Pembroke Chapel was meanwhile completed, and

Bishop Wren must have looked with joy on the completion of his thankoffering, and may have guessed, as he surveyed its beautiful proportions, that he had set his nephew, its young architect, on the road to fame. Very little is told us of the latter years of Wren’s Episcopate; one or two stories are given in the ‘Parentalia’ and then contradicted, but it seems he kept his old firmness. In 1662 he held the second Visitation of his Diocese and the articles of inquiry and directions show no change in his opinions and no deference to Puritan notions. It was by a stretch of his power as Visitor that he admitted Dr. Beaumont to be master of Peterhouse, though the college had nominated two other deserving persons, of whom Cosin was one. The choice proved, in the end, a very wise one. He could be lenient also when he thought it right, and admitted several Fellows of Jesus College who came to him, in some fear of a refusal, for institution. He ‘was very fair and civil towards them, despatched them without the usual height of the fees and persuaded them to studiousness and peace against all animosities.’ So says a contemporary letter quoted in the ‘Parentalia.’

Wren had come home at Christmas to find London comparatively free from the plague, and people gradually returning. The Royal Society, whose meetings had of course ceased during the infection, busied themselves in investigations as to the plague, and the possible methods of preventing it. It still raged in the country, and especially at Cambridge, driving Isaac Newton from his lectures there to the garden at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, where the idea of the law of gravitation first occurred to his mind.

The repair of S. Paul’s was again discussed and commissioners appointed in 1666, among whom were Evelyn, Wren, Dean Sancroft, and the then Bishop of London, who was Humphrey Henchman, the early friend of George Herbert.

On August 27th they inspected the cathedral. Two of the commissioners, Mr. Chichley and Mr. Prat, evidently wished to do as little as possible, declaring, when the nave was proved to lean outwards on both sides, ‘it was so built for an effect of the perspective,’ and proposing to repair the steeple on its old foundations. Wren thought very differently, insisted on new foundations, renewed his former proposal of ‘a noble cupola’ which was strongly supported by Evelyn, who had never forgotten the grandeur of S. Peter’s just completed when he went to Rome as a young man in 1644. They retired to the Deanery to give their opinions in writing, promising to send estimates of the cost of their several plans. Six days later a new disaster overwhelmed London and solved the question of repairing the cathedral. On the night of September 2nd the Fire of London began; for three days and four nights it burned unchecked, having gained such strength during the first panic that it could not be beaten back, the sparks constantly kindling new centres of flame.

At last the people were roused to take some steps. King Charles, who showed on this occasion great courage and presence of mind, got by water to the Tower and insisted on the houses near being blown up so as to prevent the flames from reaching the powder magazine.

Pepys gives a vivid account of the dismay and confusion; the goods removed and removed again as the fire reached what had been thought to be places of safety; the rain of fire drops, and the ever-new places in which the fire broke out, and his own difficulties of getting anything to eat but the cold remains of his Sunday’s dinner! On September 17 he went by water to Greenwich—‘seeing the City all the way, a sad sight much fire being in it still.’ S. Paul’s suffered terribly; the Portico was split and rent, nothing but the inscription remaining, of which each letter was perfect. The heat had calcined the largest blocks of stone, the Portland stone flew off wherever the flames touched it; the lead roof (no less than six acres by measure[107]), melted and fell in, and carrying everything with it in its fall, broke into S. Faith’s, the crypt below the choir, where the books belonging to the Stationers’ Hall had been carried for safety. They caught fire and continued burning for a week. The altar and roof above it, though of lead, remained untouched, and one Bishop’s tomb.[108] When at length the fire burnt out, the city was a ‘ruinous heap,’ the air still so hot as almost to singe the hair of those who sought amongst the ruins for some remains of former wealth. In the fields all round were two hundred thousand people of all classes equally destitute, silent from the very greatness of their calamity and asking no relief. The King did his utmost for them, and a proclamation was made for the country to come in and refresh them. Most fortunately the weather was warm and fair.

