A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (22 page)

CHARLES WAS FAR MORE AWARE
than Clarendon and his other older advisers that ways of thinking were changing. This was most obviously the case with religion, where so many sects appealed to individual judgement rather than the guidance of a minister in their relationship with their God. But it was also true in the wider realm of philosophy, especially natural philosophy. Here too, there were competing systems explaining the ways of nature. The ancient Aristotelian thinking and the medieval hermetic tradition of the alchemists clashed and overlapped with newer Paracelsian chemical theories and the mechanical theories of Descartes. There were arguments, in particular, about the nature of space. Was the empty space between objects a vacuum, or was the universe full of invisible but touching and intermingling bodies, a ‘subtle aetherial fluid’?

This might seem to have little to do with kingship, but Thomas Hobbes, Charles’s teacher in Paris, had made natural philosophy overtly political – and anti-clerical – in
Leviathan
in 1651. Hobbes had given a fair copy of the manuscript to the young King on his return to France after the defeat at Worcester, and his views and anti-Catholic stance were found so dangerous by Henrietta Maria that within a couple of months he was hounded from court. But although Charles was briefly upset by
Leviathan
, ‘his majestie had a good Opinion of him, and sayd openly that he thought Mr Hobbes never meant him hurt’.
¹

Hobbes was a ‘plenist’, belonging to the camp that believed the universe was full of matter. There could be no such thing therefore as ‘incorporeal bodies’, the very term was a contradiction. So when priests referred to souls, to spirits, to angels and divinities in these terms they were talking nonsense. But it was useful nonsense, as it allowed them to set up an invisible authority in opposition to the civil power, the sovereign. For Catholics, this invisible power was embodied in the Pope but the protestant sects, even more dangerously, appealed directly to the Bible. Hobbes saw this as one of the causes of civil war, a point he repeated in his condemnation of clerics in
Behemoth
in 1668, alluding to ‘Ministers, as they called themselves, of Christ; and sometimes, in their sermons to the people, God’s ambassadors; pretending to have a right from God to govern every one in their parish, and their assembly the whole nation’.
²

The material world was also the great concern of Robert Boyle, the seventh son of the Earl of Cork and younger brother of Lords Burlington and Orrery. ‘I could be very well content’, he wrote, ‘to have scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.’
³
But Boyle – like Newton – found no conflict between nature, subjected to the enquiries of reason, and his religious faith. Reason itself was a divine light, granted to mankind. The main aim of his enquiries, Boyle said, was to raise in himself and others ‘vaster thoughts of the greatness and glory, and of the wisdom and goodness of God’.
⁴
In terms of natural philosophy, he rejected all governing philosophical theories like plenism, in favour of a new experimental science that would gather information through observation and experiment and then make deductions as to cause and effect. Telescopes and microscopes had shown that things long taken for granted were other than what they seemed. In 1660 Boyle was making claims about the nature of the prime element, the air, and using his new, expensive air-pump. Nothing could be certain: everything had moved into the realm of probability.

Robert Boyle, engraved with his air-pump below left, and furnace, crucibles and instruments to the right

Was this also a dangerous challenge to ideas of authority? This approach did not only question established systems but the preeminence of reason itself. Simply in terms of the way these philosophers thought, an attack on the hierarchy of understanding could also have political undertones, as shown by Robert Hooke’s suggestive language: ‘The Understanding is to order all the inferiour services of the lower faculties; but yet it is to do this only as a
lawful Master
, and not as a
Tyrant
…It must
watch
the irregularities of the Senses, but it must not go before them, or
prevent
their information.’
⁵
Boyle’s
New Experiments Physico-Mechanical
was published in June 1660, the honeymoon month of the Restoration. In it Boyle explained what his air-pump could do, its failures as well as successes, establishing himself as a modest man of good faith who had no wish to hoodwink his readers – just as Charles initially presented himself as a ‘sober man’ who wished not to impose rigid systems but to heal rifts that were not of his making. Charles was intrigued by the new knowledge. He wanted to accommodate different views, to be open and accessible to all his subjects while still claiming the authority that Hobbes saw as vital to stability.

Like Boyle, Charles was convinced that the way to create a consensus, a platform for agreement and inclusion, was to create a forum where men of all persuasions could come to discuss new ideas without rancour. The church, for example, had been split by profound animosities, ‘which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed, or better understood’.
⁶
In this case the ‘free air’ of discussion was supposed to be the Worcester Conference, while in natural philosophy it was the club at Gresham College which quickly developed into the Royal Society. Boyle and his allies – who included clerics like John Wilkins – used a language similar to that of the moderate churchmen, being wary of ‘enthusiasts’ and sectaries, ‘dogma’ and doctrine. Like Charles at Breda, Boyle wanted to embrace dissidents within the group, rather than creating enemies outside. And, he insisted, they could only be persuaded by a positive use of language: showing the alchemists, for example, how close their practice was to experimental chemistry, while being careful not to attack their underlying ideas. ‘Quarrelsome and injurious’ words must be abjured; courtesy was vital:

For if I civilly endeavour to reason a man out of his opinions, I make myself but one work to do, namely, to convince his understanding; but, if in a bitter or exasperating way I oppose his errors, I increase the difficulties I would surmount, and have as well his affections against me as his judgment.

