Sir Christopher Wren: Architect & Courtier

foreign well good evening um everybody and it gives me pleasure to give the fourth in a series of lectures uh sponsored by the college celebrating the 300th anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren we've already had Ren on the cosmos we've had Bren on maths we've had renowned medicine and tonight we have Ren on not on architecture but sort of on architecture we have him as a courtier on the 28th of October 1642 at the head of 12 companies of foot soldiers the parliamentarian Colonel John ven entered the gates of Windsor Castle that you see here securing this Mighty Fortress was of course a military objective but equally important for the parliamentarians was its symbolism King Charles the first had made Saint George's Chapel a model of the sort of religion that he wanted for the Church of England ceremonious dignified and richly furnished the chapel the interior of which you see here and the Liturgy performed within it was an Abomination to The Godly parliamentarians who opposed the king and his policies well the dean of Windsor expecting trouble had ordered the Exquisite stained glass window in the Chapel's West End containing images of no fewer than 25 popes to be taken out and hidden as the dean was also ex-officio register of the order of the Garter he hid beneath the floorboards of the college treasury a diamond-studded George which is a badge of the order of the Garter perhaps the most valuable one ever made and then the Priceless registers of the order in three great volumes dating back to Henry VIII's reign were also hidden well Colonel then's arrival at Windsor had not only been anticipated by the dean because five days before his entry the castle had been overrun by a band of local Gentry sympathetic to Parliament fearing a royalist takeover of the Fortress before then could get there and secure it they had taken the law into their own hands demanding the keys of the college treasury from the dean who refused them they brought in giant crowbars to break into the vault inside were beautifully fashioned silver guilt basins candlesticks and flagons which were carried away sent to London and melted down for coin and it was just this sort of disorder that the House of Lords which was still sitting at this point wanted to avoid and it instructed Colonel then to protect the fabric and the ornaments of the college from defacement but then was a political radical and a religious zealot and had absolutely no intention of allowing the popish ornaments of Windsor to remain so the stained glass windows were smashed the woodwork was torn down the organ demolished the lectern fonts and statues torn out and King Edward IV's coat of chain mail and his circuit embroidered with pearls and rubies was carted away and sold well Colonel then was now in charge of the castle and not wanting to use the Royal Apartments which okay so the Royal Apartments are up here in this big block um he decided instead to live in the deanery so there's the chapel that I've been talking about and at the end of the chapel you can see um a little Courtyard and um to move it on there the deanery is this the the building um just below 12 on on the left there this um capacious lodging had been completed in 1352 as a relatively modest residence for the head of Saint George's college but by the early 17th century it had been enlarged and beautified and it was now a substantial house here for the next three years then provided presided over the Windsor Garrison and the dean Christopher Wren was expelled now Sir Christopher Wren as I shall call the architect was born in 1632 and he spent some of his childhood in the Windsor deanery while his father who was also called Christopher confusingly as his son was um was the dean uh he was educated there at Windsor and also at his father's country rectory and during the Civil War for a very short period he was at Westminster School and at Windsor he would have become familiar with the ceremony and the Grandeur of Charles the First's court and he certainly would have met the Prince of Wales his future Patron who was just two years older than him sixth degree was just about as courtly as it could be his father Christopher and his uncle Matthew who you see here from the pages of parentalia the the biography of Sir Christopher written by his son these men were both major ecclesiastical figures at court they were close to the king both in proximity and in ideology Matthew Wren his Uncle Dean of the chapel Royal and Bishop of Ely ended up spending 18 years locked up in the Tower of London for his views his brother Christopher simply lost his post at Windsor and retreated into rural obscurity luckily for Sir Christopher his father was not financially ruined like so many dispossessed royalists his mother was a co-heiress to a great Merchant Fortune then this enabled him to fund his son's education and indeed broke her excellent marriages for three of his daughters all three married fervent royalists as might be expected yet despite this undoubtedly privileged upbringing at court it was not the ceremoniousness of Charles the first court that was to be the greatest influence in his childhood his father Dean Wren was not only a courtier