CHAPTER VII.

1668-1673.

PATCHING S. PAUL'S--SANCROFT'S LETTERS--WREN'S EXAMINATION OF S. PAUL'S--SALISBURY CATHEDRAL--LONDON AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN--LETTER TO FAITH COGHILL--WREN MARRIES HER--TEMPLE BAR--S. MARY-LE-BOW-- ARTILLERY COMPANY--GUNPOWDER USED TO REMOVE RUINS.

Methinks already from this chymic flame, I see a city of more precious mold, Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, With silver pav'd, and all divine with gold.

Already, labouring with a mighty fate, She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow, And seems to have renewed her charter's date, Which heaven will till the death of time allow.

Dryden, _Annus Mirabilis_, ccxciii.

After the death of Bishop Wren, Christopher was a frequent attendant at the Royal Society, where several experiments were made of raising weights by means of gunpowder, a matter which Wren was anxious to investigate before trying to remove the mass of ruins which had been S. Paul's. Much very tedious work of carting away rubbish and opening roadways still pressed on Wren and his assistants before even the necessary levels could be taken and adjusted or any building could be begun.

In spite of Wren's previous statement, and that of Evelyn and Sancroft, in spite of the immense additional damage which the conflagration had caused, attempts were still made to patch up the remains of S. Paul's Cathedral.

As has been said, something was done in order to make it possible to hold Divine Service in the ruins, and there Sancroft ministered, and there possibly he preached before the King on the occasion of the solemn fast held for the fire on October 10, 1666.[112] Parts of the sermon rise to real eloquence, and he admonishes King Charles and his luxurious Court with singular courage and directness. So matters remained with the Cathedral until the spring of 1668.

['_INDISPENSABLY NECESSARY._']

Wren was at Oxford, delivering his Astronomy Lectures, when he received the following letter from the Dean of S. Paul's:[113]

'What you whispered in my ear, at your last coming hither, is now come to pass. Our work at the west end of S. Paul's is fallen about our ears. Your quick eye discerned the walls and pillars gone off from their perpendiculars and I believe other defects too, which are now exposed to every common observer. About a week since, we being at work about the third pillar from the west end on the south side, which we had new cased with stone, where it was most defective almost up to the chapiter, a great weight falling from the high wall, so disabled the vaulting of the side aisle by it, that it threatened a sudden ruin so visibly that the workmen presently removed, and the next night the whole pillar fell, and carried scaffolds and all to the very ground.

'This breach has discovered to all that look on it two great defects in Inigo Jones' work; one that his new case of stone in the upper walls (massy as it is) was not set upon the upright of the pillars, but upon the core of the groins of the vaulting; the other that there were no keystones at all to tie it to the old work; and all this being very heavy with the Roman ornaments on the top of it, and being already so far gone outwards, cannot possibly stand long. In fine, it is the opinion of all men, that we can proceed no farther at the west end. What we are to do next is the present deliberation, in which you are so absolutely and indispensably necessary to us that we can do nothing, resolve on nothing without you.'... 'You will think fit, I know, to bring with you those excellent draughts and designs you formerly favoured us with; and, in the mean time, till we enjoy you here, consider what to advise that may be for the satisfaction of his Majesty and the whole nation, an obligation so great and public, that it must be acknowledged by better hands than those of

'Your affectionate Friend and Servant, 'W. SANCROFT.'

Wren seems to have been unable to come up to London, and to have written an answer to Dean Sancroft reiterating his opinion, while the attempt at repairs continued.

At the beginning of July Sancroft wrote to him again:--

'Sir,--Yesterday my Lords of Canterbury, London, and Oxford met on purpose to hear your letter read once more, and to consider what is now to be done in order to the repairs of S. Paul's. They unanimously resolved, that it is fit immediately to attempt something, and that, without you, they can do nothing. I am therefore commanded to give you an invitation hither in his Grace's name, and the rest of the commissioners, with all speed, that we may prepare something to be proposed to his Majesty (the design of such a quire, at least as may be a congruous part of a greater and more magnificent work to follow); and then, for the procuring of contributions to defray this, we are so sanguine as not to doubt of it, if we could but once resolve what we would do, and what that would cost; so that the only part of your letter we demur to, is the method you propound of declaring first what money we would bestow, and then designing something just of that expense: for quite otherwise--the way their lordships resolve upon, is to frame a design, handsome and noble, and suitable to all the ends of it, and to the reputation of the city and the nation; and to take it for granted that money will be had to accomplish it: or, however, to let it lie by, till we have before us a prospect of so much as may reasonably encourage us to begin.

