscan Temple, to which the Breadth of the Brim of the Petasus and the Bells supply the Place of an Entablature:

I have been the longer in this Description because the Fabrick was in the Age of Pythagoras and his School, when the World began to be fond of Geometry and Arithmetick.

N.B. In all the Editions of Pliny for Tricenum read Tricentinûm as the sense requires.

At the end of the Discourse on Architecture is an elevation, drawn in pen and sepia, of the tomb of Mausolus, as Sir Christopher supposed from Pliny’s account that it must have been constructed. It is drawn to a scale, with indications of statues, of which he supposed there to have been forty-eight. It is remarkable how closely Sir Christopher’s conjectural elevation tallies with what recent excavations have brought to light.

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