In the following November, to quote the same writer, ‘men did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer.’ Matters were really progressing, the cathedrals and the court chapels as well as those in the Bishop’s palaces setting the example. In February (1661) Evelyn heard ‘Dr. Baldero preach at Ely House on St. Matthew vi. 33; after the sermon the Bishop of Ely gave us the blessing very pontifically.’[79]

Ely House was an ancient possession of the see,[80] the gift of William de Ludd, who in the reign of Edward I. gave the house and endowed it with his manor of Ouldbourne, a name which soon grew into Holbourn. The garden and its strawberries are immortalised by Shakespeare. It was leased to Sir Christopher Hatton by Bishop Cox in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and a struggle between the Hatton family and the Bishops of Ely then began which lasted until 1772.[81] In Wren’s time, the Bishops had recovered some of the buildings, and he had lived here before the rebellion. During that time the house had been used as a prison for ‘malignant priests,’ especially those of the city of London, and he must have found the whole building sorely defaced and injured.

The chapel, dedicated to S. Etheldreda, is a beautiful piece of Gothic architecture; and there, when it had been cleansed and restored to some order, many of the new bishops were consecrated, and Bishop Wren assisted at that preservation of the Apostolical Succession which but two years before had seemed well-nigh hopeless.

Much was done at Ely House. In the May of 1661 the Convocation of Canterbury met in S. Paul’s, its marred, plundered condition not inaptly showing the adversities through which the Church of England had passed. The Convocation had much work before it, the most pressing being to prepare a service for the baptism of those of riper years and for May 29. In order to this a committee of both Houses of Convocation was formed, which met at Ely House, and of which Bishop Wren appears to have been the ruling spirit. Many were still half afraid of their true position and afraid of the Puritan party; eighteen years of confusion and persecution had slackened all discipline, and many things seemed natural to the new generation which neither Bishop Andrewes nor Archbishop Laud would have tolerated for a day. It is implied in Dr. Barwick’s Life that many of those who should have upheld the Church discipline were willing, from a mistaken notion of conciliation and peace, to let it go. Bishop Wren set his face resolutely against this doctrine.

In November the Convocation met again. Dr. John Barwick had been appointed to the deanery of S. Paul’s, and in spite of very failing health, had resumed the weekly Communions, daily prayers, and musical services of the cathedral, and had succeeded in making the choir, where the Puritans had stabled their horses, once more fit for Divine service. At this session of Convocation the Prayer Book was finally revised, after the Bishops had heard at the Savoy Conference all that the Puritans could urge against it. Bishop Wren had been actively engaged in this work, and suggested a considerable number of alterations and additions, many of which were adopted. A large number of grammatical errors had crept in to the old book: for example, ‘which’ instead of ‘who’ was in almost all the collects and the Apostles’ creed. It still, by some oversight, survives in the Lord’s Prayer.[82] ‘The altering whereof,’ says Bishop Wren, ‘if it may seem strange at first to unskilful ears, yet will it not be a nine days’ wonder, but for ever after a right expression in all our addresses unto God.’

Page after page he corrected with the utmost care, from the very title-page and calendar to the end. July has the characteristic note, ‘Out with Dog-days from amongst the Saints.’—A considerable number of his suggestions are part of the Prayer Book to this day. The final clause of the prayer for the Church Militant beginning ‘We also bless, etc.,’ though not Bishop Wren’s composition, as he intended to have replaced the Commemoration of the Saints and the Thanksgiving as it stood in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., is yet due to his suggestion. The whole series of notes and emendations is very interesting, though they are more than can be given here. Two things plainly appear: that he wished to return as nearly as possible to the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., as the one most closely resembling the offices of the Early Church; that he was very desirous to have the book made as full, as plain, and as clear as the English language could make it. He was anxious that no needless stumbling-blocks should remain in the path either of Churchmen or of Nonconformists, but at the same time he had no intention of bartering any portion of Church truth or discipline for the doubtful advantages of ‘comprehension.’

