Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.Phillimore, Lucy
History
Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.
Phillimore, Lucy
Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714 -- Biography; Wren family; Wren, Christopher, Sir, 1632-1723
No hint even is to be found of how this loss affected Sir Christopher,
but whether it was from the desolate state of his home, or the
helplessness of a widower left with an infant son, or from other causes,
he was not long in marrying again. His second wife was Jane Fitzwilliam,
daughter of the second Baron Fitzwilliam, her mother was an heiress, the
daughter of Hugh Perry _alias_ Hunter, a sheriff and alderman of London.
Lord Fitzwilliam died in 1643, the same year that he had succeeded to
his father, and the widowed Lady Fitzwilliam died twenty-seven years
later at 'Dutchy House in the Savoy,' the family house; so Jane
Fitzwilliam had been some years an orphan when she was married to Sir
Christopher in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, on February 24, 1676-7.
In this year Wren rebuilt S. Magnus, London Bridge,[147] which having
escaped one 'most dismal fire' in 1633, was destroyed by the Great Fire
of 1666. Sir Christopher rebuilt the church with Portland stone and oak
timber, adding to it a picturesque tower with a cupola and a peal of ten
bells. London Bridge, then covered with little houses and shops, would,
Sir Christopher foresaw, require alteration, and he, anxious that S.
Magnus should not suffer when the time came, proposed to leave space by
it for a footway. The churchwardens overruled him. The improvement Wren
expected has since been made, and when the workmen came to make a
pathway under the portico they discovered to their great surprise that
Sir Christopher had made the necessary arches, though bricked up, and
left them to be in readiness for the change which he foresaw, though the
churchwardens of S. Magnus did not. The state of London Bridge was very
unsatisfactory; constant repairs were needed, and to shoot the narrow
arches and not be swamped by the fall of the water was no easy feat.
Wren had a plan for saving repairs and improving the water way by wide
Gothic arches, taking away every other arch, and making the two into
one, which would reduce the fall to nine inches at the most. This seems
to have remained a scheme only.
[_MODERN DESECRATION._]
S. Mildred's in the Poultry was also begun in this year, a small stone
church with a tower and cupola. It was destroyed in 1872,[148] and the
details of its removal are instructive as well as painful, and may well
be contrasted with the account of the manner of removing the remains of
old S. Paul's.[149]
S. Stephen's, Coleman Street, on the site of an old Jewish synagogue, is
of the same date; it is a neat small church mostly built of stone, with
a curious old stone carving, in high relief, of the Last Judgment, over
the door leading to the churchyard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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