This was also Charles’s preferred approach: affability and courtesy were important weapons in his arsenal, whereas Clarendon made enemies by his quick temper and disdain for opponents. At the Savoy Conference in 1661 the calm air of discussion had quickly broken down into ‘bitter or exasperating’ argument: once they felt openly slighted, the presbyterian ministers threw up their defences.

Charles was therefore intrigued by the approach of the experimental philosophers, especially their call to lay aside factions and unite in a common search for knowledge. The novelty of their work also attracted him. Like many young aristocrats of the time, he liked the oddity of their findings and the mechanical ingenuity of their inventions. He had first become interested at the age of sixteen, when he and Buckingham were spending bored months in St Germain. In the view of his first governor Newcastle, and his earlier gentle tutor Brian Duppa, later Bishop of Winchester, physics and chemistry and mechanics were not part of a gentleman’s education, let alone a future king’s, but Charles was inquisitive by nature, entertained by the new and the strange. In Paris his current tutor, John Earle – author of
Microcosmographie, or, A Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters
– read with him daily, and Charles also studied mathematics with Hobbes, who was an extremely influential natural philosopher as well as a political thinker. Suddenly inspired, for once Charles worked hard, grappling with the ‘mechanics of physics’ of Descartes, making himself into a competent chemist and poring over the mathematics of navigation, which fascinated him already because of his love of the sea.

When Charles moved into Whitehall at the Restoration, he set up a sundial in the Privy Garden, and his private cabinet contained a huge portfolio of maps of Britain by Dutch engravers as well as a curious model ship. His love of clocks was famous, and he was said to have seven clocks in his bedroom, all chiming at different times, as well as one in the antechamber which told the direction of the wind as well as the time. The grandfather clocks of the day were great old monsters, eight foot high, with a huge swinging pendulum and a tendency to bong, bong every quarter of an hour. But in 1660, among the clocks in Charles’s cabinet at Whitehall, there was one ‘that shewed the rising & setting of the son in the Zodiaque; the Sunn represented in a face & raies of Gold, upon an azure skie, observing the diurnal & annual motion, rising & setting behind a landscape of hills, very divertisant’.
⁷

This clock was up-to-date as well as beautiful, having been made by Ahasuerus Fromontal, a Dutch-born clockmaker who was the first to make pendulum clocks in England, following the system that Christiaan Huygens had published as recently as 1658. During the latter days of the exile courtiers like Alexander Bruce (later Earl of Kincardine) and Robert Moray had filled their empty days with their experimental interests: Moray had a chemistry laboratory and both worked on pharmacology and medicine. They were also intrigued by clocks, and in 1658 began corresponding not only about pendulum clocks but about new watches that might keep time well without varying. They worked on improved clocks with great enthusiasm, both before and after the Restoration. Later, in the Hague, Bruce worked with Huygens on marine clocks, ‘pendulum-regulated timekeepers’, an attempt to solve the problem of measuring longitude.
⁸
In days to come Charles would always have the latest technological wonders, like the spring-driven pocket watches designed by Huygens and Hooke – and a servant to wind up all his clocks. Charles also had his own laboratory beneath the Privy Gallery at Whitehall, where doctors undertook occasional anatomical dissections and demonstrators mounted experiments. After his death John Evelyn dismissed him airily as ‘a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping, not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines and the easier mechanical mathematics’. But he was more serious than that. On his restoration he was keen to promote the new knowledge, and Sir Paul Neile and Robert Moray kept him abreast of the experiments and arguments among the philosophical clubs of Oxford and London.

He also welcomed his old tutor Hobbes, whom he had spotted in the Strand two or three days after his first arrival in London and quickly invited to court. He enjoyed the irascible Hobbes’s ‘witt and smart repartees’, delivered in his mild West Country tones. Hobbes was good company, and sang bawdy songs, very badly. The wits at court liked to provoke him, remembered his friend Aubrey, but he feared none of them and replied in kind; ‘The King would call him the beare; Here comes the Beare to be bayted.’
⁹
Charles treasured Samuel Cooper’s miniature of the old man and granted him a pension, and Hobbes in turn dedicated his
Problema Physica
of 1662 to the king.

Thomas Hobbes, by Samuel Cooper

The new natural philosophy and the old overlapped. Chemistry and alchemy were a diversion of the princes of Europe and had been taken up by many courtiers during the exile. Among them was Bristol’s uncle, Sir Kenelm Digby – an ardent Catholic, Chancellor to Henrietta Maria in exile, whose life as a soldier, lover, rake, pirate and scholar reads like a romance. He was a friend of Hobbes and a disciple of Descartes, but also a student of the old Aristotelian systems, and of Paracelsian chemistry and alchemy. For several years, he had set up a laboratory at his house, which became a salon for philosophers and writers, mathematicians and alchemists. Charles was particularly interested in alchemy and in 1660 Elias Ashmole, eager to gain favour at court, presented him with three of his alchemical works, published during the Interregnum: a translation of the works of the astrologer John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I; an anthology of alchemical verse,
Theatrum chemicum Britannicum
, and his treatise,
The Way to Bliss
. (Perhaps overdoing things, his gifts to Charles also included a pickled foetus in a bottle.)
¹⁰
Charles responded generously, making Ashmole Comptroller of the Excise, appointing him Windsor Herald, and, almost more significantly, giving him full powers to collect and transcribe any documents he found useful.