'Thus far I thought good to prepare you for what will be said to you when you come, that you may not be surprised with it: and, if my summons prevail not, my lord the Bishop of Oxford hath undertaken to give it you warmer, _ore tenus_,[114] the next week, when he intends to be with you, if, at least, you be not come towards us before he arrives, which would be a very agreeable surprise to us all, and especially to your very affectionate, humble Servant, 'W. SANCROFT.'

[_THE STATE OF S. PAUL'S._]

Wren obeyed this intreaty, came up from Oxford, made a thorough examination of the Cathedral, and wrote a report for the commissioners.

'What time and weather,' he says, 'had left entire in the old and art in the new repaired parts of this great pile of S. Paul's, the calamity of the fire hath so weakened and defaced, that it now appears like some antique ruin of two thousand years' continuance, and to repair it sufficiently will be like the mending of Argo-nairs,[115] scarce anything at last will be left of the old.'

He enumerates the various 'decays' of the building from the date of the fire in Queen Elizabeth's reign which burnt the whole roof and caused 'the spreading out of the walls above ten inches from their true perpendicular'--up to the last fire, of which he says--

'The second ruins are they that have put the restoration past remedy, the effects of which I shall briefly enumerate.

'First, the portico is nearly deprived of that excellent beauty and strength which time alone and weather could have no more overthrown than the natural rocks; so great and good were the materials, and so skilfully were they laid after a true Roman manner. But so impatient is Portland stone of fire that many tons are scaled off and the columns flawed quite through.'

Then follows an account of the injuries to the rest of the building, but as they have been already touched on in the extracts from Evelyn's Diary and Sancroft's letters, they shall not be repeated here.

'Having shown in part,' he continues, 'the deplorable condition of our patient, we are to consult of the cure, if possible art may effect it. And herein we must imitate the physician, who, when he finds a total decay of nature, bends his skill to a palliative to give respite for the better settlement of the estate of the patient. The question is then, where best to begin this sort of practice; that is to make a new quire for present use.'

The only part of the cathedral where this could be safely and easily done was at the eastern end of the nave:--

'Since,' he said, 'we cannot mend this great ruin, we will not disfigure it, but that it shall still have its full motives to work, if possible upon this or the next ages: and yet prove so cheap, that between three and four thousand pounds shall effect it all in one summer.

'And, having with this ease obtained a present cathedral, there will be time to consider of a more durable and noble fabric, to be made in the place of the lower and eastern parts of the Church, when the minds of men, now contracted to many objects of necessary charge, shall by God's blessing be more widened, after a happy restoration, both of the buildings, and the wealth of the city and nation. In the meantime to derive, if not a stream, yet some little drills of charity this way; or, at least, to preserve that already obtained from being diverted, it may not prove ill-advised to seem to begin something of the new fabric. But I confess this cannot well be put in execution without taking down all that part of the ruin; which whether it be yet seasonable to do we must leave to our superiors.'

[_SALISBURY CATHEDRAL._]

Many meetings and much discussion ensued, and Wren's opinion at last prevailed; the King issued an order in council for taking down the walls at the east end, the old choir, and the tower, and for clearing the ground in order to lay a fresh foundation. While this was being done, Wren prepared sketches and designs for a new S. Paul's. He had also an engagement out of London: his friend Dr. Seth Ward, the Bishop of Salisbury, an active member of the Royal Society, asked Wren to survey his beautiful cathedral, which had suffered much in the civil wars, and lately by lightning and tempest.

Though the architecture of the cathedral was not of the kind which he considered the best, Wren had too fine a taste, too quick an eye for beauty of form, not to admire it heartily, and in his report he pronounced that 'the whole pile was large and magnificent, justly accounted one of the best patterns of the age wherein it was built.' He praised the pillars and mouldings, 'the stately and rich plainness' to which the architect had trusted. He made a thorough examination of the whole, especially the spire, which had declined to the south-west, and had caused great alarm. Wren was of opinion that the architect had not laid as sufficient foundations, especially under the pillars, as he should have done, considering the marshy nature of the soil, the frequent inundations, the great weight that the pillars had to bear, and that they themselves were too slight, particularly those under the spire.

