Graduating in 1650, he was elected three years later, after taking his Master's degree, to a Fellowship of All Souls, the next year began his friendship with John Evelyn, and he was subsequently chosen Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College[53] and Savilian Professor at Oxford. Isaac Newton in the "Principia" cites him as an authority on mathematics, and, had he never turned his attention to architecture, he would still have taken high rank in other ways. By 1663, as appears by a letter of Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, he was looked upon as the fittest man to restore the dilapidated St. Paul's, and was about the same time asked to go to Tangiers to direct the extensive fortifications and harbour projected there. He refused the offer of Tangiers on the plea of health, "and humbly prayed his Majesty to allow of his Excuse, and to command his duty in England." Although this post was to be accompanied by a reversionary grant of the Surveyor Generalship of the Royal Works, one may well ask the question, who, had he accepted it, would have rebuilt St. Paul's?[54]
ELEVATION AND SECTION OF WREN'S REJECTED DESIGN FOR ST. PAUL'S.
From his drawings in All Souls' College, Oxford, as reproduced in facsimile in Blomfield's "Renaissance Architecture in England."[ToList]
We now begin to find him devoting what Sprat most truly called "that great genius of yours" to architecture. He examined carefully the leading churches of England and of some parts of the Continent.[55] He went to Paris the year of the Plague, and it is characteristic of the taste of his time that no mediæval cathedral passed on the way is mentioned. At Paris, under the auspices of Mazarin, many architects and artists were assembled. "I hope I shall give you a very good Account of all the best Artists in France," he wrote to a friend. "My business now is to pry into Trades and Arts. I put myself into all shapes to humour them; 'tis a comedy to me, and tho' sometimes expenceful, I am loth yet to leave it." He mentions not only leading men like Colbert, but more than twenty architects, painters, and designers he met, and above all Bernini, the architect of the Louvre. "Bernini's designs of the Louvre I would have given my skin for; but the old reserved Italian gave me but a five Minutes View; it was five little designs on Paper, for which he had received as many thousand Pistoles: I had only time to copy it in my Fancy and Memory." In after years, when his enthusiasm had been tempered by a more mature judgment, this eulogium would have been materially qualified. We may add here that he was in course of time knighted, and became President of the Royal Society.
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN.
From the engraving in Elmes' Memoirs of Sir C. Wren, after the portrait by Kneller at the Royal Society's rooms.[ToList]
Such was the man to whom not merely the king and his advisers, but public opinion, turned to repair the ravages of the Fire, and in particular to rebuild St. Paul's. It was the Surveyor General, Sir John Denham, who recommended Wren as his successor, and the death of Denham in March, 1668, gave this recommendation full effect. One of Wren's many disappointments was that the opportunity was missed of laying out afresh the whole City from Temple Bar to Tower Hill, and from Moorfields to the river. His inventive genius projected broad streets, generally rectangular, with piazzas, each the meeting-point of eight thoroughfares, and quays and terraces along the river bank. He calculated that by obliterating the numerous churchyards and laying out healthier cemeteries in the suburbs, no owner would lose a square foot of ground, and that, although they would not find their property exactly on the same site, every building would be replaced, with the immense compensation of an excellent situation in the finest and healthiest city in the whole world. By this plan St. Paul's would have directly faced a long and broad street running west and passing through the present Law Courts, with St. Dunstan's Church in the centre beyond the Fleet, and the narrow Strand joining from the west at Temple Bar. At Ludgate, three hundred yards west of the cathedral, this avenue of a width of some thirty yards began to open out until, opposite the west front, it had increased to a breadth of a hundred yards, leaving ample room for a piazza. Here an acute bifurcation was formed, the northern street leading to the Exchange; the southern, a broader and a nobler Cannon Street, with St. Paul's between. This scheme, as laid before the King and Parliament, Wren declared to be thoroughly practicable. Certainly it would have prevented congestion of traffic unto this day, and given St. Paul's (although somewhat hemmed in on the east) a position unique amongst churches.[56] "The only and as it happened unsurmountable Difficulty remaining was the obstinate Averseness of great Part of the Citizens to alter their old Properties, and to secede from building their Houses again on the old Ground and Foundations"; and as rebuilding began almost as soon as the smoke of the Fire had ceased, and long before anything definite could be decided upon, a great opportunity was lost. The estimated three-quarters of a million of souls and the vehicles innumerable now crossing the boundaries every weekday are compelled, too often, to traverse choked and narrow streets, and not without danger to life and limb; while St. Paul's itself, cribbed, cabined, confined, becomes in each successive generation more hemmed in as the surrounding emporiums and magazines grow taller and taller.
At first the idea was entertained of restoring the ruins, but this was finally abandoned by royal warrant to the Commissioners in 1668, and clearing and excavations began. The workmen with pickaxes stood on the top of the walls some eighty feet high, and others below cleared away the dislodged stones—a dangerous task in which lives were lost. Of the Central Tower some two hundred feet remained, and a more expeditious plan was adopted. A deal box, containing eighteen pounds of gunpowder, was exploded level with the foundations at the centre of the north-west pillar, and the adjacent arches were lifted some nine inches, while these ruins "suddenly jumping down, made a great Heap of Ruin in the Place without scattering." Wren estimated the whole weight lifted at three thousand tons, and the labour saved equal to that of a battalion of a thousand men. When the alarmed inhabitants of the neighbourhood heard and felt the concussion, they naturally took it for an earthquake. In the surveyor's absence a subordinate used too much powder in attempting a second mine, and neither burying it low enough nor building up the mouth, a stone was projected through an open window into a room where some women were sitting at work. Although no one was hit, the neighbours took alarm, and successfully agitated against all further blasting. Delay was caused, and finally a battering-ram some forty feet in length, worked by thirty men, completed the demolition. The stones and rubbish were cleared away, and used in different buildings and in repairing the streets. Afterwards some houses on the north side which encroached on the building, and may have been those that assisted the passage of the Fire, were levelled, and their site included in the churchyard.