For a few days their stupor lasted, when it was broken into by a general alarm that the Dutch were in the river burning all the shipping. When this was at length appeased, the people flocked back to what had been the city, and either set up little sheds where their houses had been or took refuge with friends whose dwellings were uninjured, so that in four days’ time of the hundreds who had thronged the fields not one remained. To rebuild the city was an urgent necessity, and while the flames were in parts still burning Wren and Evelyn had both made plans for a new city and presented them to the King. 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. Pepys believed that it was caused by the Dutch, who in the following year did venture into Chatham and burnt several men-of-war as they lay at anchor there; but the popular idea was that it was caused by the French and the Roman Catholics, and there were plenty ready to swear that they had seen foreigners kindling the flames in fresh places by throwing fire-balls into the houses. Some said it was done by the Puritans, and very few appear to have accepted the theory, probably the true one, that it was caused by the over-heating of a baker’s oven.

Christopher Wren began his work by having the ruins cleared away. It was no easy task, especially as every now and then the flames would break out anew when the air reached the cellars where they had been smouldering. But it was a mere matter of necessity, as until this was done it was not possible to pass to and fro or take the necessary levels and measurements. He also repaired a portion of the west end of S. Paul’s, which best permitted it, for divine service. It was employment enough for one man, but as the evenings grew longer, in the intervals of elaborating his plans for the new city, he returned to the Royal Society and attended all its meetings.

Improvements in building naturally occupied much of the Society’s attention. Mr. Hooke produced a scheme for a better method of brick-making;[109] new models for the London granaries were required, and Wren gave an account of those at Dantzic.

On April 24, 1667, his uncle, the Bishop of Ely, died, at the age of eighty-one, at Ely House, in Holborn, which had probably been his chief abode, though he left it on occasions for the work of his diocese and for the consecration of the chapel at Pembroke Hall. Back to his well-loved University, and to the resting-place he had prepared for himself underneath the altar of the chapel, the Bishop’s remains were slowly borne during the first bright days of May, attended by ‘his children, his alliance, and his family.’ The Heralds’ College conducted the funeral with full dignity and solemnity. When they reached Cambridge the Vice-Chancellor and the whole university met the procession, which was headed by Rouge Dragon, Pursuivant-at-arms, carrying the silver-gilt Crozier, and Norroy, King-at-arms, carrying the silver-gilt Mitre, both of which, as well as a pair of massive silver altar candlesticks, the Bishop had provided a year before. On May 9, with the same attendance, which included ‘twenty-four scholars of S. John’s, Peter House, and Pembroke who were his relations,’[110] the coffin was borne to Pembroke Chapel from the Registry, at the end of the Regent’s Walk, where it had lain in state for two days, and after Evening Service had been said was laid in a ‘coffin of one fair whole stone,’ in the vault of the chapel. Dr. Pearson pronounced a Latin oration over it, recalling the chief events of the Bishop’s long and troubled life, describing his high-minded character, his resolute self-denial, and contrasting his conduct in never seeking, or by the least word asking, for promotion, but rather being besought to accept it, with those who gaped for church preferment, and rather snatched honours than received them. Dr. Pearson dwelt on his liberality to the University, on his never enriching his family out of the revenues of the sees he had ruled; and paid a warm tribute to the courage and faith with which he had fought for the Church, and either alone, or amongst very few, had understood her discipline and dared to revive it.

Of the four sons who survived the Bishop, Matthew, the eldest, early attracted notice by an answer to Harrington’s ‘Commonwealth of Oceana’ and by a pamphlet ‘Monarchy asserted,’ a vindication of a former work written in 1659. He was highly thought of by the Royalists, and was a member of the Parliament which met in 1661. He was Lord Clarendon’s secretary, remained loyal to him during his unmerited disgrace, and was then taken by the Duke of York as his secretary. Matthew remained with the Duke until 1672; when he died and was buried in the vault at Pembroke Chapel. He had taken a share in most of the political events of his day, always with honour and credit. Thomas, the next brother, left the profession of medicine, received holy orders, and was given the Rectory of Littlebury in Essex by his father; a preferment that he held until his death in 1680. Bishop Wren also made him Archdeacon of Ely. He was a great musician and a member of the Royal Society. The two younger sons, Charles and William, were both Oxford scholars, and received degrees at the Restoration. Charles sat for Cambridge in the Parliament of 1685, called by James II. on his accession. All these three younger sons received degrees in 1660, with many others who had been ejected by the Parliamentary Visitors in 1648–9. William Wren, who was made a knight, was a barrister of the Middle Temple, and enjoyed the questionable advantage of Judge Jeffreys’ acquaintance. Jeffreys, then Lord Chancellor, writing to Pepys[111] in 1687, says:—

William Wren died in 1689 and was buried in the Temple Church. There is no mention of the marriage of any of the Bishop’s children, and respecting the daughters I can find no record whatever, so it seems that that branch of the Wren family died out. Captain Wren was probably one of the Durham Wrens, or of those who lived at Withibrook in Warwickshire and are mentioned by Dugdale.

CHAPTER VII.
1668–1673.

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 spite of Wren’s previous statement, and that of Evelyn and Sancroft, in spite of the immense additional damage which the conflagration had caused, attempts were still made to patch up the remains of S. Paul’s Cathedral.

As has been said, something was done in order to make it possible to hold Divine Service in the ruins, and there Sancroft ministered, and there possibly he preached before the King on the occasion of the solemn fast held for the fire on October 10, 1666.[112] Parts of the sermon rise to real eloquence, and he admonishes King Charles and his luxurious Court with singular courage and directness. So matters remained with the Cathedral until the spring of 1668.

Wren was at Oxford, delivering his Astronomy Lectures, when he received the following letter from the Dean of S. Paul’s:[113]

Wren seems to have been unable to come up to London, and to have written an answer to Dean Sancroft reiterating his opinion, while the attempt at repairs continued.

At the beginning of July Sancroft wrote to him again:—

Wren obeyed this intreaty, came up from Oxford, made a thorough examination of the Cathedral, and wrote a report for the commissioners.

He enumerates the various ‘decays’ of the building from the date of the fire in Queen Elizabeth’s reign which burnt the whole roof and caused ‘the spreading out of the walls above ten inches from their true perpendicular’—up to the last fire, of which he says—

Then follows an account of the injuries to the rest of the building, but as they have been already touched on in the extracts from Evelyn’s Diary and Sancroft’s letters, they shall not be repeated here.

The only part of the cathedral where this could be safely and easily done was at the eastern end of the nave:—

Many meetings and much discussion ensued, and Wren’s opinion at last prevailed; the King issued an order in council for taking down the walls at the east end, the old choir, and the tower, and for clearing the ground in order to lay a fresh foundation. While this was being done, Wren prepared sketches and designs for a new S. Paul’s. He had also an engagement out of London: his friend Dr. Seth Ward, the Bishop of Salisbury, an active member of the Royal Society, asked Wren to survey his beautiful cathedral, which had suffered much in the civil wars, and lately by lightning and tempest.

Though the architecture of the cathedral was not of the kind which he considered the best, Wren had too fine a taste, too quick an eye for beauty of form, not to admire it heartily, and in his report he pronounced that ‘the whole pile was large and magnificent, justly accounted one of the best patterns of the age wherein it was built.’ He praised the pillars and mouldings, ‘the stately and rich plainness’ to which the architect had trusted. He made a thorough examination of the whole, especially the spire, which had declined to the south-west, and had caused great alarm. Wren was of opinion that the architect had not laid as sufficient foundations, especially under the pillars, as he should have done, considering the marshy nature of the soil, the frequent inundations, the great weight that the pillars had to bear, and that they themselves were too slight, particularly those under the spire.

