64 Facts About Christopher Wren

1.

Christopher Wren was first taught at home by a private tutor and his father.

2.

Christopher Wren spent his first eight years at East Knoyle and was educated by the Rev William Shepherd, a local clergyman.

3.

Christopher Wren's drawing was put to academic use in providing many of the anatomical drawings for the anatomy textbook of the brain, Cerebri Anatome, published by Thomas Willis, which coined the term "neurology".

4.

However, Christopher Wren became closely associated with John Wilkins, the Warden of Wadham.

5.

Christopher Wren was there provided with a set of rooms and a stipend and required to give weekly lectures in both Latin and English.

6.

Christopher Wren continued to meet the men with whom he had frequent discussions in Oxford.

7.

Christopher Wren undoubtedly played a major role in the early life of what would become the Royal Society; his great breadth of expertise in so many different subjects helped in the exchange of ideas between the various scientists.

8.

In 1661, Christopher Wren was elected Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and in 1669 he was appointed Surveyor of Works to Charles II.

9.

From 1661 until 1668 Christopher Wren's life was based in Oxford, although his attendance at meetings of the Royal Society meant that he had to make periodic trips to London.

10.

Christopher Wren observed, measured, dissected, built models and employed, invented and improved a variety of instruments.

11.

Christopher Wren submitted his plans for rebuilding the city to King Charles II, although they were never adopted.

12.

Christopher Wren was personally responsible for the rebuilding of 51 churches; however, it is not necessarily true to say that each of them represented his own fully developed design.

13.

Christopher Wren first stood for Parliament in a by-election in 1667 for the Cambridge University constituency, losing by six votes to Sir Charles Wheler.

14.

Christopher Wren was unsuccessful again in a by-election for the Oxford University constituency in 1674, losing to Thomas Thynne.

15.

At his third attempt Christopher Wren was successful, and he sat for Plympton Erle during the Loyal Parliament of 1685 to 1687.

16.

Christopher Wren retired at the general election the following year.

17.

In 1669, the 37-year-old Christopher Wren married his childhood neighbour, the 33-year-old Faith Coghill, daughter of Sir John Coghill of Bletchingdon.

18.

Little is known of Faith, but a love letter from Christopher Wren survives, which reads, in part:.

19.

The younger Christopher Wren was trained by his father to be an architect.

20.

Christopher Wren was buried in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields beside the infant Gilbert.

21.

In 1677,17 months after the death of his first wife, Christopher Wren remarried, this time to Jane Fitzwilliam, daughter of William FitzWilliam, 2nd Baron FitzWilliam, and his wife Jane Perry, the daughter of a prosperous London merchant.

22.

Christopher Wren was a mystery to Wren's friends and companions.

23.

Christopher Wren was buried alongside Faith and Gilbert in the chancel of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

24.

Christopher Wren was never to marry again; he lived to be over 90 years old and of those years was married only nine.

25.

In 1713, he bought the manor of Wroxall, Warwickshire, from the Burgoyne family, to which his son Christopher Wren retired in 1716 after losing his post as Clerk of Works.

26.

Christopher Wren had been given a lease on the property by Queen Anne in lieu of salary arrears for building St Paul's.

27.

For convenience Christopher Wren leased a house on St James's Street in London.

28.

Christopher Wren's body was placed in the southeast corner of the crypt of St Paul's.

29.

Sir Christopher Wren who died on Monday last in the 91st year of his age, was the only son of Dr Chr.

30.

Christopher Wren's body is to be deposited in the Great Vault under the Dome of the Cathedral of St Paul.

31.

Christopher Wren experimented on terrestrial magnetism and had taken part in medical experiments while at Wadham College, performing the first successful injection of a substance into the bloodstream.

32.

Christopher Wren studied and improved the microscope and telescope at this time.

33.

Christopher Wren had been making observations of the planet Saturn from around 1652 with the aim of explaining its appearance.

34.

Christopher Wren's hypothesis was written up in De corpore saturni but before the work was published, Huygens presented his theory of the rings of Saturn.

35.

Immediately Christopher Wren recognised this as a better hypothesis than his own and De corpore saturni was never published.

36.

