A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (23 page)

Not all the savants were men. Boyle’s older sister Lady Ranelagh was a great patron of intellectuals and virtuosi in her house in Pall Mall. Margaret Cavendish, now settled back at Welbeck, had already caused a stir during her exile in Antwerp by outlining her materialist views in her
Philosophical and Physical Opinions
in 1655. At Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, Anne, Viscountess Conway – a year younger than Charles – had her own alchemical laboratory and was deep in the study of abstruse texts on theosophy and mysticism. She conducted a long correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More and her house became a centre of scientific discussion. Her own book,
Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy
, published in 1690, after her death, was much admired by Leibniz.
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Country houses, London mansions and coffee-houses were thus full of talk of chemistry, physics and mechanics. During the Commonwealth different groups of theorists and experimenters had continued their research in groups that mingled royalists and parliamentarians, Anglicans and puritans, holding that these interests transcended all religious and political allegiances. ‘It is strange’, Boyle wrote in 1647, ‘that men should rather be quarrelling for a few trifling opinions, wherein they dissent, than to embrace one another for those many fundamental truths, wherein they agree.’
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During the 1650s, the circles that formed around John Wilkins in Oxford and Samuel Hartlib in London, and the neo-Platonists in Cambridge, had all argued for toleration and reason.

Their curiosity encompassed the universe, from the stars in the heavens to the veins in a human body and the microbes in the plaque on their teeth; from the telescopes and astronomical discoveries of Galileo and Kepler to Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood and Leeuwenhoek’s development of the microscope. England’s hero was Francis Bacon, who had set out a system for a new, systematic hunt for knowledge, based on observation and experiment. In
The New Atlantis
, written in 1626, he had put forward the idea of a public repository of knowledge and base for research. Called ‘Solomon’s House’, this would be dedicated to ‘knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.
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Mathematics and geometry now seemed to many the key to explaining the motions of the world, exemplified by the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, which sought to define all natural phenomena in terms of the impact, and repulsion, of bodies on each other. Different groups worked together in an atmosphere of passionate discussion: in London at the College of Physicians; at the so-called ‘Invisible College’, the circle surrounding the Prussian exile Samuel Hartlib, which was particularly interested in medical, agricultural and educational reform; and at the loose-knit club known as the ‘Philosophical College’, whose interests ranged across astronomy, mathematics, anatomy and mechanics.

One of the most dynamic members of this last group was the young cleric John Wilkins, a populariser of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and a writer on ideas of the universe and on mechanical powers. Applying theory to practical matters, he wrote vividly on the planets and on cryptography and language, and in his
Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry
he moved from simple machines like levers and pulleys to prophetic visions of flying machines, submarines and automata. Politically and theologically, Wilkins straddled the rift between parliamentarians and royalists. In his youth he had been a chaplain at court, but in the Commonwealth he became a supporter of parliament, marrying Cromwell’s sister Robina in 1656. When he became Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, he was famously open-minded, ‘with nothing of the Bigotry, Unmannerliness, or Censoriousness’ found elsewhere in Oxford.
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Men from London and Cambridge flocked to his discussion groups, including John Wallis, later Professor of Geometry, the mathematician and astronomer Seth Ward, whom Charles appointed Bishop of Exeter, and students like Robert Boyle and the young Christopher Wren.

Many were also members of the ‘Great Clubbe’ founded by another extraordinary figure, William Petty. As Cromwell’s doctor in Ireland he undertook a huge survey of the country and developed an interest in quantifying facts that brought him the name of England’s first political statistician. When Petty left Oxford, his club moved to Wilkins’s lodgings at Wadham. In 1654 Evelyn visited Wilkins and was delighted by his transparent apiaries, built like castles and palaces, and by the ‘many other artificial, mathematical, Magical curiosities’ including a thermometer and a ‘monstrous’ magnet.
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(On the same trip he met ‘that miracle of a Youth, Mr Christopher Wren’.) When Wilkins left in 1659, to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the group dispersed, some staying on in Oxford, others moving to London.

