The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sir Christopher Wren, by Lawrence
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Title: Sir Christopher Wren
Scientist, scholar and architect
Author: Lawrence Weaver
Release Date: March 23, 2023 [eBook #70352]
Language: English
Produced by: David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN ***
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN
[Illustration: COUNTRY LIFE]
[Illustration: THE CHIEF WORKS OF WREN.
A tribute by C. R. Cockerell, R.A.]
SIR
CHRISTOPHER WREN
SCIENTIST, SCHOLAR AND
ARCHITECT
BY SIR
LAWRENCE WEAVER
K.B.E., F.S.A., HON. A.R.I.B.A.
LONDON
PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES OF “COUNTRY LIFE,” LTD.,
20, TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 2,
AND BY GEORGE NEWNES, LTD., 8-11, SOUTHAMPTON
STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2. NEW YORK: CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS
MCMXXIII
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
This little book pretends to be neither a Life of Wren nor a detailed
record of his achievement. His working years were more than seventy.
At fifteen the inventor of a weather-clock and the author of a Theory
of Trigonometry which delighted Sir Charles Scarborough, he died in
his ninety-first year, not indeed in professional harness, but still
working at the multitudinous problems to which his life had been
devoted.
When the definitive “Life and Works” comes to be written, it will
itself be someone’s life-work, if it is to be adequate.
I attempt no more than to give impressions of the many sides of a great
Englishman, and have taken the liberty to ignore the chronological
order which is fitting in a biography.
My old friend Henry Wheatley pleased himself with the notion that
people who write get a grossly unfair share of the world’s praise, for
the relative greatness of men is judged by what writers say of them,
and writers are obsessed by the importance of their own craft.
It is also true that architecture has been in England an inarticulate
trade, and one regarded in our generation as a technical mystery with
which we are little concerned.
The greatness of Wren has been obscured by the modesty which checked
any inclination he may have had to enshrine his thought in writing,
save in few and disjointed but admirable fragments on science and
architecture: in any case his prodigious output of building left little
time for his pen.
It is because Sir Christopher Wren brought to his superb architectural
accomplishment the equipment of a mathematician, of a master of natural
science, and of a scholar, that it is what it is. He has been called
the English Leonardo. The praise, though great, is not excessive, but
the parallel falls short of completeness. Leonardo was poet and mystic
as well as painter, sculptor, scientist, and philosopher. But if Wren
did not carry his head in the clouds, he was still something more than
our architect of greatest achievement. He was a man of scientific and
intellectual stature worthy to be measured with our best. He was, above
all, a great English gentleman. His contemporaries knew his quality:
it were very shame if we ignored it. The Bicentenary Celebrations have
given us opportunity to pay the homage due.
_February 25, 1923._
(_Two hundredth anniversary of the
death of Wren._)
AUTHORITIES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The _Parentalia or Memoirs of the Wrens_, by Christopher, the son of
Sir Christopher, is the main source of information about the great
architect. It is as ill-constructed a book as one may meet, yet it
possesses a charm of its own. Christopher’s idea of a biography seems
to have been to print notes, letters, and discourses as they came to
his hand, without any thread of text to give coherence to very diverse
material. The result is a rather forbidding publication, which demands
of the reader no little resolution. The _Parentalia_ deals not only
with Sir Christopher, but with his father, Dean Christopher, and his
uncle, Bishop Matthew. The father, as Registrar of the Order of the
Garter and Dean of Windsor, and the uncle, as Bishop of Ely, filled
no small parts in the Church history of their day; but we are little
concerned with them here, except as they came into Sir Christopher’s
life.
This ill-compiled miscellany when completed by the younger Christopher,
who died in 1747, was published by his son Stephen in 1750. It served
as a mine for the _Lives_ by Elmes, Miss Phillimore, and Miss Milman,
and has necessarily been consulted freely by all who have made Wren the
subject of their pens. In 1903 that part of the _Parentalia_ which
referred to Sir Christopher was reprinted by Mr. C. R. Ashbee at the
Essex House Press, and twenty fine drawings of Wren’s churches by E. H.
New were reproduced. It is finely printed, and Mr. Ernest J. Enthoven’s
editing ensured an accurate transcript of the original edition as
published by Stephen Wren. To the kindness of Mr. New and Mr. Enthoven
I owe the permission to reproduce here some of the former’s drawings.
Stephen Wren was unmarried, but contrived to beget a daughter,
Margaret, who took the name of Wren. For her a copy of the _Parentalia_
was bound sumptuously in red leather, tooled and gilt. It bears the
initials “M. W.” and Margaret’s autograph appears on the title-page.
Interleaved in this delightful and unique volume are many manuscripts,
autograph letters, and engravings. Some are in connection with the Dean
and the Bishop, but most have to do with Sir Christopher. About 1908 I
became acquainted with Mrs. Pigott, _née_ Catherine Wren-Hoskyns, the
last surviving direct descendant of Sir Christopher. She was then old
and in ill-health, and contemplated bequeathing the heirloom copy to a
distant collateral. I persuaded her to allow me to collect a suitable
sum of money which she might bequeath instead, and the story of that
piece of mendicancy, with a list of the people who generously backed
me, is deposited with the heirloom copy in the Library of the Royal
Institute of British Architects.
Amongst the manuscripts of the heirloom _Parentalia_ is a chronological
_Series Vitæ et Actorum Domini Christophori Wren_ in four pages.
This is a copy, perhaps even may be the draft, of the list in the
Lansdowne Manuscript at the British Museum, which was initialed by Sir
Christopher himself about a year before he died.
I am bound to say, however, that even a list so apparently authentic
gives me no confidence. Wren was the last man to be interested in
materials for his own biography, and he was ninety when he checked
the list. His son was incurably casual and inaccurate, and the Elmes,
Phillimore, and Milman _Lives_ were based on it blindly, except in the
case of Miss Milman, who used her own judgment somewhat. Elmes was
laborious, and had access to a lot of material such as State Papers,
some of which mysteriously got into his own possession; but he was
almost blind, and he dated his dedication to Sir Humphry Davy exactly
a hundred years before I date this, at a period when biography was no
exact science. The time has come for someone to go back to all the
originals, including many which have come to light since his day. I
hope this work will not linger until February 25, 2023.
For light on Wren as a scientist I make very grateful acknowledgments
to my friend Sir Daniel Hall, K.C.B., F.R.S., an expert in the outlook
of the philosophers of Wren’s day. He will recognise as his own a
shamelessly large number of sentences in Chapter IV. Professor Hinks,
F.R.S., the present Gresham Professor of Astronomy, has helped me
with notes on that aspect of his great predecessor’s activities. Mr.
Wells, the reigning Warden of Wadham, has kindly checked my chapter on
Wren’s Oxford days. There is a common phrase for men of encyclopædic
knowledge, that they have forgotten more than other men ever knew. It
would be true of my old friend, Mr. Arthur Bolton, Curator of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, but--he has not forgotten. He has been so helpful and
full of suggestions that it would be more honest if his name were with
mine on the title-page. But he shares Wren’s gift of modesty as well as
learning, and I need only express an admiring gratitude. I am indebted
to the Duke of Portland, to the Warden of Wadham, and to the Editor of
_Architecture_ for permission to reproduce portraits.
I have attempted no bibliography, in which Longman’s _Three Cathedrals_
would have a prominent place. That task and a schedule of Wren’s
drawings, with reproductions of those that can be definitely attributed
to him, will be amongst the fitting works of the projected Wren
Society.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE v
AUTHORITIES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
I. PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD 1
II. OXFORD CAREER AND EARLY INVENTIONS 9
III. FAMILY LIFE 18
IV. ASTRONOMER, MATHEMATICIAN, AND NATURAL SCIENTIST 28
V. BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE AND VISIT TO PARIS 43
VI. TOWN-PLANNING 53
VII. ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL 59
VIII. THE CITY CHURCHES 78
IX. CHELSEA, HAMPTON COURT, AND GREENWICH 97
X. OTHER BUILDINGS: PUBLIC AND DOMESTIC 104
XI. WREN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: LAST YEARS 112
XII. THE PROFESSIONAL MAN 123
XIII. STUDENT AND SCHOLAR 132
XIV. “THE ARCHITECT OF ADVENTURE” 144
APPENDIX I.: A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE
REFERENCE IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S
PROBLEM 158
APPENDIX II.: AN ATTEMPT AT A WREN CHRONOLOGY 160
APPENDIX III.: A NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF WREN 164
INDEX 167
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
PLATE
I. THE CHIEF WORKS OF WREN _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
II. WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY 50
III. WREN’S PLAN OF LONDON 54
IV. THE WELBECK PORTRAIT 60
V. BUST BY EDWARD PEARCE AT THE ASHMOLEAN 70
VI. THE WEST FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S 72
VII. ST. PAUL’S UNDER THE DOME 74
VIII. ST. STEPHEN’S WALBROOK 88
IX. CHELSEA HOSPITAL: THE MAIN PORTICO 98
X. HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS 100
XI. GREENWICH HOSPITAL AND ITS TWO DOMES 102
XII. TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT 108
XIII. THE WADHAM PORTRAIT OF WREN 114
XIV. THE ST. PAUL’S DEANERY PORTRAIT 120
XV. THE CENTRAL PORTION OF THE CHIAROSCURO ENGRAVING 126
XVI. WREN MEDAL AT WADHAM COLLEGE 148
IN THE TEXT
PAGE
ST. PETER’S xv, xvi
ST. AUGUSTIN’S 55
ST. MARTIN’S AND ST. PAUL’S 56
THE SECOND DESIGN FOR ST. PAUL’S 64
PLAN OF THE “REJECTED DESIGN” 66
WEST ELEVATION OF THE “WARRANT DESIGN” 68
PLAN OF ST. PAUL’S AS BUILT 72
ST. VEDAST 79
ST. ALBAN 80
ST. DUNSTAN’S 82
ST. MAGNUS 85
ST. MARGARET’S PATTENS 86
ST. BRIDE’S 87
ST. MILDRED, BREAD STREET 91
ST. BRIDE’S 92
ST. MARY-LE-BOW 146
[Illustration: S^T PETER’S]
[Illustration: S^T PETER’S]
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN
SCIENTIST, SCHOLAR, AND ARCHITECT
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD
On the 20th October, 1632, Christopher Wren was born in the Rectory at
East Knoyle in Wiltshire. His father, also Dr. Christopher Wren, is
said to have descended from an ancient English family of Danish origin
which settled in the county of Durham; but I can find no authority for
the Danish story except _Parentalia_.
In J. W. Rylands’ _Records of Wroxall Abbey_ there is a pedigree
which shows Sir Christopher’s grandfather, Francis Wren, Citizen and
Mercer of London, who lived from 1552 to 1624. His father was Cuthbert
and his grandfather William Wren, of Sherborn House, Durham, who
died in 1539. This William is described as brother to a Christopher
Wren, of Wythebroke, Warwick, who died in 1542, but the authority is
doubtful. If it is accurate, however, it may be an added reason for Sir
Christopher’s purchase of the Warwickshire estate of Wroxall for his
son, who settled down there as a country gentleman.
Sir Christopher’s mother was Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert
Cox, of Fonthill, Wiltshire. So on both sides Christopher was well
born. He was an only son, with seven sisters, but one of them only is
important in Wren’s story. She married, in 1640, Dr. William Holder, of
Blechington, Oxford.
We know nothing of Christopher’s mother except her name, but his
father cut some figure in Charles I.’s reign. A loyalist of loyalists,
he succeeded his more distinguished brother, Bishop Matthew Wren, in
1635, as Dean of Windsor and Registrar of the Order of the Garter.
When St. George’s Chapel was plundered by the Cromwellian troops, the
spoils included the three Registers of the Garter Knights, but by
making a heavy payment the Dean got them back again, and cherished
them until his death in 1658. They then passed into the safe keeping
of Christopher, who soon after the Restoration handed them over to Dr.
Bruno Ryves, then the Registrar of the Garter.
Dean Christopher was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and St.
John’s, Oxford, and his son’s scientific attainments were inherited.
He was a man of delightful character, and evidently there was between
father and son the closest affection, which shines even through the
formal phrases used in those days by children when writing to their
fathers. That he added skill in architecture to his wide literary and
mathematical knowledge is clear from the fact that he was employed in
1634 to design a building at Windsor for Charles I.’s Queen, and a
detailed estimate prepared by the Dean has survived. As the building
was to cost over £13,000, it must have been an ambitious undertaking,
but it never took shape owing to the disturbances of the time.
It was of great importance to Wren that his early training should
have been given to him by so able a father, especially as he was, in
childhood, exceedingly delicate. The Rev. William Shepheard helped
the Dean as domestic tutor, and the boy’s mathematics were looked
after by Dr. William Holder. Aubrey, in his _Lives of Eminent Men_,
says of Holder that “he was very helpful in the education of his
brother-in-law, a youth of prodigious inventive wit, to whom he was as
tender as if he had been his own child. He gave him his instructions
in geometry and arithmetic, and when he was a young scholar at the
University of Oxford was a very necessary and kind friend.”
Amongst the manuscripts in the heirloom _Parentalia_ is a letter in
Latin, dated “E Musæo meo, Calendis Januarii, 1641,” from Wren to his
father, beautifully written, and expressing filial gratitude in a high
degree, and below is a Latin verse with its English translation. At
the foot the delighted father has written, “Scripto hoc, A^o ætatis
suæ Decimo ab octobris 20^o elapso.” It was certainly a remarkable
accomplishment for a boy of nine.
Also amongst the _Parentalia_ MSS. is a versified paraphrase of the
first to the fourteenth verses of the first chapter of St. John’s
Gospel. The penmanship of this is also admirable, and Wren maintained
this merit of legibility until the end of his life.
Wren went in due course to Westminster, and worked under the
redoubtable Dr. Busby. His father’s choice of the school was doubtless
due to the vehemently loyalist attitude of the great headmaster,
but it may also have been influenced by the fact that Busby, though
a notable classic, did not frown upon mathematical and scientific
studies. Christopher was a Town Boy, and never entered the College
proper. Possibly it was at Westminster that Wren first met Robert
Hooke, with whom he was to be so closely associated in after life,
though this guess is a little doubtful, for Hooke was older by three
years; but he was also a Town Boy, and boarded in Busby’s house, going
but little into school. John Sargeaunt thought that Hooke studied
mathematics apart, and that this liberty was probably shared by young
Christopher. It is likely that owing to Christopher’s delicate health
he left Westminster early and pursued his studies under the eye of Sir
Charles Scarborough, a young but famous physician who had developed
a marked genius for mathematics and science. If Wren had remained at
Westminster, he would almost certainly have proceeded in the ordinary
course, like most Westminster boys, either to Christ Church, Oxford, or
Trinity College, Cambridge: the choice of Wadham was no doubt dictated
by his friendship with the Warden. Evidently, however, Wren retained
an affection for his old school, because he took much trouble over the
design of a new dormitory which led to a great deal of wrangling, and
the work of building was postponed again and again. When, ultimately,
the policy of rebuilding was settled in 1721, Wren was ninety, and no
longer in practice. His design, therefore, was put aside, and the Earl
of Burlington produced what purported to be a new one, but was, in
fact, Wren’s, with some slight modifications. The existing building, in
fact, which looks out on the quiet Abbey Garden, may be regarded as a
work of Wren, though technically the amateur Burlington was responsible
for it.
If we are to believe Elmes, it was not until 1647, when Christopher
was in his fifteenth year, that he became acquainted with Sir Charles
Scarborough, but it seems more reasonable to ascribe to the Scarborough
period, following Wren’s retirement from Westminster, a manuscript
letter in Latin verse to his father, dated September 13, 1645,
dedicating to him an instrument called _Suum Panorganum Astronomicum_,
and a tract _De Ortu Fluminum_. On that assumption Christopher left
Westminster before he had completed his thirteenth year.
There is very little to show that Wren was much interested in the
graphic arts, but on the sheet in the heirloom _Parentalia_ which
contains the Latin letter is an ink sketch of a woman holding up a
dial-shaped object, which is possibly the _Panorganum_.
Possibly, however, this may be the sketch for a design on the ceiling
of a room which he did when he was sixteen. It included “two figures,
representing Astronomy and Geometry and their Attributes, artfully
drawn with his pen.” I cannot affirm that the lady in the heirloom copy
is a piece of his “artful” drawing, but it is likely.
What seems to fix the start of Wren’s studies with Scarborough as
roughly contemporary with his _Panorganum_ letter is the fact that the
boy in 1647 was engaged in translating into Latin, at Sir Charles’
request, Oughtred’s _Clavis Mathematicæ_. In the same year he had a
patent granted him for a diplographic instrument for writing with two
pens. Christopher describes his invention at length. An instrument of
the kind must have then seemed very important, because Sir William
Petty patented a similar contrivance in the same year. About three
years later someone stole Wren’s invention. He was exceedingly
annoyed, and wrote a letter in which he refers to the fact that Oliver
Cromwell’s attention had been directed to it. Without claiming anything
great for the invention itself, he wanted to clear himself from the
aspersion of having annexed somebody else’s device. In later years
there were to be many examples of people picking up an idea of Wren’s,
developing it to their own great credit, and failing to acknowledge
the man without whose idea they never would have started on their
enterprise.
Whenever it was that Wren began working under Sir Charles Scarborough,
it was not until his fifteenth year that he informed his father that
he was acting as a demonstrating assistant to the physician who
lectured on anatomy at Surgeons’ Hall. The story of his activities
is set out in a dignified Latin letter, which refers not only to the
Scarborough activities, but to Wren’s invention of a weather-clock, of
an instrument to write with in the dark, and of a treatise on spherical
trigonometry. Very impressive also is a long metrical Latin essay on
the Reformation of the Zodiac, which runs to nearly fifteen quarto
pages, in an appendix to Elmes’ _Life_. He was sixteen when he wrote
(again in Latin) to Mr. Oughtred, whose important essay on geometry he
had translated into Latin. We may agree with Elmes that “these juvenile
essays prove the fecundity, the ripeness, and the highly cultivated
state of his mind, his zeal, and his ardent enthusiasm in the pursuit
of knowledge and literary honours.”
But the weather-clock was destined to develop from the stage of a
“juvenile essay.” When he wrote to his father in 1647 that he was
enjoying Scarborough’s society, he added that he had imparted to
him “one of these inventions of mine, a weather-clock--namely, with
revolving cylinder, by means of which a record can be kept through the
night.”
Of this Scarborough thought well enough to ask the lad to have one
constructed in brass at his expense. I find in Birch’s _History of the
Royal Society_, vol. i., under date December 9, 1663: “Dr. Wren’s
description of his weather-clock consisting of two wings that may be
added to a pendulum clock was read.” The engraving published by Birch
shows a far simpler arrangement than that of the drawing among the
heirloom MSS. The printed _Parentalia_ gives a description of a device
more complicated than Birch’s description of Wren’s communication of
1663, and refers to a circular thermometer designed to correct the
error caused by the weight of liquid. This does not appear in the
drawing; the thermometer is of the ordinary air type. The printed
_Parentalia_ refers to Robert Hooke’s improvements on Wren’s design,
but they only partly appear in the drawing, which would seem to show
an intermediate development between Wren’s original device and Hooke’s
latest achievements.
The thing itself is of no importance now, but is worth remembering, as
showing not only the early blossoming of Wren’s scientific achievement,
but also his patience and persistence in developing an idea over a
period of years.
All this was a good prelude to his life at Oxford, which began when he
was young to be an undergraduate, by our standards, but older than we
have been led to believe.
CHAPTER II
OXFORD CAREER AND EARLY INVENTIONS
The question as to when Wren started his University career presents
considerable difficulties, but it is worth exploring, because his youth
at Oxford had an enduring effect on the development of the man.
_Parentalia_ is explicit: “In the year 1646 and Fourteenth of his
Age, Mr. Wren was admitted a Gentleman-Commoner at Wadham College ...
where he soon attracted the Friendship and esteem of the two most
celebrated Virtuosi and Mathematicians of their Time, Dr. John Wilkins,
Warden of Wadham, and Dr. Seth Ward....” This date is confirmed by the
Lansdowne Chronology MS., prepared by Wren’s son, and initialed by Sir
Christopher himself two years before his death. The MS. states:
“1646. _Admissus in Collegio de Wodham._”
But it is necessary to consider other evidence. R. B. Gardiner, in
_Registers of Wadham College_, notes that Wren’s caution money as
Fellow Commoner was received on June 25, 1649 _or_ 1650. Sir Thomas
G. Jackson gives 1649 as the year when Wren entered the college as
Fellow Commoner. Wilkins did not become Warden, in place of Dr. Pitt,
expelled by the Parliamentary Visitors, until April 13, 1648, when his
name was entered in the Buttery Book. On May 5, 1648, Wilkins had a
dispensation for twelve months from the full performance of his duties
in consequence of his attendance on the Prince Elector, whose Chaplain
he was. It was not impossible that Wren should have gone to Wadham
at fourteen--the profligate Rochester matriculated at twelve and was
M.A. before he was fourteen--but it is unlikely. Wren was exceedingly
delicate as a boy, there was no Wilkins at Wadham to attract him there
when he was fourteen or for two years after, and he was, even in 1649,
the first Fellow Commoner entered during Wilkins’ wardenship. If
Wilkins took the year’s leave granted him, and if June 25, 1649, be
taken as the correct date for the payment of Wren’s caution money, he
went there a month after the Warden settled down in his post.
If Wren had proceeded direct to Oxford at fourteen from being under
Busby at Westminster, he would almost certainly have gone to Christ
Church, not to Wadham. Moreover, it is certain that during his
sixteenth year, and perhaps later, he was very busy with mathematics
and science under Sir Charles Scarborough in London.
It is just conceivable that he entered at Wadham soon after Oxford
surrendered to the Parliament in 1646, and that he did not come into
residence until 1649 or 1650, but no document has ever suggested that,
and the theory can be dismissed. It is the opinion of Mr. Wells, the
reigning Warden, that if Wren only matriculated in 1650 he could not
have proceeded to his B.A. in 1651, as in fact he did. But the year
1649, accepted by Sir Thomas Jackson, is feasible on the basis of
Wren’s notable precocity and the then readiness of the University not
to insist on three years, as is seen by Rochester’s case.
It is, however, fair to add that the entry of Wren’s £5 in the Wadham
book is undated, but it comes at the foot of a page headed 1650, on
which the preceding entry is dated June 25, and the three previous
names are registered by Gardiner as 1650. It may be, however, that as
the Wren entry is undated, it was added later. On the other hand, if
he had gone to Oxford in 1646 he could scarcely have occupied the then
unheard-of time of five years before taking his B.A., March 18, 1650-51.
I attach no importance to the MS. prepared by Wren’s son Christopher,
or, indeed, to any of his documents, and prefer to rest on the College
records. Miss Phillimore followed the MS., but Miss Milman, without
setting down any evidence, assumed that Wren spent three years in
London between Dr. Busby and Oxford. I think she did wisely, and on all
the evidence, obscure and conflicting as it is, I accept 1649 as the
year when Wren began his Oxford career.
The rest of the dates can be cleared off shortly. He became M.A.
December 11, 1653, having been elected a Probationer Fellow of All
Souls in November of the same year, and was made D.C.L. at All Souls
on September 12, 1661.
Wren was fortunate in the influence of the Warden of Wadham, which
was so powerful during the formation of Wren’s character that it
is necessary to form some picture of the man. John Wilkins reigned
beneficently over the college from 1648 to 1659, and was described by
Aubrey as “no great-read man, but one of much and deepe thinking; and
a prudent man as well as ingeniose.” As the late Dr. Wright Henderson,
the biographer of Wilkins, wrote of him, “his greatness fell short of
genius, for it was the effect of ordinary qualities, rarely combined
and tempered into one character; but more effective for useful work in
the world than genius without sanity.” Soon after the Civil War broke
out, Wilkins was living in London as the chaplain of Charles Lewis,
Prince Elector Palatine, with whom Christopher renewed a childish
acquaintance. Mr. Wright Henderson thinks that Wilkins became the
leader, as he was certainly the friend, of the group of students of
natural philosophy who afterwards formed the Royal Society. It seems
obvious that Wren was entered at Wadham in order that he might be under
Wilkins. It is certain that he became the Warden’s favourite pupil.
It is evident from the amazing “Catalogue of New Theories, Inventions,
Experiments, and Mechanick Improvements,” exhibited by Mr. Wren at
the “First Assemblies at Wadham College in Oxford for Advancement of
Natural and Experimental Knowledge” which is printed in _Parentalia_
that Wren took all knowledge for his province. There are fifty-three
items, ranging from such solemnities as the “Hypothesis of the Moon’s
Libration, in Solid” and “To find whether the earth moves” through the
uncertainties of “Probable Ways for making Fresh Water at Sea,” and the
largeness of “Divers Improvements in the Art of Husbandry” down to the
pleasant simplicity of “A Way of Imbroidery for Beds, Hangings, cheap
and fair.”
We are reminded of the association between architecture and military
engineering during the height of the Italian Renaissance, by “To
build in the Sea, Forts, Moles, etc.” and “Secure and Speedier Ways
of attacking Forts than by Approaches and Galleries.” Sanmicheli had
invented the pentagonal bastion: Inigo Jones had fortified Basing
House against the Parliament’s attack, and had been one of the
defenders. We would give much to learn something of Wren’s invention
for “Ways of Submarine Navigation.” If he had developed “Easier Ways
of Whale-fishing,” it would have given material for another chapter in
_Moby Dick_. _Eheu fugaces!_ There is a hint of the coming gramophone
in “A speaking Organ, articulating Sounds,” and “Divers new Musical
Instruments” helps to explain Wren’s devotion to his daughter Jane,
whose monument in the crypt of St. Paul’s--she died at the age of
twenty-six--shows her in Francis Bird’s rather heavy-handed sculpture
as seated at an organ.
The technique of writing always interested Wren, so it is natural to
find in the catalogue “To write in the Dark” and “To write Double by an
Instrument,” the latter a dodge he developed to the point of patenting
it.