To prevent further mischief to the spire, he ordered some timbers in it, and in the tower, to be cut away, and put in bands and braces of iron wrought by anchor smiths who were accustomed to great work for ships. He then had a plummet dropped to the pavement, from the highest possible part of the spire, the height of which he reckoned at 404 feet from the ground, to see exactly what the decline was, and ordered this trial to be repeated at certain times to see if the decline increased.

When, nearly 200 years later, Mr. Wyatt made the trial, he found that the decline was unaltered, so true had Wren's science proved.

[_LONDON AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN._]

Both this year and the previous one had, so far as London was concerned, been taken up by the business of levelling, marking out streets, and adjusting the claims of such as had had houses in the city before the fire. Wren had laid before the King and Parliament a model of the city as he proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the design; the model probably does not exist, but the ground-plan has been preserved, and suggests a London very different to the present one.

The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the confined, winding approach to S. Paul's that it now is, even its crooked picturesqueness marred by the viaduct that cuts all the lines of the Cathedral, gradually widened as it approached S. Paul's, and divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least, which ran on either side of the Cathedral, leaving a large open space in which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to which ten streets, each sixty feet wide, converged, and around which were placed the Post Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths' Hall, and the Ensurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest streets were to be thirty feet wide, 'excluding all narrow, dark alleys without thoroughfares, and courts.'

The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal thoroughfares, and to be 'designed according to the best forms for capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All churchyards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.'

He intended that the churchyards should be carefully planted and adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials within the walls of the town he strongly objected, and the experience derived from the year of the plague confirmed his judgment. No gardens are mentioned in the plan, for he had provided, as he thought, sufficiently for the healthiness of the town by his wide streets and numerous open spaces for markets. Gardening in towns was an art little considered in his days, and contemporary descriptions show us that 'vacuities' were speedily filled with heaps of dust and refuse.

The London bank of the Thames was to be lined with a broad quay, along which the halls of the city companies were to be built, with suitable warehouses in between for the merchants, to vary the effect of the edifices.

The little stream whose name survives in _Fleet_ Street was to be brought to light, cleansed, and made serviceable as a canal one hundred and twenty feet wide, running much in the line of the present Holborn Viaduct.[116]

These were the main features of Christopher Wren's scheme, and had he been allowed to accomplish it, we can imagine what the effect of London might have been without its noisome smells, without its dark crooked lanes, without its worst smoke, its river honoured not only with the handsome quay it has at length obtained, but with a line of beautiful buildings and fair spires, and above all S. Paul's, with an ample space around it, giving free play to its grand proportions. Wren, with a perfect knowledge of his own powers, which he considered as dispassionately, and knew as accurately as any matter of mathematical science, was ready to undertake and perform his scheme to the uttermost.

[_PREOCCUPIED GROUND._]

The difficulties were however considerable: there were the endless quarrels about property, the reluctance to part with an old site, and, chief difficulty of all, the utmost hurry of rebuilding in order to house the people before the approaching winter.

Pepys[117] says that in April 1667:--

'Moorefields have houses two stories high in them, and paved streets, the city having let leases for seven years, which will be very much to the hindering of the building of the city; but it was considered that the streets cannot be passable in London till the whole street be built; and several that had got ground of the city for charity to build sheds on, had got the trick presently to sell that for 60_l._ which did not cost them 20_l._ to put up; and so the city being very poor in stock, thought it as good to do it themselves and therefore let leases for seven years of the ground in Moorefields.'

Thus Wren had by no means clear ground on which to work, and an opportunity was forfeited, which, _absit omen_, may never recur, of making London one of the beautiful cities of the world.

Important sanitary improvements were, however, made: the houses were not built of wood; the principal streets were less narrow; and, above all, the lingering contagion was burnt away. Nothing less would probably have availed; but the fire was a cleansing one, and left behind it this blessing, that though more than two hundred years have elapsed the plague has not, as yet, reappeared.

The Custom House of London was one of the first buildings to be restored, and Wren began it in 1668. It was a stately stone edifice, built in three sides of a square, with an open court in front. The same fate befell this building which had overtaken its predecessor; in 1719 it was burnt down.

