Christopher Wren Part 2 – 1665-1732

Until the time Christopher Wren had reached his early thirties his primary interests were in medical research and astronomy but, as a talented draughtsman, he had also taken time to design several new buildings at Cambridge and Oxford universities. You can read more of Wren’s early life here in the first part of this article. It was the Great Fire of London in September 1666 that was to change the course of his career.

During the mid-17^th century there was a great urban renewal in and around Paris by Louis XIV under his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. In particular were the magnificent new Palaces of Versailles and the Louvre, which Charles II would have witnessed during his time in exile. When he returned to England as monarch at the Restoration of 1660 he must have been shocked at the poor state of London and the royal palace at Whitehall. Recognising Wren’s talents and interest in architecture, Charles appointed him to a Royal Commission to look at ways to improve London. Unlike the King and others such as John Evelyn, Wren had not visited Paris and seen the new wonders there with his own eyes. In 1665 Sir John Denham, Surveyor of the Royal Works and fellow member of the Royal Commission for improving London, arranged for Wren to accompany Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother, on a trip to Paris in order that he could inspect the building works there. As part of the Queen Mother’s entourage he had full access to the French royal palaces. He reported on the work being undertaken at the Louvre, saying that “no less than a thousand hands are constantly employ’d in the Works…which altogether make a School of Architecture, the best probably, at this Day in Europe.” While in the city he was particularly interested in the riverside quay. The trip lasted nine months but by early 1666, despite negotiations between Henrietta Maria and Louis XIV, France declared war on Britain.

Wren’s unrealised plan for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire,

In 1666 Wren made a report on St. Paul’s Cathedral. The old medieval building was in a desperate state and he gave his opinion that a radical solution was required, proposing that the central tower should be demolished and replaced by a great new dome. Just days after he and a distinguished group made a site visit to assess and discuss the situation, the cathedral was all but destroyed in the Great Fire.

During the 1660s Wren, John Eveleyn, Robert Hooke and others spent time discussing amongst them the problems caused by London’s lack of urban planning. Within days of the Great Fire each of them separately submitted to either the King or the Royal Society plans for a newly laid-out City. Prior to 1666 Wren had the possibility to take up several different career options, including as a physician or scientist. It was the Great Fire that determined that he would instead primarily become an architect.

In the latter part of 1666, several months after the Great Fire, Wren was asked to provide immediate solutions to patch up St. Paul’s Cathedral so that services could begin, so he made another survey of the badly damaged building. Shortly after, part of the remains collapsed and William Sandcroft, Dean of the cathedral, asked Wren to make new proposals based on his earlier recommendations. Wren submitted two plans for the new St. Paul’s that were rejected, yet in 1673 Charles II issued a Royal Warrant marking the formal commencement of the rebuilding. It was on Wren’s third version in 1675 that the current cathedral is based, although he made many changes to the original design during the thirty-five years that it took to rebuild, by which time he was in his late seventies.

In 1669 Sir John Denham, the Surveyor of the King’s Works, died and Christopher Wren was appointed by Charles II as his successor. A residence within Whitehall Palace came with the position and Wren finally gave up his bachelor rooms in Oxford from where he had been commuting for a number of years. From then he officially became one of the most prominent people in the rebuilding of London.

At the end of 1669 Wren married Faith Coghill, daughter of Sir Thomas Coghill from Bletchingdon, the village where his father had lived after the family left Windsor. Their first son, Gilbert, was born in 1672 (named after Archbishop Sheldon who had commissioned Wren to build the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford). The following year Wren was knighted, in recognition of the position he had attained within the royal court. Firmly based in London, he resigned his position as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. Wren’s private life took a tragic turn in 1674 when young Gilbert died aged only eighteen months. A second son, Christopher, was born in 1675 but six months later Faith died from smallpox. Wren remarried in 1677 to Jane Fitzwilliam, daughter of Baron Fitzwilliam of Lifford, at the Chapel Royal at Whitehall. They had two children together, Jane in 1677 and William who was born with a mental illness. Wren’s second wife died after an illness in 1680 leaving him to look after the three remaining children.

