ON 25 FEBRUARY 1723, Sir Christopher Wren sat down in an armchair in one of the rooms of the house that he leased in St James’s Street. He had caught a chill travelling from Hampton Court. When one of his servants came to wake him, he was dead. He was ninety-one and could remember life in the early stages of the Civil War. He had outlived all his close friends and contemporaries.
It had been an extraordinary life, in which Wren was recognised as having exceptional talents at an early age: a“enlarged… astronomy, gnomonics, statics and mechanics” by the age of 16; a Fellow of All Souls aged 18; described by the diarist, John Evelyn, as “that miracle of a Youth” when he met him at Wadham in 1654; appointed a Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College when he was 25; and asked by Charles II to oversee the harbour defences at Tangiers shortly after the Restoration.
