Wren had also employment at Cambridge, of a kind he would have been loth to put in other hands. His uncle, the Bishop of Ely, had instantly on his release determined to give a chapel to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he had been a scholar under Launcelot Andrewes,[95] and he employed his nephew as his architect. Upon this work and its endowment the Bishop expended 5,000l., the first money he received after his release. His personal habits were austerely simple; for the last twenty years of his life he drank no wine, and only ate off a wooden trencher, practising fasting and abstinence with great strictness. He had never spent any of the revenues of his see upon his children, and now he made the chapel his heir, bestowing upon it an estate at Hardwick in Cambridgeshire.
The chapel, which has a peculiar interest as Wren’s first architectural work, is built in the classical style he was to make famous in England, and bears his mark in its beautiful proportions, the richness of its stucco ceiling and the pannelled wood-work. The plain glazing of the windows and a something of bareness about the whole, are probably to be accounted for by the necessity of limiting the expense to a fixed sum. Its first stone was laid May 13, 1663, by the Master, Dr. Frank, acting for Bishop Wren, who was not present.[96]
A SAD RETURN.
It was probably at the same time that Wren executed some repairs in Ely Cathedral which had suffered, like every other grand church, from the fury of the Puritans. Bitter indeed must have been the regret with which the surviving clergy returned to find the fabrics of their churches plundered and laid waste, and their flocks scattered or corrupted.
CHAPTER VI.
1664–1667.
REPAIR OF S. PAUL’S—SHELDONIAN THEATRE—THE PLAGUE—A LETTER FROM PARIS—CONSECRATION OF PEMBROKE CHAPEL—FIRE OF LONDON—BISHOP WREN’S DEATH—HIS FAMILY.
Yet, London, Empress of the Northern Clime,
By an high fate thou greatly didst expire,
Great as the world’s, which, at the death of time,