So much had happened in intellectual life during the Interregnum that the prevailing mood by 1660 was buoyant and optimistic. The Restoration itself seemed like an energising transfusion, filling most natural philosophers with hope. It brought back to the capital men who had been in exile, or in the provinces, alert for new opportunities. Many of the aristocrats, merchants and gentry who now filled London, especially during the parliamentary season, were avid collectors and ‘virtuosi’, eager for the novel and strange. In particular, the royalist exiles who had been together in Paris brought new ideas from their contacts with Descartes, Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi. London was also becoming the centre of the scientific instrument trade: in Long Acre and Chancery Lane you could buy microscopes, thermometers and telescopes of the finest quality. With the talk of experiments went an entrepreneurial vigour, a desire to apply the findings of the scholars to boost industry and create wealth, a matter of perpetual interest to Charles. But with it too went an anxiety that the new explanations of matter and energy might lead to unbelief, however much the leading figures justified their searches in terms of understanding the mysteries of Creation and the ways of God.

SOME OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS
who gathered at Oxford were among the crowds hurrying back to London at the Restoration. Wren was there already, having been recommended by Wilkins to Cromwell, at the age of twenty-five, as the new Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College. The college, on the edge of the City of London, between Bishopsgate and Broad Street, had been founded in the 1590s by the City merchant Thomas Gresham and was very different from the traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Its professors lectured in English as well as Latin, to anyone who chose to come, and it had strong links to the City, with its interest in navigation and mathematics. Petty was also now at Gresham and in 1660 the London and Oxford groups began to merge.

Wilkins, who lost his Cambridge post but was soon given a London parish, was still a central figure. On 28 November 1660, after an astronomy lecture by Wren, ten of these men met and determined to form a society, with Wilkins in the chair; twelve more, including Sir Kenelm Digby, were elected a fortnight later. The initial club included a smattering of courtiers, notably Viscount Brouncker, a mathematician and translator of Descartes, and Sir Robert Moray, who would be Charles’s chief link to the group. Moray was one of those interesting characters whom Charles always enjoyed talking to. Born and educated in Scotland, he had a lifelong interest in mathematics, chemistry and engineering: as a soldier in the French army in the 1640s, he had spent fifteen months in prison in Bavaria, studying the works on magnetism of Athanasius Kirchner. After Worcester, he worked with the royalist resistance before joining the court in exile. He was fifty at the Restoration, a man of strong presbyterian principles and a firm, though more moderate, ally of Lauderdale. Moray was one of the first courtiers to be given rooms in Whitehall. A laboratory was next to his rooms, and he and Charles would work there together. When Samuel Sorbière visited three years later, he found it ‘very edifying’, he said, ‘to find a Person imploy’d in Matters of State, and of such Excellent merit, and one who had been engaged a great Part of his Life in Warlike Commands, and the Affairs of the Cabinet, apply himself in making machines in St James’s Park and adjusting Telescopes’.
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After the royalists’ exile in Paris and the Low Countries, especially Leiden, it was fashionable for aristocrats to be interested in instruments, clocks, and experiments. Prince Rupert, who had been acclaimed as a genius at mathematics in his youth, was fascinated by mechanics, and his library was full of works on anatomy, chemistry and physics. As well as Moray and Brouncker, early courtier members of the society included Pepys’s boss, Lord Sandwich, Sir Alexander Bruce and Sir Paul Neile. In October 1660 Charles himself spent an evening at Gresham, ‘where he was entertained with the admirable long Tube, with which he viewed the heavens, to his very great satisfaction, insomuch that he commanded Sr P Neile to cause the like to be made’.
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The thirty-five-foot telescope was set up in the Privy Garden. On the day after Charles’s coronation, Christiaan Huygens (who had skipped the Coronation to watch the transit of Mercury) spent the day with the Duke of York and others, observing ‘the conjunction of Saturn with the moon, in the garden at Whitehall, with Mr Neile’s long telescopes’.
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At the new club the courtiers were joined by old experimenters like Kenelm Digby and Ashmole, by London lawyers, doctors and intellectuals, by writers like Dryden, and Oxford and Cambridge scholars like Wallis and Ward. Several were brilliant amateurs, like John Evelyn, who had been working for years on his great, unpublished book on gardening,
Elysium Britannicum
, and whose voluminous manuscripts show an interest in art, poetry and theology as well as alchemy, medicine, mathematics, physics, mechanics, natural history and chemistry.
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The new society was really an extension of the kind of clubs that met in the coffee-houses or in private houses: over the next fifteen years, the membership was top-heavy with noblemen, politicians and country gentlemen, with a solid body of clergymen, lawyers, doctors and civil servants and a small sprinkling of City merchants.

