A History of Britain, Volume 2 (40 page)

The king liked Wren's first plan enough to allow his new Surveyor-General (who at last felt secure enough to resign his chair of astronomy at Oxford) to go ahead with the enormous project of demolition that had to precede any construction. Since the ruined and burnt-out walls of old St Paul's had, paradoxically, been strengthened by all the molten lead that had poured down them from the roof, the demolition took on the aspect of a military siege. An army of labourers, miners and excavators was drafted to the site, with Wren himself and his assistants directing the campaign from their custom-built office opposite the north side of the churchyard. While the work was under way Wren and his friends from the Royal Society, Evelyn and Hooke, took advantage of the excavations, dug deep enough to assure the architect that he was not imposing his monumental structure on sand, to see what remains of previous antiquity might surface. From the account given by his son in his biographical
Parentalia
, the finds were more extraordinary than anything that could have been anticipated, and they made a profound, even emotional impression on the always historically minded Christopher. The story of a labourer bringing
Wren a stone to mark some spot in the works, and discovering that it bore the prophetic lapidary inscription
Resurgam
(‘I will arise') is well known. But this is the least of it. For as the excavators dug they travelled back down through London's history, through the medieval and Norman foundations, discovering an ancient burial site. Saxon pins and jewellery were uncovered and then, deeper down, the remains of a Roman mortuary: urns that had contained the ashes of the dead, fragments of vividly decorated pottery. Wren and his friends and colleagues busied themselves in their shirtsleeves in the trenches of the dig, sorting, dating, arranging and classifying. Even deeper still they found, to their amazement, seashells buried in the sandy rock, so that in his mind's eye the architect saw the archaic geology of the place, Ludgate Hill, no hill at all but a low strand washed by the ocean and the primitive Thames a ‘sinus of the sea'.

With antiquity made immediate, and Roman London, especially, staring him in the face, Wren's architectural imagination suddenly took wing. His second design, again translated by the Clears into an exquisite model 18 feet long, spoke of a pure revelation, an act of inspired courage that produced from Wren the most beautiful building never to be built in Britain.

Wren's design of 1673–4 confronted the awkwardness of attaching a domed crossing and choir to a traditional nave (like setting a new head on an old body) by doing away with the nave altogether, in fact, by creating the kind of church that had never been seen in Britain before. Instead of a long corridor opening up at the crossing into a tall lantern (like his uncle's church at Ely), Wren envisioned a vast scooped-out central basilica, full of light and air and sound: a Greek cross, three of the arms being equilateral, the fourth slightly elongated to provide an entrance vestibule. The vestibule, fronted by a flight of noble steps, would itself be surmounted by a smaller rotunda, serving as a kind of architectural overture to the immense cupola that lay beyond. The exterior walls of the Greek cross would be convex, setting up an exhilarating counterpoint with the concave circularity of the drum on which the great dome rested.

Wren had evidently not forgotten Bernini. But to the stunned
cognoscenti
who examined the model in the Convocation House, this was evidently just the problem. They had asked for a new St Paul's. And what Wren had given them was a new St Peter's. Had he fronted it with a set of enfolding colonnaded
braccia,
as in Bernini's new piazza, he could not possibly have done anything more aggressively Roman. The immediate and overpowering sense that they had been given something disturbingly alien, something that, as was pointed out, looked nothing like any known English cathedral, was especially ironic since Wren prided himself on
having created an expressly Protestant house of worship. By abolishing a conventional nave-and-choir design and the screen barriers that separated them, he thought to bring the congregation closer to the essential experience of Anglican-Protestant worship, which, after all, was the sermon. His, he was convinced, was a church built for the auditory reception of Christ's word, not for the glimpsed exposure of visual mystery down a darkened tunnel, as in Catholic sacred spectacle. He may even (with some justification) have felt that, just as the teachers of the Reformation justified their emphasis on word over image from what they took to be the aural evangelism of the early Christian fathers, so he was returning to those days of conversion when the great pagan temples had been made over into basilicas for the true faith.