and a Divine he owned a library of scientific books and was fascinated by botany climatology mathematics and of course architecture and he took great care over Christopher Jr's education and in particular encouraged his study of mathematics mathematics was to become the foundation of Sir Christopher's World picture the means by which the universe and all its moving Parts could be explained for him the world was a machine and it was possible using the tools of geometry and arithmetic to unravel its workings and this was immensely exciting old scientific explanations derived essentially from Greek and Roman philosophers had little interest for Ren and he very rarely if ever read their disputations from an early age turning his inventive mind to solving practical problems with new ideas and he fell into the two great centers of new scientific thought a group of brilliant men at wadham College Oxford and of course our own Gresham College and here they talked they argued they experimented and they calculated and Sir Christopher amongst the most brilliant of all of them first he became Gresham professor of astronomy age 25 and then before he was 30 a civilian professor of astronomy at Oxford now we have to remember that these extraordinary achievements for such a young man took place during the English Republic and at the restoration out of wadham and the Gresham college group came the Royal Society the oldest scientific Academy in continuous existence and through that came Christopher wren's introduction to King Charles II now King Charles used the second I should say we have to get used to the fact that there's a third King Charles used to be characterized as the merry Monarch a man wholly given to pleasure and debauchery but this really couldn't be further from the truth we now know that he shared the sense of excitement and possibilities of the new science and had a huge curiosity for astronomy chemistry physics and geometry at Whitehall adjacent to his most private quarters was an extensive laboratory where he went to conduct his own experiments so when Sir Christopher re-emerged in Charles II's life not as a ten-year-old son of a courtier but as a mathematical genius he was attracted to him immediately unquestionably because of his family but more importantly because of his brains but let's not overdo the intellectual King bit because Charles as we know loved a joke love good company loved a drink loved a laugh and a good night out and while it would have been possible to have captured the king's attention through scientific achievement alone it would not have been possible for Sir Christopher to win the king's trust friendship and high honors unless he had been extremely good company Not only was late 17th century government personal directed by the Monarch himself but to be the king's architect was to be admitted into the innermost Royal Circle not only to know the workings of the state rooms but to understand the secrets of the bed chamber and as I shall go on to explain Ren was extremely good company in fact he was the perfect courtier when in 1669 Christopher Wren became the head of the office of works the Royal architecture Department he inherited command of an organization nearly 300 years old the office of Works had in fact been established by King Richard II in 1379 not only to repair and maintain the Royal building stock but to project manage new buildings surveyor of the king's Works was a member of the king's household and although he theoretically reported to the Lord Chamberlain in practice it was to the Lord Treasurer who Ren looked in 1662 the surveyor required treasury authorization for anything more than routine maintenance and even this was capped at 40 pounds a year for the larger palaces and 20 pounds a year for the smaller ones and given the fact that almost every year Ren spent considerably more than that he took his orders from the treasurer in fact the office of work should really be categorized as a separate Department of State because its money came direct from the exchequer rather than being wired through the household and the Lord Chamberlain and if you look at it in this light Sir Christopher Wren was essentially one of the great Ministers of State on a par rather than answering to the Lord Chamberlain in a period when demonic was the head of the Executive Whitehall the principal Palace of the British Monarchy was not only the king's main residence but it was the center of national Administration there's no real modern equivalent that satisfactorily characterizes restoration Whitehall huge confusing overpopulated in equal measure squalid and magnificent it was both residents and an office block housing courtiers and bureaucrats and it was the center of the world for anybody who was anybody on assuming his senior Post in 1669 Whitehall became the center of Ren's life and the lodgings he was assigned there became the engine room of his career you see as well as the royal family Whitehall was home to an army of over 800 domestic staff and perhaps 300 others who could broadly be characterized as being courtiers some of these like Sir Christopher Wren were granted lodgings because of their household political or administrative appointments but for the majority of courtiers angling for lodgings was a feature of life everyone wanted spacious lodgings as close as possible to the king and very few got them though the palace in the 1670s had around 1 500 rooms there was always Cut Throat competition for even the smallest seller or attic because most people held their lodgings by Royal warrant for Life there were long waits for the best lodgings even for important people and policing the huge number of residents was complicated by the fact that some parts of a lodging's fabric were regarded as the responsibility of the office of works while other elements could be altered with permission and at their expense by the occupants in reality it was very difficult to persuade the office of Works to pay for doing Works in a private individual's quarters and so financial responsibility normally fell to the occupant for this reason the lodgings of the most important courtiers were essentially privately funded residences the fact that lodgings were built at their occupant's expense gave them considerable rights and as the rain Advanced lodgings were increasingly held by courtiers under a lease rather than by a warrant from the monarch of works and Sir Christopher's lodgings were situated in Scotland Yard this was the area of land that lay between the northern part of Whitehall now I hope you can see this um so just above where it says the river is the pretty Garden it says Garden stairs above that are the main lodgings the main Royal lodgings you then see pretty stairs Beyond there you can see the the kitchens then it says white or bridge and there are a whole lot of sort of raggedy bits and a bit saying Scotland do you see that there so that's Scotland Yard lying between the North Boundary of Whitehall and Charing Cross and the great houses of the aristocrats um which were built along the Strand um we can get a much better sense of this area if we look at the very well-known copper plate map and once again you can see the privy Garden can you see where it says pretty bridge that is the residential part for the Monarch but above that you can see um some yards and right at the Top Hand left hand corner uh a conglomeration of buildings which um in the Elizabethan period were already being occupied by the office of Works in that part of Scotland Yard well in the first year of King James the first Reign um Simon basil who was then controller of Works under Queen Elizabeth built a house in the northernmost section of Scotland Yard it wasn't particularly big it had a hall and a parlor that's a sort of ground floor reception room and a kitchen and it had three rooms above it and a backyard but after basil became surveyor of Works in 1606 he was granted a 60-year lease on his house and on the land around it so he decided to uh build some houses on the land which he rented for his own profit well after he died in September 15 uh his widow leased this house to his successor Inigo Jones and at the start of the Civil War Inigo Jones was still living in a house which if the pointer worked which it does oh oh oh how exciting oh that is very exciting I can show you exactly where Inigo Jones lived uh he lived just here um and um that is where he lived when he lost his positions under the um under the Commonwealth Crown um was restored Inigo Jones's house had passed into private hands and it wasn't available for the um surveyor of works the surveyor of Works in 1660 was a man called Sir John Denham he was a loyal royalist who'd been at Charles the first side when he was in prison at Hampton Court when he was locked up on the Isle of Wight and then he'd gone into Exile and been at the court of Henrietta Maria in France with most of his lands sequestered by 1648 he was in the Entourage of Prince Charles at the Hague where he acted as a messenger between the Prince of Wales um and his mother who was in Paris with no money to reward denim Services the king promised him that on the restoration he would succeed Inigo Jones as a surveyor of works at the time it probably seemed like a pretty Hollow promise but in 1660 amazingly for Charles II he kept his word the restored office of Works was established on exactly the same basis as it had been before the Civil War denim at its head was leased a plot of land in Scotland Yard on which he could build and uh just like Simon basil he built a row a Terrace of houses in fact that he let out for his own income and a house for himself and it was this house built for Sir John Denham that became the surveyors residence and which Sir Christopher Wren inherited as His official Whitehall lodgings in 1669. now very luckily one of the very first tasks assigned to Christopher Wren as surveyor of the king's Works was making an accurate survey of Whitehall Palace in preparation for the king's great plan to knock everything down and rebuild it this survey completed in 1670 shows in detail the whole of Scotland Yard now I'm going to use the magic pointer again um and you can see there there um Scotland Yard it's actually divided into two parts down by the river here there was Scotland dock where all the building materials for the Royal Works were unloaded on barges there were a series of warehouses and sheds here and all the way up here in which Timber glass lead