[_FAITH COGHILL._]

Besides all these architectural and scientific cares, Wren had business of his own on hand, and was at this time engaged to be married to a lady four years younger than himself, whom probably he had known for some time. His bride was Faith, daughter of Sir Thomas Coghill and Elizabeth his wife, who lived at Bletchingdon in Oxfordshire. Sir Thomas was sheriff of the county in 1633, and was knighted at Woodstock in that year, the same in which King Charles was crowned in Scotland. Sir Thomas was a grandson of Marmaduke Coghill,[118] of Coghill, Knaresborough. He married, in 1622, Elizabeth Sutton, the heiress of Horsell and some lands in Surrey. Faith, their daughter, was born on March 17, 1636, and baptized in the same month at Bletchingdon by her relation the Rev. John Viell, the then rector. It seems likely that Wren made her acquaintance while both were children when staying with his sister Susan and her husband, Dr. William Holder, at Bletchingdon Rectory. It may have been Faith who comforted him when, on June 3, 1656, they laid Dean Wren in the chancel of Bletchingdon Church.

One letter to Faith Coghill from her lover, exists among the curious autographs of the 'Parentalia,'[119] its delicate, finished and yet firm writing, eminently characteristic of Christopher Wren: it is as follows--

'Madam,--The artificer having never before mett with a drowned watch, like an ignorant physician has been soe long about the cure that he hath made me very unquiet that your commands should be soe long deferred; however, I have sent the watch at last and envie the felicity of it, that it should be soe neer your side, and soe often enjoy your Eye, and be consulted by you how your time shall passe while you employ your hand in your excellent workes. But have a care of it, for I put such a Spell into it that every Beating of the Ballance will tell you 'tis the pulse of my Heart which labours as much to serve you and more trewly than the watch; for the watch I believe will sometimes lie, and sometimes perhaps be idle and unwilling to goe, having received so much injury by being drenched in that briny bath, that I dispair it should ever be a trew servant to you more. But as for me (unlesse you drown me too in my teares) you may be confident I shall never cease to be,

'Your most affectionate humble servant, 'CHR. WREN.

'June 14.

'I have put the watch in a box that it might take noe harm, and wrapt it about with a little leather, and that it might not jog, I was fain to fill up the corners either with a few shavings or wast paper.'

On December 7, 1669, Christopher Wren and Faith Coghill were married in the Temple Church in London. Of their married life there is absolutely no record; they probably lived chiefly in London, as Wren had a house in Scotland Yard, which went with the office of Surveyor-General.

One of Wren's early works was the rebuilding, on a somewhat larger scale, of the Royal Exchange. 'Charles II. went to the Exchange with his kettle-drums and trumpets to lay the first stone of the new building of the Exchange on the 23rd of October 1667.'[120] Wren's own wish had been, as has been said, to make it the nave or centre of the town, in which case he meant to contrive it after the form of a Roman Forum with double porticoes. Thwarted in this, he restored it as much as possible to what it had previously been, replacing the statue of Sir Thomas Gresham, the only thing in the building uninjured by the Fire. It is curious that this restoration should have begun just a hundred years from the time when Queen Elizabeth was feasted by Sir Thomas Gresham at his house, visited the new building, and caused it to be proclaimed 'the Royal Exchange' by the sound of the trumpet.

The rebuilding was very quickly performed, though at considerable cost.[121] Readers of the _Spectator_[122] will remember Addison's fine description of the Exchange, and 'the grand scene of business which gave him an infinite variety of solid and substantial entertainments.'

[_TEMPLE BAR._]

Next came Temple Bar, which was begun in 1670, and finished in 1672. It was built of Portland stone, and had in its four niches statues of James I. and Anne of Denmark on the west side, Charles I. and Charles II. on the other.[123] Blackened and defiled as it was, and disfigured by the neighbouring houses, it was one of the picturesque, characteristic buildings of London, now disappearing with alarming rapidity, and had seen many a generation pass in triumph or in sorrow under its archway. The thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales's recovery (1872) was the last historical spectacle with which Temple Bar was connected. On that occasion the City was moved to wipe off some of the smoke of two hundred years, and to let Temple Bar be seen somewhat as it must have been when the great architect finished it, as the entrance to a city which, in spite of all drawbacks, might be fairly called his creation.