To prevent further mischief to the spire, he ordered some timbers in it, and in the tower, to be cut away, and put in bands and braces of iron wrought by anchor smiths who were accustomed to great work for ships. He then had a plummet dropped to the pavement, from the highest possible part of the spire, the height of which he reckoned at 404 feet from the ground, to see exactly what the decline was, and ordered this trial to be repeated at certain times to see if the decline increased.

When, nearly 200 years later, Mr. Wyatt made the trial, he found that the decline was unaltered, so true had Wren’s science proved.

Both this year and the previous one had, so far as London was concerned, been taken up by the business of levelling, marking out streets, and adjusting the claims of such as had had houses in the city before the fire. Wren had laid before the King and Parliament a model of the city as he proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the design; the model probably does not exist, but the ground-plan has been preserved, and suggests a London very different to the present one.

The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the confined, winding approach to S. Paul’s that it now is, even its crooked picturesqueness marred by the viaduct that cuts all the lines of the Cathedral, gradually widened as it approached S. Paul’s, and divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least, which ran on either side of the Cathedral, leaving a large open space in which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to which ten streets, each sixty feet wide, converged, and around which were placed the Post Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths’ Hall, and the Ensurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest streets were to be thirty feet wide, ‘excluding all narrow, dark alleys without thoroughfares, and courts.’

The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal thoroughfares, and to be ‘designed according to the best forms for capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All churchyards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.’

He intended that the churchyards should be carefully planted and adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials within the walls of the town he strongly objected, and the experience derived from the year of the plague confirmed his judgment. No gardens are mentioned in the plan, for he had provided, as he thought, sufficiently for the healthiness of the town by his wide streets and numerous open spaces for markets. Gardening in towns was an art little considered in his days, and contemporary descriptions show us that ‘vacuities’ were speedily filled with heaps of dust and refuse.

The London bank of the Thames was to be lined with a broad quay, along which the halls of the city companies were to be built, with suitable warehouses in between for the merchants, to vary the effect of the edifices.

The little stream whose name survives in Fleet Street was to be brought to light, cleansed, and made serviceable as a canal one hundred and twenty feet wide, running much in the line of the present Holborn Viaduct.[116]

These were the main features of Christopher Wren’s scheme, and had he been allowed to accomplish it, we can imagine what the effect of London might have been without its noisome smells, without its dark crooked lanes, without its worst smoke, its river honoured not only with the handsome quay it has at length obtained, but with a line of beautiful buildings and fair spires, and above all S. Paul’s, with an ample space around it, giving free play to its grand proportions. Wren, with a perfect knowledge of his own powers, which he considered as dispassionately, and knew as accurately as any matter of mathematical science, was ready to undertake and perform his scheme to the uttermost.

The difficulties were however considerable: there were the endless quarrels about property, the reluctance to part with an old site, and, chief difficulty of all, the utmost hurry of rebuilding in order to house the people before the approaching winter.

Pepys[117] says that in April 1667:—

Thus Wren had by no means clear ground on which to work, and an opportunity was forfeited, which, absit omen, may never recur, of making London one of the beautiful cities of the world.

Important sanitary improvements were, however, made: the houses were not built of wood; the principal streets were less narrow; and, above all, the lingering contagion was burnt away. Nothing less would probably have availed; but the fire was a cleansing one, and left behind it this blessing, that though more than two hundred years have elapsed the plague has not, as yet, reappeared.

The Custom House of London was one of the first buildings to be restored, and Wren began it in 1668. It was a stately stone edifice, built in three sides of a square, with an open court in front. The same fate befell this building which had overtaken its predecessor; in 1719 it was burnt down.

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. Sir Thomas was a grandson of Marmaduke Coghill,[118] of Coghill, Knaresborough. He married, in 1622, Elizabeth Sutton, the heiress of Horsell and some lands in Surrey. Faith, their daughter, was born on March 17, 1636, and baptized in the same month at Bletchingdon by her relation the Rev. John Viell, the then rector. It seems likely that Wren made her acquaintance while both were children when staying with his sister Susan and her husband, Dr. William Holder, at Bletchingdon Rectory. It may have been Faith who comforted him when, on June 3, 1656, they laid Dean Wren in the chancel of Bletchingdon Church.

