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.