Christopher Wren

“ Such was Sir Christopher’s care for his grand work: it was intended for the service of God, and therefore was to have no blemish which Wren’s diligence could avoid. He was constantly there and shrank neither from fatigue nor from risk. The famous Duchess of Marlborough, in her quarrels with Vanbrugh over the building of Blenheim, complained bitterly that he asked 300l. a year for himself and a salary for his clerk, ‘when it is well-known that Sir Christopher Wren was content to be dragged up in a basket three or four times a week to the top of S. Paul’s, and at great hazard, for 200l. ”

“ The year after the battle of Worcester, Inigo Jones died, poor and lonely, in a lodging close to the defaced cathedral. He and Christopher Wren must probably have met. Wren had a sincere admiration for his predecessor’s skill, and spoke of the S. Paul’s portico as ‘an exquisite piece in itself.’
MAKING HIMSELF.
In the autumn of 1653, Wren, then just twenty-one, was elected to a fellowship at All Souls, and happy in the comparative tranquillity of Oxford, pursued the various studies which he loved. ”

“ There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth.
Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there [157] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor was there any drawback to her delight: loving, gentle, modest, and courteous he had been as a boy, and the famous successful architect possessed those qualities still. In a corrupt age, all testimony leaves him spotless; in positions of great trust and still greater difficulty his integrity was but the more clearly shown by the attacks made against him; among the foremost philosophers of his age, he was a striking example that ‘every good gift and every perfect gift is from above;’ no child could hold the truths of Christianity with a more undoubting faith than did Sir Christopher Wren. ”

“ So the days went on and the grass waved in Whitehall Court, and to quote Pepys again: ‘Lord! how everybody’s looks and discourse in the streets is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.’
None but those whom absolute necessity kept in London stayed in the infected air; the works at S. Paul’s were stopped; all meetings and lectures ceased, with good reason, since to gather people together was but to spread the infection.
Christopher Wren profited by the cessation of his London work, to travel abroad. ”

“ Wren’s eldest son had in the meantime finished his Eton and Cambridge career and had obtained, by his father’s interest, the post, which must surely have been a sinecure! of Assistant Deputy Engrosser. He does not seem to have inherited any of the brilliant genius of his father, though apparently of very fair abilities and with much taste for antiquities. Far more like Sir Christopher was his daughter Jane, who shared his tastes and studies and took a vivid interest in his work. She added to her other accomplishments that of being a very skilful musician. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sir Christopher Wren approves it.’
Alas! at that time Wren’s approval was enough to determine the majority of the commission to reject any plan thus sanctioned, and Renatus Harris’s grand design survives on paper alone.
CHAPTER XII.
1697–1699. OPENING OF S. PAUL’S CHOIR—A MOVEABLE PULPIT—LETTER TO HIS SON AT PARIS—ORDER AGAINST SWEARING—PETER THE GREAT—S. DUNSTAN’S SPIRE—MORNING PRAYER CHAPEL OPENED—WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
Home-keeping youth have ever homely wit. ”

“ Besides all these architectural and scientific cares, Wren had business of his own on hand, and was at this time engaged to be married to a lady four years younger than himself, whom probably he had known for some time. His bride was Faith, daughter of Sir Thomas Coghill and Elizabeth his wife, who lived at Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire. Sir Thomas was sheriff of the county in 1633, and was knighted at Woodstock in that year, the same in which King Charles was crowned in Scotland. ”

“ 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 [25] 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.” ”

“ The main authority for Wren's life is Parentalia, or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens ... compiled by the architect's son Christopher Wren and published by Stephen Wren, London, 1750, fol. Other lives are: Elmes's Life, 1823; Phillimore's Sir Christopher Wren, his Family and Times, 1881; and Stratton's Life, Work, and Influence of Sir Christopher Wren, printed for private circulation, 1897. ”