At the outset it was not clear that the king was among those who were shocked into opposition. But the Chapter, in particular the vocal and formidable Dr Edward Stillingfleet, was appalled and confounded by the Great Model. However impeccably Protestant Wren might have thought it, they could not help but read it as a Catholic structure, something that belonged to the Rome of Pope Alexander VII rather than to the Anglican capital of King Charles II. The Chapter was anxious not to repeat the mistakes of the Laudian campaign for sacred beautification, which had been attacked as popery by the back door. They insisted on a design that reverted to the traditional Latin cross with its long nave and separated choir, not least because they knew that the whole cathedral was very seldom used, and that, other than on holy days, they needed only the smaller space of the choir for daily services. Before long these many arguments began to make a decisive impression on the king. Around 1672 his brother James had been received back into the Roman Church, and Charles himself, as Pepys later discovered, had been privately and secretly moving in that direction himself. That only increased the necessity of
not
building something that looked to most people like the temple of the Pope.

Crestfallen at the reception of the Great Model, Wren mounted a campaign to try to have the king overrule the objections of the Cathedral Chapter. But persuade, argue, even implore as Wren tried, Charles had made up his mind. While no objection was raised to some sort of domed crossing, Wren was ordered to meet the Chapter's complaints by reverting to a traditional Latin cross. Almost as if in a sulky demonstration of the impossibility of squaring (or rectangularizing) the circle, that first ‘Warrant' design was the most absurdly incongruous of all Wren's plans, obediently attaching a long nave to a bizarre double-tiered dome consisting of a Bramante-like squat circular base with a peculiar Michelangelesque onion dome on top: an Anglican pagoda. After the inevitable failure
of this monstrosity, it would take Wren years to come up with a more acceptable compromise, largely by surreptitiously ignoring some of the restraints and reverting to his original vision of 1663, in which there would be two grandiose statements on the cathedral – the mighty dome at the east end and a great portico at the west, the two connected by a spacious nave.

That is the cathedral as it stands today, more or less. But it's impossible to sit in the nave, with its echoes bouncing off the columns, and not dream of Wren's banished basilica, where perfect sound would have been bathed in limpid pools of light. Although he carried on with his work at St Paul's, Wren was devastated by the rejection. It was said that, as he heard the king's final decision, tears stood in his eyes. And although he was supposed to have been consoled by the grant of his knighthood, Wren's cup of sorrow overflowed during 1674. He was defeated in an attempt to win election to the House of Commons for Oxford and endured the death of first a child, and then of his wife, in 1675. His ambition to convert London into a new Rome had been a victim of terrible timing. For between the inception of the idea and Wren's attempt to persuade the earthly powers of its ‘beauty and convenience', something ugly had happened to English politics. That something was the return of the prime patriotic neurosis: anti-Catholicism.

It had never really gone away, of course. Between the Gunpowder and the Popish plots the equation of Catholicism with ‘enslavement' to the demonic power of tyrannical, Jesuitical Rome shrank to the margins of the great events of the mid-century wars and revolution. And understandably so, since by the Restoration probably not much more than 1 per cent of the population of England (probably rather more in Scotland) remained actively practising Catholics. But the power of anti-Catholicism as a polarizing force in politics, and the ease by which it could be exploited to unleash uncontainable forces of hysteria, fury and panic, were out of all proportion to the reality of the threat. In 1641 it had been the perception that Charles I was secretly behind the Irish insurrection and that he would use Catholic soldiers against both the Scots and English that had convinced men like Pym and Cromwell that the king could no longer be safely entrusted with control of the militia. In that sense at least, anti-Catholicism had been the proximate cause of the civil war. In 1649 Cromwell's conviction that a royalist army in Ireland might still be used to reverse the victory of parliament made him determined to annihilate resistance in that country and created in the wake of his conquests the first kingless Britain. Running through two centuries of British history like a scarlet thread – from Walsingham's
security state in the 1570s to the Gordon Riots in the 1780s – was the adamant conviction that Rome's war on heresy had ruled out the possibility of being loyal to both Church and king (or Commonwealth). Even those, like Cromwell, who had passionately believed in religious liberty, axiomatically denied that liberty to Catholics. Milton, the great guardian of the free conscience, refused to allow that Catholics were, in fact, Christians at all. For at least a century – ever since the publication of Foxe's
Actes and Monuments
(the ‘Book of Martyrs') – national identity had been hammered out against the anvil of a perennially threatening, fiendishly devious, politically tyrannical and spiritually demonic Rome. The only question had been which power had been better able to protect the heart of the nation from the dagger of the Antichrist pointed at it – king or Commonwealth, parliament or Protector?

