Christopher Wren

• 1. Introduction

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  Christopher Wren looked down from the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and, according to a 19th-century legend, checked quietly on what he called "my greatest work". The inscription carved into the floor of that cathedral, in a circle of black marble beneath the dome, puts it simply: "Reader, if you seek his monument -- look around you." Wren died on the 25th of February 1723, in his sleep, at the age of ninety-one, after catching a cold on one of those visits. He had outlived two wives, a Parliament career, a scientific revolution, and the better part of a century. What drives a man who began as an astronomer to become the architect of a city? How did a sickly child from Wiltshire end up rebuilding fifty-one churches after the single worst fire in London's history? And what did it cost him, privately and professionally, to see that work finally finished?

• 2. Scholar, Scientist, Builder

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  Wren entered Wadham College, Oxford, on the 25th of June 1650, where he studied Latin and the works of Aristotle. The intellectual circle he joined there, gathered around the warden John Wilkins, was not a casual reading group. Its members would go on to found the Royal Society, England's premier scientific body. Wren himself played a direct role in that founding: when he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, in 1657, his weekly lectures drew the same colleagues from Oxford, and the formal meetings they began in 1660 became the institution's seed.

  His scientific range was extraordinary by any measure. He performed what is now recognised as the first injection of fluids into the bloodstream of a living animal under laboratory conditions. He built a transparent beehive for observation. He began studying Saturn from around 1652, developed a hypothesis about its appearance, wrote it up in a work called De corpore saturni -- and then, when Huygens published a better theory of Saturn's rings, immediately recognised the other man's explanation as superior and shelved his own manuscript unpublished.

  In 1662, he invented the tipping bucket rain gauge, and in 1663 he designed a weather clock capable of recording temperature, humidity, rainfall, and barometric pressure. A working version of that design was completed by his colleague Robert Hooke in 1679. His friend Hooke, who saw Wren two or three times every week, said of him that since the time of Archimedes there had "scarce ever met in one man in so great perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical mind."

  It was a problem posed by Wren -- a challenge to Edmond Halley and Robert Hooke, with the reward of a book worth thirty shillings -- that led, through Halley, to Newton writing the nine-page De motu corporum in gyrum, which later expanded into the Principia Mathematica.

• 3. Fire and Commission

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  Paris changed Wren's direction. He left for France in July 1665 on his first and only trip abroad and found an architectural world closely linked to the Italian Renaissance. He met Gian Lorenzo Bernini, described by contemporaries as "the greatest artist of the century", who was himself in Paris at the time. Bernini's concrete influence on Wren's designs would come mainly through published plans and engravings, but the encounter mattered.

  Wren had already been drawn into discussions about a battered St Paul's Cathedral before the fire. Letters document his involvement as early as 1661, when Charles II consulted him about repairs to the medieval structure. In the spring of 1666, he made his first design for a dome for the cathedral, and it was accepted in principle on the 27th of August 1666. One week later, the Great Fire destroyed two-thirds of the City and left old St Paul's a ruin.

  Between the 5th and the 11th of September 1666, Wren measured the precise area of devastation, drew up a plan for rebuilding the entire city, and submitted it to the king. The plan went no further than the paper it was drawn on. But in 1669, when the King's Surveyor of Works died, Wren was promptly installed in his place.

  He was personally responsible for rebuilding fifty-one churches -- though the source notes it is not true to say that each of them represented his own fully developed design. The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor and others in Wren's office. He was knighted on the 14th of November 1673, an honour bestowed after his resignation from the Savilian chair at Oxford.

• 4. St Paul's: Thirty-Six Years

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  The cathedral that Wren actually built bears only a slight resemblance to the design that carried the royal warrant of the 14th of May 1675. The process between the fire and the finished building was long, iterative, and often contentious. His first proposal, known as the "First Model", was accepted and demolition of the old cathedral began. By 1672 that design seemed too modest, and Wren produced a grander version called the "Great Model", which the king accepted and construction started on in November 1673. The clergy rejected it. Wren was then confined to a "cathedral form" required by the church, and produced the Classical-Gothic compromise called the Warrant Design in 1674.

  Work began a few weeks before the warrant was formally attached to the drawings. What rose over the following decades was something different again from any of those designs.

  The first service was held in the cathedral in 1697, when Wren was sixty-five -- and there was still no dome. Parliament, seeking to accelerate the work, had withheld half his salary since that year. Not until 1711 was the cathedral declared complete. At that point, Wren received the salary Parliament had held back for fourteen years. His son Christopher, trained by Wren as an architect, supervised the topping-out ceremony in 1710.

  The one thing Wren could not control was the decoration. Against his explicit wishes, the commission engaged the painter Thornhill to cover the inner dome in false perspective, and authorised a balustrade around the roof line. Wren's response, described as an apt parting shot, was that "ladies think nothing well without an edging."

• 5. Private Life, Brief Marriages

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  By the time Wren married in 1669, his career was well established, and the source suggests his appointment as Surveyor of the King's Works early that year may have been what persuaded him he could finally afford to do so. His bride was Faith Coghill, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Sir John Coghill of Bletchingdon, and she had been his childhood neighbour. A love letter from Wren to Faith survives, in which he wrote of a watch he sent her: "I have put such a spell into it; that every Beating of the Balance will tell you 'tis the Pulse of my Heart."

  Faith died of smallpox on the 3rd of September 1675, and was buried in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields beside the couple's infant son Gilbert, who had died at around eighteen months old after suffering from convulsions. A few days later, Faith's mother, Lady Coghill, arrived to take the infant Christopher -- born February 1675 -- back with her to Oxfordshire.

  Seventeen months after Faith's death, Wren remarried. His second wife, Jane Fitzwilliam, was the daughter of William FitzWilliam, 2nd Baron FitzWilliam. Robert Hooke, who saw Wren regularly, recorded in his diary that he had never even heard of her, and did not meet her until six weeks after the wedding. Jane is believed to have died of tuberculosis in September 1680 and was buried alongside Faith and Gilbert. Wren never married again. He lived past ninety, and of those years was married in total for only a brief portion.

• 6. Late Battles and Legacy

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  In 1712, the Letter Concerning Design by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, circulated in manuscript and censured Wren's cathedral, his taste, and his long-standing control of royal works. Although Wren had been appointed to the Fifty New Churches Commission in 1711, he was left with nominal charge only when the surveyorship began in 1715. On the 26th of April 1718, on the stated pretext of failing powers, he was dismissed in favour of William Benson.

  He had bought the manor of Wroxall, Warwickshire, in 1713 from the Burgoyne family, to which his son Christopher retired in 1716. Queen Anne had granted Wren a lease on The Old Court House near Hampton Court in lieu of salary arrears for building St Paul's. He also kept a house on St James's Street in London, from which he made those unofficial visits to the cathedral.

  Wren was laid to rest on the 5th of March 1723, placed in the southeast corner of the crypt of St Paul's. His memorial inscription there was written by his son Christopher the Younger. It appears also in the circle of black marble on the main floor, directly beneath the centre of the dome -- the building that consumed thirty-six years of his professional life.

  His obituary appeared in the Post Boy No. 5244, dated the 2nd of March 1723. In 1997, UNESCO inscribed Wren's Greenwich Hospital on the World Heritage list, citing the complex's "outstanding architectural and artistic achievements" -- a recognition arriving more than two and a half centuries after the rebuilding of London began.