The tools of his future profession already attracted him. “A
Scenographical Instrument, to survey at one Station” is followed by
“A Perspective Box, to survey with it,” and there is a ring of Bacon
and Wotton in the compendious phrase “New Designs tending to Strength,
Convenience, and Beauty in Building.”
There is certainly no more rightly prophetic entry in the whole
astonishing list.
“Several new Ways of graving and etching” gives a certain colour to the
story--though it must be discredited--that Wren introduced mezzotint.
“New Ways of Intelligence, new Cyphers” marks his early attachment to
an amusement which he shared with others of his day, though without the
need to use the art to conceal roguish passages in what he wrote, as
was the case with Pepys’ shorthand.
His later excursions into veterinary surgery and the transfusion of
human blood are heralded by the memorandum “To purge or vomit, or alter
the Mass by Injection into the Blood, by Plaisters, by various dressing
a Fontanell.”
We have a glimpse of the experiments connected with the working out
of “A Pavement harder, fairer, and cheaper than Marble,” as well as
into the social side of these Wadham assemblies, through John Evelyn’s
glasses.
On July 13, 1654, he was at Dr. Wilkins’, at Wadham, and saw:
“Variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other mathematical
and magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a monstrous
magnet, conic and other sections, a ballance on a demi-circle, most of
them of his own and that prodigious young scholar Mr. Chr. Wren, who
presented me with a piece of white marble, which he had stain’d with a
lively red, very deepe, as beautiful as if it had been natural.”
Two days before Evelyn had visited after dinner “that miracle of
a youth.” There is no need to fill out the Wadham catalogue of
inventions: we can accept Evelyn’s valuation, and he never changed his
mind.
But the list from which I have quoted does not complete the story of
Wren’s early essays in the scientific field, essays, be it noted, which
are overwhelmingly practical. Wren was a devotee not of pure but of
applied science.
It is probably at Wadham that Wren concerned himself with what he calls
Cheirologia. In the heirloom _Parentalia_ is a sheet with pictures
of two hands, and on the next page, another hand and various notes
showing the working of the deaf and dumb language invented by Sir
Christopher. Though more complicated than the system now in use, it is
another evidence of the agility of Wren’s mind, and of his unwearying
interest in varying problems. But his time was not wholly spent in the
laboratory.
A curious incident at Oxford in 1650 gave occasion for Wren’s poetic
gift. A girl condemned for murdering her illegitimate infant was
hanged, but revived later under the care of Dr. Petty and Thomas
Willis. It is an extraordinary story told with a wealth of unpleasant
detail in a pamphlet called _News from the Dead_. Following the
narrative are some dozens of “Ingenious poems on the subject by the
Prime Wits” of the University, including one by Wren. It is in a
pompous vein, and cites Orpheus, Eurydice, the Fates, and Æsculapius in
the fashion of the time.
Morgan reprinted the pamphlet and poems in _Phœnix Britannicus_, where
they may be found by the curious. Wren’s effusion is only worth mention
as showing him in the full current of Oxford life: it is likely enough
that he had some slight part with Petty and Willis in the long business
of resuscitating the young woman.
His fellowship at All Souls did not divorce him from Wadham. In
October, 1663, he was paying rent for the chamber over Wadham Gateway
which had once been part of the Warden’s lodging.
That he long held in affection the scene of his early scientific
labours is shown by his having designed and presented to the College
a clock, the face of which appears on the outside of the chapel.
The works were only recently replaced, but the old mechanism is
preserved in the chapel. In the upper corners of the face are two
armorial devices, one of which appears to be the charges from Wren’s
coat-of-arms. There is also amongst the college silver a fine sugar
castor with an inscription which states that it was given by Wren in
1653. As, however, the maker’s mark dates the piece as being actually
of 1720, it is likely that, as often happened, the old inscription on
the 1653 piece was transferred to what in 1720 seemed a more modish
design.
At Oxford he must have stayed off and on, after his marriage in 1669,
because he retained the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy until
April, 1673, when he finally settled in London.
CHAPTER III
FAMILY LIFE
Of Wren’s mother nothing is known, not even the date of her death. Of
his seven sisters (the number given in Rylands’ pedigree), the only one
to survive was Susan, who became Mrs. Holder, and wisely used her great
skill in nursing during her brother’s delicate childhood. She was five
years his senior, and had no children of her own.
Christopher’s boyhood must have been clouded not a little by the
misfortunes of his stout-hearted uncle, Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely,
whose son, another Matthew, was a faithful cousin to Christopher in
later years. This is no place to tell the story of the Bishop who, with
eleven of his brethren, was impeached for resisting the Parliament
in 1641, and went to the Tower. After a short freedom in 1642 he
was imprisoned again, and, being charged with Catholic practices,
languished there while Laud was tried and beheaded, and, himself never
brought to trial, remained a close prisoner until he was released by
Monk’s warrant on March 15, 1660. Broken though he was by domestic
bereavements during his eighteen years of captivity, the brave old man
took up again his episcopal duties at the age of seventy-five.
That he remained a prisoner so long was due to his refusal to bow the
knee to the new order. It does not appear that Christopher ever saw
his uncle in the Tower, save on one great occasion, when he made an
unsuccessful effort to secure his release.
Wren was twenty-four when he became professor of astronomy at Gresham
College, and made the acquaintance of Richard Claypole, husband of
Cromwell’s favourite daughter, Elizabeth. At their dinner table Wren
became a frequent guest, the more welcome because Elizabeth Claypole
remained a devout Church of England woman. One day Cromwell strode
in and sat down to dinner, and fixing his eye on Christopher, said:
“Your uncle has been long confined to the Tower.” To Wren’s reply,
“He has so, sir, but he bears his afflictions with great patience and
resignation,” the Protector made the astonishing reply: “He may come
out an he will.”
When Christopher asked if he might take that message to Bishop Matthew
from the Lord Protector’s own mouth, he got the answer: “Yes, you may.”
But when the young man hurried off to the Tower with his message, the
Bishop roundly refused to deal with the usurper on terms which meant
submission, and preferred to tarry the Lord’s leisure and owe his
deliverance to Him alone. A loyal race, the Wrens.
In 1656, not long before this incident, Dean Wren had died at
Bletchingdon, where his son-in-law, Dr. Holder, had been parson for
some years, and was buried in the chancel of the church.
It was there that Christopher must have met Faith, daughter of Sir
Thomas Coghill of Bletchingdon, Oxon. Born in 1636, she was four years
younger than Wren, who is likely to have known her since his childhood.
We know extremely little of the intimate side of Wren’s life. The only
document, but that a very precious one, is the autograph love-letter in
the heirloom _Parentalia_ written by him to Faith. It is as follows:
MADAM,
The Artificer having never before mett with a drowned watch; like an
ignorant physician has been soe long about the cure, that he hath
made me very unquiet that your comands should be soe long deferred:
however I have sent the watch at last, and envie the felicity of it,
that it should be soe neer your side, and soe often enjoy your Eye,
and be consulted by you how your time shall passe while you employ
your hand in your excellent workes. But have a care of it, for I have
put such a Spell into it; that every Beating of the Ballance will
tell you, ’tis the pulse of my Heart, which labours as much to serve
you and more trewly than the watch; for the watch I believe will
sometimes lie, and sometimes perhaps be idle and unwilling to goe,
having received soe much injury by being drenched in that briny bath,
that I dispair it should ever be a trew Servant to you more: But as
for me (unless you drown me too in my teares) you may be confident I
shall never cease to be
Your most affectionate humble servant
CHR: WREN.
_June 14._
I have put the watch in a Box that it might take noe harme, and wrapt
it about with a little leather, and that it might not jog, I was fain
to fill up a few shavings of wast paper.
The letter is dated June 14, but there is nothing to show whether
it was written soon or long before Wren’s marriage to Faith. His
subscription is hardly passionate, and we know from the enchanting
letters of Dorothy Osborne that even in Puritan days such letters were
signed, “I am perfectly yours.”
Wren’s marriage to Faith Coghill took place on December 7, 1669, at the
Temple Church, but most of his domestic events thereafter are connected
with St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which was his parish church. His first
son, Gilbert, died an infant. His second, Christopher, was born in
February, 1674-5, and baptized at St. Martin’s. This first marriage
only lasted a few years, for Faith Wren was buried at St. Martin’s on
September 4, 1675. Wren soon consoled himself, for he was married on
February 24, 1676-7, at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace, to Jane,
daughter of William Lord Fitzwilliam of Lifford. By this marriage Wren
had a beloved daughter, Jane, who was baptized in November, 1677, at
St. Martin’s, and a son, William, born in June, 1679. But Wren was
soon again to become a widower. His second wife was buried at St.
Martin’s on October 6, 1680. It is rather surprising that there is no
monument to either of Sir Christopher’s wives at St. Martin’s, although
some tablets from the pre-Gibbs Church are preserved in the crypt.
Jane Wren was, by tradition, Sir Christopher’s favourite child, and
when she died at the age of twenty-six Wren suffered the greatest
sorrow of his life.
Of his son Christopher’s boyhood we know little, but Sir Christopher
wrote to him in France, probably in 1698, when the young man was
twenty-three, a very charming parental letter, which has been preserved
in the heirloom _Parentalia_. It runs as follows:
MY DEAR SON,
I hope by this time you are pretty well satisfied of the condition of
the Climat you are in: if not, I believe you will ere Lent be over,
and will learne to dine upon Sallad.... If you thinke you can dine
better cheape in Italy you may trie, but I thinke the passing the
Alpes and other dangers of disbanded armies and abominable Lodgings
will ballance that advantage: but the seeing of fine buildings
I perceive temptes you, and your companion Mr. Strong, whose
inclination and interest leades him, by neither of which I can find
you are moved; but how doth it concerne you? You would have it to say
hereafter that you have seen Rome, Naples and other fine places, a
hundred others can say as much and more; calculate whether this be
worth the expence and hazard as to any advantage at youre returne.
I sent you to France at a time of businesse and when you might make
your observations and find acquaintance who might hereafter be
usefull to you in the future concernes of your life: if this be your
ayme I willingly let you proceed, provided you will soon returne,
for these reasons, the little I have to leave you is unfortunately
involved in trouble, and your presence would be a comfort to me
to assist me, not only for my sake, but your own that you might
understand your affaires, before it shall please God to take me from
you, which if suddenly will leave you in perplexity and losse. I do
not say all this out of parsimony, for what you spend will be out
of what will, in short time, be your owne, but I would have you be
a man of businesse as early as you can bring your thoughts to it. I
hope, by your next you will give me account of the reception of our
ambassador; of the intrigues at this time between the two nations,
of the establishment of the commerce, and of anything that may be
innocently talked of without danger and reflection, that I may
perceive whither you look about you or noe and penetrate into what
occurres, or whither the world passes like a pleasant dream, or the
amusement of fine scenes in a play without considering the plot.
If you have in ten weeks spent half your bill of exchange besides
your gold, I confesse your money will not hold out, either abroad
for yourself or for us at home to supply you, especially if you goe
for Italy, which voyage forward and backward will take up more than
twenty weekes: thinke well of it, and let me hear more from you, for
though I would advise you, I will not discontent you. Mr. Strong hath
profered credit by the same merchant he uses for his son, and I will
thinke of it, but before I change, you must make up your account
with your merchant, and send it to me. My hearty service to young
Mr. Strong and tell him I am obliged to him for your sake. I bless
God for your health and pray for the continuance of it through all
adventures till it pleases Him to restore you to me and your Sister
and friends who wish the same as doth
Your most affectionate Father
CHR. WREN.
Poor Billy continues in his indisposition and I fear is lost to me
and the world to my great discomfort and your future trouble.
It would seem that young Strong, the son of Wren’s famous
master-builder, was the boy’s bear-leader.
Wren is rather fretful with his son, and rather melancholy as to his
own health, but he was then only sixty-six, and was to live until past
ninety. In a different tone is the letter to young Christopher from
his father, dated October 11, 1705, the original of which is also in
the heirloom _Parentalia_. There is no longer the note of rebuke which
followed the young man’s extravagance in Paris. His taste had changed,
and Holland wooed him rather to the buying of good books, a traffic the
old man cannot disapprove.
Poor Billy managed to live another forty years, despite Wren’s
desponding postscript. John Evelyn stood godfather on June 17, 1679,
“to a sonn of Sir Christopher Wren, surveyor of His Majesty’s
buildings, that most excellent and learned person (Evelyn never misses
a chance of praising Wren), with Sir William Fermor, and my Lady
Viscountess Newport, wife of the Treasurer of the Household.” This was
poor Billy, whose sponsors show that his father was the intimate friend
of Court personages.
William seems to have been very delicate, if not defective. When Sir
Christopher died he did not bequeath anything to William, but left him
in the charge of Christopher. William lived on until March, 1738-9, and
was thus close on sixty when he died. His elder brother, Christopher,
survived until August 24, 1747, when he was seventy-two.
That Wren lived on affectionate terms with his son Christopher may be
assumed not only from the terms of his will, but from his having sunk
most of his fortune in an estate for Christopher’s benefit.
His own connection with Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire, can be set out in
few words.
On August 29, 1713, he bought the estate for £19,600 from the trustees
of Sir John Burgoyne, Bart., who had died in 1709. Sir John’s son, Sir
Roger, died in 1711, leaving a widow, Constance, daughter of Sir Thomas
Middleton. She was one of the signatories of the deed of sale, and the
younger Christopher, then a widower, married her in 1715. Probably the
Wrens and the Burgoynes were old friends, and as Sir Roger Burgoyne had
left the estate encumbered, the sale to Wren was doubtless to clear off
the mortgages. The estate consisted of a fine Elizabethan brick house
(since Wren’s time very badly remodelled) and 1,850 acres, all of
which Wren conveyed to trustees in March, 1715, bringing them into the
settlement made on the first marriage of his son Christopher, who then
became sole owner.
That the architect ever visited the estate we do not know, but it is
a tradition that he designed a delightful garden wall planned in a
series of semi-circles. Certainly he never lived there. A succession of
Christophers owned the place until 1828, when it went to the daughter
of the last of them, who married Chandos Hoskyns, a descendant of the
Sir John Hoskyns who was Vice-President of the Royal Society when
Sir Christopher filled the chair. Catherine, the eldest daughter of
Chandos Wren-Hoskyns, became in time Mrs. Corbett Pigott, and died in
1911. From her I secured the heirloom copy of the _Parentalia_ for the
R.I.B.A., and she gave me a copy of the rare Kirkall engraved portrait
of Wren, which had come to her from Margaret Wren, daughter of Sir
Christopher’s grandson, Stephen.
I had hoped that Sir Christopher’s will would include some personal
expressions about his family, but it is an uninteresting document,
as anyone who examines it (P.C.C. Richmond 65) may discover. He
characteristically provided that his body should be decently buried
without pomp, and for the rest one sheet of paper was enough to set
out his dispositions. After reference to the trust made at his son
Christopher’s first marriage, he leaves everything to him, desiring
him “to take particular care that my son William Wren be comfortably
maintained supported and lookt after during his life.” The will was
dated April 14, 1713, and proved at London on March 27, 1723.
I consulted the will of the son Christopher (P.C.C. Potter 220) in the
hope that it might make some reference to the disposition of chattels,
such as drawings, that had belonged to his father, but it is short and
uninforming.
CHAPTER IV
ASTRONOMER, MATHEMATICIAN, AND NATURAL SCIENTIST
The sketch of Wren’s activities at Wadham (in Chapter II) shows the
variousness of his mind, but clearly his many inventions, though they
make an astonishing list, were _juvenilia_. His contemporary Hooke said
of him, “Since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man
in so great perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical a
mind”; and he describes a method of determining the parallax of comets
“invented by that incomparable mathematician Dr. Christopher Wren.”
In estimating the value of such an opinion, one of very many, I am
bound to rely on the judgment of scientific friends who have generously
helped me with this chapter, because I can only repeat Professor
Lethaby’s comment on the same text: “These things are beyond my
knowledge, but I know that they represent wonderful powers.”
We shall only understand the part played by Wren in the development of
natural science if we see that development as the work of a team rather
than of individuals. Wilkins, Boyle, Lawrence Rooke, Hooke, Seth Ward,
Wallis, Scarborough, Oughtred, Wren and many another shared a common
enthusiasm for the advancement of knowledge which showed itself in
common effort. Wren was the man to whom his associates turned for help
in solving their individual problems, because of his extraordinary
ingenuity in inventing apparatus which would establish or dispel the
truth of some scientific idea, and still more because of his ready
kindness and modesty. During the early days of the Royal Society he was
not only in an especial manner the cement which kept together the whole
fabric, but the inspirer of much work which was carried to fruition by
others.
In 1645, the year when Wren invented, as a boy of thirteen, a new
astronomical instrument, the first meetings took place at which was
sown the seed from which the Royal Society sprang. Dr. Wallis, the
mathematician, Dr. Goddard, Wilkins, later Warden of Wadham, and
Sir Christopher’s father, Dr. Wren, were amongst the attendants at
weekly gatherings, when philosophy and especially natural science were
discussed.
When Wallis, Wilkins, and Goddard went to Oxford in 1648-49, the London
meetings continued, but new meetings were held also at Oxford, first
in Dr. Petty’s rooms and afterwards at the apartments of Wilkins at
Wadham. When Wilkins went to Trinity, Cambridge, the Oxford men enjoyed
the hospitality of Robert Boyle.
The London meetings were held often at Gresham College and, when Wren
was fulfilling his duties as Professor of Astronomy at the College,
after his Wednesday lectures and after Rooke’s Thursday lectures. Lord
Brouncker, the friend of Pepys, John Evelyn and others were frequently
at the meetings, and the Royal Society took formal shape, after one of
Wren’s lectures, on November 28, 1660, when Brouncker, Robert Boyle,
Rooke, Wilkins and others withdrew to Wren’s private room and decided
to constitute themselves formally as a college or society. It was after
Wren’s next lecture on December 5, 1660, that Sir Robert Moray notified
to the meeting the King’s pleasure at the constitution of the society
and his promise of encouragement.
The Society of Philosophers into which the young Wren found himself
plunged owed its inspiration above all to the writings of Bacon.
Bacon was not himself a man of science in the sense that Galileo or
even Descartes was, for he made no observations and arrived at no
discoveries in any particular branch of science. But he summed up
all the Renaissance revolt against Scholasticism, and had set forth
in a noble literary form a definite system of knowledge that could
be opposed to the so-called Aristotelianism which hitherto had held
sway over the minds of men. Bacon’s guiding principle was the appeal
to experiment, for his famous “method of induction” amounts to that.
The Scholastic writers worked by deduction. They laid down their
premisses, they worked out the laws of formal logic by which they
could draw deductions from them, and they accepted the conclusions
without enquiring whether the premisses could bear the weight of the
superstructure built upon them. Bacon opposed to this his dictum,
“hypotheses non fingo;” the business of the man of science is to
collect the facts without any preconceived theory, and to let the
facts themselves reveal the law which binds them together. Actually,
scientific discovery does not proceed in this way. Without a guiding
hypothesis the mind is lost in a wilderness of facts, but the value of
the hypothesis must be checked continually by its capacity to embrace
the known facts and to predict new ones. None the less, Bacon’s method
was at the time a necessary summons to experiment, and under its
stimulus the young men of the day attacked the problem of the natural
world about them with the enthusiasm of crusaders. For as a corollary
to his method Bacon had insisted upon the necessity of studying the
common arts and crafts hitherto regarded as beneath the dignity of
philosophy. In the operations of the mechanic or the smelter, and in
the growth of crops, were to be found the materials of science. So
the new philosophers were universally curious and their curiosity
about things was the note of the society in which Wren grew up and the
dominant feature of his own mind until he settled down to architecture.
Wren’s scientific equipment was primarily that of a mathematician, and
to this he added an inventive turn of mind, which developed first in
the construction of apparatus and was afterwards so nobly turned to
account in his building. As a man of science he touched everything
and adorned it, but he cannot be regarded as a supreme pioneer in any
particular direction, nor is his name associated with any fundamental
discovery. As mathematician he was abreast of all the knowledge of the
day; he contributed to the advancement of knowledge therein as in his
discussions of the cycloid, but even in that particular subject his
work lacks the luminous intuition displayed by Pascal. Nor did he break
fresh ground and conceive new methods which afterwards developed into
part of the fundamental texture of mathematics, as Wallis did with
his theory of infinitesimals, or as Newton did a few years later in a
larger field.
Wren’s activity at the Royal Society in the multifarious problems
which its members examined must not be allowed to obscure the fact
that, _professionally_, he was an astronomer. Gresham Professor at
twenty-five, and Savilian Professor at twenty-eight, he achieved little
that has survived. The world and his own nimble mind called him to
an excess of enterprises. In 1662, his indulgent friend Sprat wrote,
“The Vice-Chancellor [of Oxford University] did yesterday send for
me to enquire where the _Astronomy Professor_ was, and the reason of
his absence so long after the beginning of term.... _He most terribly
told me that he took it very ill_ you had not all this while given him
any account of what hindered you in the discharge of your office.”
Sprat stoutly defended Wren and urged on the angry Vice-Chancellor
that the rebuilding of St. Paul’s and the fortifying of Tangier (Wren
toyed with the latter but refused it) were of greater “concernment for
the benefit of Christendom” than “the drawing of lines in Sir Harry
Savill’s school.” It was not until 1673, however, that Wren officially
turned his back on astronomy by resigning the Savilian professorship.
The chief document of his astronomical career is his inaugural Gresham
lecture in 1657, of which Latin and English versions are printed
in _Parentalia_. A manuscript lecture, _De corpore Saturni ejusque
phasibus Hypothesis_, flits irritatingly by us as having been possessed
by one William Jones, Esquire, but after that--silence. The Gresham
oration was a little pompous and for the “politer genii” whom he espied
in his audience.
“A time would come when men would be able to stretch out their eyes
as snails do (Wren worked with a thirty-six foot glass at Oxford) and
extend them to fifty feet in length, by which means they should be
able to discover ten thousand times as many stars as we can.” Of this
Professor Hinks says, “Rather poor stuff, suddenly rising into this
most interesting conclusion--‘and find the Galaxy to be myriads of
them, and every nebulous star appearing as if it were the Firmament
of some other world ... bury’d in the vast abyss of intermundious
vacuum.’ What would we not give [Professor Hinks continues] for
fuller knowledge of what was in Wren’s mind when he wrote this
passage so strangely before its time, so strongly suggestive of the
island universe theory of spiral nebulæ to-day.” There was also the
matter of the method for constructing solar eclipses. The lay reader
may be spared bibliographical details, into which I have dived, but
Professor Hinks makes this significant comment: “Wren was the first
to discover the graphical method of computing eclipses that, with
some modifications due to much improved tables, remains by far the
most instructive, though not the most numerically accurate way of
calculating ... and is in use to-day for the graphical prediction of
occultations.”
It was a practical thought of Wren that the Monument should be used as
a gigantic telescope, and members of the Royal Society tried so to use
it, but failed, because passing coaches caused vibrations. He had a
like idea for the great south staircase at St. Paul’s, but again, for
practical reasons, it broke down.
The biographers of Wren have made great play with a story taken from
a manuscript bound up in the heirloom _Parentalia_. Miss Milman
referred to “the problem which Pascal, ... under the pseudonym of Jean
de Montfert, challenged the mathematicians of England to answer by a
certain day. He accompanied the challenge with a promise of a prize of
twenty pistoles to the successful competitor. Christopher Wren solved
the problem, but for some unexplained reason never received the prize,
while the problem from Kepler which he set in return seems never to
have been solved.” The facts are rather different. In June, 1658,
Pascal put out a challenge to all mathematicians (not English alone)
to find a solution for certain problems connected with a cycloid, the
curve described by a point on the circumference of a circle when that
circle rolls along a straight line--_e.g._, a nail on the rim of a
carriage-wheel.
In an appendix I set out the story as it has been given me by Sir
Daniel Hall. It is rather technical, but may be summed up simply.
Pascal received both attempts at solutions and replies which merely
discussed germane matters. Wren sent a partial but admirable
contribution, unfortunately “without demonstration.” It was original
as far as it went, but not the complete solution for which Pascal had
asked. Cavarci, the umpire in this high contest, wrote that Wren had
merely solved the easy part of it.
It appears clear that in withholding the prize Pascal wronged neither
Wren nor the other contestants. The suggestion that Wren was the master
mathematician of Europe will not do. It is enough to affirm of him that
he was an ingenious geometrician who made several minor advances in
that science. He left no evidence of mathematical _genius_, a quality
which ought to be reserved to the authors of far-reaching and fruitful
conceptions. The true significance of Wren’s mathematics lies in the
fine way in which he applied them in his buildings. No one is a better
representative of applied science as compared with pure or fundamental
science. Too much has also been made of Wren’s work on the barometer.
Some enthusiasts have, indeed, tried to transfer to him the credit
which belongs to Torricelli and Pascal.
Wren repeated Torricelli’s experiment at the top and bottom of a hill,
and finding that the mercury column stood at a lower height on the
top of the hill, argued that the mercury was really balanced by the
weight of the air, or, as we now say, measured its pressure. But in
this experiment Wren was anticipated by Pascal; his experiment was
regarded by his contemporaries as made independently, but it would be
hard to say that the experiment was really Wren’s own device, so much
was the question a matter of discussion among the men of science of
the time. The enunciation of the laws of impact was made practically
simultaneously by Wallis, Wren, and Huygens. Wren’s may be regarded as
the most elegant demonstration, but it was Huygens alone who perceived
that when the colliding bodies are perfectly elastic the energy of the
system, _i.e._, the sum of the products of the mass of each of the
bodies multiplied by the square of its velocity, remains unchanged--one
of the generalisations at the base of modern science. Similarly,
although Wren became Professor of Astronomy both at Gresham College and
then at Oxford, no outstanding observation or fundamental discovery
remains attached to his name. Speaking broadly and generally we can
say that Wren was universally accomplished in all the science of the
time, that in several directions he showed a quality of mind that was
only short of the highest, and that finally he abandoned the pursuit
of pure science too soon to have accomplished in any branch such a
mass of work as would mark him as one of the founders of that science.
