THE WEST FRONT OF ST. PAUL’S.
The funds received from all sources, including borrowings, amounted in 1700 to £1,167,474, but part of this went in interest paid out and in repaying loans and part in acquiring neighbouring property. The net cost is given by Longman as £746,661.
The choir was opened for Divine Service on December 2, 1697, on the Thanksgiving Day for the Peace on the Treaty of Ryswick. By 1708 the dome was ready to be covered. The Committee wanted copper to be used. Wren held out for lead, and lead it was and is. In 1710 young Christopher Wren was deputed by his father to lay the top-stone of the lantern which surmounts the dome, and did it in the presence of Sir Christopher and Edward Strong and other workmen who had been engaged on the building. It was a proud day for the old man of seventy-eight who had carried through a unique task despite every difficulty.
He was treated with incredible meanness. From the start of the work he had received the meagre salary of £200 a year, and in 1696-7 an Act “for the completing and adorning the Cathedral Church” was passed which included the miserable provision “to suspend a moiety of the Surveyor’s salary until the said Church should be finished, thereby the better to encourage him to finish the same with the utmost diligence and expedition.”
It was a spiteful business, which Wren bitterly resented, and not until Christmas, 1711, did he secure the payment of the arrears of half-pay on the passing of an Act which certified the Cathedral was finished. But even then much remained to be done, and in the doing of it Wren was hampered and thwarted at every turn by the narrow-minded Commissioners. It is a miserable story and hardly worth telling but that Wren’s reputation needs to be defended as to some features of St. Paul’s which he resisted ineffectually. The squabble about the enclosing railings is no longer interesting because they have disappeared, but the painting of the inner dome by Thornhill with opaque masses of figures instead of the mosaic Wren had intended was a severe trouble to him. Still worse was the insistence of the Commissioners on the balustrade which crowns the upper cornice. Wren’s letter to them in October, 1717, was a vigorous protest for a man of eighty-five. “I take leave, first, to declare that I never designed a balustrade. Persons of little skill in architecture did expect, I believe, to see something they had been used to in Gothic structures, and ladies think nothing well without an edging. I should gladly have complied with the vulgar taste, but I suspended for the reasons following.” The reasons were good and many, but the Commissioners preferred to be lady-like, and the balustrade was put up. This was in 1717. In 1718 King George the First superseded Wren as Surveyor-General in favour of a rascal called William Benson, so incompetent that he was dismissed ignominiously a year later.
PLATE VII
ST. PAUL’S UNDER THE DOME.
From an old engraving dedicated to Bishop Van Mildert by Josiah Taylor.
In Wren’s own writing there appears in the MS. chronology of his life and works an entry in Greek which runs, translated: