London - Edward Rutherfurd [445]
1708
They were still in good time. He had not told them where he was taking them, but he had obtained special permission and he wanted it to be a surprise. Though O Be Joyful had passed his three score years and ten, he felt fit enough for the task he had set himself as hurrying cheerfully along he led his two favourite grandchildren up Ludgate Hill. It was a sparkling late October day and the people thronging the streets were in festive mood. It was the day of the Lord Mayor’s procession.
Except for the Commonwealth period when such festivities were banned, the ancient annual ceremony had been growing more elaborate with every decade. Earlier on, in his official residence behind St Mary-le-Bow – Sir Julius Ducket’s place, as O Be Joyful still thought of it – the mayor had put on his robes before emerging and riding down to the river. Then, in his magnificent barge, escorted by the barges of all the livery companies, he had been rowed to Westminster where like a feudal baron of olden times he performed his oath of fealty to the monarch. After this, the barges would turn, disembark their passengers by Blackfriars, and then the mayor, aldermen and all the liveries of the city would ride, in a magnificent and brightly coloured pageant, up to Cheapside and thence to the Guildhall. And what better place for the two children to see the whole affair, Carpenter had thought, than from the great outside gallery of the dome of St Paul’s?
There it was, looming in the sky ahead of them, the monarch of the city’s western hill, the mighty dome. Even now, the last finishing touches were still being made to the great stone lantern tower that rose over fifty feet above the apex of the dome to conclude in a golden cross, a dizzying three hundred and sixty-three feet above the cathedral’s floor. The dome: just as it had been in the great wooden model he had made almost thirty-five years ago, just as he had always known it would be. Yet with this one difference: Wren’s final dome was taller, even more august, than the original model.
Carpenter had watched it go up with fascination. Wren himself was often there, an old man now, but still gamely letting the workmen pull him up into the dome in a basket so that he could inspect the work. Carpenter had been especially intrigued to see that the great structure was not in fact one dome at all, but three. Between the domed ceiling seen from the interior, and the metalled exterior roof which actually rose fifty feet higher, there was, not exactly a dome, but a massive brick cone, almost like a kiln.
“And that,” Wren told him one day, “is what will support the lantern on top, and hold everything else in place as well.” A week later, taking the terrified woodcarver up in the basket with him, he conducted him into the scaffolding of the roof and showed him some of its secrets.
“Around the base of the dome,” the architect explained, “lies a great double chain. This is an extra protection to stop the weight above pushing the walls outwards. Then, all the way up the inner cone, I have placed bands of stone and iron chains which hold everything tight, like the metal hoops round a barrel. And everything needs to be very firm,” he added a little sadly. “For the outer roof was to have been made of copper. But they made me use lead. It saved them a thousand pounds, but it added six hundred tons to the load the building has to bear.”
Around the inside and the outside of the lower parts of the dome there were galleries; and, now that the huge building was completed, stairs even took the bravest up to the very pinnacle of the lantern tower itself. The view from the gallery was splendid, and thanks to Grinling Gibbons and Wren, O Be Joyful had been granted permission to go up there today. Feeling rather proud of himself, he reached the top of Ludgate Hill and led the way towards the great western portico with its huge pillars.
It amused him to notice that as the two children came to the door they hesitated for a moment before going in, but it did not surprise him. Indeed, in a way,