“ This professorship obliged him to come up to London and give a course of lectures every Wednesday in term time at Gresham College. None of these lectures have been preserved, and it seems from a hint in one of Dr. Sprat’s letters, that Wren was in the habit of lecturing from rough notes merely, and used no pains to keep any record of them.
‘HE MAY COME OUT AN HE WILL.’
At this time he made acquaintance with Richard Claypole, who was married to Elizabeth, Cromwell’s favourite daughter; both she and her sister, Lady Falconbridge, were faithful members of the persecuted Church of England. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The family, originally from Denmark, was settled in Durham in the fifteenth century. Wren's father, only son of Cuthbert Wren (d. 1558) , was born at Monk's Kirby, Warwickshire; he is said to have kept, as a haberdasher, ‘the corner stall, next unto Cheap-Crosse’ (Wren's Anatomy, 1641, p. 2) . Sir Christopher Wren [q. v.] was his nephew (cf. pedigree in Genealogist, n.s. 1884, i. 262–268, 1890, vi. 168–71) .
Matthew was a protégé of Launcelot Andrewes [q. v.] , then master of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and hence was educated at Pembroke Hall (admitted 23 June 1601) . ”

“ 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.”
[118] 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. ”

“ Wren’s was the first shown to King Charles, and though there is much resemblance between it and that of Evelyn, yet Wren’s is evidently the more useful, as well as the finer plan of the two, and was the one which the King accepted. All persons were agreed that to allow the old, narrow, filthy streets, with their magazines of oil and rosin, and their wooden houses touching each other overhead, to be put back was only to insure another plague and another fire, but the manner of rebuilding was in as great dispute as was the origin of the fire. ”

“ He had kept up a steady friendship with Sir Christopher since the day when they first met at Oxford, and had the highest opinion of his powers: ‘an excellent genius had this incomparable person,’ is his remark after a conversation with Wren. Evelyn was on the S. Paul’s Commission from the first, and Wren was destined, a few years later, sorely to miss the support of this constant friend.
The needful sum for covering in the dome of S. Paul’s was voted by Parliament in 1708. The question of using copper or lead was greatly discussed; lead was finally chosen ”

“ That Wren was a great upholder of discipline and authority, a man of a fiery energetic temper, decided opinions, and an unyielding, perhaps a severe, disposition, is certainly true; but it is also true that he practised, as Laud and Strafford did, an even-handed justice, laying his hand on rich and poor alike, and would not turn aside for any suggestion of policy or expediency. ”

“ So began the long years of Bishop Wren’s captivity. Few trials could have been harder for a man of vigorous active nature to bear than this one which rendered him powerless, when all he held dear was at stake, loaded him with calumnies and prevented his uttering a word in his defence. The diary gives no hint of what his feelings were. In silence he resigned himself, resolved to afford no triumph to his enemies. Dean Wren was somewhat better off, though he had his share of misfortunes. ”

“ In the midst of these curiously differing influences, Christopher pursued his studies under the care of the ‘most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins,’ [45] as Evelyn calls him, a man as devoted to experiments as Christopher himself. Dean Wren had been in Bristol with his daughter and son-in-law, accompanying Prince Rupert, and on the Prince’s unexpected surrender of the town to Fairfax (1645) , seems to have returned with Prince Rupert and Mr. and Mrs. Holder, either to his own living of Great Haseley, or to Mr. Holder’s at Bletchingdon. ”

“ Francis Wren, citizen of London, and son of Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor, a younger brother of doctor Matthew Wren, successively Bishop of Hereford, Norwich, and Ely. He was born at London October the eighth 1632, and became gentleman commoner of Wadham college in Oxford, where he took the degree of bachelor of arts, March the eighteenth 1650, and that of master December the eleventh 1653, and the same year was chosen fellow of Allsouls college there. While he was very young he discovered a surprising genius for the mathematics ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ He married in 1643 Susanna, only daughter of Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor and Wolverhampton, and sister of Sir Christopher Wren (Wood, Fasti Oxon. i. 393) . She died on 30 June 1688. Holder had a considerable share in the education of Sir Christopher Wren. ”

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

“ In 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 [130] 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. ”