Christopher Wren directed his far-ranging intelligence to the study of meteorology: in 1662, he invented the tipping bucket rain gauge and, in 1663, designed a "weather-clock" that would record temperature, humidity, rainfall and barometric pressure.

37.

Christopher Wren published a description of an engine to create perspective drawings and he discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors.

38.

Out of this work came another of Christopher Wren's important mathematical results, namely that the hyperboloid of revolution is a ruled surface.

39.

In subsequent years, Christopher Wren continued with his work with the Royal Society, although after the 1680s his scientific interests seem to have waned: no doubt his architectural and official duties absorbed more time.

40.

Christopher Wren's challenge to Halley and Hooke, for the reward of a book worth thirty shillings, was to provide, within the context of Hooke's hypothesis, a mathematical theory linking Kepler's laws with a specific force law.

41.

Christopher Wren studied other areas, ranging from agriculture, ballistics, water and freezing, light and refraction, to name only a few.

42.

Christopher Wren was a prominent man of science at the height of the Scientific Revolution.

43.

Christopher Wren's first known foray into architecture came after his uncle, Matthew Christopher Wren, Bishop of Ely, offered to finance a new chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge.

44.

Matthew commissioned his nephew for the design, finding the architecturally inexperienced Christopher Wren to be both ideologically sympathetic and stylistically deferential.

45.

Christopher Wren produced his design in the Winter of 1662 or 1663 and the chapel was completed in 1665.

46.

Christopher Wren met Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was "widely acknowledged by contemporaries as the greatest artist of the century".

47.

Christopher Wren was most likely at Oxford at the time, but the news, so fantastically relevant to his future, drew him at once to London.

48.

In 1669, the King's Surveyor of Works died and Christopher Wren was promptly installed.

49.

Christopher Wren was confined to a "cathedral form" desired by the clergy.

50.

The cathedral that Christopher Wren started to build bears only a slight resemblance to the Warrant Design.

51.

Finally, in 1711 the cathedral was declared complete, and Christopher Wren was paid the half of his salary that, in the hope of accelerating progress, Parliament had withheld for 14 years since 1697.

52.

In 1682, Christopher Wren advised that the original statues of the King's Beasts on St George's Chapel, Windsor be removed.

53.

The first large project Christopher Wren designed, the Chelsea Hospital, does not entirely satisfy the eye in this respect, but met its brief with distinction and such success that even in the 21st century it fulfils its original function.

54.

When Christopher Wren promised that it would be complete within a year the King, who was conscious of his mortality, replied that " a year is a great time in my life".

55.

Later, when James II was removed from the throne, Christopher Wren took on architectural projects such as Kensington Palace and Hampton Court.

56.

The story is widely told that the borough Council demanded that Christopher Wren should insert additional columns within the covered area, in order to support the weight of the heavy building above; Christopher Wren was adamant that these were not necessary.

57.

However, there is little evidence that Christopher Wren was ever involved in the design or construction of the Guildhall.

58.

Christopher Wren did not pursue his work on architectural design as actively as he had before the 1690s, although he still played important roles in a number of royal commissions.

59.

Christopher Wren resigned from the former role in 1716 but held the latter until his death, approving with a wavering signature Burlington's revisions of Wren's own earlier designs for the great Archway of Westminster School.

60.

Since at least the 18th century, the Lodge of Antiquity No 2, one of the four founding Masonic Lodges of the Premier Grand Lodge of England in 1717, has claimed Christopher Wren to have been its Master at the Goose and Gridiron at St Paul's churchyard.

61.

James Anderson made the claims in his widely circulated Constitutions while many of Christopher Wren's friends were still alive, but he made many highly creative claims as to the history or legends of Freemasonry.

62.

Nevertheless, this recorded event and many old records attest to the fact that Antiquity thought that Christopher Wren had been its Master, at a time when it still held its minute books for the relevant years.

63.

The evidence of whether Christopher Wren was a speculative freemason is the subject of the Prestonian Lecture of 2011, which concludes on the evidence of two obituaries and Aubrey's memoirs, with supporting materials, that he did indeed attend the closed meeting in 1691, probably of the Lodge of Antiquity, but that there is nothing to suggest that he was ever a Grand Officer as claimed by Anderson.

64.

Christopher Wren appears, or is mentioned in several Restoration-era novels or movies.