A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  Charles, who had spent years in Paris watching that city transformed by architects such as François Mansart, Le Mercier and Louis Le Vau, was flattered by Wren’s disarming instinct for grandeur. And his initial reaction was to congratulate and encourage the young man on his visionary optimism. But – advised by harder heads on the Privy Council – he also knew that he was no Pharaoh (or Bourbon) who could simply order it into existence. The merchants, brokers and tradesmen wanted the life of the city to resume just as quickly as possible, and just where it had been interrupted by the fire. The thousands whose bread depended on their work for those enterprises could not afford to wait around until some gleaming vision of the phoenix-metropolis had been realized. Even the very limited scale of alteration (the broader streets) required compensation to be paid to those displaced by the building, derived from a tax (on shipped ‘sea coal’) that needed authorizing by parliament. And parliament, even a Cavalier parliament, was not in the utopia business. Those country gentlemen may have had the great text-books of architectural and city design, antique and neo-classical – Vitruvius, Palladio and Serlio – in their libraries, but, with rare exceptions, the vellum gathered dust and the folios stayed uncut.

  So Wren’s marvellous vision was doomed to be unrealized. He would, though – over three decades – get to build a fair number of his churches, themselves wonders of the new architecture, which thoughtfully combined Protestant concern for the centrality of preaching (through his acoustically calibrated interiors) with steeples, tiered with tempietti and balustrades, pilasters and columns, translated from baroque Rome and Paris to London. And Wren would, of course, give the country the greatest of all its sacred buildings: not just a new cathedral, but a national basilica.

  Even had he wanted to, Wren would never have escaped St Paul’s, the rebuilding of which gave him such grief and such glory. His uncle Matthew’s cell-mate Laud, at the height of his power, had imposed a massive fund-raiser on the country for the renovation of the dangerously unsound ancient structure (whose spire had fallen from the tower in an earlier fire in 1561). And before his execution, Laud had set aside £800 in his will to further the work of renovation. For Matthew the task of bringing St Paul’s back, not just from architectural peril but from desecration, was the true meaning of the Restoration: a cleansing of profanity. When the parliamentarian army had come to London in 1647 and 1648, cavalry troopers had stalled their horses there; and after the king’s execution the statues of Charles and James that had surmounted Inigo Jones’s west portico had been pulled down and smashed. The cathedral plate had been melted down for the army, the stained glass shattered, pews and choir stalls chopped up for firewood. The royalist antiquarian William Dugdale’s instinct that a terrible iconoclasm was at hand had been proved only too accurate, but happily he had completed his detailed description of the fabric and interior of the cathedral before the worst could happen. So, armed with this inventory (beautifully illustrated by Wenceslaus Hollar), Bishop Wren, along with the then Bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, and the Dean, William Sancroft, appointed themselves the Nehemiahs of the purified temple.

  Christopher’s piety was of an altogether quieter kind than that of his uncle. But he was, in his way, a deeply pious Christian, and he was not going to shirk the challenge. Saturated in the literature of Roman and Renaissance architectural theory, he had a lifelong ambition to transplant classical architecture into England in such a way as would be consistent with the Protestantism to which he was devoutly committed. Laud had offended, because his ‘innovations’ had come to be seen as somehow an alien, even sinister, presence. Christopher Wren wanted to make spiritually beautiful and architecturally grand building seem at home in England. The fact that we now think of Wren as a quintessentially English architect suggests how completely successful he was in achieving this ambition. But the truism blinds us to the immense and painfully protracted difficulty he had in squaring the circle of a classical, colossal style for a Protestant, parliamentary nation. Somehow Wren managed his life’s work – although with innumerable compromises that embittered and saddened him – but the Stuart monarchy, which he believed would anchor itself through his public achievement, failed. His work at St Paul’s began as the showpiece of the Restoration, but it would only be accomplished after a revolution. And these two events were, in fact, crucially and meaningfully connected. What tied them together was the old lethal dance between Romanophilia and Romanophobia.

