WILLIAM SANCROFT, at the time of the Fire, was Dean of S. Paul's. Of the Bishop, Henchman, excepting that at a later period he rebuilt the palace of the Bishops of London, at his own cost, in Aldersgate Street, and contributed generously to the new Cathedral, we know not much. The Civil Wars found Sancroft at Cambridge. After some delay (whether through interest or personal respect, extraordinary in the Puritan College), he was ejected from his fellowship of Emanuel. A firm, but, it should seem, not an obnoxious Royalist, he lived in retirement. After the King's death he went to the Continent. There he was not only able to support himself, but to assist others, which he did with great liberality. Among these was Cosins, afterwards Bishop of Durham. Sancroft returned to England at the Restoration, and Bishop Cosins was able and willing to show his gratitude. He conferred on his benefactor a golden prebend, and the living of Houghtonle-Spring, then held to be one of the best and pleasantest benefices in England. Sancroft's rise was rapid; he became Master of Emanuel College, in 1662 Dean of York, in 1664 Dean of S. Paul's.' Sancroft was concerned in correcting the press for the amended Prayer Book. Burnet declared, that the office for January 30th, which he seems to attribute to Sancroft, was in C C so high a style that it did not sound CHAP. XVII. CHAP. 6 386 2 DEAN SANCROFT. After the Fire the obstinate piety of Sancroft clung to the ruins of old S. Paul's. In a sermon before the King, October 10, 1667, highly to his credit, he contemptuously repudiated all the charges of incendiarism :-' And there'fore dream no longer of grenados or fire-balls, or the ' rest of those witty mischiefs. Search no more for boutfeus, or incendiaries, Dutch or French. The Dutch intemperance, and the French pride and vanity, and the ' rest of their sins, which we are so fond of, are infinitely more dangerous to us, than the enmity of either nation, for we have made God our enemy too; or if you will 'needs find out the incendiary, "Intus hostis, intus pe'riculum," saith S. Jerome. Turn your eyes inward into 'your own bosoms. There lurks the great make-bate, the grand bout-feu, between earth and us.' In the rest of the sermon, Sancroft approaches sublimity. He dwells on God's mercy:-Thanks be to the Lord, who has so long showed us marvellously great kindness. I say not with the Psalm, in the strong city (though the strongest ' without Him is weakness), but in a very weak one, a city in the meanness of its materials, the oldness of the buildings, the straitness of some streets, the ill situation of others, and many like inconveniences, so exposed to this dismal accident, that it must have been long since in ashes, had not His miraculous mercy preserved it: who so long as He pleaseth, and that is just so long as we please Him, continues the FIRE to us, useful and safe, serviceable. and yet innocent, with as much 'ease as he lays it asleep and quiet in the bosom of a 'flint.'3 6 6 above that which was read till within 2 During the Plague the Bishop Tunbridge. Some of the London clergy were reproved for deserting their flocks. Letter in Ellis, 2nd series, vol. iv. pp. 21–28. 3 Sancroft's Life, by D'Oyley, p. 377. XVII. This sermon must have been preached in some part of CHAP. the ruined Cathedral. His compassions fail not, that • God hath left us yet a holy place to assemble in, solemnly to acknowledge, as we do this day, that most miraculous mercy, that before all our wit was puzzled, and all our industry tired out, when the wind was at the highest, and the fire at the hottest, when all our hope was now giving up the ghost, then He . . . restrained also on the sudden the fury of that merciless and unruly • element.' A temporary choir had, in fact, been hastily fitted up at the west end, thought the safest part of the ruins, the east being utterly desolate.1 These hopes of restoration, or even of temporary occupation, soon came to a disastrous end. Sancroft writes to Wren, April or July 2, 1668:- Science at the height you · are master of it, is prophetic. What you last whispered 6 6 in my ear at your last coming hither, is now come to pass. Our work at the west end of S. Paul's is fallen ' about our ears. Your quick eye discerned the walls and pillars gone off from their perpendicular, and, I believe, other defects too, which are now exposed to every common observer. The third pillar from the west, at the south side, which they had new cased with stone, 'fell with a sudden crash; the next, bigger than the rest, 'stood alone, certain to fall, yet so unsafe, that they ' dared not venture to take it down. In short, the whole 'work of Inigo Jones was so overloaded as to threaten a 'total wreck.' . . . And again, 'You are so absolutely necessary to us that we can do nothing, resolve on nothing, without you.' 5 The sum laid out on these temporary repairs was 3,5061. 