That Sir Christopher Wren, the celebrated English architect, was a Freemason, has been claimed since the late seventeenth century by some writers, yet the debate surrounding his possible membership has obscured a little-known fact: Wren’s protégé and one of England’s finest baroque architects, Nicholas Hawksmoor, was indeed a member of the fraternity. Despite this fact, very little has been written on Hawksmoor’s association with the Craft, even though the lodge to which he belonged rather tellingly met in the shadow of his master’s greatest architectural legacy – London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.
     Little is known of Hawksmoor’s formative years, although it is known that he was born around 1661 to a family of Nottinghamshire yeoman farmers, and that he somehow acquired a working knowledge of mathematics, French, and Italian. It is said that he displayed a precocious flair for architecture, and this was during an age when there was no formalised schooling in the subject. Evidently his talent was such that it won the attention of Sir Christopher Wren, the King’s Surveyor at that time who, from the early 1680s, employed Hawksmoor as his draughtsman.
     From 1687 to 1701 Hawksmoor worked in the office for rebuilding the City of London churches, and it was in this capacity that he helped Wren design a series of new churches destined to replace those lost in the Great Fire of 1666. The young student learned quickly and by the end of the 1680s he was designing buildings on his own.
     Indeed, such was Wren’s confidence in his youthful pupil, that in 1689 he managed to procure for him the Clerkship of Works at Kensington House, later Kensington Palace, and over the next few years Hawksmoor was often referred to as Wren’s ‘gentleman’, his general assistant.

ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL

Between 1691 and 1712 Hawksmoor assisted Wren in the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral and it was during this period that he became sufficiently competent to execute his own architectural projects, both with the expert guidance of his master, and on his own. From 1692 to 1695 Hawksmoor worked at Christ’s Hospital, London, under Wren’s supervision, and the succeeding year worked with Wren again on the new Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. Four years later, Hawksmoor was rewarded with the position of Clerk of Works at Greenwich, a promotion that signalled his professional coming of age.
     Over the next three-and-a-half decades, Hawksmoor’s architectural offerings were prolific. Between 1695 and 1720 he worked on the King’s Gallery and Orangery at Kensington Palace, the stable yard arcade at St. James’s Palace, a piazza and baptistery at St. Paul’s Cathedral (a project that was never realised), and the King William and Queen Anne Blocks at Greenwich Hospital. In 1716 he constructed a temporary courtroom for the trial of the Jacobite rebel Lords in Westminster, and he also assisted the playwright and architect, John Vanbrugh, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
     He worked again with Vanbrugh at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, where he subsequently worked in his own right, designing a Pyramid, a Mausoleum, and a Temple dedicated to the Greco-Roman goddess Venus. He also went on to design the West towers and gable of Westminster Abbey, but it was probably for his design of several London churches that Hawksmoor is chiefly remembered today.

LONDON CHURCHES

In 1711 Hawksmoor was appointed as one of two surveyors by the Commissioners for the rebuilding of London’s churches, and for almost two decades he worked on several projects. These included the churches of St. Alfege Greenwich from 1712 to 1718, St. George’s-in-the-East, Wapping from 1714 to 1729, Christ Church, Spitalfields from 1714 to 1729, St. Anne, Limehouse (1714–30), St. Mary Woolnoth, in the City (1716–24), and St. George Bloomsbury (1716–31). Like Wren, Hawksmoor was widely read and he was especially interested in the architecture of the ancients. This interest included biblical descriptions of Solomon’s Temple, particularly those found in the Book of Ezekiel, and almost inevitably such interests spilled out onto the pages of his architecture. For instance, the design of St. Mary Woolnoth in the City was symbolically based on the idea of a cube, or rather, ‘a cube within a cube’, a symbol that from ancient times represented the squaring of the circle. Plato in the Timaeus equated the cube with the Earth; the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple, as described in the Bible, was also a cube; and in Christian art Christ was sometimes depicted seated on one; even the Kaaba at Mecca is a cube, indeed, cube in Arabic is ‘Kaaba’.
     Similarly, at St. George’s Bloomsbury, Hawksmoor based the steeple design on Pliny the Elder’s account of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus – one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
     Inside the church, where the altar was traditionally placed, he also left a mysterious keystone over the eastern apse, which was adorned with a triangular plaque amid a sunburst, and at its centre was the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, or the Name of God.
     And it is interesting to note here, that two of the master stonemasons who worked on this church, Edward Strong junior and John Townshend, were also both free and accepted masons and belonged to London lodges.

