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.