Wren is rather fretful with his son, and rather melancholy as to his own health, but he was then only sixty-six, and was to live until past ninety. In a different tone is the letter to young Christopher from his father, dated October 11, 1705, the original of which is also in the heirloom Parentalia. There is no longer the note of rebuke which followed the young man’s extravagance in Paris. His taste had changed, and Holland wooed him rather to the buying of good books, a traffic the old man cannot disapprove.
Poor Billy managed to live another forty years, despite Wren’s desponding postscript. John Evelyn stood godfather on June 17, 1679, “to a sonn of Sir Christopher Wren, surveyor of His Majesty’s buildings, that most excellent and learned person (Evelyn never misses a chance of praising Wren), with Sir William Fermor, and my Lady Viscountess Newport, wife of the Treasurer of the Household.” This was poor Billy, whose sponsors show that his father was the intimate friend of Court personages.
William seems to have been very delicate, if not defective. When Sir Christopher died he did not bequeath anything to William, but left him in the charge of Christopher. William lived on until March, 1738-9, and was thus close on sixty when he died. His elder brother, Christopher, survived until August 24, 1747, when he was seventy-two.
That Wren lived on affectionate terms with his son Christopher may be assumed not only from the terms of his will, but from his having sunk most of his fortune in an estate for Christopher’s benefit.
His own connection with Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire, can be set out in few words.
On August 29, 1713, he bought the estate for £19,600 from the trustees of Sir John Burgoyne, Bart., who had died in 1709. Sir John’s son, Sir Roger, died in 1711, leaving a widow, Constance, daughter of Sir Thomas Middleton. She was one of the signatories of the deed of sale, and the younger Christopher, then a widower, married her in 1715. Probably the Wrens and the Burgoynes were old friends, and as Sir Roger Burgoyne had left the estate encumbered, the sale to Wren was doubtless to clear off the mortgages. The estate consisted of a fine Elizabethan brick house (since Wren’s time very badly remodelled) and 1,850 acres, all of which Wren conveyed to trustees in March, 1715, bringing them into the settlement made on the first marriage of his son Christopher, who then became sole owner.
That the architect ever visited the estate we do not know, but it is a tradition that he designed a delightful garden wall planned in a series of semi-circles. Certainly he never lived there. A succession of Christophers owned the place until 1828, when it went to the daughter of the last of them, who married Chandos Hoskyns, a descendant of the Sir John Hoskyns who was Vice-President of the Royal Society when Sir Christopher filled the chair. Catherine, the eldest daughter of Chandos Wren-Hoskyns, became in time Mrs. Corbett Pigott, and died in 1911. From her I secured the heirloom copy of the Parentalia for the R.I.B.A., and she gave me a copy of the rare Kirkall engraved portrait of Wren, which had come to her from Margaret Wren, daughter of Sir Christopher’s grandson, Stephen.
I had hoped that Sir Christopher’s will would include some personal expressions about his family, but it is an uninteresting document, as anyone who examines it (P.C.C. Richmond 65) may discover. He characteristically provided that his body should be decently buried without pomp, and for the rest one sheet of paper was enough to set out his dispositions. After reference to the trust made at his son Christopher’s first marriage, he leaves everything to him, desiring him “to take particular care that my son William Wren be comfortably maintained supported and lookt after during his life.” The will was dated April 14, 1713, and proved at London on March 27, 1723.
I consulted the will of the son Christopher (P.C.C. Potter 220) in the hope that it might make some reference to the disposition of chattels, such as drawings, that had belonged to his father, but it is short and uninforming.