It must always be remembered that Wren took to architecture when he
was just over thirty, and was immersed in a huge practice when he was
thirty-five.
But perhaps Wren also was too universal. Perhaps the very ingenuity of
his mind led to distractions in too many directions. It may be, too,
that his inclinations towards the practical fusion of art, science,
and administration, which found full expression as an architect, had
always tended to draw him away from the pursuit of abstract science.
We may notice that even in the early days of Oxford he was always the
demonstrator and the contriver of experiments at the meetings of the
philosophers, and later, in the early history of the Royal Society, we
find that it was to Wren that the Society continually turned for the
solution of almost any problem that came under discussion. A letter he
wrote to Lord Brouncker in 1663, as to an appropriate show when the
King visited the Society, suggests he was already distrusting his own
skill and pleasure in experiment. “_Sciographical Knacks_ (of which an
hundred sorts may be given) are so easy in the invention, that now
they are cheap.”
The extracts from the Minute Books of the Royal Society show the
confidence of its members in Wren’s universality of mind and
constructive ability. At the second meeting of the Society on December
5, 1660, when Sir Robert Moray brought the King’s approval, “Mr. Wren
was desired to prepare against the next meeting for the pendulum
experiment.” A fortnight later the record states “that Dr. Petty and
Mr. Wren were desired to consider the philosophy of shipping ... and
that Mr. Wren bring in his account of the pendulum experiment.”
Wren was at Oxford in the Spring of 1661, and things did not go well
without him. On May 8 we find a resolution that a letter be sent
him charging him in the King’s name to make a globe of the moon
and likewise to continue the description of several insects that
he had begun. Sir Robert Moray transmitted the royal command in a
very affectionate letter. The moon was duly delivered to the King at
Whitehall, who received it with great satisfaction.
On September 4 there is reported some correspondence with Sir Kenelm
Digby and Monsieur Frenicle concerning Wren’s hypothesis about Saturn’s
rings. Later there is a letter of Wren’s which records that, although
in 1658 he had made a model to illustrate his theory of Saturn’s rings,
he had withdrawn this hypothesis as soon as he had learnt of Huygen’s
more convincing explanation.
On January 1, 1662, “Mr. Wren was requested to prosecute his design
of trying by several round pasteboards their velocity in falling.” On
the 8th Dr. Wren brought in a scheme of a weather-clock. On January
22 the pendulum experiment is described at length together with Lord
Brouncker’s calculation of the velocity of fall, and at the same
meeting it is recorded that “Dr. Wren showed his experiment of filling
a vessel with water which emptied itself when filled at a certain
height.”
On February 5 “Dr. Wren was desired to think of an easy way for a
universal measure different from that of a pendulum.” This was a
question of devising an absolute standard of length dependent upon
some natural phenomenon, which finally found expression in the metre
and again in a standard of length derived by physicists from the
wave-length of light.
On February 12 “Dr. Wren proposed blacklead as a better means than oil
for preserving the pivots of the wheels of watches and clocks from
grating or wearing out.”
On March 5 “the amanuensis was ordered to attend Dr. Wren to take
directions concerning the experiment of water in the long tube.” This
means the setting up of a water barometer, with water in place of the
mercury of Torricelli’s experiment.
On September 3, 1662, it is recorded that “it was referred to Dr.
Wren to take care of making the several experiments mentioned at the
last meetings concerning the _aquæ salientes_,” by which we are to
understand the earliest experiments on the rise of liquids in capillary
tubes. The record goes on to say, “The request of the Society made at
the last meeting to Dr. Wren about comparing the Earl of Sandwich’s
experiments was continued but it being a business of difficulty and
much calculation required more time than he could yet obtain from
his other employments.” None the less, a week later “Dr. Wren was
reminded of promoting Mr. Rooke’s observations concerning motions of
the satellites of Jupiter,” and a fortnight later still, “Dr. Wren
presented some cuts done by himself in a new way of etching whereby he
said he could almost as soon do a piece on a plate of glass as another
could draw it with a crayon on paper.” At the same meeting, too, “Dr.
Wren proposed the experiment of forcing up water in different pieces
of different diameter and different altitudes ... and was desired to
bring a description of this experiment at the next meeting....” On
October 8 of the same year “Dr. Wren offered an experiment about the
undulation of quicksilver in a crooked tube which he suggested was for
the velocity of it proportional to the vibration of a pendulum. He was
desired to prosecute the experiment and to give in an account of it.”
Sprat, in his _History of the Royal Society_, lays especial stress on a
scheme of work devised by Wren in the interests of agriculture.
“The second work (the first was the Doctrine of Motion) which he has
advanced, is the History of Seasons; which will be of admirable
benefit to mankind, if it shall be constantly pursued, and derived down
to posterity. His proposal therefore was, to comprehend a diary of
wind, weather, and other conditions of the air, as to heat, cold, and
weight; and also a general description of the year, whether contagious
or healthful to men or beasts; with an account of epidemical diseases,
of blasts, mildews, and other accidents, belonging to grain, cattle,
fish, fowl, and insects.”
Nor must we forget Wren’s anatomical and surgical experiments. In his
early Oxford days he devised instruments (fully described by Boyle)
for making injections into the blood of a dog, which he tried very
successfully (for everyone but the dog). He also skilfully removed the
spleen of another dog which “in less than a fortnight grew not only
well, but as sportive and wanton as before.”
Bound up in the heirloom _Parentalia_ is a most careful drawing
by Wren’s hand of the anatomy of the river eel. Instances of his
versatility over the whole field of science can be multiplied almost
indefinitely.
From the end of 1662 Wren’s name began to appear less frequently in
the records of the Royal Society. His increasing preoccupation with
architecture and, later, his journey to Paris provide the reason.
But these extracts do make clear that, even when he was preoccupied
with science, Wren’s energies were to some extent dissipated by
the universality of his interests and his practical skill as an
experimenter. They can be accepted as explaining why he did not become
supreme in any one branch of science, although any loss in this
direction was, perhaps, more than compensated for by the richness of
the experience and the breadth of mind that he was thereby enabled to
turn to the service of architecture.
Though architecture became an exacting mistress, he always kept in
touch with the Royal Society and, after a period as Vice-President
when he was often in the Chair, served as President in 1680. He could
not give the time to experiment, but he was an effective stimulus
in the organisation of scientific thought, and took an exceedingly
active part in discussions which ranged from comets to the making
of jessamine-scented gloves with daffodils, from Mr. Mercator’s new
projection of maps to the conclusion that “all wholesome food should
have oils” (which smacks of vitamines), from the structure of peat to
the contrivance of an azimuth compass.
The incredible boy of Wadham days had become the tireless President at
fifty, immersed in the greatest architectural practice of his century,
but still the enthusiastic scientist. I find it all very astonishing.
CHAPTER V
BEGINNINGS OF ARCHITECTURE AND VISIT TO PARIS
Wren’s work as an architect seems to have begun in 1661, when, at the
instance of John Evelyn, the King sent for him to come from Oxford
to serve as assistant to Sir John Denham, Surveyor-General to His
Majesty’s Works. Denham was a moderate poet, but no architect, and
his appointment was merely an excuse for giving him a salary. John
Webb, “Inigo Jones’s man,” had been serving Denham as an assistant
and was naturally distressed at the interposition of Wren. This is no
place to attempt to estimate Webb’s place in English architecture. He
is put very high by some critics, but Evelyn’s description of him as
“Inigo Jones’s man” is probably fair. He had attempted unsuccessfully
to obtain the succession to Inigo Jones, and, on this second failure,
he seems to have retired from practice. The neglect of him in Wren’s
favour may have been a personal hardship, but nobody will believe
that English architecture was the sufferer. Webb belonged to another
generation, and the indolent Charles had a right perception when he
summoned the scientist to shape the architecture of the new era of the
Restoration.
In relation to Wren’s later and definitive appointment as
Surveyor-General, there is a reference in Pepys’ Diary which I never
read without a sense of personal relief.
On March 21st, 1668-9, Pepys met Hugh May, very grieved that he had
failed to secure the reversion of the Surveyorship of the King’s Works,
on the recent death of Sir John Denham, “by the unkindness of the Duke
of Buckingham, who hath brought in Dr. Wren, though, he tells me, he
hath been his servant for twenty years together,” and so on, “and yet
the Duke is so ungrateful as to put him by, which is an ill thing,
though Dr. Wren is a worthy man.” It was a lucky escape for English
architecture, but it is difficult to believe that Buckingham, or indeed
anybody, even in such venal times, would have denied to Wren the post
which he filled so perfectly, in favour of so sorry a fellow as Hugh
May. It is worth noting that when May died in February, 1683-4, his
post as Controller of the Works at Windsor Castle fell to Wren. If May
had never been in charge at Windsor that Castle might have been spared
the indignity of the Upper Bailey, which he designed of an ugliness so
surpassing that Wyattville’s remodelling, dreary as it is, was a vast
improvement.
How May saw the duties and opportunities of Surveyor-General of the
King’s Works is shown by his consoling thoughts recorded by Pepys. The
King was kind to May and promised him a pension of £300 out of the
Works (presumably an euphemism for out of Wren’s emoluments), and that
would be better than the place, because, owing to the lack of money, he
would have had to disoblige most people, being not able to do what they
desire to their lodgings.
There are many documents to show that Wren dealt assiduously and
successfully with the daily task of “lodgings” and other trivialities
belonging to the interminable routine of his post, but it is evident
that Hugh May would have done that and no more. It was an escape.
For the first two years of Wren’s new appointment as Denham’s
assistant, he received no commissions for public works, and when the
King, at the close of the war for Tangier, offered him the task of
designing the mole and fortifications he wisely declined on grounds of
health. The letter of invitation was, it is worth noting, written by
his cousin, Matthew Wren, the bishop’s son, who was secretary to Hyde,
the Lord Chancellor. Wren’s decision lost him a good salary and risked
the reversion of Sir John Denham’s post of Surveyor-General, which
was promised him if he would go to Tangier; but we may be thankful
that he resisted even so honourable an exile, and he seems not to have
suffered by it. His early labours at old St. Paul’s will be described
in the proper chapter, but his first original work in architecture
dates from early in 1663, if we except a doorway at Ely Cathedral,
of the same year. On April 29 he submitted to the Royal Society his
model for a theatre to be built at Oxford for the public acts of the
University. The Sheldonian struck a note that was to become typical of
Wren’s work, for he was not afraid to adventure on a flat ceiling with
a span of no less than 68 feet. It was a cunning piece of construction
and covered in a chamber of great interest but of uncertain design.
In the same year, 1663, was begun the Chapel of Pembroke College,
Cambridge, a thank-offering made by his uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren,
for coming safely through his long imprisonment. Pembroke Chapel is a
fine achievement of much greater artistic interest than the Sheldonian,
and, being completed long before the theatre, was no doubt the model to
which people turned, in Wren’s early days of architecture, as the proof
of his real capacity in his new profession.
In 1665 he was called in by Trinity College, Oxford, to design a new
inner court with the definite instruction that he was to build a
quadrangle. Wren protested that this idea was wrong, but showed his
skill in dealing with troublesome clients thus early. Writing to Dr.
Bathurst, then President of Trinity, he said: “I am convinced with
Machiavel, or some unlucky fellow, ’tis no matter whether I quote true,
that _the world is generally governed by words_. I perceive the name
of a quadrangle will carry with it those whom you say may possibly
be your benefactors, though it be much the worse situation for the
chambers, and the beauty of the college, and of the particular pile of
building ... but, to be sober, if any body, as you say, will pay for a
quadrangle, there is no dispute to be made; let them have a quadrangle,
though a lame one, somewhat like a three-legged table.”
Wren had his way: the Trinity court is three-sided. Elmes, in his _Life
of Wren_, says that the additions to Trinity College, Cambridge, were
going on at the same time, but this is a characteristic and obvious
blunder, for the letter from Wren to the authorities of Trinity, quoted
by Elmes, refers to the filling of the library arches with “relieves
of stone, of which I have seen the effect abroad in good buildings.”
Wren’s journey abroad did not take place until the summer of 1665, and
occupied about eight months. He started for Paris in the first week
of July, bearing a letter to the Earl of St. Albans, who represented
English virtuosity in the French capital. So much we know from the
reprint in _Parentalia_ of a letter which returned thanks to a friend
for getting him the introduction; but the chief value of it for us is
that Wren took the opportunity to record some of his impressions. He
was enchanted with the collections of rarities that he saw, and no
doubt pleased himself with infinite conversations about science and
philosophy with the scores of distinguished men he must have met. But,
unhappily, he was too busy to keep a diary or to write home at length,
and we have to be content with a few, albeit precious, _obiter dicta_.
“... I hope I shall give you a very good Account of all the best
Artists of France; my Business now is to pry into Trades and Arts, I
put myself into all Shapes to humour them; ’tis a Comedy to me, and
tho’ sometimes expenceful, I am loth yet to leave it.”
Wren had a delightful and fruitful visit.
“I have,” he wrote, “busied myself in surveying the most esteem’d
Fabricks of Paris, and the Country round; the Louvre for a while was
my daily Object, where no less than a thousand Hands are constantly
employ’d in the Works; some in laying mighty Foundations, some in
raising the Stories, Columns, Entablements, etc., with vast Stones,
by great and useful Engines; others in Carving, Inlaying of Marbles,
Plaistering, Painting, Gilding, etc., Which altogether make a School
of Architecture, the best probably, at this Day in Europe. The College
of The four Nations is usually admir’d, but the Artist hath purposely
set it ill-favouredly that he might shew his Wit in struggling with an
inconvenient Situation.” This last is a shrewd bit of criticism which
did not apply to Wren’s own work, for he always made the best of his
opportunities.
It was the Abbé Charles who introduced him to Bernini, “who shew’d me
his Designs for the Louvre and of the King’s Statue ... his design of
the Louvre I would have given my skin for, but the old reserv’d Italian
gave me but a few Minutes view; it was five little Designs in Paper,
for which he hath receiv’d as many thousand Pistoles; I had only Time
to copy it in my Fancy and Memory; I shall be able by Discourse, and a
Crayon, to give you a tolerable account of it.”
He had evidently planned to spend at least six months in studying
French architecture, for he wrote: “My Lord Berkley returns to England
at Christmas, when I propose to take the Opportunity of his Company,
and by that Time, to perfect what I have on the Anvil: Observations of
the present State of Architecture, Arts and Manufactures in France.”
Unhappily, his sight-seeing seems to have absorbed all his time in
Paris, and when he got back the torrent of work carried him along and
made impossible the fulfilment of the final promise of this letter.
Wren had an easy pen, and it is sad to think that what he had “on the
Anvil” never got into the muddled mass of manuscript from which his son
compiled the _Parentalia_. What would we not give for more portraits of
French architects and artists like his thumb-nail sketch of Bernini,
that “old reserv’d Italian” whose plans for the Louvre never went any
further? In the result, we have lost the observations which would
have been a great addition to the literature of architecture. He did
not confine himself to the buildings of Paris. “The Palace, or if you
please, the Cabinet of Versailles call’d me twice to view it; the
Mixtures of Brick, Stone, blue Tile and Gold make it look like a rich
Livery: Not an Inch within but is crowded with little Curiosities of
Ornaments: the Women, as they make here the Language and Fashions,
and meddle with Politicks and Philosophy, so they sway also in
Architecture; Works of Filgrand, and little Knacks are in great Vogue;
but _Building certainty ought to have the Attribute of eternal, and
therefore, the only Thing uncapable of new Fashions_. The masculine
Furniture of Palais Mazarine pleas’d me much better where is a great
and noble Collection of antique Statues and Bustos.”
[Illustration: PLATE II
WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY.]
Probably Wren had little sympathy with the efforts of that typical
Frenchman Philibert de l’Orme to invent new Orders a century earlier;
and is there a finer epigram of architecture than the phrase in italics?
But his travels took him wider than Versailles.
“After the incomparable Villas of Vaux and Maisons, I shall but name
Ruel, Courances, Chilly, Essoane, St. Maur, St. Mande, Issy, Meudon,
Rincy, Chantilly, Verneul, Lioncour, all which, and I might add many
others, I have survey’d; and that I might not lose the Impressions of
them, I shall bring you almost all France in Paper, which I found by
some or other ready design’d to my Hand, in which I have spent both
Labour and some Money.”
Would that Wren’s collections and drawings had been preserved with
something of the faithfulness which makes the Adam collection at
Sir John Soane’s Museum such a mine of information on one of Wren’s
greatest successors. One reference is helpful as showing the source of
much of Wren’s detail, though the work itself is informing without his
note:
“I have purchas’d a great deal of Taille-douce, that I might give
our Country-men Examples of Ornaments and Grotesks, in which the
Italians themselves confess the French to excel.”
It would have been better if Wren had relied more on English decorative
motives.
Unfortunately there is silence in the letter on the purpose of the
jaunt abroad. Was the stay in Paris the prelude to an intended visit to
Italy, or was it an end in itself? It is odd that he should not have
followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Renaissance at its
source, but there is no written evidence that he ever projected an
extension of his journey southwards. The effect of the Paris journey
was to give a French accent to Wren’s work throughout his life, and to
dilute the current of Palladian influence, which was not fully renewed
in England until the Earl of Burlington, William Kent, and others
returned to Inigo Jones and his Italian master as the fountains of
inspiration.
It is useless to speculate as to how Wren would have developed on a
fuller Italian basis. His art would have been more informed: he would
almost certainly have avoided the technical uncertainties that mar some
of his finest achievements: but he could hardly have lost the freedom
and inventiveness which make him one of the most individual of English
architects.
One of the results of Wren’s French orientation might have been that of
becoming a follower of Vignola rather than Palladio. In spite, however,
of Mansard’s work at Maisons and Blois, Wren, probably from the
influence of his great predecessor, Inigo Jones, remained on the whole
faithful to Palladio and the Ancients. As we shall see, the two-order
system of the exterior of St. Paul’s was a practical necessity, and not
an artistic preference. There is evidence enough from his work that he
did not regard architecture as bound up with the application of Orders
to building, or as the only means of salvation.
CHAPTER VI
TOWN-PLANNING
Perhaps the most pregnant thing that Wren learnt in France was the
value of planning on spacious lines. England was, in 1665, a country
of mediæval cities. Such classical buildings as marked the change of
taste were set down amidst surroundings of picturesque confusion. If
Inigo Jones had been able to create the great Palace of Whitehall, of
which the Banqueting Hall is but a symbolic fragment, the Grand Manner
would have been established in the land, but when Wren returned from
France early in March, 1666, there was nothing to stimulate him except
the Piazza of Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields laid out by Inigo
Jones, and his memory of the Place des Vosges of Henri Quatre. Perhaps
Bernini spoke of his great lay-out in front of St. Peter’s.
The Great Fire of 1666 gave him the opportunity. By command of the
King, inspired doubtless by John Evelyn, who was himself an amateur
town-planner of skill, Wren “took an Exact Survey of the whole Area
and Confines of the Burning, having traced over with great Trouble and
Hazard, the great Plain of Ashes and Ruins; and designed a Plan or
Model of a new City, in which the Deformity and Inconveniences of the
old Town were remedied....”
[Illustration: PLATE III
WREN’S PLAN OF LONDON.]
The outlines of his plan are seen in Plate III. They provided that the
Royal Exchange should stand in a great piazza from which ten streets
were to radiate; three were to run to the river, the midmost to London
Bridge, and the river was to be embanked from Blackfriars to the Tower.
Round the Exchange, on the islands formed by the radiating streets,
were to be built the halls of the Goldsmiths’ Company (the Insurance
Office), the Mint, and the Post and Excise Offices. From the Exchange
and running westwards were to be two great streets, one passing the
Guildhall, surrounded by the halls of the twelve great companies, and
another leading to St. Paul’s. The Cathedral was to stand in a great
triangular piazza at the junction of the street from the Royal Exchange
and another running eastwards through two great octagonal or round
piazzas to Tower Hill.
Westwards of the Cathedral Wren devised a circular piazza from which
radiated eight streets.
It was a gallant scheme which avoided all acute angles, and set the
parish churches on sites “conspicuous and insular.” The streets were to
be of three magnitudes--the three greatest, which ran east and west,
and the two chief cross streets 90 feet wide, secondary streets 60
feet, and no lanes less than 30 feet. A great canal was to run from the
Thames up Bridewell northwards under Holborn Bridge, and all offensive
trades and those that used great fires were to be banished out of
the City.
[Illustration: S^T AUGUSTIN’S]
The King approved the plan, as well he might, and then the trouble
began. Wren worked out a scheme whereby the freeholders of the City
were to surrender their properties temporarily to Commissioners. Their
areas and frontages were to be noted, and new sites given to them
on the new alinement of streets with equal advantages as to area and
frontage, and, needless to say, vastly greater advantages in amenity
and ultimate value. No proprietor would have been seated exactly on
his own site, but none at any considerable distance from it, and
the intelligent grouping of trades would have been of advantage
to everyone. But the individualism of the Londoner overbore every
advantage that Wren offered him. He was content to lose the chance
of being citizen of the most convenient if not the most magnificent
City the world had seen, and incidentally of benefiting his pocket
enormously, if only he could build again on the odd-shaped sites that
he had inherited from his forefathers. But we must not blame the
seventeenth-century Londoner too much. Wren was an honest man, but
the citizens might well be suspicious lest his town-planning schemes
developed into a typical piece of Caroline jobbery. There was the
little affair of a vast sum of money voted for a noble monument to
Charles the First. Wren designed it, as bidden, and the money was
forthcoming, but the monument remained on paper, to the benefit of
Charles the Second’s pocket. Wren was an apostle of town-planning born
out of due time, and his vision faded. We are constrained as the years
go by to spend millions in re-creating small scraps of his scheme in
the name of street improvements.
[Illustration: S^T MARTIN’S & S^T PAUL’S]
But the labour he gave to his great plan was not all wasted.
He perceived that the Cathedral and the parish churches were
architecturally the keys of the situation, and when he came to the
rebuilding of both he saw London as a City marked by its churches.
Foiled in his attempt to set them as elements in long vistas of noble
streets of uniform houses, he at least could determine that they should
give a beautiful skyline, and that the parish churches should be
grouped justly in relation to the great bulk of the domed Cathedral.
The picture of London from the Thames which Canaletto drew in 1767
shows what we have lost with the destruction of so many of Wren’s
towers and spires and the blotting out of many others by the hideous
incubus of Cannon Street Station and rows of ten-storied warehouses.
Wren travelled much by the highway we neglect, in a boat on the Thames,
and he must have thought much of the skyline as he passed from Hampton
Court to St. Paul’s, and watched the City growing under his hand.
It seems clear that, defeated in his major design, Wren determined on
the next best policy of renewing the skyline of the old City. Generally
speaking, he rebuilt a tower where a tower only had stood and provided
a spire where one had been before. It is only from the lantern of St.
Paul’s or from the gallery of the Monument that we can now get an idea
of how entrancing London’s skyline was when Wren died, but there is
still enough to be seen to mark him as a great town-planner and to make
the student breathe ineffectual sighs that the London of 1666 was not
worthy of him.
CHAPTER VII
ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
Turner said of Wren’s Cathedral that “the dome of St. Paul’s _makes_
London,” but the same shrewd appreciation fell in better phrase from
the lips of a friend of mine aged seven. He had been taken by his
father to St. Paul’s, and on his return home was observed to be drawing
industriously. When questioned as to his task, he held up a rudimentary
sketch of the Cathedral, in which the crowning feature of Wren’s
achievement loomed unduly large, and replied: “_I’ve drawn the Dome of
London_.” I have met no better phrase of architectural criticism in
more than thirty years of reading. The monument of Italian Unity has
shifted the architectural command of Rome from the dome of St. Peter’s
to the Capitoline Hill, but St. Paul’s still crowns London with Wren’s
dome.
Sir Christopher’s connection with the Cathedral dates from 1663, when
the derelict state of the old church drove the King to appoint a
Commission to consider its restoration. It is not certain, though it is
likely, that both Wren and Evelyn served as Commissioners; but little
was done save casual repairs until about May, 1666, when Wren laid
before the Commission a report descriptive of the state of the fabric
with recommendations as to what should be done.
[Illustration: PLATE IV
THE WELBECK PORTRAIT.]
There were two parties on the Commission: one for mere patching
and mending, another, with Wren as protagonist, for a substantial
reconstruction on classical lines. Inigo Jones, when he added the
great western portico, had refaced the outside of the church with big
stones, part of a general scheme by which the cathedral would have been
re-fronted, as happened to so many of the older churches of France
and Italy. Wren’s policy was to do the same to the interior, “and it
will be as easy to perform it after a good Roman manner as to follow
the Gothick Rudeness of the old Design.” He favoured a new vault and
cupola, not of lead-covered timber, but of “brick, if it be plaistered
with Stucco, which is a harder plaister.” The essence of his proposals
was, to remodel the tower and crossing. He was, in fact, proposing to
remove the four great piers of the old crossing, as Alan of Walsingham
had done at Ely, where the old central tower had collapsed. As Wren’s
uncle was Bishop of Ely, he was familiar with this bold idea. “I cannot
propose a better remedy than by cutting off the inner corners of the
Cross, _to reduce this middle part into a spacious Dome or Rotundo_,
with a Cupola or hemispherical roof, and upon the Cupola a Lantern with
a spring top, to rise proportionably. By this means the Church will be
rendered spacious in the middle, which may be a very proper place for
a vast auditory.” Here was the germ of the St. Paul’s which we know.
