and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1658, and at the early age of twenty-five he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London.Īlthough Wren specialized in astronomy until he was well over thirty - and, indeed, his interest in it was life-long - his researches and his inventions, while he divided his time between Oxford and London, were as wide as life itself. Wren’s academic career was brilliant - he took his M.A. As Wren’s grandson put it in the family biography (called Parentalia), Wren quickly won ‘the esteem of the most celebrated Virtuosi and Mathematicians of the Time’. At Wadhain, Wren found a warden (Dr Wilkins) and, elsewhere in Oxford, a group of distinguished scholars who even during the Civil Wars had formed what the young physicist Robert Boyle called an ‘invisible college’ of brains, devoted to the new ‘experimental philosophy’ of Francis Bacon. The young Christopher was now able to divide his time between the excellent coaching of Dr Holder, in Oxfordshire, and the private tuition of a distinguished surgeon and mathematician, Dr Charles Scarburgh, in London.Īt the age of seventeen, Wren became a gentleman-commoner at Wadham College, Oxford, in that fateful year of 1649 which in January had seen the public execution of King Charles I. When the Civil War began, the Roundheads drove the Wren family from the shelter of Windsor, first to Bristol and later to the rectory of a son-in-law, Dr Holder, at Bletchington near Bicester. Detailed evidence for these early years is scarce but, at the age of thirteen, Christopher Wren undoubtedly displayed exceptional scholarship and a precocious skill in astronomy. As a child, Christopher was somewhat delicate and, as a result, his early education was entrusted to a private tutor it was not until the age of nine that he began formal schooling under that notorious disciplinarian and ardent royalist, Dr Busby of Westminster School. Although, therefore, the young Christopher was nurtured in Wiltshire, he spent much of his boyhood in the shelter of the deanery at Windsor, where the royal children were among his playmates. He had followed his brother as Dean of Windsor and chaplain to the Order of the Garter, and, as a staunch royalist, he had only precariously escaped his brother’s unpleasant fate. His father - also a Christopher - was a fine scholar and rector of a Wiltshire village church where his ingenious plaster work and king-posted roofing can still be seen. An uncle, Matthew Wren, was the Bishop of Ely, who, as a loyal friend and supporter of Archbishop Laud, was condemned by the Puritans to eighteen years imprisonment in the Tower.

He was born in 1632 of the gentry - the very royalist gentry - and his near relatives were distinguished alumni of the High Church of England. What manner of man was Wren, what was his background and what was his life’s work? This is, therefore, an appropriate moment to reassess the life and work of the man whose elegant variety of invention still holds pride of place amid so much undistinguished anonymity. Today, new pedestrian precincts girdle a renovated St Paul’s there is a new London Bridge under construction the complex of new urban tower blocks approaches completion and at last most of the Wren architecture that survived the second Great Fire of London is ably and respectfully restored. It is even very different from what it was in the late forties when the undecorated boredom of modern 'vertical features’ in ferro-concrete first began to challenge Wren’s cathedral and his surviving City churches. The skyline of the city of London in 1973 is very different from what it was when, exactly two hundred and fifty years ago, the body of Sir Christopher Wren was carried to its simple tomb beneath the dome of St Paul’s.

Christopher wren