Christopher Wren Part 1 – 1632-1664

Born in 1632, Wren was one of ten children of a middle class family from Wiltshire, of which Christopher and three sisters survived into adulthood. When he was three his father, also named Christopher, was appointed Dean of Windsor and Register of the Order of the Garter, succeeding Wren Senior’s brother Matthew when he was appointed Bishop of Norwich. During the reign of Charles I Matthew Wren rose to become the third most influential bishop in the country after the Archbishop of Canterbury (William Laud) and Bishop of London (William Juxon) and officiated at the wedding of Princess Mary to William of Orange (the future English monarchs William and Mary). In the Stuart period the Order of the Garter was one of the most important institutions and its Register a senior official who, at certain ceremonies, took precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury. Upon Reverend Christopher Wren’s appointment, his family moved into a large house within the walls of Windsor Castle, effectively part of the royal household whenever they were in residence there.

Aged nine in 1641, young Christopher was sent to Westminster School under its distinguished headmaster Dr. Richard Busby, where he learnt the classics and took an interest in mathematics, science and drawing.

In August 1642, at the start of the Civil War Christopher’s uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren, was imprisoned in the Tower of London and remained there until 1660. Christopher’s father was stripped of his position of Dean at Windsor and for the duration of the Civil War the family relied on the charity of friends and family. They initially moved to the King’s main base at Oxford but when King Charles left the town in 1646 they moved in with in-laws outside of the town. Reverend Wren kept a low profile there, without an income, until his death fourteen years later. As a prominent royalist he was forbidden from travelling without special approval. Still at Westminster School at the very heart of anti-royalist activity, young Christopher was recalled home for his own safety (although the school continued to be headed by the royalist-sympathiser Busby throughout the Commonwealth period who took in gifted children from both sides). He continued his education at the local grammar school where his brother-in-law was headmaster.

Reverend Wren took an interest in the research of a number of royalist-sympathising physicians who were living in Oxford. At the age of fifteen young Christopher was put into the care of one of their number, Charles Scarburgh, where he was employed as a technical assistant, and from that time developed an interest in medical experimentation. By then he was already attracting attention as a gifted mathematician with an artistic flair and fluent in Latin.

From 1650 Wren attended Wadham College at Oxford where an associate of his father, Dr. John Wilkins, had been appointed Warden two years earlier by the Commonwealth government. (Wilkins was in an almost unique position of being a royalist but on good terms with the Parliamentarians). A central person amongst a group of mathematicians and physicians at Oxford, Wilkins was one of Wren’s sponsors and mentors. Someone who was to become an influence in Wren’s life several years later was John Evelyn and he wrote of his visit to meet Wilkins at Oxford in 1654 where he was shown various technical instruments, some built by “that prodigious young Scholar, Mr. Chr: Wren”. Evelyn was given one of some transparent beehives in Wilkins’s garden designed by Wren that were “built like Castles and Palaces”. Some years later, Charles II visited Evelyn at Deptford specifically to see it.

Wren had become part of a collaborative group – a ‘club’ – of royalist-sympathisers who were keeping their heads down in Oxford and spending their time with research, a group that would eventually evolve into the Royal Society in London. Dr. Thomas Willis was one of the senior scientists at the university who was undertaking anatomical research regarding the circulation of blood, and that work became a great inspiration to Wren and those around him.

Another man to whom Wren became a protégé was William Petty, fellow of Brasenose College. Petty was a respected physician and mathematician who served as Oliver Cromwell’s surgeon-general in Ireland in 1651 and 1652 and gained a reputation as a talented manager of projects. Petty employed Wren as a research assistant and during that time the young Wren learnt organisational skills that would become useful later in his life when he had to simultaneously manage numerous building works. Two projects in which Wren assisted were the inventions of a machine to sow seeds and another to make identical copies of written documents using two pens held together by sliding parts. A prototype of the writing machine was demonstrated to Oliver Cromwell around 1650 (and was later to be used by Wren in his architectural practices for producing multiple copies of contracts and plans).