Their aim, said the first historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, was to enjoy ‘the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being engaged in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age’.
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The group now established hoped, they announced, to begin ‘a more regular way of debating things; and that, according to the manner in other countries, where there were voluntary associations of men into academies for advancement of the various parts of learning, they might do something answerable here for the promoting of experimental philosophy’.
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In its stated aims and its hope to match the private academies of Paris and Florence, the new club was a step towards answering the calls for a permanent college that had been made by Bacon, Hartlib, Wilkins and others. (Evelyn was one of many who had dreamed of some form of college – in his case an idealistic, even monastic centre somewhere in the country.) The new era, with its promise of stability, seemed the right time to set up the society on a firm basis. Moreover the country now had, William Petty declared with comic inaccuracy, ‘a Philosophicall and Mathematico-Mechanical King, one that cared not for the vulgar exercise of the body’.
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To succeed, they knew they had to win the goodwill of the king. Moray told him straight away about their first gathering and brought back a warm message of approval. Immediately they set to work, drawing up a list of contributions and experiments. Dr Merret was to talk on the history of refining, Dr Goddard to show his experiments ‘on producing colours by mixing chemicals’, and Mr Boyle was asked to bring in his cylinder and ‘to shew at his best convenience the experiment of the air’ – his air-pump was the great attraction, wheeled out to entertain the Danish ambassador a few weeks later.
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The group embarked on experiments with pendulums as well as papers on shipping. On 16 January 1661, at the ‘Philosophic Club’, Evelyn saw a demonstration of the Torricellian experiment, using a mercury tube to show that the atmosphere had weight (the basis of the barometer). The Society set up a committee to plan a ‘quicksilver experiment’, an investigation into air pressure, testing how a mercury barometer would work on the summit of the 12,000ft Pica de Tenerife. In early January, over a pot of ale, Ralph Greatorex impressed Pepys with the plans for this expedition and next day Pepys went with him to Gresham College ‘(where I never was before) and saw the manner of the house, and find great company of persons of Honour there’.
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Everyone involved felt exhilarated.

There were also more practical initiatives, like drawing up a ‘history of Mechanical trades’. Evelyn provided a list of headings, and the detailed work was done later, sporadically, by others. Evelyn also found support for publishing his own work,
Sculptura: or the History and Art of Calcography and Engraving on Copper
, for which Prince Rupert, a man with a passion for experiment, promised to teach him the secret of mezzotint which he had practised himself in 1658; this had been developed in the early years of the century but never publicly explained.
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Every week there were new experiments, particularly with the air-pump. ‘We put in a Snake but could not kill it, by exhausting the aire,’ wrote Evelyn cheerfully, ‘onely made it extreamly sick, but the Chick died of Convulsions out right, in a short space’. The other great diarist, Pepys, also suggests how widespread the interest was, dining with acquaintances who describe the habits of snakes or tarantulas, or who show off after dinner with ‘Chymical glasses, which break all to dust by breaking off the little small end – which is a great mystery to me’.
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These small blown-glass bubbles, which exploded when punctured and crumbled to dust, had been demonstrated at the Royal Society the year before, and had also been studied by Margaret Cavendish while in exile in Antwerp in 1657.
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They became known as ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, and the London ones were probably by-products from the glasshouses that Rupert had set up in Chelsea and Windsor, where he supervised the furnaces himself in a sooty old apron. In March 1661 Charles himself sent one of these drops for the society to investigate: ‘the reasons were considered, but so many objections made, as was hard to solve’.
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The society’s concerns ranged wide. They undertook tests at the Minories – the furnaces of the Mint, in the Tower of London – to see if materials became heavier when burnt. They discussed barnacles and snowflakes, the reproduction of vipers and the nature of gravity. In the summer they tried out a diving bell in the dock at Deptford, letting down by cable a heavy contraption of cast lead, in which a brave pioneer spent nearly half an hour under water. They puzzled over poisons, watched plants flash like gunpowder in a fire, and tried to capture a spider within a circle of ‘ground unicorn’s horn’. The forward-looking Dr Clarke described the ‘manner of injecting into the veins’ while the alchemists talked of ‘sympathetical cures’. A matter of great debate was a letter received from Huygens concerning the rings of Saturn. When Wren read of his discovery of Saturn’s first moon he dashed off a long reply, claiming that he and others had observed this two years before.

