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In 1635, the poet Edmund Waller wrote in celebration of the new, albeit highly incongruous, porticoed west front added by Inigo Jones to 'Old' St Paul's Cathedral. In Waller's poem 'Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls', Charles I is credited with completing his father's vision of improving the Cathedral's dilapidated state. The steeple was never repaired after being toppled by the violent thunderstorm in June 1561, and the extensive damage to the roof was inadequately addressed: Waller could justly call the old Cathedral 'Our Nations glory, and our Nations crime'. The poem is a canny performance. Waller's task is to celebrate a not altogether satisfactory piece of restoration in a context where others were calling for an entirely new building - a proposal that carried divisive political overtones. Eschewing 'Ambition' that would 'affect the fame / Of some new structure; to have born her name' (lines 27-8), the king displays both the modesty and greatness of his mind 'to frame no new Church, but the old refine' (line 36). In tacit response to Puritan attacks on Laudian reform, Waller presents Charles as a moderate whose innovations are of a piece with the original architecture of the church.
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