On August 27, 1666, there was a lively meeting of the Commission when
Evelyn, as we learn from his Diary, backed Wren’s proposals against
Chichele and Pratt, who were against any new-fangled notions, and
wanted merely to repair the steeple on its old foundation. “But we,”
writes Evelyn, “totally rejected it and persisted that it required a
new foundation, not only in regard of the necessity, but for that the
shape of what stood was very mean and we had a mind to build it with a
noble cupola, a form of church building not as yet known in England but
of wonderful grace.” It is difficult to guess why Pratt, as a pupil of
Inigo Jones, resisted the idea of extending to the interior what the
elder master had done outside. Perhaps Pratt resented the intrusion
of Wren on some personal grounds. Alternatively it is conceivable
that the Jones school were more impressed with the merits of mediæval
architecture than is commonly supposed. As it turned out, Chichele and
Pratt were right about the solidity of the old central piers. Contrary
to experience outside London they proved very difficult to demolish. It
may be that some tradition of the old Roman secret remained in London,
where old walls are a byword for resistance to removal. If Wren had
known as much about mortars as the old builders, much of the trouble
with his St. Paul’s would have been avoided.
After much argument it was agreed the innovators should produce a
plan and estimate. This design is preserved at All Souls, and shows
an inner and outer dome surmounted by a lantern crowned with a huge
openwork pineapple 68 feet high, of what Sir Reginald Blomfield justly
calls “a monstrous and horrible design.”
But the scheme went no further. On Sunday, September 2nd, within a week
of the Commission meeting, the Great Fire broke out. By the 7th Pepys
saw the “miserable sight of Paul’s Church, with all the roof fallen
and the body of the quire fallen into St. Faith’s.” Evelyn was there
the same day and infinitely concerned: “Thus lay in ashes that most
venerable Church.” The destruction was complete.
Very soon after the Fire, Wren was appointed principal architect for
rebuilding the whole City, and set about fitting part of St. Paul’s
ruins for temporary use in Divine Service. On January 15, 1667, the
King made order to that effect, and on March 5 a sub-committee was set
up to do something. They seem to have been lamentable dullards, for
they still harped on the idea of patching up the ruins, and attempted
to do so, despite Wren’s protests. He seems to have followed the
wise course of leaving them to their tinkerings and to the Nemesis
of a tottering fabric, with good and inevitable results. After the
shattering experience of the Fire, the new facing of large stones
could not be secured properly to the old walls. A year and some money
had been wasted before Dean Sancroft wrote to Wren, then at Oxford,
on April 25, 1668, to say: “What you whispered in my ear, at your
last coming hither, is come to pass. Our work at the west end of St.
Paul’s is fallen about our ears.” Sancroft expected worse would follow,
confessed that they were helpless without Wren, and begged him to come
to London. It would appear that Wren was not satisfied as to their
change of heart, and thought it wiser to let them muddle along into
worse trouble before he went to their aid.
They still went on patching until things got quite hopeless, when
Wren received a peremptory order from the Archbishop and the other
Commissioners to attend with all speed. In one thing Sancroft seems to
have been wiser than Wren. He was all for the planning of a “design,
handsome and noble, and suitable to all the ends of it, and to the
reputation of the city and the nation, and to take it for granted that
money will be had to accomplish it.” Wren wanted to know what money
they would provide before he set about a design, and to delay action
until men’s minds were less distracted with all the troubles that
followed the Fire. After more argument Wren convinced everyone that the
first business was to give up all ideas of patching and to sweep the
site clear of the ruins. This task lasted until April, 1674.
[Illustration: THE SECOND DESIGN FOR ST. PAUL’S, ALSO KNOWN AS THE
“REJECTED DESIGN” AND THE “MODEL DESIGN.”]
The story of Wren’s many designs for the new Cathedral is confusing
and need not be followed here in detail. The First Design, made before
the Fire, has been mentioned. The Second Design, also known as the
“Rejected Design” and the “Model Design,” was an attempt to gratify
“the taste of the Conoisseurs and Criticks with something coloss
and beautiful, conformable to the best stile of the Greek and Roman
architecture.”
This was one of several submitted to the King, and was approved by
Royal Warrant of November 12, 1673. A model of it was made, now in the
South Kensington Museum, and its plan and perspective are reproduced
here. It represented a great break from traditional Cathedral
treatment. Planned as a Greek cross, to which a short western arm (a
vestibule or narthex) was added later, a central space 120 feet in
diameter was formed by eight great piers carrying a dome, and the
ambulatory included four shallow domes. The octagonal church of Santa
Maria della Salute gives perhaps as good an idea as any of the general
scope of the scheme, which Sir Charles Barry thought might supply a
hint for English church building. The western vestibule was roofed
with a smaller dome and finished with a colonnaded portico. It was a
noble idea, but the clergy thought it unsuitable for services, and the
absence of chapels annoyed the Duke of York, who, with his supporters,
still hoped for a restoration of the old religion. Wren had to abandon
the scheme, not, it is said, without actual tears. It is recorded in
_Parentalia_ that “the Surveyor, in private Conversation, always seem’d
to set a higher value on this Design, than any he had made before or
since; as what was laboured with more Study and Success; and (had he
not been over-rul’d by those, whom it was his Duty to Obey) what he
would have put into Execution with more Chearfulness and Satisfaction
to himself than the latter.”
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE “REJECTED DESIGN.”]
About eighteen months passed before the Third Design was submitted to
the King and approved by warrant dated May 14, 1675. It is known as the
Warrant Design. So unworthy is it of Wren’s genius that his apologists
have been ingenious in explaining it away. Miss Phillimore thought it
the result of overwork and worry. Loftie believed that Wren was “in
the nearest thing to a bad temper of which his meek and quiet spirit
was capable,” and pitched it at Charles as a joke, thinking that the
King might as well sign the silliest design he could produce as he had
rejected a sound scheme. Be that as it may--and it is not very like
Wren to play the fool--Charles passed this preposterous design as “very
artificial proper and useful,” giving Wren “liberty in the prosecution
of his work, to make some Variations, rather Ornamental than Essential,
as from time to time he should see proper, and to leave the Whole to
his management.” The design now reproduced carries its own condemnation
on its face. The western towers and the portico with its single skinny
Order were exceedingly feeble, and the crowning of the dome by a kind
of parody of St. Bride’s steeple is a feature that is best passed over
in silence.
But if it were not simply a lark, it might have been the result of a
demand for a spire that should remind London of the glory of St. Paul’s
old spire, which had been the highest in Europe.
[Illustration: WEST ELEVATION OF THE “WARRANT DESIGN.”]
Happily Wren interpreted his permission for ornamental variations
by drastic changes in essentials in the elevations, but he did not
greatly change the “warrant” plan. His frame of mind may well be
judged by the note, which follows the recital of the 1675 Warrant,
in _Parentalia_: “From that time, the Surveyor resolved to make no
more Models, or publickly expose his Drawings, which (as he had found
by Experience) did but lose Time, and subjected his Business, many
Times, to incompetent Judges.” Therefore, just as the present Houses
of Parliament grew out of the castle design, done by Barry in 1836, by
his twenty years of thought and work, so the grandeur of St. Paul’s
developed with the mind of Wren incessantly occupied in its creation
for nearly double that time. No one could help him in this gradual
evolution of his thought, but many could, and did, obstruct its
execution.
The taking down of the vast ruins of the old Cathedral made a heavy
task, and Wren took to gunpowder for demolishing the piers of the old
central tower. This worked well, but on its second employment by a
subordinate, when Wren was out of town, too much gunpowder was used
and a stone was blown into a neighbouring house. No bones were broken,
but Wren was told to find less desperate methods and achieved his end
with “that ancient Engine in War, the Battering-ram.” Wren’s troubles
with the foundations made a long and too technical story for so slight
a sketch as this, but it is fair to his memory to set down that though
some early trouble was experienced from settlements which young Edward
Strong, the son of Wren’s master-mason, was called in to repair, the
present troubles are due more to the draining of the subsoil by recent
engineering works, such as great sewers, and to the use of rubble
inside a casing of ashlar, than to any defect in the foundation design.
One notable change in the design of the West Front must be emphasised
because it marks the influence, in this case the overmastering
influence, of material over design. Wren devised the front with a
single great Order (as Inigo Jones had done in the portico he added),
therein following the scheme of St. Peter’s at Rome. Bramante had
quarried at Tivoli pieces big enough for the drums of his columns, but
had to spoil his cornices for lack of stones of adequate size. Wren was
defeated in his hope of securing drums big enough from the Portland,
Rock Abbey, and other quarries, and “for these Reasons the Surveyor
concluded upon Portland-stone, and was able to use two Orders and by
that Means to keep the just Proportions of his Cornices; otherwise he
must have fallen short of the Heighth of the Fabrick, which now exerts
itself over all the Country, as well as City, as it did of old, when
that Structure, tho’ rude, was lofty and majestick.”
[Illustration: PLATE V
BUST BY EDWARD PEARCE AT THE ASHMOLEAN, DONE ABOUT 1673, AND SHOWING
WREN AS A MAN OF FORTY-ONE.]
The first stone of the new church was laid in 1675, and during
thirty-five years, from the forty-third to the seventy-eighth of the
architect’s life, St. Paul’s was his constant preoccupation. Troubles
were many. The 1675 plan was without the two western chapels (that now
used by the Order of St. Michael and St. George and its fellow on the
north side). They were introduced into the scheme by the insistence
of the Duke of York. But the fundamental novelty of St. Paul’s, the
double dome, was present in his pre-Fire design, and whatever else was
changed, that remained.
Persons of Revival Gothic mind have been much troubled in conscience by
the “falsity” of this treatment, though it has the admitted result of
giving an absolutely right effect inside and out, and has been followed
in nearly all the subsequent domes of this scale. The provision of an
inner and an outer dome is held nowadays to be justified abundantly
by the result. The brick cone that triumphantly carries the lantern,
which is as high and large as many a church tower, is one of the many
evidences of Wren’s engineering skill.
The architect was fortunate in the men who carried out his work. Edward
Strong, the master-mason, and Richard Jennings, the master-carpenter,
were faithful servants in carrying out the bones of the great
structure; and such artists as Grinling Gibbons in the choir stalls,
and Tijou in the wonderful iron screens served Wren’s turn to
perfection. At St. Paul’s there is none of that carelessness of detail
which defaces many of the City churches. There is little doubt that
Wren was constantly on the works, watching everything in detail,
revising and directing on the spot the great fabric as it grew under
his hand.
[Illustration: PLAN OF ST. PAUL’S AS BUILT.
The dotted lines show the alinement of railings as intended by Wren.]
The cost of rebuilding was borne by the “coal-money,” a duty of 1s.
6d. a chaldron on all coal imported into London, of which four-fifths
were allocated to St. Paul’s. Even so the works were often in danger
for lack of funds, and money had to be borrowed in advance of the
coal-money receipts.
[Illustration: PLATE VI
THE WEST FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S.]
The funds received from all sources, including borrowings, amounted in
1700 to £1,167,474, but part of this went in interest paid out and in
repaying loans and part in acquiring neighbouring property. The net
cost is given by Longman as £746,661.
The choir was opened for Divine Service on December 2, 1697, on the
Thanksgiving Day for the Peace on the Treaty of Ryswick. By 1708
the dome was ready to be covered. The Committee wanted copper to be
used. Wren held out for lead, and lead it was and is. In 1710 young
Christopher Wren was deputed by his father to lay the top-stone of the
lantern which surmounts the dome, and did it in the presence of Sir
Christopher and Edward Strong and other workmen who had been engaged on
the building. It was a proud day for the old man of seventy-eight who
had carried through a unique task despite every difficulty.
He was treated with incredible meanness. From the start of the work he
had received the meagre salary of £200 a year, and in 1696-7 an Act
“for the completing and adorning the Cathedral Church” was passed which
included the miserable provision “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 with the utmost diligence and
expedition.”
It was a spiteful business, which Wren bitterly resented, and not
until Christmas, 1711, did he secure the payment of the arrears of
half-pay on the passing of an Act which certified the Cathedral was
finished. But even then much remained to be done, and in the doing of
it Wren was hampered and thwarted at every turn by the narrow-minded
Commissioners. It is a miserable story and hardly worth telling but
that Wren’s reputation needs to be defended as to some features
of St. Paul’s which he resisted ineffectually. The squabble about
the enclosing railings is no longer interesting because they have
disappeared, but the painting of the inner dome by Thornhill with
opaque masses of figures instead of the mosaic Wren had intended
was a severe trouble to him. Still worse was the insistence of the
Commissioners on the balustrade which crowns the upper cornice. Wren’s
letter to them in October, 1717, was a vigorous protest for a man of
eighty-five. “I take leave, first, to declare that I never designed
a balustrade. Persons of little skill in architecture did expect, I
believe, to see something they had been used to in Gothic structures,
and _ladies think nothing well without an edging_. I should gladly
have complied with the vulgar taste, but I suspended for the reasons
following.” The reasons were good and many, but the Commissioners
preferred to be lady-like, and the balustrade was put up. This was in
1717. In 1718 King George the First superseded Wren as Surveyor-General
in favour of a rascal called William Benson, so incompetent that he was
dismissed ignominiously a year later.
[Illustration: PLATE VII
ST. PAUL’S UNDER THE DOME.
From an old engraving dedicated to Bishop Van Mildert by Josiah
Taylor.]
In Wren’s own writing there appears in the MS. chronology of his life
and works an entry in Greek which runs, translated:
_April 26, 1718._
And there arose a king that knew not Joseph.
And Gallio cared for none of these things.
He retired to his house at Hampton Court observing “Nunc me jubet
Fortuna expeditius philosophari” and, in a strain of piety, which was
as truly characteristic as the Stoic note, “If I glory, it is in the
singular mercy of God, who has enabled me to begin and finish my great
work, so conformable to the ancient model.” After more than two hundred
years we rejoice to add, in the words of the Bicentenary Service, “We
render Thee thanks, O Lord, for the singular gifts which Thou didst
bestow upon Thy servant, Christopher Wren.”
The malevolence of his masters at the Cathedral pursued him to the
grave, but it gave his son the opportunity of inventing an immortal
epitaph. Sir Christopher was buried in the crypt, but the suggestion of
a monument was rejected by the authorities.
So the younger Christopher, seeking to explain the absence of a fitting
memorial in the place of his father’s greatest triumph, wrote on the
plain tablet which marks his resting-place, as the closing words of his
epitaph,
“SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS: CIRCUMSPICE.”
But the fatuous proceedings of Commissioners and King alike have faded
into their proper perspective, and St. Paul’s remains the supreme
monument of the genius of a single architect.
What, in fact, did Wren achieve in the building of St. Paul’s? Much
can be written of his handling of the Orders, of his structure of the
dome, of the details of the plan, and so forth; but there are broader
issues involved. St. Paul’s gave the first opportunity since the
Middle Ages for the creation of a Cathedral in England, and Wren’s
task was a Protestant Cathedral. Hitherto the Cathedral builder had
made two churches under one roof, a choir for Canons, whether secular
or regular, or for monks, and a nave for the laity, the two divided by
a solid screen which prevented nave worshippers from seeing the high
altar. Wren’s plan was a half-way house between the mediæval type and
the idea of St. Peter’s with the high altar as the central feature
under the dome. It was a classical translation of the plan of his
uncle’s Cathedral of Ely, in so far as it retained the aisle vistas
by supporting the dome on eight piers instead of four. It was English
in that it set the altar in a ritual choir well to the east of the
crossing. It was Protestant and characteristic of Wren’s views in its
provision of an admirable “auditory.”
St. Paul’s Cathedral may fairly be called the apogee of English
Baroque, because it is the finest English expression of what Mr.
Geoffrey Scott calls the Architecture of Humanism. It represents
with peculiar faithfulness the outlook of the best minds of the last
half of the seventeenth century, for Wren was one of them, and had
the power to give it expression. St. Peter’s, the only church with
which it is not unnaturally compared, was a _pasticcio_ of many minds
brought to bear in succession on a far larger but not æsthetically
more difficult problem, and it suffers from a consequent confusion,
as well as from its abnormal scale. St. Paul’s was the work of one
commanding personality, who developed indeed in the course of its
building--the difference between the warrant plan and the church itself
is proof enough of that--but he did so consistently and with a single
aim. Westminster Abbey is the supreme flower of Gothic art in England,
if not in the world, and the perfect expression of the Age of Faith.
St. Paul’s is a no less perfect emblem of what England could make of
humanistic ideals in art joined with robust English Churchmanship
expressed through so sincere an Anglican as was Sir Christopher Wren.
St. Paul’s is incomparable--the word is used advisedly--as a piece of
architecture, and it is prodigiously English.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CITY CHURCHES
The parish churches of Sir Christopher Wren once numbered fifty-three.
Of these, St. Andrew Holborn, St. Clement Danes, and St. James
Piccadilly, cannot rightly be included amongst the City churches,
as they are outside “the square mile.” Of the remaining fifty, St.
Dunstan-in-the-East, St. Mary Aldermary, St. Sepulchre, and the
destroyed St. Christopher, were only repaired by Wren. Fifteen have
been wholly destroyed, and of St. Mary Somerset only the tower remains.
Only thirty therefore remain in the City, and of these many have been
so modernised that their value has in part disappeared.
[Illustration: S^T VEDAST]
Many devout admirers of Wren have done his memory a serious disservice
by indiscriminate praise. It is no doubt an amiable fault, but it
does much to confuse serious public issues, such as the question of
“the nineteen doomed churches” which has lately agitated the public
mind and will do so again. I will not discuss here whether it is
ever permissible to remove any church, but if destruction can in any
circumstances be allowed, discussion must revolve round the quality of
what is doomed. It is common form for disputants to talk as though
all city churches were Wren churches, and all Wren churches perfect
churches. In point of fact thirteen of the nineteen were by Wren. Of
the six that were not, St. Mary Woolnoth, by Hawksmoor, is of as great
importance as a Wren church, and much more interesting than many. Of
the “doomed” thirteen by Wren, St. Vedast Foster Lane, is said now to
be out of danger: the steeple is superb, the nave merely a restoration
with some good fittings left. The leaded lantern on the tower of St.
Nicholas Cole Abbey, is exceedingly valuable, and its removal would
be a crime, but it would be a waste of tears to shed them on the
modernized nave. St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, also has a pleasant
little lantern, but if anyone supposes the interior is typical Wren he
cannot detect the more glaring feats of the restorer.
[Illustration: S^T ALBAN]
In the case of St. Michael Paternoster Royal, St. Michael Cornhill, St.
Mary Aldermanbury, St. Anne and St. Agnes, St. Alban Wood Street, and
All Hallows Lombard Street, there is enough of characteristic Wren in
tower or church, or both, to justify retention; but it is difficult to
be enthusiastic about St. Clement Eastcheap, now, and it cannot have
been easy before the church was modernized. If a hand were laid on a
stone of St. Magnus London Bridge, it would be an abomination.
The tower of St. Dunstan-in-the-East is unique for its date, and
of quite extraordinary interest: any idea of removing it should be
resisted with vehemence. But why anyone should be the least concerned
at the disappearance of the body of the church is known only to those
who detect beauty in the Gothic adventures of Messrs. Laing and Tite
in the year 1810. Of St. Mary-at-Hill the ugly 1780 tower replaced
a mediæval tower which escaped the fire, and the interior has been
somewhat havocked in latter days.
St. Clement Eastcheap has some good fittings, but, always small and
unimportant, its quality has been greatly modified by the restorer.
These notes are set down in the hope that the case for the maintenance
forever of the nobler works of Wren will not be vitiated, confused,
and, in the minds of plain men, made ridiculous by hysterical praise
of his meanest buildings from which such small quality as they once
possessed has been removed by modern vandalisms.
[Illustration: S^T DUNSTAN’S]
The achievement of Sir Christopher Wren was vast, and for that very
reason there must be discrimination between those buildings on which
he lavished his utmost personal care and those which, in the press of
a huge practice, were designed mainly by assistants and carried out
probably with the slenderest supervision by the master.
A glance at the Chronology I print in an appendix will show the sort of
pressure at which Wren worked during the ten years following the Fire.
Examination of the Accounts of the City Churches reveals that payments
began to be made in 1670 to the builders of _seventeen_ churches, and
six years later the number had grown to _twenty-eight_.
Actual work on practically the whole of the fifty-three had been
completed by 1690. None was begun after 1686 and payments were made on
eight only between 1690 and 1695.
Wren did comparatively little after 1700 except the completion of St.
Paul’s and Greenwich. This means that the great majority of his vast
bulk of achievement was done within about thirty years.
Is it any wonder that some of his churches show signs of haste and want
of thought? Can we suppose anything but that some of them were left
largely to assistants?
The year of his first marriage was his _annus mirabilis_, for during
1669 he must have been working on the plans for the seventeen churches
which began to be built in 1670, and he was developing the design of
St. Paul’s at the same time.
Evelyn’s word _prodigious_ seems to meet the case.
I have already referred to the towers and spires as showing Wren’s
sure touch as a tower-planner, but the amazing variety of their
treatment is notable evidence of Wren being, _par excellence_, the
architect of adventure. As I wrote many years ago in a detailed
examination[A] of the leaded spires, “he created within the square
mile of the city more forms of steeples than all the architects of the
Middle Ages, and if, as was inevitable, some pay the penalty of rash
experiment, others made an assured success.” Twenty-eight of the towers
are crowned with either spire or lantern, nine of stone, and nineteen
of leaded timber. Some are true spires, others spire-form steeples,
and the rest lanterns: this classification is loose and arbitrary,
but “Wren’s masterful way of playing with architectural elements
and combining them in astonishing ways makes havoc of any orderly
description.”
The preponderance of leaded spires may be attributed partly to his
affection for the most characteristic English metal--he chose it for
St. Paul’s dome after considering copper--and partly to their cheapness
as compared with stone.
[Illustration: S^T MAGNUS]
St. Swithin’s Cannon Street has a spire of Gothic type, and Wren
stepped from the square of the tower to the octagon of the spire by
trimming the tower angles to a splay, a short cut no mediæval builder
would have employed. At St. Margaret’s Pattens Rood Lane, the tower
finishes normally with pinnacles at the corners, and the spire, instead
of being leaded with vertical rolls as at St. Swithin’s, is treated
with a series of sunk panels, a beautiful and ingenious method: St.
Margaret’s spire is indeed a faultless work. Wren did nothing in stone
to match the form of these two. Exquisite in its delicacy is the leaded
needle spire of St. Martin Ludgate, set on an arcaded lantern which
grows in turn out of an ogee roof, and the latter break is marked by
a railed balcony. Obelisks take the place of a spire at St. Margaret
Lothbury, a steeple of miraculous simplicity, and at St. Mildred’s
Bread Street. The tower of St. Lawrence Jewry is crowned by a more
massive composition, and the outline of St. Augustine’s Watling Street
is a little uncertain. At St. Benet Paul’s Wharf the combination of
dome and lantern is perfect in its little way.
[Illustration: S^T MARGARET’S PATTENS]
Amongst the stone steeples St. Mary-le-Bow and St. Bride’s Fleet Street
will always have champions to argue which is the greater. Bow Tower has
a romantic, almost Jacobean, quality which contrasts strongly with the
austere outline of St. Bride’s. It may be significant of a special
importance attached to it by Wren that it is the only tower which has a
bill of account, separate from that of the church, in the full priced
accounts which I have dealt with in detail elsewhere. It cost £7,388
and the church £8,071, whereas St. Bride’s altogether accounted only
for £11,430.
[Illustration: S^T BRIDE’S]
The question of the money spent on the City churches is of considerable
interest. The total paid out was £263,786 10s. 4½d., and the amounts
entered up against each church were corrected to farthings. These
figures exclude most of the internal fittings, which must have been
the gift of pious parishioners. The MS. accounts in the Bodleian are
abstracted in my _Archæologia_ paper,[B] and give the names of every
mason, bricklayer, plumber, painter, etc., employed, with the amounts
he (or sometimes she) received. I transcribed the complete bills for
St. Mary-le-Bow with Bow Tower and for St. Stephen’s Walbrook. The
latter cost £7,652 13s. 8d., and only six churches exceeded that sum.
In some ways it is the most notable of them all, for Wren contrived
to give the effect of nave, aisles and crossing to a plain room by
his ingenuity in carrying a circular dome on eight arches which rest
on an entablature supported by twelve columns. East of the dome is
one groined bay, and west of it two groined bays divided by four more
columns: the side aisles have flat ceilings. The plan is thus an
oblong room with sixteen free columns, but so cleverly disposed as to
produce the variety of effect described above. Sir Reginald Blomfield
justly says of the details that they are “coarse and irrelevant,” but
the interior is a masterpiece of scenic planning, and the dome a not
unworthy trial piece for what followed at St. Paul’s. A melancholy
remodelling in 1847-8, the plans of which are preserved at the
R.I.B.A., destroyed some of the character of the church, but the
accompanying illustration shows it in the “unimproved” state as Wren
left it.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII
ST. STEPHEN’S, WALBROOK.]
St. Lawrence Jewry is another of the churches in which the architect
was not pinched for funds. It cost £11,870, but is on a somewhat
uninteresting plan--oblong, with an aisle on one side only. Here, as in
almost every church he built, Wren was a determined economist of space,
and with good reason. About eighty churches had been destroyed in the
Fire, only fifty were rebuilt, and every sitting was of importance. So
he did not square up his building if the site was irregular, but made
the best, usually a very ingenious best, of whatever odd shape he had
to cover in. And there was another consideration. It is obvious from
the sums paid for many of the churches, as well as from the evidence
of the fabrics, that Wren did not pull down an old wall if he could
mend it and save it. There is, therefore, all the more reason to
respect these City churches, which retain so much history in their
walls, going back even to the earliest times. Always practical and
always an opportunist of the right sort, he made the best job he
could with the materials and money he had at disposal. A more general
realisation of this would prevent criticism of details, which ought
to be addressed rather to parsimonious clients than to the architect.
Sometimes, however, he made a brilliant excursion to meet the needs
of an odd-shaped site as at St. Benet Fink, which he planned as a
decagon. This enchanting church stood behind the Royal Exchange and
had a beautiful little dome and lantern on its tower: the late Mr.