Wren attempted to prosecute his design for the quay along the northern bank of the Thames, but the ground was being rapidly encroached upon by buildings, some few of which were tolerable, but the greater part unsightly. Various interests;--the immense water traffic, doubled, one can believe, at a time when the city streets were still impassable; the uncertain support given by the King--all combined to defeat his plan. Could he now walk along that glorious achievement the Embankment, what would not his feelings be on seeing the hideous buildings which it has revealed!

The Surveyor-General's office was one which entailed endless work. There was not a street laid down, hardly a house built, in any part of the town, without the surveyor being first consulted;--now about 'a parcel of ground bought by Colonel Panton' (the present Panton Street, S.W.); now about the houses pulled down for the safety of Whitehall during the Fire.--Into every case Wren made careful inquiry, visiting the places himself, and insisting on the buildings being of stone or brick, with proper paving in the streets, and having a due regard to health.

In spite of his care several wretched buildings were put up in places which, as a few surviving names testify, were then fields near the City.

['_MEAN HABITATIONS._']

When Wren found that the owners persisted in erecting such shabby buildings he presented a petition to the King, as follows:--

'To the King's Most Excellent Majesty. The humble petition of Christopher Wren, sheweth. That there are divers buildings of late erected, and many foundations laid, and more contrived in Dog's Fields, Windmill Fields, and the fields adjoining to Soe Hoe,[124] and several other places without the suburbs of London and Westminster; the builders whereof have no grant nor allowance from Your Majesty, and have therefore been prohibited and hindered by your petitioner as much as in him lieth. Yet, notwithstanding, they proceed to erect small and mean habitations which will prove only receptacles for the poorer sort, and the offensive trades, to the annoyance of the better inhabitants, the damage of the parishes already too much burthened with poor, the rendering the government of these parts more unmanageable, the great hindrance of perfecting the city buildings, and others allowed by Your Majesty's broad seal; the choking up the air of Your Majesty's palace and park, and the houses of the nobility; the infecting or total loss of the waters which by many expenseful drains and conduits, have formerly been derived from these fields to Your Majesty's palace of Whitehall and to the mewes; the manifest decay of which waters (upon complaint of your serjeant plumber) the office of Your Majesty's works by frequent views and experiments have found.

'May it, therefore, please Your Majesty to issue a royal proclamation, to put stop to these growing inconveniences and to hinder the buildings which are not already or shall not be licensed by Your Majesty's grant; and effectually to empower your petitioner to restrain the same or otherways to consider of the premises as in Your Majesty's wisdom shall seem most expedient.

'And your Petitioner, &c.'

The petition was considered by the King in council, a proclamation was issued, and full powers were given to the surveyor, backed by commands that he should take effectual care that the proclamation was obeyed. This Wren was very ready to do: with all his gentleness and courtesy he had inherited much of Bishop Wren's firmness, and had no intention of swerving from his point.

The churches of the City began to rise gradually. Pepys says:[125]--

'It is observed, and is true, in the late fire of London, that the fire burned just as many parish churches as there were hours from the beginning to the end of the fire; and next that there were just as many churches left standing as there were taverns left standing in the rest of the City that was not burned, being, I think, thirteen in all of each: which is pretty to observe.'

There has been much dispute as to whether or not Wren repaired S. Sepulchre's Church. Mr. Elmes and others declare that he repaired it in 1671, but Mr. Hoby, one of its churchwardens, who made a careful study of all the parchments and papers belonging to S. Sepulchre's, gives it as his deliberate opinion that--

'The church was not destroyed, but very much injured, by the Fire of London, in 1666. The inhabitants would not wait until Sir C. Wren could attend to them, but repaired their own church, and did it so badly that a long time elapsed before he would grant the certificate necessary to enable them to obtain the money from the commissioners.'[126]

As has been said, such unauthorised building and patching took place pretty frequently, and all that recent researches have brought to light goes to prove that Wren had very little to do with S. Sepulchre's.