St. Stephen Walbrook, one of the earliest and finest of Wren’s designs for the City churches.

The Rebuilding Acts of 1667 and 1670 gave responsibility for rebuilding of fifty-one City churches (of the eighty-seven that had been destroyed in the Great Fire) to a commission consisting of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of London and the Mayor of London. One of their first decisions was to appoint Wren to undertake the work on their behalf. He in turn appointed two assistants: his friend and collaborator Robert Hooke, who was at that time working as one of the City Surveyors, and the surveyor Edward Woodroffe, who was assisting Wren on the work at St. Paul’s. Woodroffe died in 1675 and was replaced by John Oliver. Hooke continued working with Wren on City churches until he retired from the job in 1693 and was replaced by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The basic designs, and overseeing of contracts with masons, bricklayers and carpenters, would have been made by Wren. Much of the detail, including drawings, were undertaken by Hooke, Woodroffe, Oliver, and Wren’s clerk Andrew Phillips. It was a huge undertaking. There had been no major church-building in England for 200 years, yet in 1670 and 1671 Wren began work on twenty City churches. Those destroyed had been of the Gothic style but, in most cases, Wren rebuilt in what has become known as ‘English Baroque’, adapting Classical styles into a simpler version of the Baroque found on the Continent. The interiors were generally quite plain, with ostentation given mostly to steeples and furnishings. Craftsmen for interior furnishing were usually hired by the parish, such as the wood-carver Grinling Gibbons, providing imaginative flourish. Steeples were often added several years later, with Hawksmoor responsible for their design.

Where the Fleet Channel met the Thames, shown in 1676. It soon became merely a place to moor barges.

Wren’s grand plan for the rebuilding of London was never realised. One of his ideas was to reorder the City’s Thames wharves into a single commercial quay, as he had witnessed in Paris. Vested property interests largely prevented that scheme, except for around the entrance to the River Fleet.

The Fleet flows down the western side of City. By the 17^th it was little more than a place to dump waste, and was then known as the Fleet Ditch. Included within second Rebuilding Act of April 1670 was its transformation into the Fleet Channel, a navigable waterway from Holborn Bridge down to the Thames. It was a project undertaken by Wren and Hooke and aided by John Oliver. Strong support came from Sir John Lawrence, who had been Lord Mayor in 1665 during the Great Plague and was highly regarded within the City. Wren and Hooke produced a report to the City Lands Committee in November 1670. Centuries of accumulated mud and detritus were to be cleared and the banks lined with wharves. It proved to be a complex, difficult, and expensive project, much of it by trial and error. By 1674 work had been completed. Ultimately, Wren’s intention for the use of the Fleet were never realised. It was understood from the outset that it would require maintaining, to be paid by tolls from ships. Yet, there was a low use by vessels and it mainly became a place to moor barges. Income from tolls was negligible. It silted up and local residents continued to dump rubbish. From 1733 the Fleet was gradually covered over.

In 1675 John Flamsteed was appointed Astronomer Royal and Charles II commissioned Wren to build the Royal Observatory at the summit of Greenwich Hill. Its purpose was the advancement of nautical navigation to give British shipping an advantage over rival nations, particularly by solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea. The observatory was very much a collaborative project between Wren, Flamsteed, Hooke and the wealthy surveyor and astrologer Sir Jonas Moore.

Following the Great Fire, the first Rebuilding Act of 1667 had stipulated that a monument “to preserve the memory of the dreadful visitation” should be erected near the spot where it had started. Wren and Hooke produced several designs. In 1671 the City Corporation approved a wooden model of a design by Hooke. It is a fluted Doric column standing on a square pedestal, that is sited on Fish Street Hill. That location is 202 feet away from the origin of the fire at Farryner’s bakery, and the column was built to that same height of 202 feet. Around the base is an allegorical sculpture by Caius Gabriel Cibber (who was at the time in a debtors’ prison to which he was obliged to return each night), depicting London recovering after the tragedy. Several ideas were proposed for what should top the column, with the eventual decision coming from Hooke, based on a suggestion from Charles II, of a flaming gilt-bronze urn. Work was completed in 1677.  The column has become known simply as ‘the Monument’ and remains the world’s tallest Doric column.

Wren and Hooke’s interest in science had led them to design the column in such a way that it could be used for research. It was created hollow on the inside, to form a giant telescope to track the stars and rotation of the Earth, although that eventually proved to be impractical. They had greater success fixing a pendulum from the top and taking measurements with various instruments. Internally there are 311 steps set at six-inch intervals that could be used for observations in barometric pressure.

Since the Middle Ages the boundary between the cities of London and Westminster had been at Temple Bar, where Fleet Street meets the Strand. The Great Fire of 1666 spread westwards across London but was finally extinguished just as it approached Temple Bar. Nevertheless, it was decided that the old and dilapidated gate should be rebuilt and replaced with a new stone structure as part of the overall improvements. It is generally attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, yet according to some sources the female architect Elizabeth Wilbraham may have been responsible for the design. It was completed in 1672.

Wren worked from an office at Scotland Yard, Whitehall. From 1681, after the death of his second wife, he took on a colossal amount of work as Surveyor of the King’s Works and as Commissioner for the Rebuilding of City Churches as well as the on-going rebuilding of St. Paul’s. From then he also took on the Presidency of the Royal Society for two years, during which he chaired twenty-seven out of twenty-nine of their meetings.

Charles II passed on to Wren plans he had obtained of Les Invalides in Paris, Louis XIV’s charitable hospital for retired and wounded soldiers. In 1681 the King asked Sir Stephen Fox, Paymaster General to the army and a friend of Wren, to find a method of financing such an undertaking. The old Chelsea College had been given to the Royal Society in 1667 for them to create for themselves a suitable building, but they had failed to raise the necessary funds. At the same time as Fox was looking into the possibility of the military hospital, Wren became the Society’s President, and the two men agreed for the Crown to purchase of the site at Chelsea for the new institution. Wren created the magnificent Chelsea Military Hospital, featuring a pair of four-storey quadrangles facing onto a central court that opened to the Thames. It was completed in around 1691 (which remains the home of the ‘Chelsea Pensioners’ to this day) and Wren served on its board of governors until 1712.

From 1679 Wren was also an investor in the Hudson’s Bay Company and attended thirty-five of their meetings in 1681 and 1682. In 1684 Wren’s friend Sir Stephen Fox acquired the thriving Hungerford Market from another of the Hudson Bay investors, Sir Edward Hungerford, and sold a quarter share to Wren. Fox and Wren continued to manage the market for some years. Another of Wren’s business ventures was the acquisition in 1688 of the former London home of the Duke of Bridgewater near Aldersgate after it was destroyed by fire. He and his partner in the venture sold plots of land on which to build houses.

In 1682 the city of Winchester persuaded Charles II of its delights as an alternative to Newmarket where he had been attending horse-racing each summer. The King decided to build a palace there and as Royal Surveyor it was Wren’s duty to build it. Between 1683 and 1685 forty-four thousand pounds was spent on the building. The young Nicholas Hawksmoor, introduced to Wren by the plasterer Edward Gouge, joined the architectural team in 1684 and it was the first large project that he was involved in. The palace was almost complete when Charles and his wife made a visit at the beginning of 1685. He looked forward to spending his summers there but a week later the King died and the Winchester Palace project was abandoned. It survived as a barracks until 1896 when it was destroyed by fire.

