Mr. Basil Champneys has recorded a notable observation by Thomas Carlyle on Chelsea Hospital: “I had passed it, almost daily, for many years without thinking much about it, and one day I began to reflect that it had always been a pleasure to me to see it, and I looked at it more attentively, and saw that it was quiet and dignified and the work of a gentleman.” This was evidently a favourite theme with Carlyle, for William Allingham’s Diary for June 25, 1874, records a similar phrase with the addition that the Hospital was “admirably adapted for its uses.” Carlyle’s devotion to Wren’s memory had an odd repercussion. When William De Morgan called on the Sage to beg him on behalf of William Morris to join the Anti-Scrape Society, Carlyle was cold at first, but a reference to the dealings of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners with Wren’s churches set him alight. He ended a panegyric on Wren with “he was a very great man, of extraordinary patience with fools,” and glared round at the company reproachfully. Morris rather winced when Carlyle, in a letter accepting membership of the Anti-Scrape, referred to the City churches as “marvellous works, the like of which we shall never see again,” and his hatred of the Renaissance never ceased to blind him to Wren’s genius.

It would have been well if the Society had been more active, in the past, in defence of Wren’s churches. The narrow mediævalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century wrought havoc even where it failed to destroy. Stained glass and other alien trappings have prejudiced far too many of his fine interiors. One church architect of the type responsible for these things was finely reproved with the reminder that Wren was just as good a High Churchman as he was.

The site of Chelsea Hospital had been given by the King to the Royal Society soon after its foundation, but it was an inconvenient possession, and the Society sold it back to the King for the foundation of a Royal Hospital for disabled soldiers. Sir Stephen Fox, a retired army contractor, supplemented the King’s benefactions, and on May 25, 1682, the inevitable Evelyn went with Fox and Wren to Lambeth to secure the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approval to the plot and design or, as we should say, plan and elevations. Ten weeks later Evelyn was at Chelsea with Fox to see the foundations started. Wren was a good deal more than architect to the Hospital. It was during his Presidency of the Royal Society that the land was re-conveyed to the King: he carried the business through with characteristic despatch, and the statutes governing the charity were of his drafting. The buildings were completed in 1692, and no better praise of them than Carlyle’s can be invented. Wren shows himself in one of his characteristic moods as a sane economist where the purpose of the building makes economy an æsthetic as well as a practical virtue. The Hospital is a liberal education in the handling of London brickwork. When Sir John Soane, in the days of Nash stucco, had to add an Infirmary building, he was careful to design in brick and content to despise the abuse it evoked at that time. At Hampton Court Wren had a very different problem: he was housing not pensioners but a King and Queen. His original scheme had a quality of immensity. Our Dutch monarch who had so successfully countered the statesmanship of Louis XIV. doubtless wanted to follow, at some distance, his building exploits at Versailles and elsewhere. Queen Mary had a great liking for the situation of Hampton Court. Wren was bidden to prepare a scheme for a complete rebuilding and did so. Part of the old fabric was taken down and Wren’s two great suites of apartments for King and Queen rose in its place. The work went forward vigorously from 1689 to 1694, and then the Queen’s death caused the completion of the plan to be abandoned. The execution of the partial scheme drifted on until 1700. There was a chance then of the King proceeding to the finishing of the complete plan, but William’s death finally killed it. To these accidents of mortality we owe it that part of Wolsey’s palace has remained. If Wren had had his way, not a brick of the Tudors would have survived. The architect was happy in only one of his royal clients. Mary was amiable and reasonable, but William’s temper and his habit of interference tried Wren very high. The King, however, was fair enough to say that the insufficient headroom of the cloisters must be ascribed to his express orders which overbore Wren’s wishes.

Despite this, the Fountain Court is one of the successful features of the Palace, which reveals Wren’s sanity and dignity and Englishness in a most convincing way. It is enough to look at Chatsworth, in the light of Hampton Court, to realize the difference between pedantry and genius. Norman Shaw so greatly admired Hampton Court, that he would have followed it in Whitehall, if he had been entrusted with the Government offices. The weakest part of the Palace is the pedimented garden front, where a sense of display, due perhaps to Royal Command, contrasts with the greater simplicity of the return façade towards the Tudor garden.

Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a palace, and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place in the development of the English interior. Left more to himself, Wren would have been more English in the height of his rooms. He had a sense of fitness which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren was unlucky at Hampton Court in more than in one of his clients. His Comptroller (or, as we should say, Clerk) of the Works was William Talman, who accused him of having passed bad work. Some masonry showed cracks, and enough stir was created to lead the House of Lords to order an enquiry. Wren was exonerated, and with characteristic generosity he did not call, as he might well have done, for the dismissal of a disloyal assistant. Time has revenged him. Chatsworth shows Talman to have been a heavy-handed fellow, but he is also remembered as a bad colleague in other things than the Hampton Court accusation. If visitors to the Palace should feel that Wren failed in giving a suitable approach to the State apartments, they should remember that they are in the presence of an incomplete scheme, and that he left a design of notable splendour for wings with colonnades at the north side. The incidental furnishings of avenues took shape in the chestnuts of Bushey Park, but the rest remained on paper. In one detail of the gardens Wren must have taken special pleasure. The marvellous iron screens by Tijou have been moved from their original position, but they remain to show Wren’s skill in the choice of his craftsmen.

The third of his great secular buildings, Greenwich Hospital, had the same charitable purpose as Chelsea, but exceeded Hampton Court in magnificence. Charles I. had employed Inigo Jones to build, at some distance from the Thames, a house for his Queen, Henrietta Maria. Soon after the accession of Charles II., John Webb, as ghost for Sir John Denham, had begun the great building by the shore for which Inigo Jones may have left designs; but money ran short and work was suspended after only a small part had been done. This wing is on well-known Palladian lines, but is hampered by a heavy attic, so ill-adjusted as to discredit whoever was responsible for it. When William and Mary succeeded James II., the Queen wished to emulate her uncle Charles in making provision for disabled seamen as he had done for soldiers. Once more Wren and Evelyn were to be colleagues. On May 5, 1695, the Royal Commission, consisting of these two, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bigwigs, had its first meeting at the London Guildhall, and sixteen days later the two friends and three others went, as a Committee, to survey the site. Evelyn’s task was to raise subscriptions, and he made an interesting choice of a secretary in Mr. Vanbrugh, afterwards Sir John. About a year was spent in preparing plans, and on June 4, 1696, the Committee met at Wren’s house in Whitehall to make agreements for materials and workmen and to give orders for the foundations to be begun. On the last day of June a select committee of thirteen dined together at Greenwich, and precisely at five o’clock (Mr. Flamsteed, the King’s Astronomer, “observing the punctual time by instruments”) Wren and Evelyn jointly laid the foundation stone.

Queen Mary wanted the old Queen’s House and the Charles II. wing to be integral parts of the new scheme—a rather hampering condition. Wren took the former as the closing feature of a vista from the river, between his two new blocks named after William and Mary and his Queen Anne block, which balances and exactly follows the Jones-Webb block of Charles II.

Wren’s contribution to Greenwich was, therefore, the two superb quadrangular blocks with open sides adorned with colonnades and the big idea of planning which pulled together the work of four reigns into a coherent and superb whole. The duality of the domes is a most notable feature, and their individual design is beautifully differentiated from the grander scale of St. Paul’s. They are domestic, rather than church-like, in conception. That Hawksmoor in his capacity as Deputy-Surveyor had a somewhat free hand in designing part of the work after 1705, that Vanbrugh succeeded Wren as Surveyor in 1716, that Colin Campbell took up the task ten years later, and that Ripley superseded him in 1729, does not deprive Wren of the title of architect of the Hospital. In so far as they departed from his original designs the buildings suffered, especially from the baldness of the Campbell elements and the heavy-handedness of the ex-carpenter Ripley. Wren’s planning, his domes and his colonnades, make Greenwich the noblest of English public buildings in the Grand Manner.

The view of the Palace from the Thames is magnificent and has been an inspiration to artists ever since. Abroad, it would be an objective to all travellers.