5s. 1d. See Dugdale, p. 126. Sancroft's Letter to Wren (D'Oyley's Sancroft, p. 171), dated July 2, 1668, CHAP. XVII. From that time (about two years after the Fire), the doom of old S. Paul's was irrevocably sealed. Nothing now remained but to clear away every vestige of the ancient fabric, and build a new one worthy of the nation and of the City-the Christian nation, the Christian City. Was, then, the Fire of London, if so remorseless, so fatal a destroyer? Are we to mourn with unmitigated sorrow over the demolition of old S. Paul's? Of England's more glorious Cathedrals, it seems to me, I confess, none could be so well spared. Excepting its vast size, it had nothing to distinguish it. It must have been a gloomy ponderous pile. The nave and choir were of different ages (that was common), but ill formed, ill adjusted together, with disproportioned aisles, and transepts, and a low, square, somewhat clumsy tower, out of which once rose a spire, tall indeed, but merely built of woodwork and lead. London would, at best, have been forced to bow its head before the cathedrals of many of our provincial cities. Old S. Paul's had nothing of the prodigal magnificence, the harmonious variety of Lincoln, the stately majesty of York, the solemn grandeur of Canterbury, the perfect sky-aspiring unity of Salisbury. It had not even one of the great conceptions which are the pride and boast of some of our other churches; neither the massy strength of Durham 'looking 'eternity' with its marvellous Galilee, nor the tower of Gloucester, nor the lantern of Ely, nor the rich picturesqueness of Beverley, nor the deep receding, highly decorated arches of the west front of Peterborough. And of ancient S. Paul's, the bastard Gothic of Inigo Jones Even within our own days, the anniversary of the Fire of London (September 2) was observed by a special service in S. Paul's, but that service had altogether lost its meaning; it had no longer any hold on the scanty worshippers. Therefore-not from any unwillingness to implore the special protection of the Almighty over our matchless fabric-at the same time that the special State services were abolished, it was thought fit to discontinue the commemoration of the Fire of London. had cased the venerable if decayed walls throughout with a flat incongruous facing. The unrivalled beauty of Inigo Jones's 'Portico' was the deformity of the Church. Even in its immediate neighbourhood, though wanting a central tower, and its western towers, not too successfully afterwards added by Sir Christopher Wren, the Abbey, with its fine soaring columns, its beautiful proportions, its solemn, grey, diapered walls,-the Abbey, with its intricate chapels, with its chambers of royal tombs, with Henry VII.'s Chapel, an excrescence indeed, but in sufficient harmony with the main building, in itself an inimitable model of its style, crowned by its richly fretted roof, -the Abbey of Westminster would have put to perpetual shame the dark unimpressive pile of the City of London: Westminster modestly reposing in its lower level-S. Paul's boastfully loading its more proud, but more obtrusive eminence. The rebuilding of S. Paul's Cathedral was at once (the necessary delay of a few years intervening) assumed as a national work. It rested not with the Bishop, the Dean and Chapter, or the City of London. The King, the whole nobility, Parliament, without demur, recognised the paramount duty of erecting a splendid Cathedral, worthy of the metropolis, worthy of England. It was not, however, till November 12, 1673, that letters patent, under the Great Seal of England, were issued, announcing the determination to erect a new Cathedral:• Inasmuch as it is now become absolutely necessary totally to demolish and to raze to the ground all the relics of the former building, and in the same place, and on new 'foundations, to erect a new Church; wherefore that it 'may be done to the glory of God, and for the promotion of the divine service therein to be celebrated, and to the end. ' that the same may equal if not exceed the splendour and СНАР. XVII. |