CHAPTER XII.
1697–1699.
OPENING OF S. PAUL’S CHOIR—A MOVEABLE PULPIT—LETTER TO HIS SON AT PARIS—ORDER AGAINST SWEARING—PETER THE GREAT—S. DUNSTAN’S SPIRE—MORNING PRAYER CHAPEL OPENED—WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
Home-keeping youth have ever homely wit.
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
One serious trouble and hindrance in all public works was the state of the coinage. The money had been so clipped and defaced, that no coin was worth its professed value, and for some time the expedients used by the Government failed to lighten the pressure. In paying such an army of workmen as those employed about S. Paul’s, the inconvenience must have amounted to positive distress. Scattered here and there through Evelyn’s diary are many references to the ‘great confusion and distraction’ it occasioned.
A sudden subsidence of a large part of the ground at Portland, close to the quarries set apart for Wren’s use, caused an inconvenient delay in bringing the stone to London, but yet the work progressed, and on December 2nd, 1697, the choir was opened for service.
It was the occasion of the thanksgiving for the peace of Ryswick, which, though it brought little glory to England, was yet heartily welcomed as the close of a long and exhausting war.
King William went to Whitehall, and heard Bishop Burnet’s flattering sermon, while Bishop Compton preached for the first time in the new S. Paul’s. No report of his sermon has come down to us. The choir was not yet enriched with the carvings of Gibbons; but the pulpit appears to have been very remarkable in its way: Sir Christopher had placed it on wheels, perhaps with a design of using it afterwards, for services under the dome, not unlike those we are now familiar with.
A pulpit on wheels was a novelty, which gave rise, we can well believe, to many squibs, one of which has been preserved.