Peabody now sits in bronze on the site. At St. Antholin’s, a church in
Watling Street, with a superb stone tower and spire, all swept away in
circumstances of infamy, he got over a swerve in the street alinement
by splaying the plan at the west end. At St. Mary Abchurch and St.
Swithin’s, he had short, broad, and slightly irregular sites to deal
with, and covered in a square with a dome and let the rest work out
as it would. St. Mildred Bread Street is a longer oblong which Wren
treated very delightfully by covering the middle with a dome and the
ends with round arches. The need to house large congregations led
him to provide galleries at Christ Church Newgate Street, St. James
Piccadilly, St. Bride’s, St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, and elsewhere.
Wren’s outlook on the whole problem of parish-church design was
indicated with his usual clarity in a letter which he wrote to guide
his fellow Commissioners in the task of building fifty new churches in
Queen Anne’s reign. Written when he was nearing eighty, the letter sums
up the experience of an amazing lifetime of church building.
[Illustration: S^T MILDRED·BREAD S^T]
He is strongly against burials in churches and commends the idea
of cemeteries on the outskirts of the towns which will “bound the
excessive growth of the City with a graceful border, which is now
encircled with scavengers’ dung stalls.”
[Illustration: S^T BRIDE’S]
In the siting of churches, Wren is against too nice an observation of
“east and west in the position, unless it falls out properly,” and
wants to see them brought as forward as possible into the larger and
more open streets. “Such fronts as shall happen to lie most open to
view should be adorned with porticoes, both for beauty and convenience;
which together with handsome spires or lanterns rising in good
proportion above the neighbouring houses (of which I have given several
examples in the City of different forms) may be of sufficient ornament
to the town, without a great expense for enriching the outward walls of
the churches, in which plainness and duration ought principally, if not
wholly, to be studied....”
A long paragraph is devoted to the question of materials. He complains
bitterly of the badness of the available bricks, despite the fact that
London earth will yield a brick more durable than “any stone our island
affords.”
Wren is all for Portland-stone for windows and doors, and likes oak for
roofs “because it will bear some negligence. The churchwardens’ care
may be defective in speedy mending drips: they usually whitewash the
church, and set up their names, but neglect to preserve the roof over
their heads.”
There is an oddly topical flavour in the note that “the wars in the
North Sea make timber at present of excessive price,” and a prophecy
of Imperial trading in: “I suppose, ere long, we must have recourse to
the West Indies, where most excellent timber may be had for cutting and
fetching.”
As to roof coverings, “our tiles are ill-made and our slates not good:
lead is certainly the best and lightest covering, and being of our
own growth and manufacture, and lasting, if properly made, for many
hundred years, is, without question, the most preferable; though I
will not deny but an excellent tile may be made to be very durable:
our artisans are not yet instructed in it, and it is not soon done
to inform them....” If the Gothic Revivalists had worked on Wren’s
lines, the Church would not now be saddled with a legacy of badly built
Kentish rag and rubble churches and spires, thinly roofed with Welsh
slates, an endless anxiety to parishes unable to find money to remedy
original defects of construction.
Wren’s next point is of the essence of the problem which he was facing,
how to provide the accommodation required for the people.
Even if the new fifty churches were to hold 2,000 apiece, there would
not be room enough. “The churches, therefore, must be large, but
still, in our reformed religion, it should seem vain to make a parish
church larger than that all who are present can both hear and see.
The Romanists, indeed, may build larger churches; it is enough if
they hear the murmur of the Mass, and see the elevation of the Host;
but ours are to be fitted for auditories.” Wren then quotes his St.
James’s Piccadilly as the most practicable model of “a single room so
capacious, with pews and galleries, as to hold above 2,000 persons,
and all to hear the service and both to hear distinctly and see the
preacher.” He claims for St. James’s that it is a beautiful and
convenient form, with “no walls of a second order, nor lanterns nor
buttresses, but the whole roof rests upon the pillars, as do also the
galleries ... the cheapest of any form I could invent.” St. James’s
Piccadilly cost £8,500, so its accommodation for 2,000 persons worked
out at £4 5s. a seat. This church is really in the line of development
of the old English timber Hall so far as its constructive idea is
concerned. It lent itself to the passing need of galleries, but they
are not essential to the idea, as is sometimes supposed.
In discussing the place for the pulpit Wren has some shrewd things to
say about the enunciation of English parsons, which hold good to-day:
“A Frenchman is heard further than an English preacher because he
raises his voice and sinks not his last words ... an insufferable fault
in the pronunciation of some of our otherwise excellent preachers.”
Wren would have appreciated the similar advice of a modern bishop to
a class of candidates for ordination, that they should not drop their
voices at the end of a sentence “lest the congregation might suppose,
_however erroneously_, that they had lost something.” On the vexed
question of seating the people, our architect has some shrewd words: “A
church should not be so filled with pews, but that the poor may have
room enough to stand and sit in the alleys: _for to them equally is the
Gospel preached_.”
We may guess that Wren would have been all for the rush-bottomed chair
if it had been invented in his day: “It were to be wished there were to
be no pews, but benches: but there is no stemming the tide of profit,
and the advantage of pew-keepers.”
I have quoted at length from this letter in order to mark the massive
common sense which Wren brought to the solution of his problems.
Mr. Arthur Bolton gives me the interesting parallel of 1818, when
Sir John Soane reported to the Government on the national church
building scheme. His recommendations show that he worked on his great
predecessor’s report and he even sent to St. James’s and measured it
as a typical instance. As, however, the year 1818 preferred numbers to
quality, the results fell far below those of the earlier century.
It was Wren’s quality of common sense as much as the genius of the
artist that made his City churches what they are, practical solutions
of practical difficulties and instinct with the English spirit of
compromise, but none the less the greatest group of churches created in
any country by the genius and practical wisdom of one man.
CHAPTER IX
CHELSEA, HAMPTON COURT, AND GREENWICH
Mr. Basil Champneys has recorded a notable observation by Thomas
Carlyle on Chelsea Hospital: “I had passed it, almost daily, for many
years without thinking much about it, and one day I began to reflect
that it had always been a pleasure to me to see it, and I looked at
it more attentively, and saw that it was quiet and dignified and _the
work of a gentleman_.” This was evidently a favourite theme with
Carlyle, for William Allingham’s Diary for June 25, 1874, records a
similar phrase with the addition that the Hospital was “admirably
adapted for its uses.” Carlyle’s devotion to Wren’s memory had an odd
repercussion. When William De Morgan called on the Sage to beg him on
behalf of William Morris to join the Anti-Scrape Society, Carlyle was
cold at first, but a reference to the dealings of the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners with Wren’s churches set him alight. He ended a panegyric
on Wren with “he was a very great man, of extraordinary patience
with fools,” and glared round at the company reproachfully. Morris
rather winced when Carlyle, in a letter accepting membership of the
Anti-Scrape, referred to the City churches as “marvellous works,
the like of which we shall never see again,” and his hatred of the
Renaissance never ceased to blind him to Wren’s genius.
It would have been well if the Society had been more active, in
the past, in defence of Wren’s churches. The narrow mediævalism of
the latter half of the nineteenth century wrought havoc even where
it failed to destroy. Stained glass and other alien trappings have
prejudiced far too many of his fine interiors. One church architect
of the type responsible for these things was finely reproved with the
reminder that Wren was just as good a High Churchman as he was.
[Illustration: PLATE IX
CHELSEA HOSPITAL: THE MAIN PORTICO.]
The site of Chelsea Hospital had been given by the King to the
Royal Society soon after its foundation, but it was an inconvenient
possession, and the Society sold it back to the King for the foundation
of a Royal Hospital for disabled soldiers. Sir Stephen Fox, a retired
army contractor, supplemented the King’s benefactions, and on May
25, 1682, the inevitable Evelyn went with Fox and Wren to Lambeth to
secure the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approval to the plot and design
or, as we should say, plan and elevations. Ten weeks later Evelyn was
at Chelsea with Fox to see the foundations started. Wren was a good
deal more than architect to the Hospital. It was during his Presidency
of the Royal Society that the land was re-conveyed to the King: he
carried the business through with characteristic despatch, and the
statutes governing the charity were of his drafting. The buildings
were completed in 1692, and no better praise of them than Carlyle’s
can be invented. Wren shows himself in one of his characteristic moods
as a sane economist where the purpose of the building makes economy
an æsthetic as well as a practical virtue. The Hospital is a liberal
education in the handling of London brickwork. When Sir John Soane,
in the days of Nash stucco, had to add an Infirmary building, he was
careful to design in brick and content to despise the abuse it evoked
at that time. At Hampton Court Wren had a very different problem: he
was housing not pensioners but a King and Queen. His original scheme
had a quality of immensity. Our Dutch monarch who had so successfully
countered the statesmanship of Louis XIV. doubtless wanted to follow,
at some distance, his building exploits at Versailles and elsewhere.
Queen Mary had a great liking for the situation of Hampton Court. Wren
was bidden to prepare a scheme for a complete rebuilding and did so.
Part of the old fabric was taken down and Wren’s two great suites of
apartments for King and Queen rose in its place. The work went forward
vigorously from 1689 to 1694, and then the Queen’s death caused the
completion of the plan to be abandoned. The execution of the partial
scheme drifted on until 1700. There was a chance then of the King
proceeding to the finishing of the complete plan, but William’s death
finally killed it. To these accidents of mortality we owe it that part
of Wolsey’s palace has remained. If Wren had had his way, not a brick
of the Tudors would have survived. The architect was happy in only one
of his royal clients. Mary was amiable and reasonable, but William’s
temper and his habit of interference tried Wren very high. The King,
however, was fair enough to say that the insufficient headroom of the
cloisters must be ascribed to his express orders which overbore Wren’s
wishes.
Despite this, the Fountain Court is one of the successful features of
the Palace, which reveals Wren’s sanity and dignity and Englishness
in a most convincing way. It is enough to look at Chatsworth, in the
light of Hampton Court, to realize the difference between pedantry
and genius. Norman Shaw so greatly admired Hampton Court, that he
would have followed it in Whitehall, if he had been entrusted with the
Government offices. The weakest part of the Palace is the pedimented
garden front, where a sense of display, due perhaps to Royal Command,
contrasts with the greater simplicity of the return façade towards the
Tudor garden.
[Illustration: PLATE X
HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS.]
Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a
palace, and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place
in the development of the English interior. Left more to himself,
Wren would have been more English in the height of his rooms. He had
a sense of fitness which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren
was unlucky at Hampton Court in more than in one of his clients. His
Comptroller (or, as we should say, Clerk) of the Works was William
Talman, who accused him of having passed bad work. Some masonry showed
cracks, and enough stir was created to lead the House of Lords to order
an enquiry. Wren was exonerated, and with characteristic generosity
he did not call, as he might well have done, for the dismissal of a
disloyal assistant. Time has revenged him. Chatsworth shows Talman
to have been a heavy-handed fellow, but he is also remembered as a
bad colleague in other things than the Hampton Court accusation.
If visitors to the Palace should feel that Wren failed in giving a
suitable approach to the State apartments, they should remember that
they are in the presence of an incomplete scheme, and that he left a
design of notable splendour for wings with colonnades at the north
side. The incidental furnishings of avenues took shape in the chestnuts
of Bushey Park, but the rest remained on paper. In one detail of the
gardens Wren must have taken special pleasure. The marvellous iron
screens by Tijou have been moved from their original position, but they
remain to show Wren’s skill in the choice of his craftsmen.
The third of his great secular buildings, Greenwich Hospital, had
the same charitable purpose as Chelsea, but exceeded Hampton Court
in magnificence. Charles I. had employed Inigo Jones to build, at
some distance from the Thames, a house for his Queen, Henrietta
Maria. Soon after the accession of Charles II., John Webb, as ghost
for Sir John Denham, had begun the great building by the shore for
which Inigo Jones may have left designs; but money ran short and
work was suspended after only a small part had been done. This wing
is on well-known Palladian lines, but is hampered by a heavy attic,
so ill-adjusted as to discredit whoever was responsible for it. When
William and Mary succeeded James II., the Queen wished to emulate
her uncle Charles in making provision for disabled seamen as he had
done for soldiers. Once more Wren and Evelyn were to be colleagues.
On May 5, 1695, the Royal Commission, consisting of these two, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bigwigs, had its first meeting
at the London Guildhall, and sixteen days later the two friends and
three others went, as a Committee, to survey the site. Evelyn’s task
was to raise subscriptions, and he made an interesting choice of a
secretary in Mr. Vanbrugh, afterwards Sir John. About a year was spent
in preparing plans, and on June 4, 1696, the Committee met at Wren’s
house in Whitehall to make agreements for materials and workmen and to
give orders for the foundations to be begun. On the last day of June a
select committee of thirteen dined together at Greenwich, and precisely
at five o’clock (Mr. Flamsteed, the King’s Astronomer, “observing
the punctual time by instruments”) Wren and Evelyn jointly laid the
foundation stone.
[Illustration: PLATE XI
GREENWICH HOSPITAL AND ITS TWO DOMES.]
Queen Mary wanted the old Queen’s House and the Charles II. wing to
be integral parts of the new scheme--a rather hampering condition.
Wren took the former as the closing feature of a vista from the river,
between his two new blocks named after William and Mary and his
Queen Anne block, which balances and exactly follows the Jones-Webb
block of Charles II.
Wren’s contribution to Greenwich was, therefore, the two superb
quadrangular blocks with open sides adorned with colonnades and the big
idea of planning which pulled together the work of four reigns into a
coherent and superb whole. The duality of the domes is a most notable
feature, and their individual design is beautifully differentiated
from the grander scale of St. Paul’s. They are domestic, rather
than church-like, in conception. That Hawksmoor in his capacity as
Deputy-Surveyor had a somewhat free hand in designing part of the
work after 1705, that Vanbrugh succeeded Wren as Surveyor in 1716,
that Colin Campbell took up the task ten years later, and that Ripley
superseded him in 1729, does not deprive Wren of the title of architect
of the Hospital. In so far as they departed from his original designs
the buildings suffered, especially from the baldness of the Campbell
elements and the heavy-handedness of the ex-carpenter Ripley. Wren’s
planning, his domes and his colonnades, make Greenwich the noblest of
English public buildings in the Grand Manner.
The view of the Palace from the Thames is magnificent and has been an
inspiration to artists ever since. Abroad, it would be an objective to
all travellers.
CHAPTER X
OTHER BUILDINGS: PUBLIC AND DOMESTIC
This volume has no claim to be a biography of Wren: still less is it a
_catalogue raisonné_ of his buildings. Familiar students of his work
will be merciful if they find a bare reference, or none, to something
they may regard as peculiarly satisfying and notably Wrennish. I can
but plead the limitations of a little book. But some of his buildings
not included in earlier chapters must be at least mentioned, if shortly
and in a disjointed list.
Amongst public works the Monument takes a prominent if rather
unsatisfactory place. The design was subjected to a good deal
of interference, for Hawksmoor records that the flaming urn was
substituted as a crowning feature for the intended statue of Charles
_contra architecti intentionem_.
Amongst the pedestals of equestrian statues in London, there is none to
compare with that of Charles I. at Charing Cross, which was probably of
Wren’s designing, but it has been attributed also to Grinling Gibbons.
Temple Bar was an interesting archway which now adorns Theobald’s Park
and is commemorated on its old site in Fleet Street by a melancholy
monument. There seems a good case for the return of Temple Bar to
some site in London. The neighbouring entrance to the Middle Temple is
one of Wren’s most charming achievements. His use of brickwork here
in conjunction with a stone base and pilasters is of an ideal modesty
and simplicity, matched within the Temple by the cloister of Hare
Court and rubbed brick doorways in King’s Bench Walk. Of these works
as of Kensington Palace Coventry Patmore’s words were abundantly true:
“Sir Christopher Wren could not build a common brick house without
impressing his own character upon it.” He might have added that it
needs a considerable artist to give character to a common brick house,
for the palette is limited. Wren’s work at Kensington has been a good
deal modified by later hands, but the Queen’s staircase and the Gallery
remain very typical. The exterior suffers greatly from the clumsy
additions of William Kent, which are too often accepted as part of the
original house. The lay-out should be restored, and the great alcove be
brought back from its present stupid position near the fountain. The
Orangery is a masterpiece of simplicity and reserve, and shows Wren
exercising the consummate taste which cannot in honesty be regarded as
a continuous characteristic. The attribution of various houses to Wren
rests either upon vague tradition or upon imaginary internal evidence.
The belief that he designed Belton is persistent but unsupported
by documents. The notable contributions made to its decoration by
Grinling Gibbons may have strengthened the tradition. Certainly Belton
is worthy of Wren. The same may be said of two houses in Chichester,
Pallant House and another which has long been called Wren’s House. Miss
Milman in her _Life_ printed a chronological list of works, and starred
those for which there was no documentary authority. But her stars must
be increased. The Chichester houses are cases in point.
It is unfortunate that Marlborough House has been so mishandled since
Wren’s day: the attic storey is a clumsy addition. As he planned
it, the disposition of the rooms showed no advance on the planning
of Inigo Jones and Webb. The main rooms were _en suite_ without any
corridor behind them, a march of convenience which Vanbrugh developed
at Blenheim, not otherwise a mirror of perfection. Sarah, Duchess, must
have been a client calling for all Wren’s skill in handling people.
When she quarrelled with Vanbrugh about his fees for Blenheim, she
quoted Wren as a pattern of moderation “content to be dragged up in a
basket, three or four times a week, to the top of St. Paul’s, and at
great hazard, for £200 a year.”
Groombridge Place, Kent, is another house of infinite charm which has
been attributed to Wren. The All Souls Collection of his drawings
includes some sketch elevations of houses. One sheet in particular
gives two alternative treatments for the same plan, but neither is
up to Wren’s best form, and it seems reasonable to assume that the
smaller domestic work for private clients had to be ignored in the
main because of his heavy public employments. Amongst his works which
have disappeared altogether are the Custom House, the Armoury and Mint
in the Tower of London (where his Storehouse has survived), Christ’s
Hospital, and the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane.
Not the least interesting of an architect’s designs are those which are
never carried to full fruition. The most notable of these was a great
Palace at Winchester, begun for Charles II. Not much of it was built,
for the King died before it was finished, and his successors did not
like Winchester. The uncompleted core was later adapted so drastically
for use as barracks that it ceased to have any Wren significance.
The Tomb of Charles I., for which Parliament voted £70,000, was
designed by Wren in 1678. The drawings preserved at All Souls show
a domed structure, which was to have stood at the east end of St.
George’s Chapel, Windsor. Within was to be a statue of the Martyr King
standing on a shield upheld by four allegorical figures. Alternative
treatments are shown for this group in marble and bronze. Grinling
Gibbons would no doubt have been the sculptor, but, as Wren’s title
of the drawings notes, it was _eheu conditionem temporum, nondum
extructum_. The _nondum_ gives a hint that Wren hoped that it might
later be done, but the £70,000 found less worthy employment. Wren’s
careful detailed estimates for the work are printed in Sir William
St. John Hope’s monumental _Windsor Castle_, with reproductions of the
drawings.
[Illustration: PLATE XII
TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT.]
Noble as this design was, I confess I take more pleasure from Wren’s
design for a monument (also in All Souls Library) which Sir Reginald
Blomfield reproduces[C] with the note that it was probably drawn by
Grinling Gibbons. It shows a lady reclining on a couch, not unlike
Raggi’s Lady Cheyne in Chelsea Old Church, but she points with a lively
gesture to cherubs flying above her in a burst of rays and clouds. It
shows Wren in his most baroque mood, and is perhaps his reminiscence of
old Bernini’s monumental manner.
In Scotland he did nothing; but the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, near
Dublin, is attributed to him with some reason. In 1679 he was ordered
to view the site, but no record remains of his visit, and this Irish
variant of Chelsea Hospital is not claimed by his son in the list
of works. The building is simple and dignified with open cloisters
round a big quadrangle. Probably Wren did designs for it and left
some assistant or local architect to supervise its building. The best
evidence for his authorship is that there was no architect in Ireland
who could have produced such a design, with the possible exception of
the designer of Beaulieu, near Drogheda.
Another charitable foundation, Morden College, Blackheath, is
certainly Wren’s. It is an enchanting piece of brickwork with a
pedimented centre-piece and lantern.
As Cambridge was the locus of his first _completed_ work of importance,
Pembroke Chapel (the Sheldonian is called in the _Parentalia_ “the
first publick Performance of the Surveyor,” but it was finished later
than the chapel); it also gave him the opportunity for one of his
greatest achievements, the Library of Trinity. His first design was
for a circular building with a domed roof, but this soon gave place to
the scheme that was carried out. A long memorandum by Wren explains
his reasons for the design, which was limited by the need of joining
the new Library to the extension of Neville’s Court, a junction which
was not very happily achieved. The governing consideration of the
elevation to the Court was the maintenance of the Library floor on the
same level as the adjoining chambers. Unfortunately Wren would use two
Orders despite the fact that the structure of the work was in conflict.
Evidently he was forcing a design, naturally of a Palladian type, of a
_piano nobile_ on a lower storey which would be the podium of an Order.
It is a case where his ingenuity overbore his artistic sense, and he
resorted to the doubtful expedient of a range of arches, the tympana
of which are filled in solid. The river front has been criticised on
the grounds of an undue austerity, but I find it difficult to follow
this: it is surely a miracle of dignity. For the interior of the
Library there can be nothing but praise. Ideal in dignity and ideal in
convenience, Wren’s book presses have the additional merit of showing
Gibbons carving of peculiar excellence, and he must not be charged
with the overcrowding of the floor by smaller cases needed by modern
accessions of books.
Wren was less happy in his chapel and cloister at Emmanuel College. The
breaking of the pediment of the central feature by the lantern turret
is not in his usual vein, but the lantern itself is a very charming
composition. Another related work is the Honywood Library and Cloister
at Lincoln Cathedral, but the Library itself is a rather low and not
specially distinguished apartment.
I bring this slight catalogue of Wren’s miscellaneous works to a close
with a return to Oxford. It is difficult to determine how far he was
responsible for the Library at Queen’s College (1693) because Hawksmoor
was mixed up with him there, but the whole College must be regarded as
a Wren building. There is nothing of Hawksmoor’s more faithful to his
old master’s ideas, and less influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh’s, the two
poles between which the lesser man was always oscillating. Sir Reginald
Blomfield is strongly against attributing the Ashmolean to Wren, but
it is difficult to believe that such a building at such a time could
have been entrusted to anyone else. Similarly Trinity College Chapel
(1694) is somewhat of a mystery. It has been said that Dean Aldrich
was the architect and that Wren was only called in to advise. The
quality of the design suggests that Wren was the senior partner in the
combination. There is no confusion with regard to Tom Tower. Dr. Fell,
Dean of Christ Church, commissioned him to build a tower over Wolsey’s
gateway. The result is something certainly not Tudor, but quite
certainly a picturesque composition of a high order. Wren’s detail is
little like that of the sixteenth century below it, but he did the one
thing needful: he provided a dignified and picturesque portal for the
College, and it is folly to rebuke a late seventeenth-century architect
for not entering into the spirit of his predecessors of the early
sixteenth. The study of the spirit of Gothic work, alike systematic and
sympathetic, is a growth of less than a hundred years. Wren was of his
age.
CHAPTER XI
WREN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: LAST YEARS
The appreciation a man may win in his own day and generation is no
sure guide to his quality as an artist, as witness the cases of Mr.
Martin Tupper and many Past Presidents of the Royal Academy; but when
the chorus of praise persists during something like eighty years and
comes from men in every walk of life, it is at least evidence of
notable character. Such praise was Wren’s in a marked degree, and it
helps to explain the way he held his own under the fickle King Charles,
the cantankerous King William, and the casual Queen Anne. Under King
George I., when Wren was a very old man, he lost his appointment, but
only as the culmination of a discreditable campaign against him by
futile people who lacked the wit to appreciate the greatness of the man
against whom they plotted their dishonest little persecutions.
In so far as Wren’s advancement as an architect may be attributed to
any one man, it is clear that John Evelyn the diarist must have the
credit. Whether he met Wren before 1654 does not appear; but he was in
Oxford on July 11 of that year, Wren being then twenty-two years old,
and after dinner he visited “that miracle of a youth,” and had further
dealings with him two days later, as is noted in an earlier chapter.
By 1664, when Wren showed Evelyn the model of the Sheldonian, he had
become “that incomparable genius,” and Evelyn went to Oxford in 1669
for the celebrations which marked the completion of the theatre.
Wren’s appointment as Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works was due
to Evelyn’s great influence with Charles II., to whom he seems to have
acted in some sort as an architectural adviser.
How greatly Evelyn valued Wren’s judgment in ordinary matters is shown
by a letter in 1665 in which the diarist asks Wren to recommend a
tutor for his boy. In the same letter Evelyn mentions his translation
of Fréart’s _Parallels_, a book on architecture which had been very
successful in France and sold very largely in England in Evelyn’s
edition. The first issue was dedicated to Sir John Denham, but it is
interesting to find that in February, 1696-7, Evelyn wrote to Wren
saying that he would dedicate to him the new edition he was then
producing, and so he did with many flourishes.
There is a characteristic outburst in the _Diary_ for May 5, 1681,
when Sir W. Fermor dined with him and Wren: “A wonderful genius had
this incomparable person,” an echo of what he had written seventeen
years before when Wren showed him the model of the Sheldonian--“that
incomparable genius.”
The last Wren entry in the _Diary_ was forty-four years later than the
first. Wren went down to Says Court with “Mr. London, his gardener,” to
render Evelyn the service of estimating the damage done to the house
and gardens during its occupation by Peter the Great, who had comported
himself in a manner which justly disgusted Evelyn. Wren outlived his
old and faithful friend by more than twenty years.
[Illustration: PLATE XIII
THE WADHAM PORTRAIT OF WREN.
An 1825 copy by John Smith of Oxford based on the Sheldonian
portrait, to which Dallaway attached the unlikely attribution of
Thornhill, “painted in conjunction with Verrio and Kneller.”]
