The Forbidden Universe (22 page)

Ernest Lee Tuveson observed that Bacon’s ‘conception of natural processes owes much to hermeticism, and other traditional [i.e. esoteric] sources’,
¹³
and asked why he
therefore
condemns the likes of Dee, Fludd and Paracelsus. He concludes that, although Bacon shared their underlying philosophy, he disagreed about the methods that should be used to put it into practice, advocating the application of objective reasoning instead of magic. However, we can
suggest a rather more expedient, if not cynical, motive: Bacon was in need of the king’s favour, and was all too aware that there were certain subjects that were best avoided.

King James I, offspring of the doomed Mary, Queen of Scots was a weird little man with a paranoid terror of witches and would go to any lengths to protect himself from the threat of witchcraft, real or imagined (mostly the latter, but your innocence would hardly matter if you were accused and condemned and rolled down a hill inside flaming barrels on his orders). It was James’ horror of all things occult that had been responsible for Dr Dee’s decline.

In many ways Bacon was Dee’s successor, another man of many talents who was involved in court and diplomatic activity under the patronage of the monarch. He rose to prominence at court immediately after Dee’s fall from grace, for example producing the masque performed on the day following the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatine. But rising to prominence in those days was no guarantee of a long happy life – one had to work at it constantly, which usually involved shameless amounts of regal boot-licking.

Bacon was a highly ambitious man. As Arthur Johnston notes in his introduction to a 1973 edition of
The Advancement of Learning
, Bacon’s life was ‘a long pursuit of political power’.
¹⁴
In practice this meant mounting a campaign to attract the king’s attention and favour – which certainly worked. In fact, as Jerome R. Ravetz, lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds cautions: ‘All Bacon’s published writings are propaganda; their function was to convert his audience, and their relation to his own private views was purely incidental.’
¹⁵

Bacon enjoyed a succession of appointments at court that culminated in his elevation as Lord Chancellor in 1618. As
an appeal to James I’s intellectual pretensions,
The Advancement of Learning
opened his campaign of
self-advancement
and eventually earned him a job putting his proposed reforms of learning and education into practice. Fittingly, the very first paragraph includes the hardly subtle appeal for ‘the good pleasure of your Majesty’s
employments
’.
¹⁶
The book was addressed directly to James, whom he overtly flatters: ‘There hath not been since Christ’s time any King or temporal Monarch, which has been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human.’
¹⁷
Bacon certainly knew how to lay it on with a trowel, echoing Bruno’s wildly over-the-top flattery of James’ predecessor, Elizabeth I. More interestingly he dared to liken James to Hermes Trismegistus:

This particular description of Hermes is taken from Marsilio Ficino – which presumably Bacon relied on James not knowing.

Bacon’s call for a ‘fraternity in learning and illumination’ may have influenced the authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos, but if so he was also influenced in turn by them. There are clear signs that he was familiar with the
Fama Fraternitatis
in his utopian
New Atlantis
, published in 1627, the year after he died, and which was a particular influence on the Royal Society’s founders. Bacon seems also to have read and digested Campanella’s
City of the Sun
(published four years earlier) – or maybe it is a coincidence that his plot, too, involves shipwrecked sailors encountering the inhabitants of a perfect society (the preservers of an early,
pure form of Christianity, whose officials wear white turbans bearing red crosses)?

Given Bacon’s unofficial interests, it is rather ironic that he is seen to represent the beginning of the divergence of magic and science.

A more elusive and unequivocally arcane influence on the origins of the Royal Society was Freemasonry. Although the origins of Freemasonry are still controversial and obscure, whatever its roots it had certainly emerged as a significant institution by the mid-seventeenth century. Many historians have seen the Brotherhood as a repository of the Hermetic tradition, though this is not to suggest that Freemasonry is only about Hermeticism.
¹⁹

Significantly, Masonic writer Robert Lomas points out that one of the rituals an initiate undergoes when entering the second degree makes specific reference to the
heliocentric
theory: ‘The sun being at the centre and the Earth revolving around the same on its own axis … the sun is always at the meridian with respect to Freemasonry.’
²⁰
Even in the mid-seventeenth century heliocentricity was still not fully accepted – and in Catholic countries was an outright heresy – so the Masons’ emphasis is all the more telling.

A Masonic influence on the early Royal Society is now generally acknowledged, but its extent and significance are more controversial. However, what is less contested is that the Society’s main connection with the Freemasons was embodied by one of the driving forces behind its foundation – the man who secured its royal patronage, Sir Robert Moray (1609–74). His Masonic initiation in 1641 has the distinction of being the first to be recorded on English soil.

Described by Lomas as ‘a first-rate fixer and born survivor’,
²¹
Moray was a mixture of James Bond and soldier of fortune – but with mystical trappings. His origins remain
obscure, but he first made his mark as a member of the Scots Guard of Louis XIII’s army in 1633, when he spied for Cardinal Richelieu. He then turns up as the quartermaster of the Scottish Covenanters’ Army when it marched on England in 1640. This campaign was part of the struggle over control of the Church in Scotland during which the Scots occupied parts of northern England including Newcastle, where Moray was initiated into a Masonic lodge on 20 May 1641. It is generally thought that he used his Masonic connections for intelligence work. After the end of the Covenanters’ campaign, he returned to the French court for yet more soldiering and spying and eventually established himself as an emissary between the French court and that of Charles I, who knighted him in 1643. Moray went on to become the King’s secretary, and after Charles’ execution he joined Charles II’s exiled court in Paris and became heavily involved in the negotiations to set him on the restored English throne.