It is a proof that he was not, with all his high-minded firmness, the persecuting prelate of Puritan pamphleteers, or the sour and severe man which, in early days, Lord Clarendon thought him, that both in Norwich, his former diocese, and in the one he then ruled, most of the clergy renounced the Covenant.[83]

S. Bartholomew’s day, 1662, was the time fixed for those who refused to conform to the Church to resign their livings. It has been easy to represent this as a piece of cruel tyranny, as the turning out of a body of pious men who were labouring in the work which others neglected. In truth, as even Milton says, they were ‘time-servers, covetous, illiterate persecutors, not lovers of the truth, like in most things whereof they had accused their predecessors.’ To this grave indictment must be added that they were, in the strictest sense, intruders, thrust into charges by Cromwell’s authority, while the true priests were imprisoned, fined, forbidden to minister, or even to teach as schoolmasters, and literally left to starve.

One of the earliest appointments made at the Restoration was that of Dr. Bruno Ryves[85] to be Dean of Windsor and Registrar of the Garter. In the August of 1660, Christopher Wren went to Windsor, and solemnly delivered to the Dean the three registers and the note books of the Order of the Garter, which Dean Wren had, with so much difficulty, recovered and hidden carefully until, at his death, he transferred the charge to his son. Dean Ryves gave a written acknowledgment to Christopher that he had safely received the books, and the service his father had done in preserving them was fully admitted. Gresham College had been cleansed and set in order after the Restoration, and Christopher resumed his lectures there, which were largely attended.

After one of these lectures given in November, Lord Brouncker, Mr. Robert Boyle, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Dr. Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray and others withdrew with Wren to his room, where they discussed a project for a philosophical College or Society. It was not an entirely new idea, for it had been a favourite scheme of Evelyn’s, also of the poet Cowley’s.[86] It was not a matter to be arranged in one sitting, and accordingly they settled to meet weekly in Wren’s rooms after his lectures, and agreed that for incidental expenses each should pay down ten shillings and subscribe a shilling weekly. A list was made of between thirty and forty probable members, among them those previously mentioned, and Christopher’s old friend Sir C. Scarborough, Dr. Seth Ward, Matthew Wren, Cowley, Sir Kenelme Digby, Mr. Evelyn and others. Sir Robert Moray undertook to explain the project to King Charles, and brought back a gracious message that he well approved of it, and would be ready to give it every encouragement. One of the first orders of the Society was that Wren should at the next meeting of the Society bring in his account of the pendulum experiment, with his explanation of it: this experiment related to ‘the determination of a standard measure of length by the vibration of a pendulum.’[87] There followed experiments for the improvement of shipping, in which Wren worked with Dr. Petty and Dr. Goddard. It was a question to what mechanical powers sailing, especially when against the wind, was reducible; ‘he showed it to be a wedge; and he demonstrated how a transient force upon an oblique plane would cause the motion of the plane against the first mover. He made an instrument that mechanically produced the same effect and showed the reason of sailing to all winds.’

But to give all Christopher’s experiments would be to write over again the already well-told history of the Royal Society. It had few more assiduous members.

In 1661, Christopher resigned his Gresham Professorship, in order to accept the Savilian Professorship of Astronomy, at Oxford.[88] It had been held by Dr. Seth Ward, who was soon afterwards made Bishop of Salisbury in succession to Bishop Hyde. Shortly after his appointment, Christopher had a command from the King to make him a lunar globe, according to the observations made with the best telescopes. He constructed one ‘representing not only the spots and various degrees of whiteness on the surface, but the hills, eminences, and cavities moulded in solid work.’ This curious toy was highly admired, placed in the King’s cabinet at Whitehall, and esteemed a great ‘rarity.’

In this year Wren took his degree as Doctor of Civil Laws, Oxford, and received a similar honour from the University of Cambridge. King Charles purposed paying a visit to Oxford, and the Philosophical Society both there and in London resolved to give him an entertainment. Lord Brouncker wrote from London to Wren to consult him. Wren wrote back:—

He proposed to show an experiment with a ‘weather wheel to measure the expansions of air.’ Another—‘no unpleasing spectacle—of seeing a man live without new air as long as you please;’ this was to be effected by an instrument of Wren’s invention which cooled, percolated, and purified the air. Also ‘an artificial eye truly and dioptrically made as big as a tennis-ball.’

