PLATE X
HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS.
Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a palace, and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place in the development of the English interior. Left more to himself, Wren would have been more English in the height of his rooms. He had a sense of fitness which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren was unlucky at Hampton Court in more than in one of his clients. His Comptroller (or, as we should say, Clerk) of the Works was William Talman, who accused him of having passed bad work. Some masonry showed cracks, and enough stir was created to lead the House of Lords to order an enquiry. Wren was exonerated, and with characteristic generosity he did not call, as he might well have done, for the dismissal of a disloyal assistant. Time has revenged him. Chatsworth shows Talman to have been a heavy-handed fellow, but he is also remembered as a bad colleague in other things than the Hampton Court accusation. If visitors to the Palace should feel that Wren failed in giving a suitable approach to the State apartments, they should remember that they are in the presence of an incomplete scheme, and that he left a design of notable splendour for wings with colonnades at the north side. The incidental furnishings of avenues took shape in the chestnuts of Bushey Park, but the rest remained on paper. In one detail of the gardens Wren must have taken special pleasure. The marvellous iron screens by Tijou have been moved from their original position, but they remain to show Wren’s skill in the choice of his craftsmen.
The third of his great secular buildings, Greenwich Hospital, had the same charitable purpose as Chelsea, but exceeded Hampton Court in magnificence. Charles I. had employed Inigo Jones to build, at some distance from the Thames, a house for his Queen, Henrietta Maria. Soon after the accession of Charles II., John Webb, as ghost for Sir John Denham, had begun the great building by the shore for which Inigo Jones may have left designs; but money ran short and work was suspended after only a small part had been done. This wing is on well-known Palladian lines, but is hampered by a heavy attic, so ill-adjusted as to discredit whoever was responsible for it. When William and Mary succeeded James II., the Queen wished to emulate her uncle Charles in making provision for disabled seamen as he had done for soldiers. Once more Wren and Evelyn were to be colleagues. On May 5, 1695, the Royal Commission, consisting of these two, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bigwigs, had its first meeting at the London Guildhall, and sixteen days later the two friends and three others went, as a Committee, to survey the site. Evelyn’s task was to raise subscriptions, and he made an interesting choice of a secretary in Mr. Vanbrugh, afterwards Sir John. About a year was spent in preparing plans, and on June 4, 1696, the Committee met at Wren’s house in Whitehall to make agreements for materials and workmen and to give orders for the foundations to be begun. On the last day of June a select committee of thirteen dined together at Greenwich, and precisely at five o’clock (Mr. Flamsteed, the King’s Astronomer, “observing the punctual time by instruments”) Wren and Evelyn jointly laid the foundation stone.
PLATE XI
GREENWICH HOSPITAL AND ITS TWO DOMES.
Queen Mary wanted the old Queen’s House and the Charles II. wing to be integral parts of the new scheme—a rather hampering condition. Wren took the former as the closing feature of a vista from the river, between his two new blocks named after William and Mary and his Queen Anne block, which balances and exactly follows the Jones-Webb block of Charles II.
Wren’s contribution to Greenwich was, therefore, the two superb quadrangular blocks with open sides adorned with colonnades and the big idea of planning which pulled together the work of four reigns into a coherent and superb whole. The duality of the domes is a most notable feature, and their individual design is beautifully differentiated from the grander scale of St. Paul’s. They are domestic, rather than church-like, in conception. That Hawksmoor in his capacity as Deputy-Surveyor had a somewhat free hand in designing part of the work after 1705, that Vanbrugh succeeded Wren as Surveyor in 1716, that Colin Campbell took up the task ten years later, and that Ripley superseded him in 1729, does not deprive Wren of the title of architect of the Hospital. In so far as they departed from his original designs the buildings suffered, especially from the baldness of the Campbell elements and the heavy-handedness of the ex-carpenter Ripley. Wren’s planning, his domes and his colonnades, make Greenwich the noblest of English public buildings in the Grand Manner.