Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

St Paul's Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial

Not Charles II’s words — a 20th-century retelling King Charles II 1630–1685 · King of England, Scotland and Ireland
Disputed Free to reuse

The king really did praise Wren’s design, and he really did use the word artificial — but in a warrant, not a quip. The document signed at Whitehall on 14 May 1675 approved the design because “We found it very artificial, proper, and useful.” The tidy three-adjective sentence people quote, and the tour-of-the-cathedral scene around it, cannot be traced to Charles II at all.

Last verified 7 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“St Paul's Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial” King Charles II's royal warrant of 14 May 1675 approved Christopher Wren's design for St Paul's Cathedral because “We found it very artificial, proper, and useful.” The familiar “amusing, awful, and artificial” version is a 20th-century retelling — first printed in 1938, and credited there to King James. · Verbatim: “We have particularly pitched upon one, as well because We found it very artificial, proper, and useful.”

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of truth, time and creativity. Theme: "St Paul's Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "St Paul's Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Document
Royal warrant approving Wren’s design for the new St Paul’s
Dated
Whitehall, 14 May 1675 — “in the 27th Year of Our Reign”
Countersigned
By His Majesty’s command, Henry Coventry (Secretary of State)
Printed in
Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens
Published
1750, London — compiled by the architect’s grandson

… whereas among divers Designs which have been presented to Us, We have particularly pitched upon one, as well because We found it very artificial, proper, and useful; as because it was so ordered that it might be built and finish’d by Parts: We do therefore by these Presents signify Our Royal Approbation of the said Design … Given at Our Court at Whitehall, the 14th Day of May, 1675, in the 27th Year of Our Reign.

Spelling modernised from the 1750 printing, which sets the long ſ (“becauſe”, “uſeful”). The three words that matter — artificial, proper, and useful — are verbatim.

Printed royal warrant, 1750 edition
Parentalia (1750) at the Internet Archive
Parentalia (1750) — full text at the Internet Archive

How we verified this

  • The warrant’s wording was checked directly against the OCR of the 1750 first edition of Parentalia at the Internet Archive ↗, which reads “We found it very artificial, proper, and uſeful” and ends “Given at Our Court at Whitehall, the 14th Day of May, 1675 … By His Majeſty’s Command, Henry Coventry.”
  • The provenance of the popular version follows Quote Investigator’s survey ↗, which finds the earliest “amusing, awful, and artificial” instance in a 1938 Sunday supplement article, “How Talk Becomes Language”, where the words are credited to King James.
  • Quote Investigator’s own conclusion is the limit of what can be claimed: there is good evidence Charles II or a representative described the plans as “very artificial, proper, and useful”, while for “awful, amusing and pompous” it has “so far been unable to locate substantive citations in the proper time-period.”
Public domain

The warrant is a 1675 English state document and the text quoted here comes from a book published in London in 1750. Both are far beyond any term of copyright, so the passage is in the public domain in the United States.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

The story is told about four different monarchs, and the adjectives change with the telling. That instability is the clearest sign that the sentence is a retelling rather than a record — and the versions all postdate the reign they describe.

King James Earliest known instance of the famous version

The first appearance of “amusing, awful, and artificial” located by Quote Investigator ↗ is a 1938 article in the Sunday supplement “This Week Magazine”, which credits King James, not Charles II. Reader’s Digest reprinted it in 1939 and gave it mass circulation.

Queen Anne

A 1966 newspaper advertisement in the Times-Picayune of New Orleans gave the three adjectives to Queen Anne, who reigned when the cathedral was completed in 1710.

King William III

A 1989 newspaper column on words printed a reader’s note crediting “awful, pompous, and artificial” to William III — a version the science-fiction writer Poul Anderson had used in a 1968 short story.

the dean and chapter of St Paul’s Not the king at all

A 1903 history of English churches has the design chosen by the dean because it was “the most awful and artificial” — praise placed in the clergy’s mouths rather than the king’s, and still without a period citation.

What is documented is narrower and older than the anecdote: a warrant signed at Whitehall on 14 May 1675 approving Wren’s design because “We found it very artificial, proper, and useful” — verifiable in the 1750 Parentalia ↗. Everything else in the story is later.

Context

Why it mattered

The anecdote survives because it is a tidy lesson about language drifting under our feet: in the 17th century awful meant awe-inspiring, amusing meant amazing, and artificial meant made with art. All three glosses are sound, which is exactly why the story is so hard to dislodge — the moral is true even though the quotation is not.

The word that genuinely carries the old sense is the one in the warrant. When Charles II’s clerks wrote that the design was “very artificial”, they were calling it skilfully contrived; by 1873 a writer in Fraser’s Magazine had to stop and explain to readers that “the word artificial, we need scarcely explain, then meant artistic.”

The moral of the story is true. The quotation is not.

Read the full story

St Paul’s was rebuilt between 1675 and 1711 after the old cathedral burned in the Great Fire, a span covering several reigns — which is part of why the tale can be attached to Charles II, James II, William III or Anne without anyone noticing a problem.

The warrant also undercuts the scene the anecdote needs. It approves a design from drawings, before building began, and Wren then altered the scheme heavily as work went on. There was no completed cathedral for a king to tour and pronounce upon in the moment the story describes.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Time Creativity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: “St Paul’s Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: every variant monarch and adjective, dated, with the 1938 first appearance of the famous version.
Parentalia (1750) — full textarchive.org

Scanned first edition of the Wren family memoirs. The royal warrant, with “very artificial, proper, and useful”, appears in the St Paul’s section.
Parentalia (1750) — scan detailsarchive.org

Catalogue record and page images for the same volume, if you would rather read the warrant in facsimile than in OCR.
Charles IIen.wikipedia.org

Life dates and reign (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685; restored to the throne in 1660).
Christopher Wrenen.wikipedia.org

The architect on the other side of the anecdote (30 October 1632 – 8 March 1723).
St Paul’s Cathedralen.wikipedia.org

The building itself, including the 1675–1711 rebuilding the warrant set in motion.

The author

About King Charles II

King Charles II

1630–1685 · King of England, Scotland and Ireland

Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 after the Interregnum, and reigned until his death in 1685. His reign took in the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 — the fire that destroyed old St Paul’s and made Wren’s cathedral necessary. He was a patron of the sciences, chartering the Royal Society, of which Wren was a president.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Wren, Christopher, comp. Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens. London: Printed for T. Osborn and R. Dodsley, 1750. Royal warrant of Charles II, Whitehall, 14 May 1675.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘St Paul's Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial’?” Last verified 7 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/st-pauls-cathedral-is-amusing-awful-and-artificial/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied