Well, you had to find some way to pass the time when you were an impoverished intellectual of staunchly Royalist stock during the closing years of the Commonwealth. Wren designed gadgets, including a duplicating machine, a seed drill, and a transparent beehive. He observed the stars, was a noted mathematician, and practised anatomy. None of this was architecture. Even by the multi-tasking standards of the day, Wren was unusual.

Lisa Jardine’s lengthy and immensely detailed account of Wren’s life and times chronicles how a circle of Royalist thinkers, deprived of public office and wealth under Cromwell and with time on their hands, was instrumental in progressing British science at this period. Wren, as a brilliant pupil and academic at Oxford, joined this circle at exactly the right time. In 1660 the monarchy was restored with the accession of Charles II, and the old Royalist supporters swept back into power, carrying Wren with them. As his late father, Dean Christopher Wren, and uncle Matthew were both leading churchmen loyal to the executed Charles I, the young Wren came with impeccable family credentials. He quickly became official architect to the throne. Staying on top of his game through five monarchs into the Hanoverian era was not the least of Wren’s achievements.

The greatest, of course, was to design and build St. Paul’s Cathedral, and to live to see it completed in 1711. He finally died in 1723 at the age of 91, his mind by all accounts as sharp as ever. Right at the end of his life, he reckoned he had discovered a foolproof way to calculate longitude. The Wren method involved studying Jupiter’s moons from a stabilized telescope aboard a ship fitted with a vacuum-sealed chronometer and an ingenious nautical speedometer. Nice try, Chris, but just a trifle over-complex for the early 18th century seaman.