Must fall, and rise a nobler frame by fire
Annus Mirabilis, ccxii. Dryden.
The repairs of S. Paul’s Cathedral could not be delayed. Wren, as Sir John Denham’s assistant, was greatly occupied about the matter, which was one of no ordinary difficulty. The responsibility was really his, for Sir John went out of his mind, and though he recovered, probably did but little business.
When Inigo Jones built his portico, he cased the nave with Portland stone, and rebuilt the north and south fronts. In doing so he pared down the original pointed architecture, until little of its beauty or character remained. His work had in its turn been damaged by the Puritans, who set up booths in the portico, and dug sawpits in the cathedral inclosure. Besides these injuries Christopher Wren’s accurate eye detected graver faults in the original design, some of which he enumerates. ‘The pillars of the nave, though eleven feet in diameter, were only cased with stone, and filled up with rubbish inside. The roof was always too heavy for them, so that they are bent outwards on both sides, so that the roof already cracked will finally fall in.’ He proposed to substitute a roof[97] of ‘a light, thin shell of stone, very geometrically made.’ The tower leant much to one side, and was propped with arches and buttresses, so as to block the view from the west end. Upon this tower, which he despairingly calls ‘a heap of deformities,’ there had been formerly a tall, thin, wooden spire, which was destroyed by lightning. For this he wished to substitute ‘a dome or rotunda, and upon the cupola for outward ornament, a lantern with a spring top to rise proportionately.’ He hints that when the dome was finished the rest of the cathedral should be harmonised with it, almost impossible though the task appeared. He expected great difference of opinion, and that ‘some would aim at a greater magnificence than the age would afford, and some might fall so low as to think of piecing up the old fabric here with stone, there with brick, and covering all faults with a coat of plaster, to leave it still to posterity as an object of charity.’ The miserable state of the building is implied in the epitaph of its Dean, Dr. Barwick, who in 1664, ‘Inter sacras Ædis Paulinæ ruinas reponit suas (utrasque resurrecturas securus)’.[98]
SHELDONIAN THEATRE.
Another work upon which Wren was engaged was the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. Sheldon, who succeeded Archbishop Juxon in the see of Canterbury in 1663, was determined to free S. Mary’s Church from the profane uses to which it was put when the various ‘Acts’ were kept there, and any kind of jesting and buffoonery was considered allowable. He had had experience of Wren in the discussions about S. Paul’s, and now engaged him as architect. The building is too well known to need a description; the roof was reckoned a triumph of skill because of ‘the contrivance of supporting the same without the help of any beam, it being entirely kept up by braces and screws; and is the subject of an excellent mathematical treatise by that prodigy of the age, Dr. Wallis.’[99] It was six years building, and cost 25,000l. Evelyn, with whom Wren had often discussed the plans, went to Oxford on purpose to be present at the opening on July 9, 1669.
‘In the morning,’ he says, ‘was celebrated the Encenia of the New Theater ... it was resolved to keep the present Act in it and celebrate its dedication with the greatest splendor and formalitie that might be, and therefore drew a world of strangers and other companie to the Universitie from all parts of the nation. The Vice Chancellor, Heads of Houses and Doctors, being seated in magisteriall seates, the Vice Chancellor’s chaire and deske, Proctors etc. covered with Brocatall (a kind of Brocade) and cloth of gold; the Universitie Register read the founder’s grant and gift of it to the Universitie upon these solemn occasions. Then followed Dr. South, the Universitie’s orator, in an eloquent speech which was very long and not without some malicious and indecent reflections on the Royal Society as underminers of the Universitie, which was very foolish and untrue, as well as unseasonable. But, to let that pass from an ill-natured man, the rest was in praise of the archbishop and the ingenious architect.’
Dr. Plot, the historian of Oxfordshire, who was a member of the Royal Society, in his quaint book gives a careful technical description of the construction of the theatre by Wren, and his assistant, ‘Richard Frogley, an able carpenter.’
During the years that the theatre was building Wren did not intermit his attendance at the Royal Society; amongst other inventions he produced a machine for drawing in perspective, which was exhibited at one of the meetings.