In the Shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral: The Churchyard That Shaped London by Margaret Willes

Author:Margaret Willes [Willes, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History, Architecture, Buildings, Religious
ISBN: 9780300265675
Google: 8eVfEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-03-22T20:27:20+00:00

11. Sutton Nicholls’s engraving of 1695 showing Wren’s new cathedral under construction, with the east end almost complete, but with screens to keep the curious away from the middle part of the building.

Henry Compton, Bishop of London, preached from the new pulpit that Gibbons had carved. His sermon, appropriate for the occasion, was based on Psalm 122, ‘I was glad when they said unto me: Let us go into the house of the Lord’. He intended that the cathedral should unite the nation, reviving the concept of anniversary services and sermons that had been such a feature of Elizabethan and early Stuart times. But now these were to take place inside the cathedral, rather than at the pulpit of Paul’s Cross in the Churchyard. One such anniversary was the double deliverance on 5 November, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and the arrival, thanks to the Protestant wind, of William of Orange to rid the nation of its Catholic King, James II, in 1688.

John Evelyn wanted also to attend the afternoon service, but ‘the presse of people was so greate that I durst not venture’.23 Instead, he listened to a sermon in St Martin Ludgate, although he did mingle with the crowds in the Churchyard. He was delighted to learn from some of Wren’s workmen that they had been making use of his translation of Fréart’s Parallèle de L’Architecture Antique et de la Moderne. So impressed was he by the new St Paul’s that he resolved to write a preface to a new edition of the book. In his characteristically flowery style, he paid tribute to Wren, declaring:

the great Esteem I have ever had of Your Virtues and Accomplishments, not only in the Art of Building, but thro’ all the learned Cycle of the most Usefull Knowledge and Abstruser Sciences, as well as of the most Polite and Shining. . .; if the whole Art of Building were lost, it might be Recover’d and found again in St Paul’s, the Historical Pillar.

He also declared rather more succinctly in a letter to Wren that ‘the Phoenix is Risen’.24

But in 1697 the cathedral was still lacking its crowning feature. Wren had from the very beginning intended that the new St Paul’s should have a dome at the crossing. Indeed, back in 1666, with John Evelyn’s support, he had argued for a dome for Old St Paul’s. It was going to be this part of the cathedral that departed radically from the Warrant Design of 1675. Instead of the rather modest dome topped by a tall spire, Wren was planning a much more monumental structure to rise in magnificence over London’s skyline. However, such a structure would be too lofty when seen from the inside. His solution was to build a brick cone in support of the lantern that was to be surmounted by a ball and cross. Over this cone he built the outer dome, 60 feet taller.

Wren was a young man in his early thirties when he began to work on St Paul’s.

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