With the monarchy restored, Moray based himself in London, where he became one of the twelve that formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. At their second meeting in December 1660, he took the encouraging news that the King approved of their aims and was prepared to give the society his royal endorsement.

However, all was not well within the ranks of the early Society. It is evident that there was a struggle behind the scenes between those who followed a more Hermetic/Rosicrucian model of a learned society and those who shared Bacon’s vision. The Hermetic version lost. This happened during the securing of the royal charter, which is normally portrayed as a simple intervention by Sir Robert Moray, enthusiast for the project and close friend of the King. But papers lost for three hundred years and rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century reveal a welter of plotting behind the scenes. Prime mover in this was Baron
Skytte, a Swedish nobleman and confidant of King Karl Gustav, who was in London to promote the creation of a Protestant Alliance. Also interested in the new learning, Skytte attended the lectures at Gresham College.

On 17 December 1660, Hartlib wrote to John Worthington that since his last letter of ten days before:

These papers, he goes on, were sent to him by Skytte, and comprise:

Skytte had evidently resurrected Hartlib’s plans. However, although Boyle supported them, they ultimately failed because of opposition from other founding members. Hartlib wrote to Worthington in April 1661, ‘There becomes nothing of Lord Skytte’s business, & I believe the other virtuosi will not have it that it should go forward.’
²⁴
After the royal charter was granted in July 1662, Skytte returned to Sweden, and Hartlib died the following year.

In response to the Royal Society’s publication in 1667 of
its early official history, by Thomas Sprat – later Charles II’s chaplain and the Bishop of Rochester – Worthington railed that the society was ‘materialistic and for nothing but what gratifies externall sense.’
²⁵
His outburst underlines criticism that the Society had failed to realize its full potential because it had rejected the more philosophical and metaphysical elements championed by Hartlib and Baron Skytte. The essential difference between the two visions of a learned society is that Hartlib’s had the reforming aspect that went back to Andreae and the Rosicrucian manifestos, and beyond that, to Campanella – and ultimately to Bruno.

One wonders exactly why a society, no matter how well connected, would be in quite so much of a hurry to rush out its official history, just seven years after it was founded. Their haste may represent a desire for the victors to etch their triumph in the minds of its readers, but it also suggests the promotion of a version of events that was economical with the truth.

Another sign of the Royal Society’s Hermetic eclipse was the sidelining of John Wilkins, the man who had started the club at Wadham College and a Rosicrucian-friendly founder. Although he was appointed as the Society’s secretary, he shared this role with a newcomer, the
German-born
theologian and diplomat Henry Oldenburg, and was soon marginalized.

Was the struggle over the direction and control of the Royal Society simply about the scientific philosophy it should adopt? In fact there appears to have been more to it even than that. One result of the organization of the new Society was that Oldenburg, as its foreign secretary, inherited Hartlib’s network of correspondents, and he undoubtedly used his position for intelligence-gathering of a more politically sensitive kind.

Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s curator responsible for organizing experiments, complained that Oldenburg ‘made
a trade of intelligence’.
²⁶
In fact, he used his network for gathering not just scientific but also political information, the latter on behalf of the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, even arranging for all the Society’s correspondence from abroad to be delivered to the office of Arlington’s
under-secretary
. Oldenburg was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months as a suspected spy during the Anglo-Dutch war of 1667, only being released when peace was made.
²⁷

As Sir Robert Moray was also a spy, this raises the question of whether one reason the Royal Society was created was as a cover for intelligence-gathering. After all, it still remains unclear why Charles II was quite so interested in the Royal Society. What was in it for him? Although this suggestion might seem absurd, bear in mind that in its early days the Society was not the celebrated and distinguished institution it is today. It was only when Isaac Newton became its president in 1703 (his presidency lasted for twenty-four years) that it could bask in his immense prestige. John Gribbin writes that by the end of Newton’s tenure the society has completed ‘the process whereby a gentleman’s club became a pillar of the establishment’.
²⁸

If the reforming side of the Hermetic tradition had been extinguished by the time the Royal Society came into being, its influence over the scientific revolution had not waned. And it reached its final, and greatest, flowering in the person of ‘the most outstanding scientific intellect of all time’,
²⁹
Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely regarded as the greatest scientific genius in history, and his masterwork,
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
(
Philosophiae naturalis principia mathemetica
) – usually known,
reverentially
,
simply as the
Principia
– is deemed the single most influential book ever written. His elucidation of the laws of motion and of gravity effectively
created
the modern world: mechanics and most forms of transport, including space travel, would be impossible without them. Newton even created the mathematical system, infinitesimal calculus, needed for his work – in itself no small achievement. After all, this and most other books would never see the light of day if writers had first to invent laptops – or, more appositely, writing itself. But Newton had the vision to know what he needed to be great, then went ahead and made it all happen with the unswerving, if often anti-social dedication of genius.