stone bricks were all kept and on this this run of buildings up here were the masters of the works so you had the master Carpenter the Master Mason the king's Glacier the King's Locksmith the king's painter they all had little houses there which also doubled as their offices and at the top here you can see this building which is the Terrace of houses built by Sir John Denham which didn't pass to Ren and remained the possession of a denim's widow but crucially here the house which was built by denim for himself as survey of the works and is the house that Sir Christopher Wren moved into when he got the big job now this house was Sir Christopher wren's main residence between 1669 and his loss of office in 1718 a period of 50 years he had no other home no City Mansion no country seat under William and Mary he was given um an official Residence at Hampton Court because he was doing so much work there and he was given another uh almost really a sort of cottage at Kensington but Ren lived the whole of his architectural career in Whitehall Palace in this house just a stone's throw from the Royal Apartments now after sir Christopher's death this house in Scotland Yard was found to be in extremely poor condition and it was surveyed in order to decide whether to rebuild it or to refurbish it and the plan survives and I believe this has never been identified before what you are looking at is the house in which Sir Christopher Wren lived for 50 years and you will see that the walls are covered three colors you can ignore the um the the yellow because that represents another building to the uh to one side um the gray is are the offices of the office of works so that is where the clerks um his assistants uh had their offices every day that's where they work their working place they came in off at Scotland Yard here they came in up a staircase there um into the upper rooms and there were three rooms uh three offices uh downstairs and you can see that this color is a different color because that means that it was the responsibility of the office of Works to maintain those rooms the rest of it the gray bit is Sir Christopher wren's private residence which he was responsible for maintaining um himself and on the ground floor uh was his see if I can get this here here's Hall and his kitchen uh he had a lovely Garden here at the top oh it switches off in a minute so you can see um there's a little yard here had Cellars um and um various other uh sort of ancillary buildings there was a stair that led up to the first floor and although we don't have a plan of the first floor we do have the building accounts and we know that he had a great dining room a smaller private dining room a drawing room a dressing room and a bedroom and we know that his bedroom had been set up with a fashionable bed Alcove by Sir John Denham and in this the surveyors bed was placed there was a floor above for his servants which probably also contained the nursery for his children as I've shown you there was sellers full of wine two yards and a long Walled Garden which in 1669 he um set up with a garden seat surmounted with a pediment perhaps slightly further away from the Royal Apartments than some courtier lodgings Ren's house was in fact amongst the largest and best appointed of all the houses allocated to any of the senior courtiers and here in this house he lived happily with his first wife faith and it was in that house that she died of smallpox in 1675. two children were born to her including Christopher the younger who survived his father and in 1677 Ren married his second wife James Jane Fitzwilliam in the chapel Royal at Whitehall she was already pregnant which shows that Ren was not without an active libido after giving birth to a daughter she also died in 1680 and so in the 1680s we have to imagine this house in Scotland Yard with three young children running around in it and the fascinating thing is that we know from the building accounts that at first floor level there was an interconnecting door from Ren's drawing room into the office of works and I think we have to imagine these three small children opening the door peeping in seeing the clerks there um enrolling the accounts and drawing their plans Ren's daughter never married and she lived at home in this house with her father and his young younger son William who was mentally handicapped also lived at home and the only one of his children who moved out was Christopher Jr who moved to a house in St James's that his father had bought for him so this is the environment in which Ren lived for 50 years hug a Mugger with his family in the center of Whitehall a stone's throw away from the King now his official remuneration as surveyor was 382 pounds five Shillings and eight Pence a year and his salary was actually made up of three allowances the first one was paid by the exchequer and it was a daily fee of two Shillings and uh a day plus Sixpence which was an allowance to employ a clerk and that was a total of 45 pounds 12 Shillings and six months a year the second part of his salary was a sort of historical Legacy because the surveyor used to be one of the household officers who used to wear a uniform and when the uniforms were abolished or the Livery was abolished the fee