Although a quiet, modest, and always overworked person, Wren seems to
have liked social relaxation. He was at Lord Brouncker’s in February,
1666-7, with Samuel Pepys, who refers to the music that their host had
provided. There were two eunuchs, so tall as to move Sir T. Harvey to
some physiological imaginings, and one woman “very well dressed and
handsome enough, but would not be kissed,” at least so Mr. Killigrew
informed Mr. Pepys. Not long afterwards Pepys met Wren at Streeter’s,
“with several virtuosos,” looking at the paintings which were being
made for the new theatre at Oxford. It must have been a pleasant
occasion on February 9, 1671, when Wren and Pepys dined with Evelyn at
Says Court, and all of them went afterwards to see the “Crucifixion”
which Grinling Gibbons had carved. A few weeks later the King and Queen
indicated their wish to see this work, at Evelyn’s suggestion, and it
was taken to Whitehall for their inspection. Evelyn records the anger
he felt at the Queen ignoring the merits of the wonderful carving
because a “French pedling woman” had run it down, but he had the
compensation that “Mr. Wren faithfully promised me to employ him.” How
faithfully that promise was fulfilled is proved by the choir stalls of
St. Paul’s and work at many another Wren building.
In February, 1676, Evelyn and Wren, with other notable Fellows of the
Royal Society, dined with Sir John Williamson, and in November in the
following year the same inseparable friends dined in the company of
Prince Rupert and other learned men at the Lord Treasurer’s. Wren had
achieved that useful measure of friendship with Prince Rupert which
caused his name to figure on a list of intimates to whom the Prince
sent every year a gift of choicest wine from his estates on the Rhine.
In August, 1680, Evelyn was deputed by the Royal Society to make a
visit of ceremony to Monsieur Chardine, a famous French traveller who
had come to London, and characteristically he took Wren with him.
Wren must have been good company at dinner. In 1669 Sir John Clayton
wrote to a friend: “Saturday last I went with the Duke of Buckingham
to Denham ... on our return home we dined at Uxbridge, and never in
all my life did I pass my day away with such gusto, our company being
his Grace, Mr. Weller, Mr. Surveyor Wren and myself: nothing but
quintessence of wit and most excellent discourse.”
As to whether Wren enjoyed wide hospitalities in his alleged character
of Freemason it is impossible to say, but there is a tradition that he
was Grand Master of a lodge which was intimately associated with St.
Paul’s and became in due time what is known as the Antiquity Lodge.
Some candlesticks, and a mallet bearing an inscription which suggests
that it was used at a St. Paul’s ceremonial, remain in possession of
the Antiquity Lodge. It is necessary, however, to add that Gould in
his _History of Freemasonry_ gives it as his opinion, after careful
investigation of the architect’s connection with the craft, that
the evidence points to Wren not having belonged to a lodge, nor to
a society which was not in existence until 1717, and he goes on to
allege that there are three misstatements on the mallet inscription. I
have no knowledge of these matters, but assume that Gould’s opinion is
competent. There is no reference to Freemasonry in any Wren document
or in _Parentalia_, but so far as the latter is concerned the omission
means nothing.
I have indicated very slightly, and with the diffidence of one who
knows nothing of science but a few of its fairy tales, the large range
of Wren’s scientific labours. It may be that they were curious rather
than important, but it is necessary to set down the considered opinion
of Dr. Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society. It is a notable
tribute:
“In the whole progress of this narration, I have been cautious to
forbear commending the labours of any Private Fellows of the Society.
For this, I need not make any apology to them; feeling it would
have been an inconsiderable honour, to be praised by so mean a
writer: But now I must break this law, in the particular case of Dr.
Christopher Wren: For doing so, I will not alledge the excuse of my
friendship to him; though that perhaps were sufficient; and it might
well be allowed me to take this occasion of Publishing it: But I only
do it on the mere consideration of justice: For in turning over the
Registers of the Society, I perceived that many excellent things,
whose first invention ought to be ascribed to him, were casually
omitted: This moves me to do him right by himself, and to give this
separate account of his endeavours, in promoting the design of the
Royal Society, in the small time wherein he has had the opportunity
of attending it.”
Dr. Sprat then recites some of Wren’s achievements in the fields of
natural science, astronomy, etc., and continues thus:
“This is a short account of the principal discoveries which Dr. Wren
has presented or suggested to this assembly. I know very well, that
some of them he did only start and design; and that they have been
since carried on to perfection, by the industry of other hands. I
purpose not to rob them of their share in the honour: Yet it is but
reasonable, that the original invention should be ascribed to the
true author, rather than the finishers. Nor do I fear that this will
be thought too much, which I have said concerning him: For there is
a peculiar reverence due to so much excellence covered with so much
modesty. And it is not flattery but honesty, to give him his just
praise; who is so far from usurping the fame of other men that he
endeavours with all care to conceal his own.”
A man could not ask a better epitaph than “so much excellence covered
with so much modesty.”
It may be that Sprat was carried away by his affection for Wren and
overstated the case, but that amiable reason can hardly apply to all
his contemporaries. Robert Boyle, who had witnessed some of Wren’s
experiments, testified that his knowledge of Wren’s extraordinary
sagacity made him very desirous to try what he proposed.
The evidence of Sir Isaac Newton cannot be ignored. His Preface to the
second edition of the _Principia_ groups Wren with Wallis and Huygens
as “hujus ætatis geometrarum facile principes,” and gives to them the
first credit for a true conception of the laws governing the impacts
and reactions of two bodies in collision. Praise from Newton is praise
indeed.
Thomas Hearne carried it a little further. “I heard an eminent
mathematician say that he could mention another equal in mathematics
to Sir Isaac Newton, _though he had not published_ ... Sir Christopher
Wren, who was, indeed, a very extraordinary man.”
When Isaac Barrow succeeded to the Gresham Professorship of Geometry,
he took occasion, in his inaugural oration, to refer to Wren in this
fashion: “One there is, whose name common gratitude forbids me to pass
over, whom I know not whether to admire for his divine genius or for
the sweetness of his disposition ... it will suffice if I name the
great and good Christopher Wren, of whom I will say no more since his
merit attracts the eyes of the whole world” ... and so on, with the
inevitable references to Wren’s modesty.
In nothing did the sweetness of Wren’s nature so clearly appear as in
his relations with Robert Hooke, a sour philosopher and, it would seem,
a disloyal fellow. Hooke was at Westminster just before Wren and ran
second to him all his life. If Elmes’ view of the case be true, Hooke
picked up Wren’s ideas, developed them and tried to take all the credit
of them, and was a bad colleague generally. He quarrelled with Newton,
disputed with Flamsteed, and was snubbed by the Royal Society when he
did a design, unasked, for their home which was promptly rejected and
Wren asked to do it instead. He was always in hot water and incurably
unpopular, but Wren stuck to him. When an assistant was needed in the
great labours which followed the Fire, Wren appointed Hooke to measure
and set out the ground of all the “private street houses,” but was wise
enough to keep the Public Works in his own hands.
Wren was delightfully loyal to the contractors whom he employed. He
must have been on intimate terms with Edward Strong, master mason
at St. Paul’s and elsewhere, for he sent young Christopher abroad
in charge of Strong’s son. He gave the buildings he liked best to
the few men he most trusted. Strong and Christopher Kempster did St.
Stephen’s Walbrook; Strong did the delightful brickwork at St. Benet
Paul’s Wharf, St. Augustine’s, St. Mildred’s, and several others. On
the fifty churches only thirteen joiners and ten plasterers received
contracts. All the coppersmith work, except at two churches, was done
by one Robert Bird. My publication of the accounts of the City churches
destroyed all manner of vain fancies as to the employment of Dutch
joiners and Italian plasterers in their building. When Wren found a
good English workman he employed him steadily, and only went to a
foreigner like Tijou for the miraculous ironwork at St. Paul’s, Hampton
Court, and elsewhere when he was a notable artist and far superior to
his English colleagues.
[Illustration: PLATE XIV
THE ST. PAUL’S DEANERY PORTRAIT.
A copy of the Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery.]
As an example of the way Wren was trusted, it is worth noting that when
Flamsteed was bickering by letter with Cassini, the French astronomer,
and accusing Halley of disingenuous practices and praying God to make
Halley sensible of his faults, the peaceful Wren was called in as
umpire.
I could wish that some Parliamentary contemporary had put on record
his impressions of Wren as an M.P., an unlikely trade for a man of his
temperament. Elected for New Windsor in William’s first Parliament,
he was unseated on a technicality, but immediately re-elected. In
1700 he was returned for the Borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis,
but, as Elmes gravely observes, “notwithstanding this additional
occupation, he found time to write a dissertation on the ascension
of the sap in trees, and a paper on the superfice of the terraqueous
globe.” Doubtless he found these employments prettier relaxations from
architecture than attendance at the House of Commons.
Wren seems to have got on well with Charles II., who knighted him at
Whitehall on November 20, 1672.
Indeed, the King might well have been grateful to the man who so
notably gave lustre to his reign. Wren stood to Charles in something
the same relation as Phidias to Pericles.
King William was an awkward client, and interfered with Wren in the
design of Hampton Court; but Queen Mary liked to talk to him about
architecture and gardening, and to watch the progress of the works
“on which she often offered her own judgment, which was allowed to be
exquisite.” For Wren’s sake, we hope it was.
Queen Anne was invoked by Wren to take a hand in his quarrels with the
Commissioners of St. Paul’s. He had a shrewd dig at them in one formal
petition to Her Majesty, in which he was able to show that they were
making a mess of the railings round her own statue, and throwing over
Tijou’s design, as approved by Wren, in favour of some model of their
own.
What action Anne took does not appear, but then or at some time she
gave Wren a delightful chest of drawers, which remained an heirloom in
the Wren family until Mrs. Pigott’s death, and a calendar watch that
reposes in Sir John Soane’s Museum with a walking-stick, which conceals
drawing instruments.
I have dealt with Wren’s dismissal from office in the chapter on
St. Paul’s. He was then in the eighty-sixth year of his age and the
forty-ninth of his Surveyorship. The remainder of his life was spent
in retirement, “in which Recess, free from worldly affairs, he passed
the greatest part of the five last following years of his life in
contemplation and studies and principally in the consolation of the
holy scriptures: cheerful in solitude and as well pleased to die in the
shade as in the light.”
The manner of Wren’s passing is told by Miss Phillimore, and is, I
imagine, a family tradition derived from Mrs. Pigott:
“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.”
So died a great artist, a great Christian, and a great gentleman, who
lived, as his epitaph says, more than ninety years, not for himself,
but for the good of the State.
CHAPTER XII
THE PROFESSIONAL MAN
It is of some interest to attempt to form a picture of Wren, not as
a great artist in building, but as a professional architect dealing
with clients who were often awkward and sometimes dishonest, like the
St. Paul’s authorities in his later years, carrying out a vast amount
of detail work which is now regarded as the task of the surveyor
rather than the architect, making arrangements for the settlement of
disputes, boundary lines, frontages, and for compliance with Royal
Proclamations and Acts of Parliament, negotiating with clients as to
fees, and generally dealing with the financial and business side of his
profession.
All his biographers have emphasised the undoubted fact that Wren was
not a self-seeking man, but I think they have a little overdone the
suggestion of altruism. It is said in _Parentalia_ and elsewhere
that Wren’s salary of £200 a year for the work of designing and
superintending St. Paul’s was a very modest sum. That is true, but
it must be remembered that the salary ran from 1675, when he was
appointed Surveyor-General and Architect of St. Paul’s, until 1711,
when the House of Commons determined that the Cathedral was completed.
He, therefore received £7,200 in respect of St. Paul’s. It is also
stated in _Parentalia_ that he received £100 a year for work on the
City churches. But this seems to be wholly untrue, for Wren was paid
on exactly the same basis as an architect of to-day--_i.e._, by a
commission on the value of the work executed. Until 1919, when it was
raised to 6 per cent., the customary remuneration of an architect in
England was 5 per cent.; and a manuscript account, covering the period
from July, 1670, to March, 1673, quoted by Wyatt Papworth, shows
that twelve-pence in the pound for all monies received and paid was
disbursed “for allowances for rebuilding the Churches to the Officers
of Works for the management of the whole.” This is 5 per cent., out of
which Wren no doubt paid for his office staff. As the total expenditure
on the City churches was £263,786, Wren must have received over
£13,000. In addition, the City authorities would now and again give to
him (or in one case to Lady Wren) a lump sum by way of expressing their
gratitude for his services.
In the capacity of Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works, he was
receiving, in 1675, 13s. 2d. a day and “availes” of £80 per quarter,
which meant another £320 a year, by way of retaining fee; and Papworth
presumes, I think with reason, that he also received specific payment
in respect of each service performed. By the year 1715, his salary and
“riding charges” had dropped to £136 a year, but it is also to be
remembered that all this time he had an official residence in Whitehall
consisting of sixteen rooms and a cellar, which he occupied for about
fifty years without cost to himself.
In respect of Chelsea Hospital he received a fee of £1,000, but there
are many examples of his refusing payment altogether. He insisted on
doing all the work at Greenwich Hospital without payment, saying, “Let
me have some share in an act of charity and mercy.” When he came to
design the Library of Trinity at Cambridge, for which the Master had
some difficulty in getting enough subscriptions, Wren’s contribution
was the value of his own work, for which he made no charge; and,
similarly, he received nothing in respect of his work at St. Clement
Danes. These are acts of generosity of which we happen to have definite
record, and I do not doubt that there were many other examples of the
same sort not recorded, for Wren’s generosity was equalled only by his
modesty.
He was not above a trifling piece of nepotism; for his son Christopher
became Deputy Clerk Engrosser in the Office of Works in 1694 and Clerk
of Works in 1702, succeeding Dickenson. This appointment was confirmed
by George I. in 1715. But when Sir Christopher fell from favour his
son was also dismissed, and from the younger Christopher’s casual
proceedings in the compilation of the material of _Parentalia_, I
cannot believe that the State suffered greatly from his disappearance.
During thirty-two years of Wren’s professional career, Nicholas
Hawksmoor was his domestic clerk, which we may take to mean that he was
in charge of Wren’s office and his right-hand man, both in designing
and in the financial supervision of the works. It would appear that
he performed a good many of the duties which now fall to the separate
profession of quantity surveyor. I suspect that, for example, the
payments to the various contractors for the City churches, and possibly
also for St. Paul’s, were certified by Wren after the value of the work
done had been examined by Hawksmoor. It seems certain that the very
elaborate accounts of the City churches, with which I have dealt fully
in _Archæologia_, were actually written out by Hawksmoor himself.
[Illustration: PLATE XV
THE CENTRAL PORTION OF THE CHIAROSCURO ENGRAVING BY ELISHA KIRKALL,
AFTER KLOSTERMAN.]
By Wren’s time, the practice of architecture had been organised
generally on lines which were developed notably by the brothers Adam,
very competent business men, and have been elaborated in very modern
times. But substantially the methods remain the same except that
contracting has equally been developed so that separate tradesmen are
now merged in a general contractor in England. In Scotland Wren’s
way still prevails to a large extent. There was nothing slapdash
about Wren’s methods: everything was recorded in the most orderly and
detailed manner. If materials delivered to St. Paul’s were for any
reason transferred to one of the City churches, most careful entry was
made in the accounts of the quantities and values, and the necessary
debits and credits were taken into account when the contractors’ bills
were settled. Wren was as efficient in business details as he was in
design.
If my memory does not deceive me (and some thieving friend has made it
impossible for me to verify my reference), it was Mr. G. K. Chesterton,
in _Biography for Beginners_, who made moving comment on an imaginative
picture of Wren in the act of being helped into a fur coat by an
obsequious flunkey, as follows:
_Sir Christopher Wren
Went to dine with some men.
“If any body calls
Say I’m designing St. Paul’s.”_
Perhaps the major part of his long life of work was taken up by far
less attractive tasks, for he was His Majesty’s Office of Works and
His Majesty’s Office of Woods and Forests of his day rolled into
one. The Privy Council called on him for reports on questions of all
kinds. Elmes ploughed through a manuscript book of the Council’s
transactions on almost every page of which Wren’s name appears. One
Mr. Berkehead wanted to build a house and brew-house at Knightsbridge.
Was this in contravention of His Majesty’s proclamation? No, it was
too far out of town, and Mr. Berkehead may proceed. May Mr. Sleymaker
build on an old foundation in Brick Lane? He gets his permission. Sir
Richard Stydolfe had improperly started building at the rear of St.
Giles’s Church leading from thence to Piccadilly. May he go on? The
Surveyor-General goes off to St. Giles’s, examines the whole matter
and reports that he should be so licensed “provided the said Sir
Richard Stydolfe build regularly, according to direction and according
to a design to which his said licence may refer; that he be obliged to
build with brick, with party walls, with sufficient scantlings, good
paving in the streets, and sufficient sewers and conveyances for the
water ...” and so forth and so on. The Colonel Panton who gave his
name to Panton Street was in similar trouble, but Wren found that the
Colonel’s building scheme would “cure the noysomeness of the place”
and “the design of the building shewn to me may be very usefull to the
publique.” Wren was constructive in everything he did, and did not
merely deal with the current business that was referred to him. Some
builders in Soe Hoe “(surely a pleasanter spelling than Soho)” were
building small and mean habitations, “receptacles for the poorer sort
and the offensive trades” and rendering the government of these parts
more unmanageable. His Majesty’s Sergeant Plumber was much upset about
the manifest decay of the waters in the expenseful drains and conduits
of Whitehall Palace which resulted from these nefarious proceedings
in Soe Hoe, and Wren supported him with a petition. Soe Hoe had gone
too far. His Majesty in person, His Majesty’s royal brother and Prince
Rupert, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and others in full council,
looked into the matter, met more than once about it. Wren was ordered
to see that obedience be given to His Majesty’s proclamation: failing
which, he was to imprison the workmen for contempt.
Lord Rochester asks him to examine the bills for repairing the Royal
stables, and Wren goes through them and finds “the particular prices
very reasonable, one thing with another.”
But sometimes Wren must have been bored. Finding lodgings for Mr.
Ronchi at St. James’s was hardly a task for the creator of St. Paul’s,
but he found them. In 1679 he was in professional touch with the
troubles that followed the finding of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey dead in
a ditch. Papists’ plots were in the air. The Spanish Ambassador became
highly unpopular, and the Lords’ Committee appointed to look into “the
late horrid conspiracy” ordered Sir Christopher Wren and Edward Warcup,
Esq., to put padlocks on all such doors as open out of Mr. Weld’s house
into the Ambassador’s house.
So “we repaired to Wild-house and having viewed the dores ... we
affixed padlocks ...” and much more to the same effect, “all which
we humbly submit.” I am glad to add that His Excellency showed
great civility to Wren in the character of locksmith. In all these
proceedings, as Elmes justly remarks, “the honour, integrity and public
spirit of Wren appear transcendent.”
I must add a word about Wren as a draughtsman. The drawings which
can with certainty be attributed to his own hand show him to have
been a competent but not a good performer. A man so immersed in
multifarious work had no time for the niceties of the drawing-board,
and it is probable that his details were drawn roughly in the shops
of his contractors or “on the job,” as the work progressed. The idea
was complete in his own mind, and with workmen used to his words and
wishes verbal instructions on his frequent visits would forward the
work without the elaborated drawings and details of a modern contract.
Differences were adjusted by the simple methods of trade measurement
in use. But that he attached great importance to drawing as an element
in a liberal education is shown by a reference in Christ’s Hospital
Committee Book, and it is delightful to find here once more the
association of Wren and Pepys.
“At a committee of the Schooles in Christ’s Hospitall, the 30th
November, 1692, ... Mr. Treasurer acquainted the committee that he had
two letters one from Sir Christo. Wren and the other from Esq. Pepys
declaring their opinions concerning the introducing the art of drawing
among the Boyes.”
Wren’s letter, which Mr. Nathaniel Hawes read aloud to the Committee,
is as follows:
“Nov. 24th, 1692.
“SIR,
“... It was observed by somebody there present [at his house] that
our English Artists are dull enough at invention but when once a
foreigne patterne is sett they imitate soe well that commonly they
exceed the Originall, I confess the observation is generally true,
but this showes that our natives want not a Genius but education in
that w^{ch} is the foundation of all Mechanick Arts, a practice in
designing or drawing, to w^{ch} everybody in Italy, France and the
Low Countries pretends more or less. I cannot imagine that next to
good writing anything could be more usefully taught your children
especially such as will naturally take to it, and many such you
will find amongst your Numbers who will have a naturall genius to
it, which it is a pity should be stifled.... It is not Painters,
Sculptors, Gravers, only that will find an advantage in such Boyes,
but many other Artificers too long to enumerate. Noe Art but will be
mended and improved; by which not only your Charity of the House will
be enlarged but the Nation advantaged....
“Your affectionate friend and humble servant,
“CHR. WREN.”
This is a strong plea for the teaching of drawing in schools, but there
is, as always, the same practical comment. Draughtsmanship is of value
as the foundation of the “mechanick arts,” but it comes next to “good
writing.”
CHAPTER XIII
STUDENT AND SCHOLAR
Before attempting some sketch of Wren’s position in the world of
English Architecture, in which will be set down his own outlook on
his art, mainly in his own words, it seems reasonable to describe his
attitude towards the past and the views of others. The liveliness and
modernity of his mind did not blind him to the lessons of antiquity,
and his essays in the “restoration” of classical buildings show him to
have been an earnest antiquary. Criticism of his conclusions must carry
with it the remembrance that the _apparatus criticus_ was exceedingly
limited in his day, when the book was everything. The spade had not
yet revealed a superior authority and opened out a vast prospect of
boundless antiquity and tradition.
One of the most interesting features of the interleaved documents
in the heirloom _Parentalia_ is the sketch of Wren’s conjectural
restoration of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.[D] The last note of the
printed _Parentalia_ is headed, “Of the Sepulchre of Mausolus, King of
Caria.” It ends with the words, “The plate of the above is omitted, on
account of the drawing being imperfect.”
This imperfect drawing is pasted on the last page of the _Discourse_ in
the heirloom copy, and shows Wren to be less careful as an archæologist
than might have been anticipated. “The Sepulchre,” he writes, “is so
well described by Pliny that I have attempted to design it accordingly,
and also very open, conformable to the Description in Martial, _Aere
vacuo Pendentia Mausolea_, and yet it wanted not the solidity of the
Dorick order;” and he goes on to say, on very insufficient grounds, “I
conclude this work must be the exactest Form of the Dorick.”
The odd thing is that Wren had not noticed the statement of Vitruvius
that Pythios, the architect of the Mausoleum and the sculptor of the
chariot group, gave up the Doric order because of the incongruous
arrangements which arose in its use. Wren’s great blunder, however,
was in the misreading of one word in Pliny’s description, “Pteron.” He
says it is an unusual term. Russell Sturgis gives its meaning as “that
which forms a side or flank, as the row of columns along the side of a
temple, or the side wall itself.” It is the more odd that Wren boggled
over the word Pteron, seeing that he used the word Dipteron in his
description of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. At Ephesus there was no
question in his mind of an “Attick order rising above the cornice,” but
he takes the Pteron at Halicarnassus to have that meaning, and to be “a
word of Greek Authors of Architecture now lost.” Anyhow, it pleasantly
exemplifies on how insubstantial a foundation can rest a piece of
architectural criticism which is based on literary evidence alone.
His mistake naturally vitiates the whole restoration, apart from the
fact that the Mausoleum was of the Ionic order.
The consideration of Wren’s restoration will send the student to
Professor Lethaby’s illuminating monographs on “Greek Buildings
represented by fragments in the British Museum.” They must make him
realise again, and more sensitively, the importance of going to the
stones, and setting aside even Pliny (or, perhaps, especially Pliny) if
he does not confirm their evidence.
On the wall of the Mausoleum Room at the British Museum is a drawing
lettered “Design by Sir C. Wren from Pliny’s description of the Tomb of
Mausolus, copied from Wren’s book, the _Parentalia_,” and signed “J. E.
Goodchild, 1893.” Goodchild was a pupil of Cockerell, who also made a
restoration represented at the British Museum both by a drawing and a
model. In the MS. of the _Parentalia_ at the Royal Society is a sheet
with a rough sketch-plan, doubtless from Wren’s hand. From it and from
Wren’s description, Goodchild presumably made his drawing. The sketch
elevation in the heirloom copy gives an infinitely better-proportioned
and more reasonable building than Goodchild’s. There is the possibility
that the imperfect drawing referred to in the _Parentalia_ is the
sketch-plan bound up with the MS., but I feel sure the elevation
in the heirloom copy is indicated. Goodchild’s description on the
drawing suggests that he had merely copied from the _Parentalia_. It
would have been more correct had he said “based on indications in the
_Parentalia_.”
A word may be added about Wren’s description (printed in the
_Parentalia_) of the Artemision at Ephesus. There are bound, in the
ordinary copies of the book, engravings of a plan and elevation of the
Temple, and also a plan and elevation of Wren’s conjectural restoration
of the shrine of the goddess.
The odd feature of this restoration is again Wren’s reliance on Pliny’s
figures, which would have made what Professor Lethaby calls a temple
of “enormous and impossible size.” In order to fit in Pliny’s 127
columns, Wren has to make the fronts decastyle. To absorb the odd
number of columns he invents a quite enchanting shrine which has small
claim to credibility, and rather recalls the garden temples of the
eighteenth century. He again neglects the safer guidance of Vitruvius,
who states that the temple was octastyle. His observations on the
Temple of Peace built by Vespasian include some charming phrases:
“Each Deity had a peculiar Gesture, Face, and Dress hieroglyphically
proper to it; as then Stories were but Morals involved: and not only
their Altars and Sacrifices were mystical, but the very Forms of their
Temples. No Language, no Poetry can so describe Peace, and the Effects
of it in Men’s Minds, as the Design of the Temple naturally paints
it, without any affectation of the Allegory. It is easy of Access,
and open, carries an humble Front, but embraces wide, is luminous and
pleasant, and content with an internal Greatness, despises an invidious
Appearance of all that Heighth it might otherwise justly boast of, but
rather fortifying itself on every Side, rests secure on a Square and
ample Basis.”