[_S. MARY LE BOW._]

S. Mary le Bow, with its proverbial bells,[127] was begun in this year and finished five years later, on a very old foundation. The first S. Mary's was built by William the Conqueror,[128] on marshy land, and stood upon arches of stone, whence the church took the name of S. Maria de Arcubus or le Bow. The 'great bell of Bow' was, in 1469, ordered by the common council to be rung at nine o'clock every evening, and money was left for this object; when the church was burnt in the Great Fire it had twelve very melodious bells hung in its steeple. When Sir Christopher came to rebuild the church he found an older foundation to work upon than even that in 1100. In clearing the ground he came upon a foundation firm enough to build upon, which on examination proved to be the 'walls, with windows and pavement, of a Roman temple.' Upon these walls he built the body of the church, but for its beautiful steeple it was necessary to buy the site of an old house and to advance about forty feet to the line of the street. Here the workmen dug through about eighteen feet of made earth, and then, to Wren's surprise and their own, came to a Roman causeway of rough stone firmly cemented, about four feet thick, underneath which lay the London clay.

With this foundation Wren was content and built up what has ever ranked as one of his finest churches. A good judge of architecture has pronounced that the steeple is 'beyond all doubt the most elegant building of its class erected since the Reformation ... there is a play of light and shade, a variety of outline, and an elegance of detail, which it would be very difficult to match in any other steeple.'[129]

The Arches Court of Canterbury derived its name from this church, where, until the fire, its sittings were held. The court then sat at Exeter House in the Strand, then at Doctors' Commons, and finally in Westminster Hall.

The vane which completes the spire is the City dragon, with a cross on either wing, curiously chased in gilt copper.

The ancient Church of S. Christopher le Stocks in Threadneedle Street suffered severely in the Fire, only the mere shell of the building remaining; it had been made a storehouse for a quantity of papers hastily rescued from some merchant's office and placed in S. Christopher's, where they perished and greatly damaged the church. It had been lately repaired and was endowed with 20_l._ in trust 'for a minister to read divine service there daily at 6 o'clock in the morning for ever. 50_s._ each yearly to the clerk and the sexton for their attendance, and 5_l._ yearly to provide for lights in winter time.' In 1671, Wren finished the repairs of the church, carefully preserving its pinnacled Gothic tower; in 1696 he further adorned the interior. It is curious that the first church which came under Wren's hands should have been one dedicated to his patron saint; curious also that this should have been the first of the churches destroyed by those who should have been their guardians. S. Christopher's was literally sacrificed to Mammon; it was destroyed for the enlargement of the Bank of England in 1781.

[_JOINS THE ARTILLERY COMPANY._]

In 1669 Wren appears in a new character as a member of the Honourable Artillery Company. He was admitted at their festival on August 17, when the company marched in state to a church in Broad Street, probably one of the many temporary ones put up after the Fire, and rewarded Dr. Waterhouse for his sermon with three of the newly-coined guinea pieces. A great banquet in the Clothworkers' Hall in Mincing Lane, where the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many other distinguished persons were present, concluded the festival.[130] It is hardly conceivable that Wren could have found time to be more than an honorary member, but scattered notices here and there of observations made when 'firing off my piece' seem to point to his having attended the drills of the company.

One wishes there was a portrait extant of Sir Christopher in his uniform, wearing the red-plumed high hat which appeared on gala days!

In 1673 Wren resigned the Savilian astronomy professorship, to which the pressure of his architectural work made it impossible he should any longer attend. No doubt it was with great regret that he gave up the post, with all its curious speculations, its boundless possibilities of discovery, and turned himself from the study of the heavens to the dust and turmoil, the endless difficulties and petty quarrels, which thwarted him at every step of his London labours.

In truth, the pressure of business was enormous. Not a moment could be spared while the population of the City had neither churches, places of traffic, nor houses to dwell in; and the architect, whose plan had been marred, had to do the best he could in the midst of every kind of incongruity.

The futile attempts to patch up S. Paul's were in 1673 at last abandoned, and Wren ordered the ground to be cleared that new foundations might be laid. A great mass of material for building had had to be disposed of while the repairs were going on.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Winchester, and Oxford, and the Lord Mayor, were commissioners for the repair of S. Paul's; from them Wren obtained an order that--

'The clerk of the works shall be required to dispose of and sell the stone, chalk, timber and free stone for, and towards, the rebuilding of the parochial churches and to _no other use whatsoever_, as he shall be directed, at merchantable rates to the masons and carpenters that build the said churches by order of Sir Leoline Jenkins (judge of the Admiralty Court), Dr. Sancroft, and Dr. Wren, or any two of them.'