for buying the outfit was still paid to the office holder and ren got 12 pounds 13 Shillings and four points a year in lieu of his uniform the third stream of income which was actually issued by the paymaster of the office of Works was a big bundle of allowances and compensations and that actually made up the bulk of his salary now 380 pounds a year was not enough to sustain Ren as a gentleman and it was way beneath the salaries and allowances of the more senior household officials just to give you an example the master of the robes who looked after the king's personal wardrobe was paid 500 pounds a year and required no technical knowledge and very little special skill and in fact in later life Ren was to remark to his son Christopher that Charles II had done him a big disservice enticing him into architecture and if he'd stuck to Medicine he would have become a rich man well this was perhaps a bit disingenuous because in addition to his salary from the office of Works Ren received fees for his work rebuilding the churches in the city of London which had been destroyed by the great fire so that was a hundred pounds a year and of course in addition were the fees paid to him as the architect for Saint Paul's Cathedral another 200 pounds a year and later on he was also paid for his work for the Royal Hospital in Greenwich several private commissions at Cambridge University and some work for individual courtiers and so actually his total earnings in the 1690s cannot have been much less than 800 pounds a year in fact so confident was he of his financial position by that stage that he magnanimously waived his fee for the design of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea so in reality Ren was able to cut quite a dash at court he maintained a carriage with liverid Coachmen and a stable full of horses in Scotland Yard he had several servants including a footman who was normally in attendance with him he dressed in the Fashions of the day here's the lovely picture in the National Portrait Gallery which you'll be able to see next week when the gallery reopens he entertained liberally and he furnished his house fashionably he commissioned portraits of his wife he bought Furniture kept up with interior design fashions when he moved in to his house in 1670 the sergeant painter redecorated more or less the whole house and for his second marriage he ordered the redecoration of his bed chamber the old threes and what was described in the accounts as bed mold of 1661 was taken down and 50 foot of new bed mold was erected in its stead the door to the dressing room next door was moved and in a room nearby was petitioned in 1676 a custom made drawing table was installed in his house not in the office next door but in his private quarters and a couple of years later his private closet was enlarged the house we know was decorated with a large number of prints including many prints of his own buildings but also Prince of paintings Interiors classical busts and statues one room perhaps his closet we don't know contained bookshelves containing some 600 volumes larger cabinets perhaps in the same room contained some 900 drawings and there was a cabinet with antique gems and medals so let's be very clear Ren lived in style and luxury with his family at court in a large house attached to his office and I'm showing you this view again which is the view by Kip taken after the catastrophic fire at Whitehall that burnt this section down but this is Ren's house up here this whole almost everything in the circle there that is where he's living and the building that I have been describing to you and this was how all the great office holders at court lived office and home were won just like 10 Downing Street or the White House in Washington today so if this is the case uh what do we actually know about his interactions with the court and indeed the king well there are two sources of information that can help us get right into the daily life of this extremely busy and fashionable man first is the Diary of Robert Hook brilliant scientists and natural philosopher and the curator of experiments for the Royal Society his interest moved into surveying and architecture and he had an intimate association with Ren for some 50 years from 1672 to 1680 and then from 1688 to 93 he kept a notebook recording his daily movements his thoughts his Impressions and this captures Ren's life in great detail Hook was with Ren several times a week and just going through the diary I can tell you he met him 75 times in 1674 70 times in 1675 and 80 times in 1676. now it's quite a read this diary I have to tell you if none of you've come across it before it's quite odd because Hook was quite odd I think he was obsessed with his poor health and his bodily functions on the 1st of August 1675 I'll just give you an example he writes of taking volatile Spirit of wormwood which made me very sick and Disturbed me all the night and purged me in the morning drank small beer and spirit of Sal almoniac I purged five or six times very easily on Sunday morning I hope this will dissolve some of that vicious slime that hath so tormented me in my stomach and guts and it goes on like this sort of every every day but of course crucially he lived in Gresham