HAWKSMOOR AND FREEMASONRY

It is not known exactly when Hawksmoor became a Freemason, except that in 1732 one ‘Nicholas Hawkesmore Esq.’ was listed as a member of the lodge that met at the Oxford Arms in Ludgate Street, which met within the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This lodge was officially warranted by the Grand Lodge on 29 June 1732 as number 94, and it counted among its members the Jacobite antiquarian and nonjuror – one of the beneficed clergy who refused to take the oath of allegiance in 1689 to William and Mary – Dr. Richard Rawlinson, F.R.S., who in 1719 published Elias Ashmole’s Antiquities of Berkshire.
     Of course it is entirely possible that Hawksmoor joined the fraternity prior to 1732, not least because his lodge appears to have existed before this time, but also because he had worked with many Free and Accepted Masons from as early as the 1680s.
     Indeed, according to the antiquarian John Aubrey and the diarist John Evelyn, Wren was accepted or ‘adopted’ as a Freemason at a convention held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in May 1691. It is perhaps significant that it was in 1691 that Hawksmoor began assisting Wren in the construction of the new cathedral.
     Furthermore, this project is known to have employed several masons who had attended the acception lodge that had been held on 11 March 1682 at the home of the London Masons’ Company. This lodge was not only attended by the celebrated antiquary, Elias Ashmole, but one of the stonemason attendees that day, John Thompson, also worked at Kensington Palace between 1690 and 1691, precisely when Hawksmoor was Clerk of Works at the Palace.
     One Free and Accepted Mason who worked closely with Hawksmoor throughout his career was John James.
     James had started out as apprentice to the King’s Master Carpenter, Matthew Banckes (1690-97), but in time his talent propelled him to the more exalted rank of surveyor and architect. In 1716 James joined Hawksmoor as one of the two surveyors appointed by the City Commissioners for the building of London’s Churches, and thereafter the two men worked closely on several projects: St. Alphege’s Church Greenwich, St. Luke Old Street, and St. Michael Cornhill, alongside fellow Freemason, Edward Strong junior. It is not known when James became a Freemason, although it is interesting to note that in 1725 he was listed as a member of the lodge that met at ‘The Swan’ in East Street, Greenwich, close to where he had been assistant Clerk of Works at Greenwich Hospital under Hawksmoor since 1705. Significantly, this lodge also boasted some other interesting notables such as the master stonemason, Edward Strong junior, and the painter, Sir James Thornhill, who had both worked on St. Paul’s Cathedral; Thornhill later served as Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge in 1729.
     Another key Freemason known to Hawksmoor was Nathaniel Blackerby. From January 1722 Blackerby was treasurer to the Commission building the new churches, and in this capacity he worked alongside the Commission’s two surveyors – Nicholas Hawksmoor and John James. As a Freemason Blackerby not only belonged to the prestigious lodge that met at the Horn Tavern, Westminster, but he was also a prominent figure in the Grand Lodge nomenclature and rose to become Deputy Grand Master in 1728. Around this time, Blackerby also paid for masonry work to be carried out on Hawksmoor’s house, and in 1731, the year after he stood down as Deputy Grand Master, both men toured England together, visiting Blenheim, Easton Neston, and Castle Howard. A few years later, Blackerby also married Hawksmoor’s daughter.
     Hawksmoor died on 25 March 1736 at his house in Millbank, Westminster. He was buried at Shenley where he is commemorated by a stone cut by the stonemason Andrews Jelfe – another Free and Accepted Mason. His obituary was scribed by his son-in-law and fellow Freemason, Nathaniel Blackerby who, in an edition of Read’s Weekly Journal, attested that Hawksmoor was not merely a master architect, but he was also ‘a very Skilful Mathematician, Geographer, and Geometrician’.

© M. D. J. Scanlan