WREN, Matthew (1585-1667)

Matthew Wren set out the progress of his ecclesiastical career in his brief jottings on the notable events of his life, which were later transcribed and reproduced in the compilation of documents on the family of Sir Christopher Wren^‡, the bishop’s nephew, published in 1750 as Parentalia. Parentalia, esp. 133-4. These notes show that Matthew Wren was the son of a freeman and mercer of London who belonged to a cadet branch of the Wrens of Durham. He attended Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he quickly came to the notice of the college master, Lancelot Andrewes, who appointed him as his chaplain in 1615 and continued to act as his patron for many years. He held numerous posts at Cambridge from the 1620s, including master of Peterhouse between 1625 and 1634, and vice-chancellor of the university in 1628-9. He remained a devoted alumnus and benefactor to the university and especially to his original college, Pembroke Hall.

He was also increasingly shown royal favour. Wren was appointed chaplain to the prince of Wales in 1622, and was promoted by him after his accession as Charles I, due probably to the liturgical views that they shared with William Laud^†, bishop of London. Wren was given a series of prominent ecclesiastical posts in the royal gift: dean of Windsor, and with it the office of registrar of the Order of the Garter, from 1628, and clerk of the closet, from 1633. In March 1635 he was consecrated bishop of Hereford, but at the end of that year was translated to the more troublesome diocese of Norwich where he became infamous for his thoroughgoing, and abrasive, introduction of Laudian reforms in a large diocese heavily populated with nonconformists. Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, described Wren as ‘a man of a severe, sour nature, but very learned, and particularly versed in the old liturgies of the Greek and Latin Churches’. Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 1. In 1638 he was translated to Ely, perhaps because his tenure of the Norwich see had been so controversial and largely unsuccessful. In the anti-episcopal agitation of 1640-1, Wren was probably the most hated churchman in England after the archbishop himself and articles of impeachment were submitted against him on 20 July 1641. Pending his trial, which never took place, he was imprisoned in the Tower in September 1642. He remained there for close to 18 years until he was released on 15 Mar. 1660. Parentalia, 11-15, 133-4; Joyfull Newes from the Isle of Ely (1642). Throughout his long imprisonment there were calls for his trial and execution, especially after the archbishop himself went to the scaffold in January 1645. The Last Advice of William Laud, late Archbishop, to his Episcopall Brethren (1645). Parliament preferred to keep him incarcerated, and in March 1649 the Council of State ordered that no proceedings would be taken against him, perhaps unwilling to make another martyr for the underground Church of England. EHR, lxxxiii, 530-31.

Wren did not remain idle in the Tower. He wrote copiously, maintained a clerical register for his diocese and corresponded with Gilbert Sheldon, later archbishop of Canterbury, among others. EHR, lxxxiii, 529-33; Parentalia, 26-30; PROB 11/324; Bodl. Tanner 145, ff. 4-8. From the early 1650s he was also in steady communication with Dr John Barwick, the royalist agent, who was briefly imprisoned in the Tower with him. Wren rejected the proposals put forward by Sheldon and Barwick in the first months of 1653 to allow a commission of the surviving bishops to dispense former Church of England ministers still remaining in their cures from having to conform exactly to the Prayer Book, in order to ensure the survival of the proscribed ministry. Wren argued against this scheme that ‘it were better to forbear all the public worship of God till such time as by preaching and the want of it men were brought into a hungering desire to accept of it all’. Tanner 52, f. 5; Bosher, Restoration Settlement, 19-21. This desire to avoid all compromises in the formal practice and government of the Church arose again in 1659 when he was a central figure in the project to consecrate new bishops to those sees which had fallen vacant. Hyde looked especially to Wren to provide the names of suitable candidates for the episcopate, ‘much preferring the bishop of Ely’s judgment and advice in that point, before any man’s’, but became frustrated by Wren’s reluctance to take any action in rescuing the moribund Church of England. In a series of letters Hyde had to hound Wren, through Barwick, to provide the names of candidates for the empty see of Carlisle, which Wren constantly demurred from doing. Life of Dr John Barwick (1724), 410, 424, 427, 439-40, 453.