College that's where he lived and I hope that his ill health wasn't a result of that um and of course in those happy far off days uh professors were given a residence in the city of London and he regularly attended lectures including one lecture on Thursday June the 17th 1680 when he recorded in his diary attended morning lecture none came not one luckily that hasn't been my experience but there's always that risk nevertheless we hear of hook turning up at rem's house in Scotland Yard and dining with him dining with other major Court figures with politicians with foreign dignitaries and sometimes with other people from the office of Works presumably the great dining room that we read about was for larger parties and the many accounts that hook gives of intimate dinners took place in the small dining room upstairs lady Ren was there sometimes and I get the impression that uh perhaps not as as often as she might have liked because it was quite a sort of boys club hook meets Ren in coffee houses and taverns and at Gresham College of course as well as at Council meetings of the Royal Society and on numerous building sites in the city churches and Saint Paul's Cathedral all the time that is the magnetic draw of Whitehall where their shared professional responsibilities for the city churches and Saint Paul's Cathedral required them to audit accounts and approve payments to contractors in uh Ren's lodgings marvelous source of information for Ren's life comprising many hundreds of entries recording his movements who he saw what he was working on what he liked to eat and what he liked to drink the other key source is much more empirical the surveyor was entitled to claim travel and subsistence if he left London traveling around the city was covered by an allowance of four Shillings a day in his annual remuneration but when he left London he was able to claim an additional four Shillings and Temperance a day this was claimed each month in arrears and all these travel claims survive and they tell us not where he was going but the fact that he was going and this allows us to do some clever stuff triangulating the diary and the expenses you can begin to paint an interesting picture and I'll give you an example so as usual throughout June and July 1679 hook and ren were meeting at least once a week often Two Three or even four times but suddenly after meeting Ren in a City Coffee House on the 1st of August hook doesn't see him again until the 30th of August at Saint Paul's Cathedral an unnaturally long gap of a whole month if we turn to the office of Works Rising charges for August we see that after many months of inactivity and no claims for expenses at all he charges for two days riding expenses most likely one for the way out and one for the way back but how do we work out where he went well in 1679 the king's rebuilding of the royal lodgings at Windsor Castle was completed and the whole Court decamped from Whitehall to Windsor for four weeks of fun frolics Bulls hunting card playing plays fasting and music feasting not fasting feasting and music everyone was there including it seems Christopher Wren this wasn't a professional trip you may had been the architect for the castle not Ren and though I suppose it is possible that architecture was discussed this month was about being a courtier not about being an architect October 1676 is another good example that month Ren clocked up 13 days charges when for the previous three months there was nothing and the following four months he didn't make a claim either the explanation is that on the 4th of October the king the queen and the Duke of York moved with the court to Newmarket and ren clearly followed them hooks diary explains that he dined with Ren on October the 5th the day after the court left but didn't see him again until Ren's birthday dinner on the 20th of October an absence of over two weeks in September 1682 after weeks of claiming no travel the court removed to Winchester and ren clocked up six days riding charges in 1674 when Charles moved the court to Windsor again Ren incurred two days riding charges in each July and August and hook notes in his diary that Ren was at court he came back to London part way through to attend to business but returned to Windsor hook noting on July the 18th that he was finally back in Whitehall I could go on but I'm not going to because this is more than enough to demonstrate that when the court left Whitehall for Windsor New Market or laterally Winchester Ren was hot on its heels we should not imagine that Ren was busy discussing building works during these peregrinations of the Court he was a courtier and he threw himself into whatever entertainments were on offer diarist John Evelyn spent the night at Newmarket in October 1671 and you can see on the screen here the surviving Pavilion of Newmarket Palace built by Charles II it's a lovely Museum now well worth visiting but in October 1671 John Evelyn found and I quote the Jolly blades racing dancing feasting and reveling more resembling a luxurious and abandoned route than a Christian Court and racing really was not the only entertainment at Newmarket the tennis court a Bowling Green the most important of all there was a cockpit and sometimes while the court