One of Wren’s earlier tasks in the employment of Scarburgh was to translate a treatise on sundials by the eminent mathematician William Oughtred. It was included in Oughtred’s Key to Arithmetic in 1652, which brought Wren favourable early attention and helped gain him a fellowship at an unusually young age to All Souls College after he had received his MA.

During the early and mid-1650s Wren spent time perfecting and building new telescopes and microscopes. Using his additional artistic skills he was able to make accurate large-scale drawings of the wing of a fly, a flea and a louse as seen through a microscope. Around 1661 he presented copies to Charles II who was greatly amused and liked to show them to visiting dignitaries. Several years later Wren’s friend Robert Hooke published his best-selling book Micrographia with similar illustrations of his own and with an introduction acknowledging Wren’s earlier inspirational work.

Wren had an advanced understanding of the planets and the universe and was doing experiments that would prove useful in nautical navigation. In 1657 he was appointed to succeed Lawrence Rooke as Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, giving his inaugural address that August. The college, founded in 1597 according to the will of Sir Thomas Gresham and located between Bishopsgate Street and Broad Street, was then London’s leading institution of learning.

During that time Wren made studies of the planet Saturn, which he eventually wrote up and published in 1661 as De corpore Saturni. He also continued his medical research, particularly making experiments on animals to learn about the effects of blood transfusion.

When the Wren family vacated Windsor, the valuable Order of the Garter records were hidden under the floor of the castle’s treasury but they were later discovered by the Parliamentarians. Reverend Wren spent some years recovering what he could of them. When the lawyer Elias Ashmole was carrying out his research on the Order, Wren accompanied him to Windsor and drew for him a picture of the castle. It was later engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar and appeared in Ashmole’s book on the history of the Order published in 1672. In August 1660, two years after his father’s death, Christopher Wren was able to deliver the surviving Garter records to the newly restored Charles II and thereby begin a special relationship with the English monarchs that were to last throughout his life. (Wren’s relations also benefited from the King’s return. His elderly uncle was restored as Bishop of Ely and his cousin Matthew appointed as secretary to the Lord Chancellor).

By the end of the 1650s many of the group of which Wren had been part during his studies at Oxford were meeting with other like-minded intellectuals at Gresham College. From 1660 they were entertaining the newly restored royal court with scientific demonstrations and in that year decided to formalise their activities under charter from the King as the ‘Royal Society’.

Another member of the Royal Society was Robert Hooke. Wren and Hooke had first met at Oxford and formed a friendship that was to last a lifetime. The pair collaborated closely for several years on a number of projects, particularly in the field of astronomy. The normal pattern was that an idea was proposed at a meeting of the Royal Society, the two spent some discussing it, and then Hooke continued working on the practical research and reported the results at a subsequent meeting. Wren was the more able in conceptual and theoretical matters whereas Hooke’s talents lay in technicalities and applied experiments. Wren was also the better draughtsman of the two.

In 1661 Wren was appointed as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford (which he held until 1673) and resigned his position at Gresham College. While at Oxford, Wren may have been involved in some small ways in the design of new buildings. The first that can definitely be attributed entirely to him is the chapel of Pembroke College at Cambridge, commissioned by his uncle Matthew Wren in 1663 when he was appointed Bishop of Ely. It was – and remains – a restrained but impressive classical design with Dutch influence. (Bishop Wren was buried within the chapel in 1667 and his son, Christopher’s cousin Matthew, beside him five years later). Wren’s second commission was the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, paid for by Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a new location for graduation ceremonies to take place and to house the university’s printing operation. Work began in 1664 and was completed in 1669. Wren was interested in designing spaces with ideal acoustics, which he was able to achieve at the Sheldonian.

In 1665 Wren travelled to Paris to see for himself the city’s new architecture, a visit that would, in the following year, change the course of his career. Click here to continue reading about Christopher Wren.