In the early days of the Restoration there were rumours, indeed ‘fears’, that Wren, one of only nine surviving bishops from before 1642, would be promoted to Canterbury despite his unpopularity. This did not happen, though after the death of William Juxon, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1663 Wren was the most senior member of the episcopal bench. HMC 5th Rep. 184; Bodl. Carte 30, f. 611; Cardwell, 257. He was not asked to participate in the debates of the Savoy Conference of 1661, perhaps because of his association with Laud and perhaps because Charles II and Clarendon may have preferred not to have such a vociferous and belligerent High Churchman involved. In 1661 the Scots presbyterian Robert Baillie lamented the presence of Wren, ‘the worst bishop of our age after Laud’ at the royal court, and even such a devoted son of the Church as John Evelyn commented disapprovingly upon attending a service at Ely House in February of that year that Wren ‘gave us the blessing very pontifically’. Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie ed. D. Laing, iii. 405-6; Evelyn Diary, iii. 271. Clarendon however did favour the bishop’s son, also named Matthew Wren^‡, who had distinguished himself by writing a robust defence of monarchical government in the years before the Restoration. The younger Wren was appointed Hyde’s secretary shortly after the return of the king and was returned to the Commons for Mitchell in 1661. Life of Barwick, 421-2.

Bishop Wren was active in Convocation in shaping the liturgy of the re-established Church of England. Sometime during 1660-1, and perhaps even earlier, Wren annotated a 1639 edition of the Prayer Book with notes and suggestions for revision and these formed the basis for discussions between churchmen who met at his London residence of Ely House during the summer of 1661 to discuss the new Book of Common Prayer. Cardwell, 374-7; Jacobson, Fragmentary Illustrations of the Hist. of the Book of Common Prayer, 41-46. When Convocation reassembled on 21 Nov. 1661 Wren was named to a committee of eight bishops appointed to oversee the revision. Owing to the extensive preparation by Wren, John Cosin, bishop of Durham, and their colleagues of the summer, the committee was able within two days to present to the Lower House the proposed revisions and the new Prayer Book was agreed upon by both houses of Convocation by the end of the year. In the same period Wren was a constant presence in the House of Lords. On 20 Nov. 1661 he was one of the 23 bishops who sat in the House for the first time since the expulsion of the bishops in 1642 on the first day of the reconvened parliamentary session. He went on to attend all but five of the remaining sittings of that session of 1661-2, an attendance level of 92 per cent. However, he was not among the nine bishops who were added on 20 Nov. to the existing standing committees and was named to only 12 committees on legislation over the session. Despite his important work on shaping the liturgy of the re-established Church, he was not one of the bishops placed on the committee established on 17 Jan. 1662 to consider the bill for Uniformity, nor was he added to this committee when the revised Prayer Book was placed before it for consideration on 25 February. Frere and Proctor, A New Hist. of the Book of Common Prayer, 194-5, 204; Cardwell, 388-90.

Wren maintained a similar high attendance rate in the following session of 1663 when he missed only five of the sittings (93 per cent attendance). The proxy of his close colleague Bishop Cosin was registered in Wren’s name on 1 Feb. 1663 and he would have exercised it from the first day of the session, 18 February, until Cosin’s return to the House on 29 April. He was nominated to 11 committees on legislation and some of his appointments reveal his involvement with East Anglian matters. He was placed on 12 May 1663 on a committee for the bill to repair highways in Cambridgeshire. On 15 July he was named to the committee for the bill for draining the Bedford Level and the following day he participated in its first meeting (his name as chairman in the committee minutes book is deleted and replaced by that of Robert Sutton, Baron Lexinton who later reported the bill). At the committee meeting he raised objections to the state of the bill as it presently stood before the committee, complaining that it did not match exactly the version intended by the Commons. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, p. 427. Surprisingly, considering his strict insistence on conformity, recently seen in his diocesan visitation of autumn 1662, he was on 24 July named to the committee to provide relief for those ministers who were initially unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity. Green, Re-establishment of Church of England, 135-8.

