I could wish that some Parliamentary contemporary had put on record his impressions of Wren as an M.P., an unlikely trade for a man of his temperament. Elected for New Windsor in William’s first Parliament, he was unseated on a technicality, but immediately re-elected. In 1700 he was returned for the Borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, but, as Elmes gravely observes, “notwithstanding this additional occupation, he found time to write a dissertation on the ascension of the sap in trees, and a paper on the superfice of the terraqueous globe.” Doubtless he found these employments prettier relaxations from architecture than attendance at the House of Commons.
Wren seems to have got on well with Charles II., who knighted him at Whitehall on November 20, 1672.
Indeed, the King might well have been grateful to the man who so notably gave lustre to his reign. Wren stood to Charles in something the same relation as Phidias to Pericles.
King William was an awkward client, and interfered with Wren in the design of Hampton Court; but Queen Mary liked to talk to him about architecture and gardening, and to watch the progress of the works “on which she often offered her own judgment, which was allowed to be exquisite.” For Wren’s sake, we hope it was.
Queen Anne was invoked by Wren to take a hand in his quarrels with the Commissioners of St. Paul’s. He had a shrewd dig at them in one formal petition to Her Majesty, in which he was able to show that they were making a mess of the railings round her own statue, and throwing over Tijou’s design, as approved by Wren, in favour of some model of their own.
What action Anne took does not appear, but then or at some time she gave Wren a delightful chest of drawers, which remained an heirloom in the Wren family until Mrs. Pigott’s death, and a calendar watch that reposes in Sir John Soane’s Museum with a walking-stick, which conceals drawing instruments.
I have dealt with Wren’s dismissal from office in the chapter on St. Paul’s. He was then in the eighty-sixth year of his age and the forty-ninth of his Surveyorship. The remainder of his life was spent in retirement, “in which Recess, free from worldly affairs, he passed the greatest part of the five last following years of his life in contemplation and studies and principally in the consolation of the holy scriptures: cheerful in solitude and as well pleased to die in the shade as in the light.”
The manner of Wren’s passing is told by Miss Phillimore, and is, I imagine, a family tradition derived from Mrs. Pigott:
“Once a year it was his habit to be driven to London, and to sit for a while under the dome of his own Cathedral. On one of these journeys he caught a cold and soon afterwards, on February 25, 1723, his servant, thinking Sir Christopher slept longer after dinner than was his wont, came into the room and found his master dead in his chair, with an expression of perfect peace on the calm features.”
So died a great artist, a great Christian, and a great gentleman, who lived, as his epitaph says, more than ninety years, not for himself, but for the good of the State.