  Wren’s connection with St Paul’s began in 1663, when a Royal Commission was set up to examine the soundness or unsoundness of the structure after the ordeal of the Commonwealth. The Surveyor-General of the Royal Works was the poet Sir John Denham, and it was decided to take advice from architects who included the fashionable house-builder Roger Pratt and the unknown Oxford mathematician and astronomer Christopher Wren. Wren had had no formal architectural training and had been foisted on the commissioners by Sheldon, who had daringly commissioned him to build the ceremonial theatre in Oxford that bore his name. Wren had borrowed from the precedent of the ancient theatre of Marcellus in Rome to create an arena, and since, unlike its Italian counterpart, the building could not be open to the skies, he had enclosed it with a roof, supported by disguised buttresses and painted on the inside with a dazzling trompe l’oeil classical allegory. With this commission under way, Wren had no hesitation in disregarding the much more provisional recommendations of Pratt to repair and restore St Paul’s, especially its great tower. Instead, he proposed the demolition of the tower altogether and the removal of its columns. Surmounting the crossing in its place would be a great ribbed dome, carried on a drum and supported from within by eight massive piers. More eccentrically, it was to be surmounted, not by a conventional lantern but by a pineapple spire – the fruit of choice for architectural ornament, it is true, and possibly a compliment to the king, whose garden at Kew had just presented him with the first home-grown specimen.

  Roger Pratt was not amused. In fact he was incensed at the temerity of this unknown and inveighed to the bishop, his patron Clarendon and the king against the extravagance and impracticality of the scheme. But Charles, guided by Sheldon, was in fact enough taken with the suggestion to refrain from any sort of veto. And in the summer of 1665, while London was in the grip of the plague, Wren took a journey that, if anything, made him even more resolved to pursue his vision of a Romanized basilica. His sojourn was not in Rome but in Paris. But architecturally speaking, Rome was in Paris in the person of its great genius Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whom Wren duly visited at his house where he saw the drawings of his stupendously audacious (and unrealized) plans for the east front of the Louvre. The contrapuntal rhythms of Bernini’s rendering of the façade, swelling and receding, convex and concave, obviously made an impact on the impressionable Wren, since he too aimed for that kind of music in stone in the most ambitious of his own plans for St Paul’s. But the rebuilding of Louis XIV’s Paris and the great classical houses of the Ile de France, like Vaux-le-Vicomte, while more formally austere than Bernini’s building language, gave Wren an opportunity to see at first hand how domed churches and colleges could be successfully transplanted into settings very different from Rome. French architects had felt free to play with the possibilities offered by different kinds of cupola: Bramante’s hemispherical plan for St Peter’s or Michelangelo’s loftier, more tapered version. And Wren must also have admired the energy and clarity with which the royal architects carved their way through the clutter of medieval streets parallel to the Seine to create great axial thoroughfares converging on spacious squares, the house façades harmonized by classical pilasters.

  When Wren arrived back in London his head was buzzing with creative ingenuity, and he was impatient to press on with his ideas for the all-out, rather than makeshift, reconstruction of St Paul’s. On 27 August 1666, in the company of John Evelyn as well as the still intensely antagonistic Pratt, a tour of inspection of the cathedral was made. Plumb lines dropped from the top of the columns supporti
ng the tower found that they leaned, in some cases as much as 6 inches or a foot away from true perpendicular – a variation that Pratt had a hard time accounting for as the prescient intention of the original Gothic architects, concerned to allow for settling. But it was, of course, the great fire, which broke out six days later, rather than any invincibility of Wren’s arguments, which settled the matter. Even after the fire, though, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Wren would be allowed to implement his Romanizing dream. For much as Charles might have liked to have been Louis XIV and to be able to order grandeur into existence with a wave of his cane, he was not and he could not. Parliament had to be consulted when money needed to be spent, and the Cathedral Chapter’s concerns, which were often practical rather than aesthetic, had to be listened to.