But devotion to the antiquities of Greece did not hinder Wren from
digging deeply into the history of Roman Britain, and his conclusions
as to the London of the Romans are quoted with respect by the
archæologists of to-day.
Amongst the criticisms directed against Wren as an antiquary are
those which are concerned with his Gothic exercises. One otherwise
devout admirer says of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, St. Mary’s, Aldermary,
and St. Michael’s, Cornhill: “Whether Wren made these designs under
pressure, or merely as academical exercises for the entertainment
of his friends is unknown, but it is very evident that he had not
the least sympathy with Gothic architecture, or taken any trouble to
master its most rudimentary features.” Without going into the reasons
for these Gothic adventures beyond dismissing the idea that Wren made
such solid entertainment for his friends, it is at least safe to reply
that Wren understood the nature of Gothic very well. That is not to
say that he could reproduce it, but the informed student of any phase
of art is not necessarily the person to create it. In 1669 he made
a survey of Salisbury Cathedral for his old friend Bishop Seth Ward,
and wrote a report which shows a true critical appreciation of the
problems of the mediæval architect, of where he failed but also of
where he succeeded. There is none of the contemptuous violence used by
the virtuous Evelyn when he refers to Gothic, which led the way for
Ruskin’s later vehemence about the “foul torrent of the Renaissance.”
Wren merely remarks, “This Form of Churches has been rejected by modern
Architects abroad, who use the better and Roman Art of Architecture,”
and commends the proportions of the nave and aisles: “The Mouldings are
decently mixed with large Planes, without an Affectation of filling
every Corner with Ornaments, ... the Architect trusted to a stately and
rich plainness.” Wren’s criticisms are directed to the foundations, the
low level of the floor, the insufficient size of the pillars, and the
bracing of the walls with iron. He also objected, with some justice, to
the poise of the aisle vaulting, supported from without by buttresses
but not within save by the pillars themselves.
It happened that Wren had to concern himself intimately with other
“congestions of heavy dark melancholy and monkish piles, without any
just proportion, use or beauty” (the phrase is Evelyn’s), such as
Westminster Abbey. For twenty-five years he was Surveyor to the Abbey,
and wrote a Report on it in 1713. We may pass over his historical
paragraphs, which show shrewdness of observation, for his _obiter
dicta_ on Gothic methods. He disliked the “flutter of archbuttresses,”
as they “occasion the Ruin of Cathedrals, being so much exposed to
the Air and Weather,” but is tolerant of Henry VII.’s Chapel, “a nice
embroidered Work.”
We have learnt by dire experience the heavy burden of repairs incident
to the mediæval system of external supports by flying arches,
pinnacles, and buttresses in our climate. He goes on to specify
necessary repairs, some done, and others needed, and to plead for the
finishing of the West Front and the completion of the Central Tower
with the addition of a spire, which “will give a proper Grace to the
whole Fabrick, and the West End of the City, which seems to want it.”
Sir Charles Barry was later to be equally concerned with the idea of
completing the outline of the Abbey, as his last designs show.
Wren’s common sense and real respect for Gothic are alike shown by his
proposal for the spire: “I have made a Design, which will not be very
expensive but light, and still in the Gothic form, and of a Style with
the rest of the Structure, which I would strictly adhere to, throughout
the whole Intention: _to deviate from the old Form would be to run into
a disagreeable Mixture: which no Person of a good Taste could relish_.”
He went on to talk of the north window, then stopped with plaster to
prevent its total ruin, and said his models for the new work were
“such as I conceive may agree with the original scheme of the old
Architect, _without any modern mixtures to shew my own Inventions_.”
His North Transept Front was swept away by Pearson, not to everyone’s
satisfaction, and though the Gothic grammar of it was inevitably at
fault, because he was trying to do something against the current of
the times, the failure was not due to any lack of appreciation of
Gothic. The existing western towers were not built in Wren’s lifetime
and he need not be charged with the defects of their execution by the
introduction of definitely classical cornices and other details of a
type which Wren would not have used. So much for Wren as a student of
Gothic. I come now to an example of the use he made of other men’s
writings.
In the library of Shirburn Castle there is a copy of Wotton’s _Elements
of Architecture_, first edition, 1624, annotated by the hand of Sir
Christopher himself. It is worth while quoting from these notes in some
detail, because they show that Wren was a careful reader and that he
was quick to mark every kind of practical application of what he read.
The page references are to the first edition of the _Elements_.
Where Wotton says of staircases (on p. 58) that “the breadth of every
single step should never be less than one foot, nor more than eighteen
inches,” Wren adds “nor so much as eighteen inches at any time, for
if a step exceed twelve, those who have but short [legs] must tread
twice upon the same step, especially in descent, which, to women
especially, is troublesome, and dangerous to the hasty.” James Wyatt,
in the circular staircase of Devonshire House, erred in this way, with
exactly the effect that Wren describes. One bears in mind in this
connection that Wren himself was of short stature. On p. 55 Wotton
discourses of the advantage of luminous rooms: “Indeed, I must confess
that a frank light can misbecome no edifice whatsoever, temples only
excepted, which were anciently dark, as they are likewise at this day
in some proportion, devotion more requiring collected than defused
spirits,” on which Wren makes the comment that Christ Church in London
was practically nothing but window, and was fitter for a stage than for
a church, “although for the kind of building it is a thorough piece of
work.” On gardens and their treatment with aqueducts, walks, etc., Wren
makes the note, “And for disposing the current of a river to a mighty
length in a little space I invented the Serpentine, a form admirably
convoying the current in circular and yet contrary motions upon one and
the same level, with walks and retirements between to the advantage
of all purposes, either of gardenings, plantings, or banquetings ...
far beyond the bungarly [!] invention at Hatfield so much liked for
pleasure.” Up and down the book there are scattered all manner of other
interesting notes. There is a practical thought in Wren’s reference to
the very small chimneys in use in Spain, where charcoal was sold by
weight. He has evidently had difficulty with smoky chimneys, for to
Wotton’s observation, “Then there is a repulsion of the fume by some
higher hill or fabrique that shall overtop the chimney,” he makes the
significant comment, “As in our buildings here.”
In connection with terracing any story (by which Wotton seems to
have meant the making of loggias), Wren remarks: “Terracing is most
commended in hotter climates, and in our country must serve mostly for
summer rooms.” To Wotton’s general reflection that “various colours
on the out-walls of buildings have always in them more delight than
dignity,” Wren adds the criticism in Latin that in this particular the
noble building of Lord Exeter at Wimbledon also offends. He seems,
however, to have been friendly to the use of mosaic, for he says:
“Herein excels that excellent cave at Bodington wherein stands the
brazen hydra with seven springs out of seven heads.” With regard to the
art of the plasterer, Wotton had said: “Plastique is not only under
sculpture, but indeed very sculpture itself, with this difference that
the plasterer doth make his figures by addition, and the carver by
subtraction.” Wren makes short work of this with, “This proposition can
never hold true to the name of sculpture.”
At the end of the _Elements_ Wotton promises another work, “A
Philosophical Survey of Education, which is indeed a Second Building
or Repairing of Nature, and, as I may term it, a kind of moral
architecture.” Wren must have taken considerable pleasure from the
_Elements_, for in the margin he has written: “Oh that we might see
that, so long expected.”
There are bits of detailed criticism in his first _Tract_ which might
have been used in recent comments on a great London building: “Fronts
ought to be elevated in the Middle, not the Corners; because the Middle
is the place of greatest Dignity and first arrests the Eye; and rather
projecting forward in the Middle, than hollow. For these Reasons,
Pavilions at the Corners are naught; because they make both Faults,
a hollow and depressed Front.... No Roof can have Dignity enough to
appear above a Cornice, but the Circular: in private Buildings it is
excusable.”
We know little about the amount of Wren’s general reading, but he was
certainly a student of Elyot’s _Governour_. Some years ago I was the
means of placing in the R.I.B.A. Library the 1546 edition of this
once famous but now almost forgotten book. Its chief interest lies
in the fact that it bears the autographs on the title-page of Sir
Christopher’s father, Dean Christopher Wren, and of Sir Christopher
himself. The other writings scribbled on the margins are the work of
much earlier owners of the volume, which was nearly a century old when
the Dean acquired it. There is some little evidence that the architect
studied the book with care. Sir Thomas Elyot was concerned to set out
the whole behaviour of a knightly gentleman, and among other things
gives some warnings against the use of oaths. When Sir Christopher was
building St. Paul’s Cathedral he was distressed by the profanity of the
workmen, and posted up a notice directed against bad language. It is
possible that he consulted the _Governour_ before drafting this notice,
for the page references in the index under the heading “othes” has been
corrected from 170 to 160, and this was possibly done by Wren when he
sought for what Elyot had to say about oaths.
CHAPTER XIV
“THE ARCHITECT OF ADVENTURE”
In trying to estimate with any precision what is Wren’s position
in the history of British Architecture, the immediate and obvious
comparison is with Inigo Jones. I refer to Wren in my Preface as our
architect of greatest achievement, because I hesitate to use the
simpler words--our greatest architect. In my own mind the latter is a
true description, but the enthusiasts for Inigo Jones would dispute
it. None, however, can cavil at the statement that Wren achieved more
than any other English architect, whatever nice distinctions may be
drawn as to the relative greatness of his art and that of Inigo Jones.
The two men are not strictly comparable, and represent in their work
and outlook two different currents in the history of architecture.
Inigo Jones was essentially academic and, in his relationship to the
traditional methods of building which he found, the forerunner of the
modern professional architect. He had trained himself by much foreign
travel and by close study of the facts of building before he embarked
on his career. Wren, on the other hand, was essentially an amateur, if
the word be understood in its most favourable sense and not in the
least contemptuously. Inigo Jones was not an inventor. He took the
Palladio tradition as his model and adhered to it with faithfulness.
Wren does not seem to have had any particular hero amongst the great
Italian architects. He kept throughout his career a free mind, open
to the suggestions of his own inventiveness, ready to accept existing
conditions, rather than academic rules, as the guides to his treatment
of a problem, and eager to try new structural ideas.
It must plainly be said that Wren suffered frequent lapses of taste,
and it does no service to his great memory to gloss over these faults.
As a result of them it happened that practically no work of Wren,
however noble in its conception, however magnificent its solution of
difficult problems, can be freed from criticism in detail. He did not
produce the complete unity against which no criticism can lie. Of Inigo
Jones at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden (as it was before it was rebuilt),
and again at the Banqueting Hall, of Robert Adam in the hall at Syon,
and of Sir Charles Barry at the Reform Club, it can be said that they
made no mistakes. Each achievement is complete and perfect in its kind.
But it is impossible to say that even of St. Paul’s Cathedral: there
are elements in its design which are weak and confused. Even in the
steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, which is very nearly perfect, the diameter
of the cylinder enclosed by the ring of columns is hardly right.
This sort of criticism is even more true of the majority of the City
churches. The cause for this lack of perfection is not difficult to
find. Wren was an amateur, not only by the cast of his mind, but by
the circumstances of his entry into architecture: he was imperfectly
trained for his work.
[Illustration: S^T MARY-LE-BOW]
If he had followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Italian
Renaissance on the spot, not only in respect of design, but also of the
facts of building, he would have avoided many pitfalls. Great as is the
part which the knowledge of mathematics and geometry plays in his art,
nothing did and nothing could take the place of the practical knowledge
of the art of building which Jones possessed and Wren lacked, at least
until his later years.
It is possible, for example, that the present trouble at St. Paul’s
Cathedral would have been avoided if Wren, whose whole admiration
was for the Roman manner of building, had gone to Rome to see what,
in fact, Roman building was. He would then have learnt that Roman
builders did not carry immense weights on piers which consisted, as at
St. Paul’s, of a core of rubble cased in by finely jointed ashlar. He
would have found that it was advisable to build them either of ashlar
throughout, or, if he had decided on a rubble core with an ashlar
casing, to interrupt the rubble core at reasonable intervals by courses
of hard tiles or bricks. These would have prevented the perpendicular
settlement of the rubble that has now disturbed the relation between
the rubble and the ashlar casing. The professional Inigo Jones would
not have made that mistake. The amateur Wren did. And there is little
excuse for this fault. In his Report on St. Paul’s, written before the
Fire, Wren is very contemptuous of his Gothic predecessor: “The work
was both ill design’d and ill built from the Beginning: ill design’d,
because the Architect gave not Butment enough to counterpoise and
resist the weight of the Roof from spreading the Walls; for the Eye
alone will discover to any man that those Pillars, as vast as they are,
even eleven Foot diameter, are bent outwards at least six inches from
their first position. This bending of the Pillars was facilitated by
their _ill Building, for they are only cased without, and that with
small stones, not one greater than a Man’s Burden; but within it is
nothing but a Core of small Rubbish-stone, and much mortar_, which
easily crushes and yields to the weight.” When the time came for Wren
to build the piers that carry his dome, he fell into exactly the same
blunder.
He was similarly defeated sometimes by problems of design for lack
of knowledge of the history of his art, and by too great a reliance
on his own invention. In trying at St. Paul’s to marry the idea of a
great central dome to the Gothic cruciform plan with a determination
to preserve the long vista down the aisles, he involved himself in
difficulties in the support of the dome which he could not safely
overcome without clumsy elements of design, to be discussed later.
[Illustration: PLATE XVI
WREN MEDAL AT WADHAM COLLEGE.
Cast and chased about 1783 by G. D. Gaale.]
Yet, in spite of all his technical ignorance, he succeeded because
of the essential greatness of his mind. In succeeding, he carried
architecture forward, not by a normal development, but by leaps and
bounds, so far indeed, that there was found no one to follow him in
that line of development. Hawksmoor was an exceedingly capable
architect who had benefited, so far as his capacity would allow, by
thirty-two years of close association with the master; but, as Sir
Reginald Blomfield has said, he was always trying to interpret Vanbrugh
in terms of Wren. While he was under the influence of Wren he designed
like Wren, when he came under the influence of Vanbrugh he designed
like Vanbrugh.
Of Wren’s own outlook on his art we fortunately possess illuminating
notes, not only in his printed Tracts, but in a MS. bound up with the
heirloom _Parentalia_. It was printed by Miss Phillimore, and forms
the text of Professor Lethaby’s enchanting essay on “The Architecture
of Adventure,”[E] from which I have borrowed the heading of this
chapter--an acknowledgment, trivial though it be, of the debt I owe to
its author.
Wren’s paper is no more than a fragment, but it is a noble fragment and
begins thus:
“Whatever a man’s sentiments are upon mature deliberation, it will
still be necessary for him in a conspicuous Work to preserve his
Undertaking from general censure, and so for him to accommodate his
Designs to the gust of the Age he lives in, tho’ 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 than 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 different 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 Flood.”
And then Wren goes off into musings on the construction of the Ark,
the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, and the Sepulchre of Porsenna as
described by Pliny, finishing with this luminous phrase:
“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_.”
This was the core of Wren’s claim as an architect, the reliance upon
scientific rather than traditional elements in design. He develops the
idea in his first Tract printed in _Parentalia_:
“Beauty is a Harmony of Objects, begetting Pleasure by the Eye.
There are two Causes of Beauty--natural and customary. Natural is
from Geometry, consisting in Uniformity (that is equality) and
Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the Use of our Senses
to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes,
as Familiarity or particular Inclination breeds a Love to Things
not in themselves lovely. Here lies the great Occasion of Errors,
here is tried the Architects Judgment, but always the true Test is
natural or geometrical Beauty. Geometrical Figures are naturally more
beautiful than other irregular; in this all consent as to a Law of
Nature. Of geometrical Figures, the Square and the Circle are most
beautiful; next the Parallelogram and the Oval. Straight Lines are
more beautiful than Curve.... There are only two beautiful Positions
of strait Lines, perpendicular and horizontal; this is from Nature
and consequently Necessity, no other than upright being firm.”
Wren’s acute judgment noted the great part played by such factors
as historical association, one of the “other causes,” in the public
appreciation of architecture.
Earlier in the Tract he makes obeisance to the three principles which
had been laid down by earlier writers, but with a characteristic rider:
“Beauty, Firmness and Convenience are the Principles: the two first
depend upon geometrical Reasons of Opticks and Staticks; the third
only makes the Variety.”
Scholarly though Wren was in his art, he took nothing for granted, but
examined the common-places with a desire to establish reasons for them
or reject them:
“Modern authors who have treated of Architecture seem generally
to have little more in view, but to set down the Proportions of
Columns, Architraves and Cornices in the several Orders, as they
are distinguished into Dorick, Ionick, Corinthian, and Composite,
and in these Proportions finding them in the ancient Fabricks of
the Greeks and Romans (though more arbitrarily used than they care
to acknowledge) they have reduced them into Rules, too strict and
pedantick, and so as not to be transgressed, without the Crime of
Barbarity, though in their own Nature they are but the Modes and
Fashions of those ages wherein they were used.”
There is a very modern ring about the following moralising:
“Although Architecture contains many excellent Parts, besides the
ranging of Pillars, yet Curiosity may lead us to consider whence
this Affectation arose originally, so as to judge nothing beautiful
but what was adorned with Columns, even where there was no real use
of them.... It will be to the purpose, therefore, to examine whence
proceeded this Affectation of a Mode which hath continued now at
least 3,000 years, and the rather, because it may lead us to the
Grounds of Architecture and by what Steps this Humour of Colonades
came into Practice in all Ages.”
But for all his contempt of the pedantry of rules of proportion, which
the greatest architects of antiquity did not observe unless it suited
them, he saw in the Orders themselves something eternal:
“Architecture aims at Eternity; and therefore _the only thing
uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals_, the Orders. The
Orders are not only Roman and Greek, but Phœnician, Hebrew, and
Assyrian, being founded upon the Experience of all Ages, promoted
by the vast Treasures of all the great Monarchs, and skill of the
greatest Artists and Geometricians, every one emulating each other.”
Wren rises to his greatest height in the opening of his first Tract,
and shows that if his life had fallen out otherwise, he might have left
a reputation as a writer:
“Architecture has its political Use; Public Buildings being the
Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and
Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion
is the Original of all great Actions in a Commonwealth. The Emulation
of the Cities of Greece was the true Cause of their Greatness. The
obstinate Valour of the Jews, occasioned by the Love of their Temple,
was a Cement that held together that People, for many Ages, through
infinite Changes.”
I have quoted at what may seem to be inordinate length, but Wren is
justified alike by the content of his thought and the aptness of his
phrase, and I am concerned rather to reveal the man than my idea of him.
In all Wren’s writings he shows an acute perception of the fact that
architecture has had an immensely long evolution. He had, of course,
no suspicion as to how far back its origins were to be sought, but
clearly he was approaching the idea that forms, once constructive,
pass into decoration and become part of the language of architecture.
This is the final and, as I believe, the effective reply to the
puritan theorist, who cries aloud for the discarding of traditional
features in art. Sir Joshua Reynolds warned his students that the
business of a painter is to paint a fine picture, and that he is
not to be cheated of his materials by specious arguments. Wren was
clear-sighted enough to see that the Orders have a definite beauty
value: his only trouble was that he was not fully equipped to bend
them wholly to his will. The western front of St. Paul’s may be taken
as an instance. As a Whole it is a magnificent composition, and a
source of inspiration to everyone with any feeling for architecture,
but can it be pretended that the segmental vault of the upper portico
does not belie the entablature and pediment in front of it? Wren could
cut away architrave and frieze inside for the benefit of his great
arches, and refer his critics to the Temple of Peace (now the Basilica
of Maxentius) at Rome for his authority, but he lacked the insight or
the courage to deal with the external problem in the same fashion. The
fact is that the great architect of any age is both leader and led, and
cannot wholly escape the limitations of his time. But there are valid
compensations. His work could not be justly representative of the age,
one of the significant values of architecture, if he could entirely
dissociate himself from his age. When it is remembered that Sir
William Chambers can actually say in his _Civil Architecture_ (1759)
that every time he passes St. Paul’s he regrets that the pilasters
have no entasis--probably few know it--we can form an idea of the
limitations of thought that Wren would have to encounter. Vitruvius,[F]
with all his imperfections, was still enthroned, and few, if any, had
yet divined the real relation of that retired military engineer to
the arts of Greece and Rome. Wren had the true spirit of Bacon, and,
with further travel, might have seen further through the idols of his
market-place.
He seems to have realised the trouble in which he had involved himself
in the arches of the octagon that supports his mighty dome. Every
architectural student since his day has sat and speculated as to what
the solution might have or should have been. Wren left a sufficiently
feeble suggestion of curtains and seated apostles, occupying the
tribunes (three in each presumably), as a means of veiling the defect.
But the difficulty goes deeper than that: the octagon is peculiarly
troublesome to handle in terms of the Orders, as a number of failures
exist to show.
Wren’s work was always improving. The last, and westernmost, bay of
St. Paul’s inside shows more breadth and grandeur, but the carving
of the spandrels is so strange that one wonders if it can really be
original. This brings us to a characteristic of Wren which probably
accounts for some of his lapses of taste. It seems likely that he was
not hard-hearted enough with the people who worked under him, that he
was too generous, too ready to accept things on his assistants’ and
craftsmen’s assurance that they were the best that could be produced.
He may thus have been led into an occasional acquiescence, both in
design and construction, in things which he must have well known were
not really right. Confronted with every sort of difficulty, and none
too well backed, he must have been desperately anxious to avoid delays.
His very ingenuity, moreover, would lead him to make the most of what
was available. Unfortunately in works of _eternity_--architecture aims
at eternity--such compromises meet with a stern Nemesis.
In the two centuries that have elapsed since his death Wren has been
admired and followed from very different points of view. It has been
justly said that he has been in fashion and out of fashion and is now
above fashion. Any doubt as to the reality and massive quality of his
genius can easily be dissipated by a consideration of what imitators
have done. No domed church on the lines of St. Paul’s has achieved
equal beauty and grandeur, nor have any of the innumerable steeples,
based on his inventions, been of the same rank. In domestic buildings,
his special character remains pre-eminent and informs the best work of
to-day--a certain graciousness that in others degenerated often into
heaviness. There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman
at Chatsworth.
Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there is the same feeling
that caused Sir John Vanbrugh to refuse the succession to his office
“out of tenderness for Sir Christopher Wren,” and that led the
_Spectator_ to publish a noble tribute repudiating the ingratitude of
his dismissal. The lovers of architecture everywhere will feel that
in honouring Wren they have honoured the Art to which a man of such
amazing gifts and nobility of character was content to devote the
flower of his life.
Sir Christopher Wren was the very fulfilment of Wotton’s
prophecy--“Architecture can want no commendation, where there are Noble
Men or Noble mindes.”
APPENDIX I
A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE REFERENCE IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S
PROBLEM
Mathematicians who wished to answer Pascal’s challenge were given
until October 1, 1658, for a solution, and an umpire, M. de Cavarci,
was nominated, and the prizes were 40 doubloons or pistoles and for
the second, 20. In a letter of October 10 Pascal says he has received
both attempts at solutions of the problems set and also a number of
discussions of matters connected with the cycloid which did not pretend
to be solutions of his problem:
“Mais entre tous les écrits qu’on a recues de cette sorte, il n’y
a rien de plus beau que ce qui a été envoyé par M. Wren; car outre
la belle manière qu’il donne de mesurer le plan de la roulette
(=cycloid), il a donné la comparaison de la ligne courbe même et ses
parties, avec la ligne droit: sa proposition est que la ligne de la
roulette est quadruple de son axe, dont il a envoyé l’énonciation sans
démonstration. Et comme il est le premier qui l’a produite, c’est sans
doute a lui que l’honneur de la première invention en appartient.”
Summing up his history of the cycloid, he concluded that the first to
remark that curve in nature was P. Mersenne, that M. de Roberval first
worked out some of its properties, “que le premier qui en a mesuré la
ligne courbe a été M. Wren.”
The story is then taken up by a letter of Cavarci (dated December
10, 1658), the umpire, to Pascal (now masquerading under a new
pseudonym--A. Dettonville = an anagram of Louis de Montalte), in
which he recites the nature of the problems set--_i.e._, to find the
dimensions and centres of gravity of the solids generated by the
revolution of the cycloid. He goes on to say that there were sent
solutions of the more easy problems--“savoir: le centre de gravité de
la ligne courbe et la dimension des solides, lequelle M. Wren nous
envoya dans ses lettres du 12 Octobre”--but concludes that of the
challenge problem no solutions had been sent.
Pascal replied to this letter with a series of letters setting out a
general method for dealing with such problems and the actual solutions
of the problems he had proposed.
The real quarrel as to whether the problems had been solved or not was
with Wallis and not with Wren. Wallis appears to have sent a solution
and followed it up by various letters offering corrections. However,
he was adjudged wrong in principle (see Récit de l’Examen pour les
prix sur la Roulette). The prizes were not awarded. Wallis afterwards
(1659) published a “Tractatus de Cycloide,” in which are included four
propositions on the cycloid which Wren had given to Wallis.
Turning now to Wren’s counter problem. It is not directly connected
with the cycloid, but with one of the properties of the ellipse, and
it had previously been suggested by Kepler. It appears to have been
confused with Pascal’s cycloid problems because Pascal showed in his
general method that various cycloid problems could be referred to the
ellipse. Pascal has a chapter, “L’égalité entre les lignes courbes de
toutes sortes de Roulettes et les lignes elliptiques,” in the course of
which he remarks, “Cette admirable égalité de la courbe de la roulette
simple à une droite [=straight line] que M. Wren a trouvée, n’était,
pour aussi dire, q’une égalité par accident, qui vient de ce qu’en ce
cas l’ellipse se trouvé réduite à une droite.” Wren’s challenge seems
to have remained unnoticed.