The money thus collected was put aside for the fabric of the Cathedral.

[_USE OF GUNPOWDER._]

Though much of the old material was removed in this manner, and yet not diverted from its proper purpose, the ground was by no means clear. Wren, appointed under the Great Seal, architect of S. Paul's, and one of the commissioners in the new commission for its rebuilding, had to take down by degrees what portions of the old building were still standing.

Warped and cracked as they were, the walls, eighty feet high and five thick, were yet strong enough to make the process of pulling down both difficult and tedious. Wren determined to avail himself of the knowledge he had acquired in the Royal Society's recent experiments in raising weights by means of gunpowder. Houses, it is true, had been blown up in several places during the Fire in order to protect the Tower of London and Whitehall, but the use of gunpowder to raise a definite weight, and throw it a fixed distance and no farther, was a novel experiment. When the labourers reached at last the old central tower, the walls of which were two hundred feet high, they were afraid to go up to the top, as they had done elsewhere, and work with their pickaxes, while those below shovelled away the stones and mortar that they threw down into separate heaps.

This was the time for Wren's experiment.

With great precautions, and the use of eighteen pounds of gunpowder only, he blew up the north-western angle of the tower, so contriving it that, while he raised more than three thousand tons weight, it was not scattered and no damage was done, though the shock made the neighbours imagine it to be an earthquake.

Encouraged by this success, Wren had another mine prepared, but unluckily was obliged to go out of town himself and to leave it in the charge of his next officer.

The man, thinking to improve upon his master, increased the quantity of powder, caused an explosion which shot stones far and wide, and though no lives were lost, terrified the City, all the more that an old superstition declared that the tower of S. Paul's and the City of London would fall together.

Forbidden, owing to the panic thus caused, the use of this modern method, Wren betook himself to ancient times, and devised a gigantic battering ram, with a great spike at one end. Thirty men, fifteen on each side, worked the ram against one place in the wall, Wren watching and encouraging them when, disheartened by a day's work without visible result, they were ready to give up in despair. On the second day the wall fell.

Wren made great use of this machine and 'pleased himself that he had recovered so notable and ancient an engine.'

FOOTNOTES:

[112] 'Lex Ignea, or the School of Righteousness.'--_Life of Sancroft_, vol. ii. p. 355. Doyley.

[113] _Life of Sancroft_, vol. i. p. 141. Doyley.

[114] i.e. by word of mouth.

[115] Probably a misprint for 'Argo-navis,' referring to the frequent repairs of the Argo.

[116] In 1672 a bridge, with a beautiful arch resembling those that cross the canals at Venice, was built over 'the Ditch,' opposite Bridewell Hospital. One or two other bridges were built, and the stream made navigable, but apparently not 'cleansed,' which in time rendered it a nuisance. The bridges were taken down and the stream reduced to a drain in 1765.--_Ann. Reg._, 1765, p. 136.

[117] _Diary_, vol. iv. p. 8.

[118] The Coghills of Glen Barrahane, county Cork, are descended from the elder branch of this family. Captain Coghill, who died with Lieutenant Melville, having carried off the colours from the battle of Isandula, January 1879, was the eldest son of the present head of the family.

[119] Never before printed.

[120] Pepys' _Diary_, vol iv. p. 241.

[121] This building was destroyed by fire 1838, and rebuilt from designs by Mr. Tite 1844.

[122] _Spectator_, vol. i. No. 69.

[123] They were the best work of John Bushnell, an eccentric and half-crazy sculptor, who died in 1701.

[124] 'Soe Hoe' became a favourite residence. In November 1689, Evelyn came up 'with his family to winter at Soho in the Great Square.' Some handsome houses are still standing.

[125] _Diary_, Jan. 31, 1667-8.

[126] _Restoration of the Church of St. Sepulchre, London._ A. Billing.

[127] It is said that in the children's game of 'Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of S. Clement's, &c.' the best peals of bells in London are enumerated. I do not know the date of the game.

[128] _Repertorium_, vol. i. p. 437-440. Newcourt.

[129] _Hist. of Modern Architecture._ Fergusson, pp. 306-307.

[130] _Hist. of the Honourable Artillery Company._ Captain Raikes, vol. i. p. 194.