The King appointed Wren as assistant to Sir John Denham, the Surveyor-General of Works. Sir John had been appointed by Charles I., in reversion during the lifetime of Inigo Jones, surveyor at that time, and had succeeded, at Inigo Jones’s death, to what was then but a barren honour. Evelyn, who had a dispute with Sir John about the placing of Greenwich Palace in that very year, says: ‘I knew him to be a better poet than architect, tho’ he had Mr. Webb[89] (Inigo Jones’s man) to assist him.’ Of this Charles II. was probably aware, and anxious to supply his deficiency. That his choice should have fallen upon Wren, unless Evelyn’s friendship suggested it, is remarkable, as, until then, Wren seems to have made no special study of architecture. No doubt the practical experience learned in the details of the assistant-surveyor’s work was afterwards very serviceable to him. He appears to have had a most retentive memory as well as a very quick eye and power of apprehension. In spite, however, of these calls on his time he was assiduous at the Society’s meetings.

The death of Laurence Rooke, his friend and fellow-labourer, threw more work on his hands. Rooke was succeeded in the Geometry Professorship by Isaac Barrow, afterwards a well-known divine who, in his first Latin oration, eulogised the Savilian Professor as ‘formerly a prodigy of a boy, now a miracle of a man, and a genius among mortals. Lest I should appear to speak falsehood, it will be enough for me to name to you the most ingenious and excellent Christopher Wren.’[90] It was a high compliment, but Barrow knew that his audience would heartily re-echo it. It is to be hoped that Barrow’s lectures were somewhat shorter than his sermons, which, fine as they are, were not always listened to with patience.

On March 25, 1663, the Society was finally incorporated by a charter from the King, with a preamble written by Christopher Wren, explaining its objects. The style of the preamble is far more florid than is usual in Wren’s writing: it has in it the exultation of one who is accomplishing a long-cherished scheme. One paragraph is evidently intended as a defence against certain attacks which were made upon the English philosophers as they had been in past times against Galileo:—

King Charles, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert, always a lover of experiments, were among the first members of the Society, and its beginning was prosperous enough; but Court favour has always created some envy. It happened that in the self-same year Butler,[92] then secretary to Jeremy Taylor’s friend, Lord Carbery, published his famous ‘Hudibras.’ It created a great sensation; the Court read it, the town read it; Pepys, hearing ‘the world cry it up so mightily, tried twice or three times reading to bring himself to think it witty.’ It was in everyone’s mouth, and Butler naturally thought himself sure of promotion. None, however, came to him, and he directed his bitter wit against those more fortunate than himself, the members of the new Royal Society, and Bishop Sprat in particular, in a poem called ‘The Elephant in the Moon,’ which opened as follows:—

With sharp touches indicating the various Members of the Society the satire continues, telling how they see in the moon, through the telescope, marvellous things, and an appearance of an immense elephant; they agree that a record must be made, and during the discussion who is to write it, one of the servants peeping through the telescope discovers that a mouse has got in between the two glasses! It, and a swarm of small flies, are the causes of the mysterious phenomena, the vast beast, the marching and countermarching armies which have been so learnedly explained![93]

The Society does not seem to have paid much attention to the poet, and the experiments went on as usual. A different task was presently offered to Wren by the King. When he married Catharine of Portugal, he received Tangiers, Tripoli, and Bombay as part of her dowry. Tangiers was reckoned as a very important place to the English, whose sailors were still constantly harassed by the Moorish pirates, and the fortifications of the town were a pressing care. King Charles offered, through Matthew Wren, then Lord Clarendon’s secretary, a commission to Christopher Wren, as one of the best geometricians in Europe, to survey and direct the works at the mole, harbour, and fortifications of Tangiers, offering him an ample salary, leave of absence from his Professorship, and a reversionary grant of Sir John Denham’s office. Flattering though the offer was, Christopher declined it on the ground of his health, and begged the King to command his duty in England.