Dying childless, Charles was succeeded by his brother James. Enjoying a close relationship with both the Charles and James, it was not unexpected that Wren continued in the post of Royal Surveyor, and he organised the coronation for the new King. As part of James’s policy of placing his allies in key positions, Wren was nominated as a burgess of Plympton in Devon with a view to him becoming the town’s MP, which duly took place. Generally speaking – and wisely – however, Wren carefully avoided being drawn into politics. The reign of James II lasted less than four years and ended abruptly when he was deposed by James’s daughter Mary and son-in-law William of Orange.

Yet again, the transition from one master to another went smoothly for Wren and once more he was responsible for the coronation arrangements for William and Mary at Westminster Abbey. The new King and Queen quickly abandoned Whitehall Palace because of the foggy air and moved to Hampton Court where Wren was instructed to modernise the building. In 1689 the Earl of Nottingham’s house on the western side of Hyde Park was purchased as their new London home and converted by Wren and his assistant Hawksmoor into the royal Kensington Palace.

Another scheme in which Queen Mary, Wren and Hawksmoor were all involved was the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. It had originally been conceived by Mary’s father James, but she continued the project after his deposition, spurred on in 1692 by the large number of casualties returning from the naval battle at La Hogue. Her intention was for it to be a counterpart of Chelsea and of greater splendour. It was built on the site of the former Placentia Palace. In the 1660s Charles II previously had the old Tudor buildings demolished, with the intention of building a new residence, but that scheme was never completed. The unfinished buildings were given over to the hospital project and expanded by Wren into the magnificent buildings that remain today. Mary died in 1694 before work had begun, but her husband William insisted it should be completed in her memory. It was one of the last projects in which Wren was personally involved as the chief designer.

Wren was put in charge of Mary’s funeral arrangements at Westminster Abbey, which were carried out by Hawksmoor. The talented Hawksmoor, who had by then been working in Wren’s office for fourteen years, was appointed as Clerk of the Works at Greenwich.

In 1698, in addition to his position as Royal Surveyor and still deeply involved in the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Naval Hospital, Wren was appointed as Surveyor of Westminster Abbey. Bishop Thomas Pratt requested a detailed survey of the old building and Wren presented a plan for completing the unfinished West Front and adding a (never to be built) new tower and steeple.

Wren was responsible for building at least seventy buildings, mostly in London. The majority of his churches were in the City but he was also commissioned to build St. James, Piccadilly as the parish church for the new suburb of St. James’s, and St. Clement Danes on the Strand in Westminster.

Several works at Cambridge and Oxford were personal projects undertaken as acts of friendship. The request to design the library of Trinity College, Cambridge came from Dr. Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity. It was a project of great satisfaction for Wren and, unlike most of the City churches, the drawings are nearly all in his hand. Work began in 1676, at about the same time as St. Paul’s Cathedral. William Sancroft, Dean of St. Paul’s, was another friend and he commissioned Wren to replace the chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A later university project, in the 1680s, was Tom Tower at Christ Church College, Oxford.

When James II succeeded his brother, Wren was instructed to create a Catholic chapel at Whitehall Palace and to rebuild various royal apartments. For Queen Mary II he created a riverside terrace at the palace, with stairs to board the royal barge. All Wren’s work at Whitehall was lost in the fire of 1698, with the exception of Mary’s stairs that remain in place.

In 1708 Wren was commissioned by the Duchess of Marlborough to create her new house on Pall Mall, adjacent to St. James’s Palace. He worked on Marlborough House with his son Christopher. The Duchess was a difficult client and dismissed the Wrens when the main work had been completed.

In 1702 and 1703 Wren lost two of his closest companions. His favourite child and companion was his talented daughter Jane by his second marriage. After her death in 1702, aged only twenty-six, he started to build a close relationship with his son Christopher who began to assist his father in his work. The following year his loyal collaborator of many years, Robert Hooke, died.

Although he lived a comfortable life, Wren never made a great deal of money for himself in comparison with many of his contemporaries, usually working for a fixed salary, often paid some years in arrears. In 1708 he petitioned Queen Anne to acquire a fifty-five-year lease on a house at Hampton Court in lieu of money he had never been paid by King William. He was later able to leave the house to his son.