Wren missed only two of the 36 sitting days of the session of spring 1664, but came to only 57 per cent of those in the 1664-5 session, while he did not attend the Oxford session of Parliament in October 1665 at all. He registered his proxy with Humphrey Henchman, bishop of London on 2 Oct. 1665 for the session. A correspondent of William Sancroft, later archbishop of Canterbury, informed him on 9 May 1665 that Wren, despite reports, was not dead, but was very sick. Tanner 45, f. 6. Wren was sufficiently recovered to attend the following 1666-7 session almost in its entirety, missing only one of its 89 sitting days, during which he held the proxy of William Lucy^* [1865], bishop of St Davids, from 9 Sept. 1666. Despite this impressive attendance record, throughout his career in the Restoration House he was largely inactive and was nominated to only 36 committees on legislation throughout, the majority of them in the sessions of 1661-2 and 1663. Although he was not named to the committee established on 7 Jan. 1667 to discuss the bill for the unification of two rectories in his own diocese, he did appear before the committee on 9 Jan. to give his consent to the proposed merger. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 149.

Wren attended the House for the final time on the day of prorogation of the 1666-7 session, 8 Feb. 1667. He died on 24 Apr., and was buried in the new and only recently-consecrated chapel at Pembroke Hall, in a lavish service which followed the minutely detailed instructions in his will. PROB 11/324; Tanner 158, f.88; Parentalia, 40-45. Wren’s lasting influence was probably felt most strongly here, at Cambridge University. As bishop of Ely he was able to exercise patronage in appointing high churchmen, often his own kinsmen or chaplains, as heads of colleges. The mastership of Jesus College was in the gift of the bishop and in 1660 he choose John Pearson, later bishop of Chester. When Pearson moved on in April 1662, Wren was able to insert in his place Joseph Beaumont, the husband of his step-daughter Elizabeth Brownrigg. Shortly after, in 1663, Wren overrode the wishes of the fellows of Peterhouse by ‘intruding’ this favoured son-in-law as their master. J. Twigg, Univ. of Cambridge and Eng. Revol. 248. Other kinsmen who benefited from Wren’s patronage were his younger brother Christopher, who replaced him as dean of Windsor in 1635 (on Matthew’s recommendation), and Christopher’s son and namesake, the architect Christopher Wren. Shortly after his release from the Tower, the bishop commissioned his talented nephew to design a chapel for his old college of Pembroke. This was Christopher Wren’s first architectural assignment and the building was consecrated in 1665, just before the Fire. It was probably through the influence of his uncle that Christopher stood for a seat for Cambridge University in a by-election of March 1667, even though at that point he was already Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. He lost to a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, by only six votes. HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 149.

The greatest beneficiaries of the bishop’s enormous wealth were his own children. His long and complicated will detailed some £10,000 in money bequests and provided well for his eight surviving children, bequeathing to them numerous estates in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Buckinghamshire. PROB 11/324. Most of his children maintained their father’s engagement in ecclesiastical and political life. The eldest son, Matthew, transferred his secretarial services to James Stuart, duke of York, after the fall of his patron Clarendon in October 1667, but was fatally wounded at the battle of Sole Bay, at which he accompanied the duke, in 1672. A younger son, Thomas, continued in his father’s profession and became an archdeacon and canon of Ely. The youngest, Sir William Wren^‡, unsuccessfully contested a seat for Cambridgeshire in 1674 and then again in 1679, but eventually was returned for the borough of Cambridge in 1685. The bishop’s daughter Susanna married Robert Wright^‡, a successful lawyer on the Norfolk circuit (thanks in part to the many cases Bishop Wren was able to direct his way), Member for King’s Lynn from 1668, and recorder of Cambridge, and thus returning officer, at the time of Sir William’s election there and lord chief justice under James II. HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 762-3, 766-8. According to one 18th-century commentator the building of Pembroke Hall chapel was ‘the only public thing as I find that [Wren] did, for he was a great accumulator of wealth for his children; and so let his episcopal house at Ely go to such ruin, that it was uninhabitable, ‘till fitted up by his two most worthy successors’. Willis, Survey of Cathedrals, ii. 364.