He no doubt judged wisely, and the refusal gave no offence at Court. Perhaps the leave of absence might not have been easily obtained, for the following letter from Dr. Sprat shows that Wren was already embarrassed by the difficulty of being in two places at once:—

Wren had also employment at Cambridge, of a kind he would have been loth to put in other hands. His uncle, the Bishop of Ely, had instantly on his release determined to give a chapel to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he had been a scholar under Launcelot Andrewes,[95] and he employed his nephew as his architect. Upon this work and its endowment the Bishop expended 5,000l., the first money he received after his release. His personal habits were austerely simple; for the last twenty years of his life he drank no wine, and only ate off a wooden trencher, practising fasting and abstinence with great strictness. He had never spent any of the revenues of his see upon his children, and now he made the chapel his heir, bestowing upon it an estate at Hardwick in Cambridgeshire.

The chapel, which has a peculiar interest as Wren’s first architectural work, is built in the classical style he was to make famous in England, and bears his mark in its beautiful proportions, the richness of its stucco ceiling and the pannelled wood-work. The plain glazing of the windows and a something of bareness about the whole, are probably to be accounted for by the necessity of limiting the expense to a fixed sum. Its first stone was laid May 13, 1663, by the Master, Dr. Frank, acting for Bishop Wren, who was not present.[96]

It was probably at the same time that Wren executed some repairs in Ely Cathedral which had suffered, like every other grand church, from the fury of the Puritans. Bitter indeed must have been the regret with which the surviving clergy returned to find the fabrics of their churches plundered and laid waste, and their flocks scattered or corrupted.

CHAPTER VI.
1664–1667.

The repairs of S. Paul’s Cathedral could not be delayed. Wren, as Sir John Denham’s assistant, was greatly occupied about the matter, which was one of no ordinary difficulty. The responsibility was really his, for Sir John went out of his mind, and though he recovered, probably did but little business.

When Inigo Jones built his portico, he cased the nave with Portland stone, and rebuilt the north and south fronts. In doing so he pared down the original pointed architecture, until little of its beauty or character remained. His work had in its turn been damaged by the Puritans, who set up booths in the portico, and dug sawpits in the cathedral inclosure. Besides these injuries Christopher Wren’s accurate eye detected graver faults in the original design, some of which he enumerates. ‘The pillars of the nave, though eleven feet in diameter, were only cased with stone, and filled up with rubbish inside. The roof was always too heavy for them, so that they are bent outwards on both sides, so that the roof already cracked will finally fall in.’ He proposed to substitute a roof[97] of ‘a light, thin shell of stone, very geometrically made.’ The tower leant much to one side, and was propped with arches and buttresses, so as to block the view from the west end. Upon this tower, which he despairingly calls ‘a heap of deformities,’ there had been formerly a tall, thin, wooden spire, which was destroyed by lightning. For this he wished to substitute ‘a dome or rotunda, and upon the cupola for outward ornament, a lantern with a spring top to rise proportionately.’ He hints that when the dome was finished the rest of the cathedral should be harmonised with it, almost impossible though the task appeared. He expected great difference of opinion, and that ‘some would aim at a greater magnificence than the age would afford, and some might fall so low as to think of piecing up the old fabric here with stone, there with brick, and covering all faults with a coat of plaster, to leave it still to posterity as an object of charity.’ The miserable state of the building is implied in the epitaph of its Dean, Dr. Barwick, who in 1664, ‘Inter sacras Ædis Paulinæ ruinas reponit suas (utrasque resurrecturas securus)’.[98]

Another work upon which Wren was engaged was the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. Sheldon, who succeeded Archbishop Juxon in the see of Canterbury in 1663, was determined to free S. Mary’s Church from the profane uses to which it was put when the various ‘Acts’ were kept there, and any kind of jesting and buffoonery was considered allowable. He had had experience of Wren in the discussions about S. Paul’s, and now engaged him as architect. The building is too well known to need a description; the roof was reckoned a triumph of skill because of ‘the contrivance of supporting the same without the help of any beam, it being entirely kept up by braces and screws; and is the subject of an excellent mathematical treatise by that prodigy of the age, Dr. Wallis.’[99] It was six years building, and cost 25,000l. Evelyn, with whom Wren had often discussed the plans, went to Oxford on purpose to be present at the opening on July 9, 1669.

Dr. Plot, the historian of Oxfordshire, who was a member of the Royal Society, in his quaint book gives a careful technical description of the construction of the theatre by Wren, and his assistant, ‘Richard Frogley, an able carpenter.’