When George I succeeded Queen Anne in 1714, Wren was once again re-appointed as Surveyor of the Royal Works. Sir John Vanbrugh then held the position of Comptroller of the Works. He arranged for Hawksmoor to join him and Wren on the Board of the Works, relieving Wren, by then in his early seventies, of much of the day-to-day workload. Nevertheless, between 1704 and his eventual replacement by William Benson in 1718 – by which time he had held the post for almost fifty years through the reigns of five successive monarchs – Wren continued attending the regular Board meetings, commuting between his two homes at Hampton Court and St. James’s Street. In his last years, Wren and his son Christopher had begun assembling documents to record his life’s work, and in turn his grandson Stephen continued the work, which was eventually published in 1750 as Parentalia.

One of the most brilliant men of his age, with interests that spanned several areas of the arts and sciences, Wren had an ability to manage a number of projects simultaneously. Yet his success was also partly because he was the right person, in the right place at the time of the Restoration of Charles II. Additionally, through his charm and sincerity he was able to befriend the great and the good. His long-term collaborator Robert Hooke once wrote of him: “He is a very sincere and honest man: I find him so, and perhaps the only honest person I have to deal with.” Wren’s avoidance of politics also allowed him to continue as a royal favourite through five monarchs despite the tumultuous changes of the latter part of the 17^th century.

Wren left many great monuments by which he is remembered in London and elsewhere. In 1672 the City Lands Committee voted to make an ex-gratia payment to him of one hundred guineas for “the many and great services…[he] hath performed for the benefit and on the behalfe of the Citty of London.” John Evelyn wrote that he had “Rebuilt and Beautified” London. Wren on the other hand believed that the opportunity to build a truly magnificent city had been missed after the Great Fire. For him, not only had the great plans been brushed aside on account of the lack of political will-power to carry them forward but many others of his grand designs that were undertaken for the monarchy had never been completed due to lack of finance.

The one building on which Wren’s fame is based more than any other is St. Paul’s Cathedral. Recalling how fate had intervened, allowing the opportunity to rebuild it, Evelyn wrote him a dedicatory letter, saying: “[the] Dreadful Conflagration happen’d out of whose Ashes this Pheonix is Risen, and was by Providence Design’d for You.”

Sir Christopher Wren worked through, and for, four successive monarchies, that of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. To his own successors in English architecture, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh, he was a venerable figure. By the time of Anne’s death in 1714 Wren was over 80 years old and still active.

Yet by then there were younger men with new ideas. His English Baroque style made way for Palladianism. Wren was sidelined for the final touches of St. Paul’s Cathedral, with James Thornhill chosen to paint the inner dome. In 1715 he resigned as Surveyor-General of Greenwich naval hospital, and was not included in the new Board of Chelsa Hospital. In 1717 the City Churches Commission was finally wound up, its work complete. Following the succession of King George I, the Board of Works, responsible for undertaking government building work, and of which Wren had been the Surveyor-General for over 40 years, was reorganised. In 1718 he was ousted from his position and finally left his office at Scotland Yard. He spent most of last few years at his home at Hampton Court. He occasionally visited his house at St. James’s Street, and it was there that, at the age of 90, he quietly passed away in February 1723. He remained the Surveyor of Westminster Abbey until his death and continued advising Hawksmoor on proposals for rebuilding and renovation there.

Wren’s funeral took place appropriately at St. Paul’s with great pomp and ceremony. Wren was buried in St. Paul’s where his tomb bears the inscription in Latin: “Reader, if you seek a monument look around you.”

In modern times we consider Wren as one of the great British architects, yet during his lifetime architecture was yet to be considered as a profession. Those who designed buildings tended to be artists, officials, or technicians. (Inigo Jones who designed Covent Garden and Banqueting house was a scenery and costume designer). Despite the fame he gained with the many great buildings he created, towards the end of his career Wren described his life’s work as “rubbish” compared with what he could have achieved if he had continued his earlier interests in medical research.