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.

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:

Dr. Sprat then recites some of Wren’s achievements in the fields of natural science, astronomy, etc., and continues thus:

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.

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:

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.