One letter to Faith Coghill from her lover, exists among the curious autographs of the ‘Parentalia,’[119] its delicate, finished and yet firm writing, eminently characteristic of Christopher Wren: it is as follows—

On December 7, 1669, Christopher Wren and Faith Coghill were married in the Temple Church in London. Of their married life there is absolutely no record; they probably lived chiefly in London, as Wren had a house in Scotland Yard, which went with the office of Surveyor-General.

One of Wren’s early works was the rebuilding, on a somewhat larger scale, of the Royal Exchange. ‘Charles II. went to the Exchange with his kettle-drums and trumpets to lay the first stone of the new building of the Exchange on the 23rd of October 1667.’[120] Wren’s own wish had been, as has been said, to make it the nave or centre of the town, in which case he meant to contrive it after the form of a Roman Forum with double porticoes. Thwarted in this, he restored it as much as possible to what it had previously been, replacing the statue of Sir Thomas Gresham, the only thing in the building uninjured by the Fire. It is curious that this restoration should have begun just a hundred years from the time when Queen Elizabeth was feasted by Sir Thomas Gresham at his house, visited the new building, and caused it to be proclaimed ‘the Royal Exchange’ by the sound of the trumpet.

The rebuilding was very quickly performed, though at considerable cost.[121] Readers of the Spectator[122] will remember Addison’s fine description of the Exchange, and ‘the grand scene of business which gave him an infinite variety of solid and substantial entertainments.’

Next came Temple Bar, which was begun in 1670, and finished in 1672. It was built of Portland stone, and had in its four niches statues of James I. and Anne of Denmark on the west side, Charles I. and Charles II. on the other.[123] Blackened and defiled as it was, and disfigured by the neighbouring houses, it was one of the picturesque, characteristic buildings of London, now disappearing with alarming rapidity, and had seen many a generation pass in triumph or in sorrow under its archway. The thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales’s recovery (1872) was the last historical spectacle with which Temple Bar was connected. On that occasion the City was moved to wipe off some of the smoke of two hundred years, and to let Temple Bar be seen somewhat as it must have been when the great architect finished it, as the entrance to a city which, in spite of all drawbacks, might be fairly called his creation.

Wren attempted to prosecute his design for the quay along the northern bank of the Thames, but the ground was being rapidly encroached upon by buildings, some few of which were tolerable, but the greater part unsightly. Various interests;—the immense water traffic, doubled, one can believe, at a time when the city streets were still impassable; the uncertain support given by the King—all combined to defeat his plan. Could he now walk along that glorious achievement the Embankment, what would not his feelings be on seeing the hideous buildings which it has revealed!

The Surveyor-General’s office was one which entailed endless work. There was not a street laid down, hardly a house built, in any part of the town, without the surveyor being first consulted;—now about ‘a parcel of ground bought by Colonel Panton’ (the present Panton Street, S.W.); now about the houses pulled down for the safety of Whitehall during the Fire.—Into every case Wren made careful inquiry, visiting the places himself, and insisting on the buildings being of stone or brick, with proper paving in the streets, and having a due regard to health.

In spite of his care several wretched buildings were put up in places which, as a few surviving names testify, were then fields near the City.

When Wren found that the owners persisted in erecting such shabby buildings he presented a petition to the King, as follows:—

The petition was considered by the King in council, a proclamation was issued, and full powers were given to the surveyor, backed by commands that he should take effectual care that the proclamation was obeyed. This Wren was very ready to do: with all his gentleness and courtesy he had inherited much of Bishop Wren’s firmness, and had no intention of swerving from his point.

The churches of the City began to rise gradually. Pepys says:[125]—