  Wren, however, was only intermittently paying attention. The summer of 1667 had added yet another body blow to the credibility of the restored monarchy to be the divinely appointed protector of the nation. Charles and his governments had been unable to protect the country from plague and fire. And now they had shown themselves incapable of fulfilling the elementary obligation of defending the country against foreign invasion. Astoundingly in June, a Dutch fleet commanded by the great admiral Michiel de Ruyter had sailed up the river Medway with impunity, landed soldiers at Sheerness, stormed the river forts at Upnor and Chatham, broken the barrier chain and destroyed or captured the better part of the English fleet. The king’s flagship, the Royal Charles (which as the Naseby had been the terror of the North Sea), was taken back to Amsterdam in triumph.

  Panic was followed by a bitter sense of humiliation, which in turn was followed by fury. As an official of the Navy Board, Pepys was lucky to escape with his position more or less intact; his senior, Peter Pett, was hounded from his place and sent to the Tower. Predictably, the hue and cry turned on the most conspicuous scapegoat, Lord Chancellor Clarendon – even though he had been vocal in criticizing the decision to go to war as recklessly ill-advised. His grandiose house was attacked, and Clarendon became genuinely frightened that, with talk of impeachment in the air, he might suffer the same fate as Strafford. Before that could happen he took himself back into the exile from which the Restoration had rescued him. Always hag-ridden by the ghosts of history, he would now try to exorcise them by writing it. And the partisan masterpiece that is his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England was the result.

  The shock of 1667 only made the need for some sort of triumphalist statement, testifying to the undimmed grandeur of Crown, Church and country, more urgent. Perhaps the Almighty might smile a little more generously on his afflicted kingdom if a great Solomonic temple could be built to extol him. And Clarendon’s fall had also removed as an obstruction his pet architect, Pratt, who prudently chose to occupy himself henceforth with gentlemen’s estates, including his own. In due course Wren became the new Surveyor-General. But the relatively modest scale of his first design for a new St Paul’s suggested that he was still conscious that funds were tight. Following the practice of the great Italian masters he admired so much, Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, in 1669 Wren had the carver Richard Clear and the master-joiner William Clear build a scale model, which was put on display at Whitehall for the king’s delectation. From the surviving fragments and drawings, it is apparent that Wren had not yet taken the great leap of imagination that would produce a truly stunning design. The cupola from his 1663 plan remained, but it was oddly attached (over a square base) to a conventionally rectangular nave, made somewhat grander by the colonnade, which was to be built along its exterior length. Most controversially, the dome dominated the east end of the church – the end that had been most badly damaged by the fire. The immediate concern of the Chapter was to have a new choir built as quickly as possible so that some semblance of church worship could be restored, before the rest of the rebuilding was tackled. But since that choir was now housed within the domed structure, acceptance of the plan was to become committed to its most ambitious, time-consuming and expensive feature.

  The king liked Wren’s first plan enough to allow his new Surveyor-General (who at last felt secure enough to resign his chair of astronomy at Oxford) to go ahead with the enormous project of demolition that had to precede any construction. Since the ruined and burnt-out walls of old St Paul’s had, paradoxically, been strengthened by all the molten lead that had poured down them from the roof, the demolition took on the aspect of a military siege. An army of labourers, miners and excavators was drafted to the site, with Wren himself and his assistants directing the campaign from their custom-built office opposite the north side of the churchyard. While the work was under way Wren and his friends from the Royal Society, Evelyn and Hooke, took advantage of the excavations, dug deep enough to assure the architect that he was not imposing his monumental structure on sand, to see what remains of previous antiquity might surface. From the account given by his son in his biographical Parentalia, the finds were more extraordinary than anything that could have been anticipated, and they made a profound, even emotional impression on the always historically minded Christopher. The story of a labourer bringing Wren a stone to mark some spot in the works, and discovering that it bore the prophetic lapidary inscription Resurgam (‘I will arise’) is well known. But this is the least of it. For as the excavators dug they travelled back down through London’s history, through the medieval and Norman foundations, discovering an ancient burial site. Saxon pins and jewellery were uncovered and then, deeper down, the remains of a Roman mortuary: urns that had contained the ashes of the dead, fragments of vividly decorated pottery. Wren and his friends and colleagues busied themselves in their shirtsleeves in the trenches of the dig, sorting, dating, arranging and classifying. Even deeper still they found, to their amazement, seashells buried in the sandy rock, so that in his mind’s eye the architect saw the archaic geology of the place, Ludgate Hill, no hill at all but a low strand washed by the ocean and the primitive Thames a ‘sinus of the sea’.

  With antiquity made immediate, and Roman London, especially, staring him in the face, Wren’s architectural imagination suddenly took wing. His second design, again translated by the Clears into an exquisite model 18 feet long, spoke of a pure revelation, an act of inspired courage that produced from Wren the most beautiful building never to be built in Britain.

  Wren’s design of 1673–4 confronted the awkwardness of attaching a domed crossing and choir to a traditional nave (like setting a new head on an old body) by doing away with the nave altogether, in fact, by creating the kind of church that had never been seen in Britain before. Instead of a long corridor opening up at the crossing into a tall lantern (like his uncle’s church at Ely), Wren envisioned a vast scooped-out central basilica, full of light and air and sound: a Greek cross, three of the arms being equilateral, the fourth slightly elongated to provide an entrance vestibule. The vestibule, fronted by a flight of noble steps, would itself be surmounted by a smaller rotunda, serving as a kind of architectural overture to the immense cupola that lay beyond. The exterior walls of the Greek cross would be convex, setting up an exhilarating counterpoint with the concave circularity of the drum on which the great dome rested.

  Wren had evidently not forgotten Bernini. But to the stunned cognoscenti who examined the model in the Convocation House, this was evidently just the problem. They had asked for a new St Paul’s. And what Wren had given them was a new St Peter’s. Had he fronted it with a set of enfolding colonnaded braccia, as in Bernini’s new piazza, he could not possibly have done anything more aggressively Roman. The immediate and overpowering sense that they had been given something disturbingly alien, something that, as was pointed out, looked nothing like any known English cathedral, was especially ironic since Wren prided himself on having created an expressly Protestant house of worship. By abolishing a conventional nave-and-choir design and the screen barriers that separated them, he thought to bring the congregation closer to the essential experience of Anglican-Protestant wors
hip, which, after all, was the sermon. His, he was convinced, was a church built for the auditory reception of Christ’s word, not for the glimpsed exposure of visual mystery down a darkened tunnel, as in Catholic sacred spectacle. He may even (with some justification) have felt that, just as the teachers of the Reformation justified their emphasis on word over image from what they took to be the aural evangelism of the early Christian fathers, so he was returning to those days of conversion when the great pagan temples had been made over into basilicas for the true faith.

  At the outset it was not clear that the king was among those who were shocked into opposition. But the Chapter, in particular the vocal and formidable Dr Edward Stillingfleet, was appalled and confounded by the Great Model. However impeccably Protestant Wren might have thought it, they could not help but read it as a Catholic structure, something that belonged to the Rome of Pope Alexander VII rather than to the Anglican capital of King Charles II. The Chapter was anxious not to repeat the mistakes of the Laudian campaign for sacred beautification, which had been attacked as popery by the back door. They insisted on a design that reverted to the traditional Latin cross with its long nave and separated choir, not least because they knew that the whole cathedral was very seldom used, and that, other than on holy days, they needed only the smaller space of the choir for daily services. Before long these many arguments began to make a decisive impression on the king. Around 1672 his brother James had been received back into the Roman Church, and Charles himself, as Pepys later discovered, had been privately and secretly moving in that direction himself. That only increased the necessity of not building something that looked to most people like the temple of the Pope.