During the years that the theatre was building Wren did not intermit his attendance at the Royal Society; amongst other inventions he produced a machine for drawing in perspective, which was exhibited at one of the meetings.

A frightful interruption came to these and to all other pursuits in London. In 1665, the plague, which had more than once afflicted England, broke out with fearful force in London, where the dark narrow streets with their houses meeting overhead, and the foul state of the entire town, gave every encouragement to its ravages. Pepys, who stayed in London all through the worst time of the plague, gives many a record of this visitation.[100]

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. Before going he had much to settle; to help Mr. Evelyn find a tutor, ‘a perfect Grecian and more than commonly mathematical,’ for his son. This youth went two years later, at the age of thirteen, to Trinity College, Oxford, ‘being newly out of long coates.’

Wren’s Oxford Professorship, and his works, both there and at Cambridge, required to be set in good order before he could go. At Oxford he was engaged on the repairs of Trinity College, for his friend Dr. Bathurst.[101] On June 22, 1665, Wren writes to them as follows:—

Some technical details for the builder follow, and then:

The College was repaired by Sir Thomas Pope, it having been left in a very ruinous condition, but the ornamental part is due to Dr. Bathurst, aided by munificent Archbishop Sheldon and other old members of the College.

He was making considerable additions to Trinity College at Cambridge: to this date belongs the library, which he added to the beautiful western Quadrangle known as Nevile’s Court.

Very full directions and six drawings follow, explaining the plan and its details.

It was not until midsummer that Wren was able to start on his journey: he went at once to Paris to the Earl of S. Albans, the English ambassador, to whom he had letters. Lord S. Albans had lived at Paris in great ease and luxury all through the Rebellion, far more so, Evelyn indignantly says, than had the King. He was supposed to be privately married to the Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria. He was what was then called a great virtuoso, a friend of Cowley and of other wits, and entertained Wren with much courtesy and hospitality. Wren’s name was, in itself, a sufficient introduction to the scientific men and philosophers of the city, in whose society he took great pleasure.

He had long been a Member of the Order of Freemasons, and had distinguished himself by the attention he gave to the lodges under his care: at the time of his journey to France he was Deputy Grand Master under Earl Rivers; no doubt he availed himself to the full of the opportunities which Freemasonry afforded him for observing the details of the work and becoming acquainted with the workmen, the architects, and the sculptors, whom Louis XIV. had brought in great numbers to Paris.

It would have been interesting had Wren left us a record of his impressions of Paris from a political point of view. It was the brief interval of peace between England and France before the war of the Netherlands. Louis XIV., climbing upwards to the zenith of his brilliant reign, keeping the supreme power in his own hands since Mazarin’s death (in 1661), with the wise Colbert for his financier, surrounded by all the great captains, statesmen, wits and artists who made up the ‘Siècle de Louis XIV.,’ must have been a very interesting subject for the observation of a philosopher like Wren, whose youth had been passed among terrible political storms. There is, however, but one slight hint in his journal, but one suggestion that he discerned the true value of much of the glitter and veneer of universal, if temporary, success. Pascal, with whom he had corresponded, and between whose brief career and his own there is a curious resemblance, had died three years before Wren took his one foreign journey.

The ‘Académie Royale des Sciences,’ which had just received the formal sanction of Louis XIV., had begun much like the English Royal Society, by small meetings and conferences at Paris amongst scientific men, and in these conferences, Pascal, while very young, had taken a brilliant place. His father, Etienne Pascal, when he found it a vain attempt to withhold mathematical science from his son, cultivated the boy’s genius to the utmost, beyond, perhaps, what the very feeble physical frame could bear.

One cannot doubt that Wren was introduced to this society, and took an interest in its discussions, though his attention seems most of all to have been given to architecture.

In a journal written for a Dr. Bateman, the friend who gave him the letters to Lord S. Albans, he says:

With the great men Latin was probably the common tongue, but with the artizans he must have talked in French, and have either possessed or acquired no small mastery of the language and of the technical terms of their various trades. The ‘observations’ were either never hammered into the shape Wren wished, or else were subsequently lost or copied by someone else, as frequently happened to one so careless of his own fame as was Wren. In January 1666, the English Ambassador was recalled from Paris, and the war began between England, and the Netherlands with France for their ally.