Under Wren as Surveyor-General we have already mentioned the master-mason Edward Strong and his son Edward. John Oliver was Assistant-Surveyor and Purveyor, with a salary of £100; Lawrence Spencer was Clerk of the Works and Pay-master at a like salary; Thomas Russell was Clerk of the Cheque at a salary of £50, and called over the roll of workmen at six in the morning, one in the afternoon, and six in the evening.[68] It has to be added that Wren and the royal commissioners did not agree; and that about the time of the consecration of the choir, an Act was passed with a clause suspending "_a moiety of the Surveyor's Salary until the said Church should be finished, thereby the better to encourage him to finish the same with the utmost Diligence and Expedition_." His salary of £200 was thus reduced temporarily to £100, and the arrears, in accordance with the terms of this Act, were not made good until the completion. And worse than this was the charge brought against him that he deliberately delayed the building so that his pittance of two hundred a year might be continued. The commissioners knew nothing of building, and, like many people of to-day, may have thought that the old cathedrals were finished in a few years. Fortunately, Wren was an enthusiast in his great work, and the happy possessor of an equable temperament that nothing could seriously disturb. Otherwise this disgraceful treatment of so old a man might well have been fatal.
It is better to turn away from this as quickly as may be, and contemplate with a laudable pride the great achievement of our ancestors. The Plague, and still more the Fire, must have seriously impoverished the City; and in 1703 the great storm did immense damage. Of the five-and-thirty years the cathedral was in building, one half were years of war; and the public confidence and security were further disturbed by a revolution, by civil war in Ireland, and by plots and intrigues without number, following in the wake of a disputed succession. Yet the City raised, and almost without complaint, a sum enormous in those days, and which would, even in our own time, be reckoned as serious.
I have calculated the expense as follows. My figures lay no claim to infallibility--I doubt whether a chartered accountant could make a quite accurate balance-sheet--but they may be taken as fairly approximate:--