The credentials of the Protectorate as an Anglo-Protestant warrior-state, much vaunted by Cromwell in a rabidly anti-Spanish oration to parliament, had taken a fatal blow when the ‘Western Enterprise' in the Caribbean came to ignominious grief on Hispaniola. And the religious and political anarchy of 1659 had provided a perfect opening for the Restoration monarchy to advertise itself as ensuring strength through a return to order and conformity. This is, indeed, what Clarendon and Archbishop Sheldon genuinely believed: that a return to the unquestioned authority of the Church of England, not some deluded and divisive liberty of conscience, was the best bulwark against the subversion of ‘fanatics' – whether Calvinist, Quaker or Catholic. And through the honeymoon years of Charles II's reign, notwithstanding his attempt to pass a Declaration of Indulgence in 1662, the assumption among the vast majority of the county gentry was that this was the staunch opinion of the king as well. Whatever his shortcomings as a model of upstanding Christian propriety, Charles at least went through the motions of Anglican observance, and when taxed with the consequences of his relentless lechery responded disarmingly that he did not believe ‘God would damn a man for a little irregular pleasure'.

But elegant flippancy only took you so far. In good times it advanced general merriment, a quality the Restoration consciously promoted against the public grimness of the Protectorate. In bad times, though, the banter could suddenly seem wan and facetious. (Evelyn, the devoted monarchist, quickly sickened of it as so much political confectionery.) The avalanche of misfortune that crashed down on England after 1665 raised questions among the more pious gentry in the shires, who were by no means all unreconstructed Presbyterians, about the seriousness with which Charles took his coronation vow to be the Defender of the
Faith. The shamelessness of his debauchery, the squalid promiscuousness with which he took both mistresses and spaniels into his bed (sometimes, it was said not inaccurately, at the same time), undoubtedly had a cumulative effect on men who identified with the supposedly independent, old-fashioned virtues of ‘country' as against the licentious sink and rapacious self-promotion of the ‘court'. It was an article of country-Cavalier faith that their displeasure with court and courtiers would never affect their allegiance to the king himself. But over the long stretch of bad years, country suspicion and hostility towards those around the king deepened, and with it came anxiety that the king's proverbial laziness, self-indulgence and irresolution (so unlike his sainted father) might yet lead the country into crisis, even before Charles had deigned to notice it. John Evelyn, who always had his ear to the ground when it came to the prejudices of the gentry, echoed them by judging that Charles, who ‘would doubtless have been an excellent prince, had he been less addicted to women, who made him uneasy and always in want to supply their unmeasurable profusion', was sovereign of everything except himself.

Towards the end of the decade, these fears, for a while amorphous and unarticulated, began to take on much crisper definition. There was, to begin with, the disturbing fact of royal childlessness. The barrenness of the Portuguese Catholic queen, Catherine of Braganza – in unhappy contrast to the fecundity of Charles's many mistresses – was surely some sort of punishment laid on the kingdom. If you looked at the world through the correct – which was to say the most conspiratorially acute – lenses, you saw right away something so rotten that it could only have originated in the filthy stews of the Whore of Babylon (aka the Jesuit-ridden Papacy). Fatal sterility and spendthrift concupiscence were part of the same plan – to sap the vitals of sturdy Protestant England.

Fruitlessness led to fretfulness. Without a direct heir, the next in line to the throne was the king's brother, James, Duke of York, whose own confessional allegiances seemed much closer to those of the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, still very much alive and very much the unrepentant Catholic, utterly convinced that the downfall of her husband had been his wishful thinking that a strong monarchy could be created in an Anglican, parliamentary country. James, described as ‘the most unguarded ogler in England', was every bit as much of an unappetizing lecher as his older brother, but, unlike Charles, managed to alternate hearty bouts of lust with equally fierce orgies of sanctimoniousness. James's first marriage, to Clarendon's daughter Anne Hyde, had shown that he could indeed produce children, at least daughters. Demoted by James's mistresses to an object of ridicule, Anne sought consolation in the Hyde family weakness,
the table, and like her father expanded in girth as she declined in dignity. When she died in 1671, leaving the two girls, Mary and Anne, who would both become queen and who resisted their father's efforts to make them follow him back into the arms of the Roman Church, James lost no time in taking a second wife in 1673: the unquestionably Catholic (and strikingly beautiful) Mary of Modena.