was in Residence there were cockfit cockfights twice a day and in the evenings there were plays so this is the environment in which Ren spent a considerable amount of his time now unfortunately eyewitness accounts of Ren's more formal interactions with Charles II are much harder to find we can read in the financial accounts of the office of works that he was personally instructed by the King on every major project and many of the minor works that he undertook but we do have a couple of descriptions in early 1683 the lawyer and Architectural connoisseur Roger North was at a meeting of the treasury in the presence of the king Ren had been summoned and the subject was the financing of the new Palace at Winchester the king asked Ren how long it would take to build it and he told his majesty it would take two years but Charles thought that this was too long and inquired whether it could be built in one year yes Wren replied but only with great confusion charge and inconvenience notwithstanding this warning Charles made the decision to proceed and on the 9th of February the treasury authorized expenditure of 36 000 pounds a rare glimpse of that conversation between King and architect making a decision other references show that the relationship between the two men was not always easy in some way we don't know how it's recorded in Hook's diary Ren briefly fell out with the king in October 1674 and famously after the great model for Saint Paul's Cathedral wren's you know greatest desire to build this particular scheme after it was rejected by the Royal commission the king told Ren and ordered Ren to start again on a new design and he openly burst into tears in the king's presence these occasions I suggest are signs of the intimacy that Charles II and ren shared and the access that that Ren had to the king and ren was very jealous of this position his access on matters scientific and Architectural and this is revealed in an extremely interesting exchange with Robert Hook one of Hook's most intense areas of inventiveness was in clock making and one of his inventions a magnetic clock was shown to the King by Richard Busby a royal ecclesiastical favorite Charles II Intrigue intrigued wanted to meet hook and he was summoned to court where one of the Grooms of the bed chamber Silas Titus presented hook to the king who then quite uh extraordinarily invited hook into his closet for an intimate examination of a double pendulum C clock which hook had brought with him in a box leaving the king hook full of excitement at his Royal interview went straight to Scotland Yard to show the clock to Ren and tell him all about his uh his interview Ren was Stone Cold to his friend telling him that he should never have a room at Whitehall and that if he wanted to meet the king in future he should do it in Saint James's Park Ren a hook noted in his diary seemed very jealous of him in fact Ren was so cross that hook a socially inferior person and his Junior in every way had gained access to the king that he then withheld his wages despite having money about his person it took three weeks for Ren's irritation to Abate and even then hook had to hang around for hours until Ren signed off his bill well the right order of things was re-established in March 1678 when Hook was having trouble with his lately deceased brother's will at Ren who had this wonderful free access to the King was asked to raise it with the Monarch and this was done much to the satisfaction of Hook uh in 1680 hook expressed an interest in seeing the Royal Library at Whitehall the King was away from the palace and ren used his Pass Key to take hook into Whitehall and show him the room so why is all this important well I think it's a very different perspective on a man who's often portrayed as austere intellectual and a bit of a workaholic it's uh the the records I think show how much he was plugged into fashionable life following and making fashion it demonstrates the way architecture at Charles II's Court was a joint Enterprise between the Monarch and Ren and that um first and foremost Ren to be successful had to be a courtier and that was the basis of everything so this year as we try and get closer to this man who died 300 years ago we begin to understand a little bit more about him blessed with a pedigree that gave him a deep understanding of the Court the king its ceremonies and behavior he shared with Charles II the fascination with science and experimentation and was spotted by him as a vehicle to achieve his architectural Ambitions and so he moved to court and that was where he spent his life unlike so many awkward Geniuses he was engaging amusing a great conversationalist able to navigate the treacherous Rapids of Court life tonight ladies and gentlemen I hope I've introduced you to the Flesh and Blood of this great man no lonely genius but a cog in the great machine of State oiled with his own charm and genius thank you [Applause] thank you very much Simon um I rather hope you've all got your traveling expenses hidden away in some secret account it was going to be much safer that way I suspect um one of the things that is hidden away in your talk somehow is the sort of mechanics of his daily life of how someone was able to contribute to the cosmos