Matthew Wren's brief incumbency of Norwich, which lasted almost two and a half years from December 1635 until April 1638, proved to be bitterly divisive to contemporaries, and continues to invite controversy. On the one hand, Wren remains the viperous figure of ‘Little Pope Regulus’ drawn by William Prynne. On the other hand, a sympathetic account of the bishop's work was provided some time after the Restoration by his great-nephew, Christopher – son of his famous namesake, Sir Christopher Wren – who understandably lauded his family's accomplishments. Christopher junior attested to his great-uncle's skills as a Hebraist. More than that, Matthew Wren was a zealously loyal son of the Church of England, who was to be remembered for ‘his Courage and Resolution in putting into Practice impartially the legal Ecclesiastical Discipline, in a most dissolute, hypocritical age’. For his pains, Bishop Wren became the victim of a malicious backlash from ‘troublesome’ puritans.

This partisan reading of Matthew Wren's career has been endorsed by his fullest biographer to date, Peter King, who, drawing upon Wren's extant papers in the Bodleian Library for a 1969 doctoral thesis, took the bishop at his own word. After all, Wren's correspondence is rich in details about mundane matters of diocesan government. Reflecting what is to be found in the sources, King concluded that Wren was no more than an overly efficient administrator, whose energetic pursuit of the moderate aims of order and uniformity hardly warranted his eighteen-year imprisonment by Parliament from 1642 until the return of monarchy in 1660.