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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V.
1659–1663.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On February 3, 1660, Evelyn writes:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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