to medicine to architecture whilst partying as far as I could see traveling from one place to another what was the infrastructure in which he lived well I think the as I say the absolute key to it was this house and what you read in Hook's diary and he dined with Ren there the whole time uh are the other guests around the table and they are the leading scientists uh the the leading artists and Architects um you know foreign visitors ambassadors other court officials I mean this is where it all goes on round the dining table in in Scotland Yard and uh afterwards he would go out he'd come to the city look at a couple of City churches uh he'd then go to one coffee house which was meet with a whole lot more people in another coffee house um some days he'd go to three or four coffee houses one after the other um meeting people all of whom are listed in in the diary and you could have a very uh draw a very interesting sort of spidery diagram showing this extraordinary web of connections which all went back to this Center of activities in Whitehall because um that is where he went to sign sign audit the accounts to supervise the draftsman in his drawing office and to do a very big administrative job he's not only doing the administration for all the Royal palaces he's doing it for the city churches and for Saint Paul's Cathedral and for the Greenwich Hospital of the Chelsea hospital and for a library in Cambridge it's a it's a huge amount of work and he must have been a really extraordinary man to fit it all in thank you for a really fascinating lecture Simon I wonder if you could say something about Ren's travels on the continent particularly in France yeah um well he well he certainly he went once to the continent now there's a very very interesting debate about whether he went during the Commonwealth and I'm not going to get into that now but I am giving a lecture later on this year after some deep delving into the into some quite interesting records about whether he went another time but the key time he goes um is just before he becomes um severe of The Works um and I'm pretty certain that he was more or less sent to France by uh Charles II who was determined to rebuild Whitehall Palace um he goes with the chief of introductions from the then uh surveyor Sir John Denham and it's a fact-finding mission he's just about the only uh person who's active in the architectural sphere who didn't spend most of the uh of the Republican period on the continent and so he was really at a disadvantage I'm a huge disadvantage and I think he recognized is that Charles will second recognized that and he went on this extraordinary architectural tour and came back with a you know with Crepes full of books and prints and drawings um and he um did his best to meet all the most famous Architects and people who were working in France and so it was it was definitely a formative moment for him um and in fact um hook does give the impression that he he came back with the French Valley who then lived with him in this house for some years um dying in the um in the late 1680s what I'd like to know is what his relationship was like with Cromwell before John II well as I said um his his sort of meteoric rise and his initial Fame all took place during the Republic and um many of those people who he had closest connections with including his key patrons were very uh very knitted in with the cromwellian court and in fact one of his um inventions apparently Cromwell himself wanted to wanted to see so um it is in a way is extraordinary that he was became so successful and and in his Circle famous during that period given his background I mean as you know he really could not have the name Ren was just like a big you know Bullseye Target which he'd shoot at because you know you couldn't be anything other than a die-hard royalist and of course um when Charles II returned he was Ren was able to present back to the king the registers of the order of the Garter on bended knee there you are your majesty they were saved by my family so um you know that his royalist credentials uh didn't hold him back and I think his his Brilliance just carried him through wouldn't it be nice if that happened yeah I was rather hoping we could have somewhere nice to get together as professors at Gresham college but yes many centuries ago speaking of Brilliance um I think your last scheduled lecture for impression College very sadly I'm hoping we can persuade you back in the future but you've been doing it since 2009 to discover it when I looked back as professor of the built environment um all the lectures have been erudite entertaining enthusiastic educational wonderful and delivered with great charm and elegance and we'll miss you doing that very much indeed and as I say I hope to entice you back again and perhaps with a little bribery oh thank you very much so ladies and Gentlemen please join me in thanking thank you thanks [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 3,416

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, Christopher Wren, architecture, courtier, windsor castle, Order of the Garter, Parentalia, Charles II, Scotland Yard

Id: -8roQiy1Gak

Length: 58min 55sec (3535 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023