Collaboration was often spiced with competition and argument. As the minutes show, the society’s varied interests and haphazard exploration often led them into curious cul-de-sacs, as much as solid achievement, but they always maintained their belief that knowledge gained from observation and experiment had to be preferable to the dubious conclusions derived from preconceived theories. In 1661 Boyle published
The Sceptical Chymist
, a dialogue between an old-style hermetic philosopher and a modern sceptic who wants to question the Aristotelians, Paracelsians, alchemists and other theorists, in an effort to drag ‘the chymists’ doctrine out of their dark and smoakie laboratories’ and bring it ‘into the open light, and shew the weaknesses of their proofs’.
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In March 1661, Sir Robert Moray was elected president of the society, an ideal link between Gresham and the court. Very cannily, knowing of Charles’s old link with the family, and also of his love of intricate inventions, Moray intrigued Charles by describing the work of their talented young star, Christopher Wren, who had now left Gresham to become Professor of Astronomy in Oxford. Wren had already sent the king some drawings of a flea and a louse, as seen through a microscope. Charles was entranced and in May, Moray and Neile instructed Wren that ‘The King hath commanded us to lay a double Charge upon you, in his Name’.
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He had asked him to make:

a Globe representing accurately the figure of the Moon, as the Best Tubes represent it: and to delineate by the Help of the Microscope the Figures of all the Insects, and small living Creatures you can light upon…If it were needful to add any further Excitement to your industry, we should tell you how much our whole Society is rejoiced, that his Majesty has a just Esteem of your Parts, and honours you with his Commands.

Wren declined to make the microscopic drawings, but he did set about his lunar globe. In earlier Oxford days Wilkins and Wren had built an eighty-foot telescope to observe the entire face of the moon and to map this, Wren had developed a special eye-piece. Now he put these beautiful maps onto a globe of painted cardboard, and had it mounted and presented it to Charles (without showing it to the society), inscribed with the dedication, ‘To Charles II, King of Great Britain, France and Scotland, for the expansion of whose Dominions since no one Globe can suffice, Christopher Wren dedicates another in the Lunar Sphere’. Charles placed this elegant, evocative lunar globe, showing all the hills and valleys, gleaming surfaces and shadows, on its stand in his cabinet, and showed it to all who came.

Wren’s portrait, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, shows him pointing to the new skyline of London. He holds his plan of St Paul’s, and his mathematical instruments, celestial globe and telescope are by his side.

The society became another of Charles’s diversions. In January 1661 he sent Moray down to a meeting, with two magnets and a message ‘that he expected an account from the society of some of the most considerable experiments upon them’. In March he sent Sir Paul Neile with his ‘five little glass bubbles’, two filled with liquid and two solid; in July he sent Sir Samuel Tuke, with a paper of seeds that had been sent to him from Warwickshire, where it had ‘rained wheat’.
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He chatted to Evelyn, as he sat at supper at Whitehall, about the recent viewing of Saturn through Neile’s large telescope, and kept Petty in conversation for half an hour in front of forty lords, ‘upon the philosophy of Shipping, loadstone, skreen’d guns, the feathering of arrows, the vegetation of plants, the history of trades, etc.’
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