APPENDIX II
AN ATTEMPT AT A WREN CHRONOLOGY
_The dates of Wren’s work have been set down so wildly that I prefer
the omission of some buildings to the repetition of blunders. Even so I
have no doubt repeated many old mistakes and made some fresh ones. An
accurate chronology of Wren would be of great comfort to the student.
I have checked only forty-seven of Miss Milman’s dates, but found
forty-five of them wrong, by from one to twenty-five years._
_The City churches are given under the year during which the first
payment to the builders was made: the dates in brackets mark the
last of such payments, which may well have been some years after the
buildings were completed. Wren seems to have settled final accounts in
batches._
L. W.
1632. Birth of Sir Christopher Wren, October 20.
1642. Entered Westminster School.
1647. Invention of weather-clock.
1649. Entered Wadham College.
1651. B.A.
1653. M.A. and Fellow of All Souls.
1654. Meets John Evelyn at Oxford.
1657. Appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy.
1658. Attempt to solve Pascal’s problem.
1660. Royal Society founded in Wren’s room at Gresham College.
1661. Appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy.
D.C.L., Oxford and Cambridge.
Appointed Assistant to Sir John Denham, Surveyor-General.
1662. Offer of Tangier surveyorship refused.
Appointed to survey old St. Paul’s.
1663. Doorway, Ely Cathedral.
Pembroke Chapel, Cambridge, begun.
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.
1665. Trinity College, Oxford: new court.
Visit to Paris (July).
1666. Return from Paris (March).
Report on old St. Paul’s (May), and First Design for dome over
crossing.
The Great Fire (September).
Prepared new Plan of London.
Appointed Surveyor-General and Principal Architect for repairing
St. Paul’s, the City churches, and other public buildings.
1668. Emmanuel Chapel, Cambridge (1677).
Repairs to Salisbury Cathedral Spire.
1669. First Marriage: to Faith Coghill, December 7.
Appointed Surveyor-General of the King’s Works.
1670. St. Olave’s, Jewry (1679).
St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East (1671).
St. Michael’s Wood Street (1687).
St. Mary Aldermanbury (1686).
St. Mary-at-Hill (1676).
St. Christopher’s (1675).
St. Vedast Fosters (1673).
St. Sepulchre’s (1677).
St. Mary Woolnoth (1677): the pre-Hawksmoor church.
St. Mildred Poultry (1679).
St. Benet Fink (1681).
St. Mary-le-Bow (1680).
St. Lawrence Jewry (1686).
St. Bride’s (1684).
St. Dionis Backchurch (1686).
St. Michael’s Cornhill (1677).
St. Edmund the King (1679).
St. Sepulchre’s (1677).
“Rejected Design” for St. Paul’s.
Temple Bar.
1671. St. Nicholas Cole Abbey (1681).
St. George Botolph (1679).
St. Mary-le-Bow Steeple (1683).
St. Magnus (1687).
The Monument.
Wren meets Grinling Gibbons.
1672. St. Stephen’s Walbrook (1687).
Wren knighted (or possibly 1674).
1673. St. Paul’s: “Model Design” approved by King (afterwards
rejected).
Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
1674. St. Bartholomew Exchange (1686).
St. Stephen’s Coleman Street (1681);
St. James Garlickhithe (1687).
Honywood Library, Lincoln Cathedral.
1675. St. Paul’s: “Warrant Design” approved by King and first stone
laid.
Birth of son Christopher. Death of first wife.
Greenwich Observatory.
1676. St. Anne and St. Agnes (1687).
St. Michael’s Queenhithe (1687).
St. Michael Bassishaw (1682).
1677. Christ Church (1691).
St. Peter’s Cornhill (1687).
St. Benet Paul’s Wharf (1685).
St. Martin’s Ludgate (1687).
All Hallows the Great (1687).
St. Swithin’s (1687).
All Hallows Bread Street (1687).
Second marriage: to Jane Fitzwilliam, February 24.
Birth of daughter Jane, November.
1678. St. Antholin’s (1691).
Design of Charles I.’s tomb.
1679. Kilmainham Hospital, Dublin.
Birth of son William.
1680. St. Austin’s (1687).
Death of second wife, October.
St. Clement Danes.
1681. St. Mildred Bread Street (1687).
St. Benet’s Gracechurch (1687).
St. Mary Abchurch (1687).
St. Matthew’s Friday Street (1687).
Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford.
Sworn in as President of the Royal Society, January 12.
1682. St. Alban’s Wood Street (1687).
Chelsea Hospital begun.
Latin School, Christ’s Hospital.
1683. St. James Piccadilly.
St. Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street (1687).
St. Clement’s Eastcheap (1687).
Palace at Winchester begun but not completed.
1684. St. Margaret Pattens (1689).
St. Michael’s Crooked Lane (1694).
Appointed Controller of Works, Windsor Castle.
Middle Temple Gateway.
Repairs to Chichester Cathedral Spire.
1685. St. Andrew’s Wardrobe (1695).
1686. St. Margaret’s Lothbury (1693).
St. Mary Somerset (1694).
All Hallows Lombard Street (1694).
St. Michael’s Royal (1694).
1688. Town Hall, Windsor.
1689. M.P. for Windsor.
1690. Hampton Court begun.
1690. Kensington Palace.
1691. Chapel, Trinity College, Oxford.
1693. Library, Queen’s College, Oxford.
1694. Chapel, Trinity College, Oxford.
1695. Greenwich Hospital begun.
Morden College, Blackheath.
1697. St. Paul’s: Choir opened for service, December 2.
1698. Marlborough House, London.
North Transept front, Westminster Abbey.
1700. M.P. for Weymouth.
1703. Death of daughter Jane.
1704. Orangery, Kensington Palace.
1710. St. Paul’s: top-stone of Lantern laid.
1711. St. Paul’s: nominal completion.
1717. St. Paul’s: Wren’s complaint to Commissioners against the
Balustrade.
1718. Dismissed from Surveyorship.
1723. Death of Wren, February 25.
APPENDIX III
A NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF WREN
The following brief particulars of several portraits of Wren, some of
which are reproduced in the preceding pages, may lead to more precise
information being disinterred:
(_a_) _Wren as a Man of Forty_ (Plate II.).--When I saw this, it
was in the possession of the late Mrs. Catherine Pigott. It is now,
I believe, in the possession of the Bishop of Southwell, to whom
it passed on Mrs. Pigott’s death. It is unsigned, and there is no
record as to its authorship. It shows Wren as a young man, and I
had thought it represented him while in the twenties. Mr. Richard
W. Goulding, F.S.A., dates the cravat about 1675, which would make
Wren forty-three. The modelling of the face is not unlike that of the
Pearce bust, which tends to confirm the age as about forty.
(_b_) _The Wadham College Portrait_ (Plate XIII.).--This is in
itself a poor piece of painting, and has a vague history. It is an
1825 copy by John Smith, of Oxford, deriving ultimately, it is said,
from a Kneller portrait at Lambeth Palace, which, I am informed,
has disappeared. It seems rather to be based on the Sheldonian
portrait, which was attributed by Dallaway to Thornhill, “painted in
conjunction with Verrio and Kneller.” I give the unlikely story of
its authorship as it is told, adding only that as the plan in Wren’s
hand shows the St. Paul’s of the Warrant Design or later, it must be
after 1675, and therefore Wren is depicted as a man of forty-three or
more, probably a good deal more, for he is markedly older than in the
last mentioned.
(_c_) _Bust by Edward Pearce at the Ashmolean_ (Plate V.).--This
beautiful work has been dated 1673, by a letter written by
Christopher, the architect’s son, and quoted by Mr. Lionel Cust. It
may well be Wren as a man of forty-one, and the younger Christopher’s
date can be accepted, but he was very casual in his chronologies.
(_d_) _The Royal Society Portrait._--The legend on the frame says
this picture is by Michael Wright, but Mr. Collins Baker attributes
it, on the ground of style, to Riley and Closterman in collaboration.
He claims that it is the basis of the Kirkall engraving (see next
note). If so, Kirkall turned the face the other way. The view of St.
Paul’s shows a transitional design between the Warrant Design with
its nightmare steeple and the dome as built. The clock towers are
almost exactly like the intermediate design preserved at All Souls. I
suggest it shows a man of seventy.
(_e_) _The Kirkall Engraving after Closterman_ (Plate XV.).--This
rare portrait was given to me by Mrs. Pigott shortly before her
death, and apart from its having been, as she told me, an heirloom
in the Wren family, it has an interest as showing Elisha Kirkall’s
“chiaroscuro” style of engraving interpreting Closterman’s portrait.
(_f_) _The St. Paul’s Deanery Portrait_ (Plate XIV.).--This is a
copy of the best known portrait of all, the Kneller at the National
Portrait Gallery, and an inferior copy, for it reveals a man of far
less distinction, both in character and feature, than the National
portrait. The latter is attributed to the year 1711, and is therefore
of Wren when he was nearly eighty.
(_g_) _The Welbeck Portrait_ (Plate IV.).--The picture is a small
whole length on panel. The architect wears a red dressing-gown
with white lining, white stockings, and red shoes; his right hand
is placed on his hip, and in his left hand he holds a drawing of
the elevation of the façade of St. Paul’s. On the left side of the
picture there is a lurid sky indicative of the burning of the City;
in the right-hand top corner is a bust of Charles II., flanked
by an amorino weighing the insignia of royalty (crown, sceptre,
etc.), against four shields of arms (England, France, Scotland, and
Ireland), and round the waist of the amorino is a scroll lettered
“Justum est.”
This picture was acquired by the fifth Duke of Portland in 1861.
It was then attributed to H. Gascar, who is stated to have been in
England _circa_ 1674-80, and who might consequently have painted Sir
Christopher soon after he made his design for the new Cathedral. The
West Front is shown in the picture with the single Order, an early
stage of the design. The architect looks very young for a man of
about forty-two years of age, but in the case of painted portraits it
is often difficult to reconcile the actual age of a sitter with his
_apparent_ age.
(_h_) _The Queen’s College Bust._--This posthumous portrait has been
attributed to Rysbrack; it is certainly worthy of him. Wren is shown
as a very old man.
(_k_) _The Medal at Wadham College_ (Plate XVI.).--As it is commonly
said that this medal was struck to celebrate the completion of St.
Paul’s, it is a little unkind to have to set down the fact that it
was cast and chased (not struck) by G. D. Gaale, a German, about the
year 1783, when he exhibited it in London, sixty years after Wren’s
death in 1723.
(_l_) _Art Union of London Medal._--A medal was issued in 1846:
obverse, with bust of Wren, signed H. Wilson, Sc.; reverse, St.
Paul’s, signed B. Wyon.
I hope the above notes may lead people better informed than myself to
bring out facts which will enable a full and correct catalogue of Wren
portraits to be prepared. Their publication in the Bicentenary issue of
_Architecture_ brought Mr. Richard W. Goulding to my aid in correcting
some mistakes I then made, and he has added the facts about the Welbeck
portrait.
A list of engravings after the Kneller portrait is given in Mr. F.
O’Donoghue’s “Catalogue of Engraved English Portraits in the British
Museum.”
INDEX
Abbey, Westminster, Wren and, 137, 138, 139
Aims of architecture, Wren on the, 153
All Hallows, Lombard Street, Church of, 81
Armoury and Mint at the Tower of London, 107
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 110
Association between architecture and military engineering, 13
Astronomy, Wren as a Professor of, 19, 36
Bacon, influence on Wren of, 30, 31
Barometer:
Torricelli’s work on the, 36
Wren’s work on the, 36
Belton House, 105
Benson, William, Surveyor-General, 74
Bernini:
Lay-out in front of St. Peter’s, Rome, 53, 108;
meeting with Wren, 48, 49;
referred to, 108
Bird, Robert, coppersmith, 120
Birth of Sir Christopher Wren, 1
Building materials, Wren’s views on, 93, 94
Busby, Dr., of Westminster School, 4, 10, 11
Cambridge:
Pembroke College Chapel, 109
Trinity College Library, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125
Campbell, Colin, work at Greenwich Hospital by, 103
Carlyle, Thomas, on the City churches, 97, 98;
on Chelsea Hospital, 97
Cathedrals:
Lincoln, Honywood Chapel at, 110
St. Paul’s, London. See St. Paul’s Cathedral
Salisbury, 137
Chapels:
Pembroke College, Cambridge, 46, 109
Trinity College, Oxford, 110
Wadham College, Oxford, 16, 17
Charles I., design for the tomb of, 107, 108;
pedestal for statue of, Charing Cross, 104
Chelsea Hospital, 97, 98, 99, 108, 125
Childhood of Wren, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Christ Church:
Newgate Street, 90
Oxford, College, 111
Christ’s Hospital, London, 107, 130
Chronology, an attempt at a Wren, 160
Church:
St. Andrew, Holborn, 87
St. Clement Danes, Strand, 78, 125
St. James, Piccadilly, 78, 90, 94, 95
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, 21, 22
Temple Church, 21
Churches, City:
Christ Church, Newgate Street, 90
St. Alban, Wood Street, =80=, 81
St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, 90
St. Anne and St. Agnes, 81
St. Antholin, Watling Street, 90
St. Augustine, Watling Street, =55=, 86, 119, 126
St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, 86, 119
St. Benet Fink, 90
St. Bride, Fleet Street, =87=, 88, 90, =92=
St. Clement, Eastcheap, 81
St. Dunstan-in-the-East, 78, 81, =82=, 136
St. Lawrence Jewry, 86, 89
St. Magnus, London Bridge, 81, =85=
St. Margaret, Lothbury, 86
St. Margaret’s Pattens, Rood Lane, 84, 85, =86=
St. Martin, Ludgate, =56=, 85
St. Mary Abchurch, 90
St. Mary, Aldermanbury, 81
St. Mary Aldermary, 76, 136
St. Mary-at-Hill, 81
St. Mary-le-Bow Cheapside, 87, 88, 145, =146=
St. Mary Somerset, 78
St. Mary Woolnoth (by Hawksmoor), 79
St. Michael, Cornhill, 136
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 81
St. Mildred, Bread Street, 86, 90, =91=, 120
St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, 80
St. Sepulchre, 78
St. Stephen, Coleman Street, 81
St. Stephen, Walbrook, 81, 88, 89, 119
St. Swithin, Cannon Street, 84, 90
St. Vedast, Foster Lane, =79=, 80
City Churches, referred to, 97, 98, 119, 120, 124, 126, 136, 145, 146,
160
Coghill, Faith, Wren’s first wife, 20, 21
College:
All Souls, Oxford, 11, 12
Christ Church, Oxford, 111
Emmanuel, Cambridge, 110
Morden, Blackheath, 108, 109
Pembroke, Cambridge, 46, 109
of Physicians, Warwick Lane, 107
Queen’s, Oxford, 110
Trinity, Cambridge, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125
Wadham, Oxford, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16
Cox, Mary, mother of Wren, 2
Custom House, London, 107
De l’Orme, Philibert, referred to, 50
Denham, Sir John, Surveyor-General, 43, 101
“Dome of London, The,” 59
Draughtsman, Wren as a, 129, 130
East Knoyle Rectory, Wilts, Wren’s birthplace, 1
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, chapel and cloister at, 110
Etching on glass, Wren’s experiments in, 40
Evelyn, John, 15, 24, 25, 43, 53, 60, 62, 98, 102, 112, 113, 114, 115,
137
Family life of Sir Christopher Wren, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 27
Fitzwilliam, Jane, Wren’s second wife, 21, 22
Fitzwilliam of Lifford, Lord, father of Wren’s second wife, 21
France, Wren’s travels in, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51
Gibbons, Grinling, 71, 104, 106, 107, 108, 114, 115
Gothic Architecture, Wren and, 138, 139
Greenwich Hospital, 83, 101, 102, 103, 125
Groombridge Place, Kent, 106
Hampton Court Palace, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156
Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 79, 103, 104, 110, 126, 149
Holder, Dr. William, a tutor and brother-in-law of Wren, 3, 20
Honywood Library and Cloister, Lincoln Cathedral, 110
Hooke, Robert, 4, 8
Hospital:
Chelsea, 97, 98, 99, 108, 125
Christ’s, London, 107, 130
Greenwich, 101, 102, 103, 125
Kilmainham, Dublin, 108
Houses by, or attributed to, Wren:
Belton, 105;
Groombridge Place, Kent, 106;
Hampton Court Palace, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156;
Kensington Palace, 105;
Marlborough
House, London, 106;
Pallant House, Chichester, 106;
Winchester Palace, 107;
Wren’s House, Chichester, 106
Inventions of Wren, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Jennings, Richard, master-carpenter, 71
Jones, Inigo, referred to, 13, 43, 51, 52, 53, 70, 101, 106, 144, 145,
146, 147
Kempster, Christopher, 119
Kensington Palace, 105
Kent, William, and Kensington Palace, 105
Kilmainham, Dublin, Royal Hospital at, 108
Knighting of Wren, 121
Lansdowne Chronology, MS. by Christopher Wren junior, 9
Letter of Wren to his son, 22, 23, 24
Library:
Honywood, Lincoln Cathedral, 110
Trinity College, Cambridge, 109, 110, 125
Love-letter from Wren to Faith Coghill, 20, 21
Marlborough House, London, 106
Mathematics, Wren’s study of, 4, 31
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Wren’s conjectural restoration of the,
132, 133, 134
Middleton, Constance, wife of Christopher Wren junior, 25
Mint, the, in the Tower of London, 107
Monument, the, London, 34, 104
Morden College, Blackheath, 108, 109
Morris, William, and the City churches, 97, 98
Museum, Ashmolean, Oxford, 110
“News from the Dead,” pamphlet by Wren, referred to, 16
Oughtred, Mr., Wren’s letter to, 7
Oxford:
Ashmolean Museum, 110
Christ Church College, 111
Incident at, 16
Queen’s College, 110
Sheldonian Theatre, 45, 46
Trinity College Chapel at, 110
Wren’s education at, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Palace:
Hampton Court, 99, 100, 101, 121, 156
Kensington, 105
Winchester, 107
Palladio’s influence on Wren, 52
Pallant House, Chichester, 106
Parentage and pedigree of Wren, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
_Parentalia_, the, 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 13, 15, 22, 24, 26, 34, 41, 65, 109,
124, 125, 132, 149
Paris, Wren’s journey to, referred to, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51
Parliament, Wren as a member of, 120, 121
Pascal’s problem and Wren’s solution of it, 34, 35, 36, 158, 159
Pedestal of the Charles I. statue, Charing Cross, 104
Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge, 46, 109
Pepys, Samuel, 14, 114, 130
Physicians, College of, Warwick Lane, 107
Pigott, Mrs. Corbett, 26
Plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire, Wren’s, 53, 54, 55,
56, 57, 58
Portraits of Sir Christopher Wren, some, 164, 165, 166
Pulpits and pews, Wren’s views on, 95
Queen’s College, Oxford, 110
Ripley, Thomas, and Greenwich Hospital, 103
Royal Society, Wren and the, 12, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
Ruskin, John, and Renaissance Architecture, 137
Ryland’s pedigree of the Wren family, 18
St. Alban, Wood Street, 81
St. Andrew, Holborn, 78
St. Andrew-in-the-Wardrobe, 90
St. Anne and St. Agnes, 81
St. Antholin, Watling Street, 90
St. Augustine, Watling Street, =55=, 86, 119, 126
St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, 86, 119
St. Benet Fink, 90
St. Bride, Fleet Street, 87, =87=, 88, 90, =92=
St. Clement Danes, Strand, 78, 125
St. Clement, Eastcheap, 81
St. Dunstan-in-the-East, 78, 81, =82=, 136
St. James, Piccadilly, 78, 90, 94, 95
St. Lawrence Jewry, 86, 89
St. Magnus, London Bridge, 81, =85=
St. Margaret, Lothbury, 86
St. Margaret Pattens, Rood Lane, 84, 85, =86=
St. Martin, Ludgate, =56=, 85
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, 21, 22
St. Mary Abchurch, 90
St. Mary, Aldermanbury, 81
St. Mary Aldermary, 78, 136
St. Mary-at-Hill, 81
St. Mary-le-Bow Cheapside, 87, 88, 145
St. Mary Somerset, 78
St. Mary Woolnoth, 79
St. Michael, Cornhill, 136
St. Michael Paternoster Royal, 81
St. Mildred, Bread Street, 86, 90, =91=, 120
St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, 80
St. Paul’s: Old, Wren’s plans for the restoration of, =56=, 59, 60,
61;
Cathedral, London, balustrade on the upper cornice of, 74;
cost of, 73;
dome of, =55=, =56=, 59, 71, 103;
first design for, 63;
mean treatment of Wren over, 73, 74;
opening of, 73;
“rejected” or “model” second design for, 63, =64=, 64, 65, =66=, 66;
South Staircase of, referred to, 34;
third or “warrant” design for, 67, =68=;
Wren’s achievement in, 76, 77;
reference to, 83, 116, 121, 122, 126, 143, 145, 147, 148, 154, 155,
156
St. Peter’s, Rome, 53
St. Sepulchre, 78
St. Stephen, Coleman Street, 81
St. Stephen, Walbrook, 81, 88, 89, 119
St. Swithin, Cannon Street, 84, 90
St. Vedast, Foster Lane, =79=, 80
Salisbury Cathedral, 137
Scarborough, Sir Charles, a tutor of Wren, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10
Shaw, Norman, and Hampton Court Palace, 100
Shepheard, Rev. William, a tutor of Wren, 3
Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, 45, 46
Soane Museum, Wren relics at, 121
Sir John, 99
Sons of Sir Christopher Wren, 25
Spires, City church, by Wren, 84
Strong, Edward, master-mason, 22, 23, 24, 69, 71, 73, 119, 120
Talman, William, architect, 101, 156
Temple Bar, 104, 105
Temple Church, 21
Thermometer designed by Wren, 8
Thornhill, Sir James, paintings in St. Paul’s by, 74
Tijou, Jean, metal-worker, 71, 101, 120, 121
Tomb, Wren’s design for a, 108
Tom Tower, the, Oxford, 111
Torricelli, his work on the barometer, 36
Tower of London, 107
Town-planning, Wren and, 53
Trinity College, Cambridge, Library of, 46, 47, 109, 110, 125
Trinity College, Oxford, Chapel at, 110
University degrees, Wren’s, 11, 12
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 103, 106, 110, 149, 157
Ward, Dr. Seth, 9
Webb, John, 43, 101, 106
Wilkins, John, Warden of Wadham, 9, 12, 13
Winchester Palace, 107
Wotton, Sir Henry, 139, 140, 141, 142, 157
Wren, Sir Christopher:
_Family and relations_:
Father, 1;
mother, 2;
sisters, 18;
grandfather, 1;
great-grandfather, 1;
sons, 21, 22, 23;
daughter, 13;
brother-in-law, 2;
uncle, 2, 18;
cousin, 18
_Education and Studies_:
Studies at home, 3;
at Westminster School, 4;
under Sir Charles Scarborough, 5;
Assistant at the Surgeon’s Hall, 7;
at Oxford, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17;
matriculation of, 11;
University degrees of, 11, 12;
Fellowship of All Souls, 16
_Personal_:
Critical mind, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142;
death, 122;
epitaph of, 75;
health of, 4, 10, 18;
heirlooms at Soane Museum, 121;
Kirkall engraved portrait, 26;
legible penmanship, 4;
letter to his son, Christopher, 22, 23, 24;
letter in Latin to his father, 5;
love-letter to Faith Coghill, 20;
marriage, first, to Faith Coghill, 21;
marriage, second, to Jane Fitzwilliam, 21;
patience of, 8;
poetic gift of, 16;
portraits of, 164, 165, 166;
retirement, 75;
social relaxations, 114, 115, 116;
theories of beauty, 150, 151;
will, 25, 26, 27
_Scientific Studies and Achievements_:
As an astronomer, 32, 33, 34, 37;
as a classical archæologist, 132, 133, 134;
as a student and scholar, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139,
140, 141, 142, 143;
essays, 15;
experiments in etching on glass, 40;
experiments in natural science, 38, 39, 40, 41;
inventions of, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17;
part in the development of natural science, 28, 29;
place as a mathematician, 34, 35, 36;
scientific labors of 116, 117, 118;
solution of Pascal’s problem, 34, 35, 36, 158, 159;
transactions with the Royal Society, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
_Professional and Public_:
“Architect of Adventure, The,” 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150,
151, 152, 153, 154, 157;
as a Member of Parliament, 120, 121;
as a professional man, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,
131;
influence of Inigo Jones, 51, 52;
influence of Palladio, 52;
introduction to Bernini, 48;
knighting of, 121;
plan for rebuilding London, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58;
remuneration and fees, 124, 125;
Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works, 43, 124, 125, 127, 128,
129;
travels in France, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51
Wren, Dean Christopher (father), 1, 2, 3, 20, 142
Wren, Christopher (second son) 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 119, 125
Constance (daughter-in-law), 25
Cuthbert (great-grandfather), 1
Faith (mother), 2, 18
Francis (grandfather), 1
Gilbert (eldest son, died in infancy), 21
Jane (daughter), 13, 21, 22
Margaret (great-granddaughter), 26
Matthew, Bishop of Ely (uncle), 2, 18
Matthew (cousin), 18
Stephen (grandson), 26
William (great-great-grandfather), 1
William (third son), 22, 24, 25, 27
Wren chronology, an attempt at a, 160
Wren’s House, Chichester, 106
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., GUILDFORD AND ESHER
FOOTNOTES:
[A] _English Leadwork: Its Art and History_, chapter vi.
[B] “The Complete Building Accounts of the City Churches (Parochial)
designed by Sir Christopher Wren,” _Archæologia_, vol. lxvi.
[C] _A History of Renaissance Architecture in England._
[D] I dealt with this subject in detail some years ago in the
_Architectural Review_.
[E] In _Form in Civilization_ (Oxford University Press), 1922, a volume
to be read by everyone, for it contains the ripe judgment on many
matters of a very stimulating critic of the part played by architecture
in thought and life.
[F] In Wren’s petty cash accounts is the entry: “For a booke on
Vitruvius for the use of ye office--£3.”
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