Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “I didn’t think that Elizabeth wanted you or anyone else to have it. She didn’t tell me anything. I was trying to do what she wanted, but it doesn’t seem to matter now. Look, if it gets you out of Cambridge quicker, it will have been of some use.”

  Twenty-nine

  In the silence that followed Lily’s leaving, I knew that despite the pain in my eyes, I could not postpone reading that final chapter, a chapter I had already sketched in my head from Elizabeth’s original notes and inferences. Those facts had begun to speak for themselves. Outside in the garden, nothing moved; the wind had dropped. The lights reassembled on the walls, like a spectral gathering, solemn and still, as if restlessness had ceased, for the moment. I was sure that I knew now what she had discovered, that terrible truth, about a great man’s climb to power, about the price Newton was prepared to pay for the red robe, the Lucasian chair of mathematics. Yes, I was sure that Elizabeth had tracked Newton the alchemist to his lair, that she had found him out. This was her chapter:

  The Crimson Room

  The fact that Newton was appointed to a prestigious fellowship at Trinity College in 1667 is remarkable. He was certainly in the running—his scholarship made him eligible—but he had not distinguished himself academically, and he had given a poor performance in his examination for the scholarship.

  Few Newton scholars have anything to say about the unusual circumstances by which the Trinity fellowships had become vacant by 1667. An American academic, Louis Trenchard More, who published a detailed biography of Newton in 1934, is an exception. He presents the vacancies as being the result of good fortune: “On October first [Newton] was elected a Minor Fellow. There were nine fellowships vacant that year, as no elections had been held in 1665 and 1666. One of them was made by the death of the poet, Cowley; two of the other vacancies were caused by Fellows falling down staircases—whether the result of defects in the stairs or of excessive conviviality may be left to the imagination…One of the Senior Fellows…Barton, had been ejected from the college in the preceding June on the grounds of insanity.”27

  Even Michael White, whose more recent biography of Newton claims that Newton was, as an alchemist, “the last sorcerer,” ascribes the vacancies to luck, and seems not to know that the falls of Valentine and Greswold resulted in deaths: “By chance, that year the number of vacancies had been inflated by several retirements and a death occasioned by events which vividly convey the atmosphere of Restoration Trinity. A senior fellow had been recently removed on the grounds of ‘mental aberration’ of some unknown variety, and two other fellows had been forced to retire through injuries sustained after falling down the staircase leading to their rooms while in a drunken stupor. A fourth, the poet Abraham Cowley, had died after catching a fever brought on by a night spent sleeping in a field after a bout of heavy drinking. Luckily for Newton, this created a lengthy enough list to give him an opening.”28 Luckily for Newton.

  Richard Westfall fails to mention the deaths of the Trinity fellows at all, regarding them perhaps as less relevant than the vote rigging and corruption in the elections, which he describes as common practice in Trinity at the time. However, he does describe Newton’s unusual behaviour in the months from his return to Cambridge in March 1667 to his appointment to fellow status in October 1667. Westfall implies that the young man ought to have been nervous: “As with the scholarship three years earlier, Newton’s whole future hung in the balance of this election. It would determine whether he would stay on at Cambridge and be free to pursue his studies or whether he would return to Lincolnshire, probably to the village vicarage that his family connections could have supplied, where he might well have withered and decayed in the absence of books and the distraction of petty obligations. On the face of it, his chances were slim. There had been no elections in Trinity for three years, and as it turned out there were only nine places to fill…How could an erstwhile subsizar of whatever capacity hope to prevail against such odds?”29

  Strangely, as Westfall points out, Newton’s financial accounts for 1667 (laid out after his list of sins) show that the young man was acting in a way that revealed absolutely no anxiety about his future: “Neither in Newton’s papers nor in the surviving anecdotes does a hint of tension over the outcome [of the examinations] appear. His accounts present a picture of relaxation which almost belies our other evidence of unremitting, introverted study. Soon after his return, he spent 17s 6d [£92 in current rates] to celebrate his Bachelor’s Act and on subsequent occasions tossed away another of the £10 [£1,000] he had pried loose from Hannah Smith and then some with ‘acquaintances’ at taverns. He cheerfully confessed to a loss of 15s [£81] at cards, compensated perhaps by a purchase of oranges for his sister. The accounts radiate confidence as well. He invested £1 10s [£163] in tools, real tools, including a lathe, such as he must have longed for in Grantham—not the purchase of a man seriously expecting to move on a year hence.”30

  In 1667 Newton clearly did not think his stay in Cambridge was going to be temporary. He was already celebrating his future. Could he have known the outcome of the elections in advance? And how would that have been possible unless Barrow, Babington, and others had told him? Where did all this confidence come from? What had he been promised, and by whom?

  On being elected a fellow in 1667, Newton turned his rooms into a crimson chamber. Instead of taking the new rooms allocated to him as a fellow, he continued to use those he shared with Wickins, between the Great Gate and the chapel, the rooms that adjoined the laboratory and physic garden. After being elected, he paid for these rooms to be redecorated and bought new crimson furniture and hangings, as well as new carpets and pictures and a whole wardrobe full of expensive clothes.

  Newton had shown an obsession with the colour red since he had copied out those earliest recipes for mixing colours in the Grantham notebook; that obsession would persist into his old age. In a list of possessions drawn up by Catherine Conduitt after her uncle’s death, she records “a crimson mohair bed complete with case curtains of crimson Harrateen” and in the dining room “a crimson settee.”31 Other items included crimson drapes and valances in the bedroom, a crimson easy chair, and six crimson cushions in the back parlour.

  Red was the colour of power in Cambridge—Barrow, as the Lucasian Professor of mathematics, was the only fellow of the college to wear a scarlet gown. Scarlet robes marked out a special kind of status in the city too, for the aldermen exchanged their ordinary gowns for scarlet gowns on ceremonial occasions, for churchgoing, and for the pomp required for the opening of the Stourbridge Fair.32

  There was talk in the college now, whisperings that connected Newton to the deaths of Greswold, Valentine, and Cowley, that embroiled Newton in talk of conspiracies and poisonings and murder. Those were suspicious deaths, at least collectively. He and the other newly elected fellows had gained from them. But Newton was the only one who had access to the physic garden and the poisonous plants that were said to grow there. What was the truth behind these rumours?

  One figure has been overlooked by Newton’s historians. Ezekiel Foxcroft, some ten years Newton’s senior, a fellow of King’s College and lecturer in mathematics, had been travelling between London, Cambridge, and Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, carrying messages and manuscripts for his mentor, the philosopher Henry More, since the early 1660s. At Ragley Hall, he had presided over scores of complex alchemical experiments in the company of important alchemists, including his own mother and her companion Anne Finch. In his rooms at Cambridge or at Ragley Hall, he was working on the translation of the powerful Dutch alchemical text Chymical Wedding, a book divided into seven chapters, seven days of revelation. It was a book cross-hatched with sevens. He had been preparing to take on the mantle of power that had been promised him for a decade or more. The Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, they said, was his.33

  Then, in 1661, a boy called Isaac Newton came to Trinity College. Hearing from Barrow about the dexterity of the young man’s mathematical skills and from Henry M
ore about the young man’s alchemical skills, Ezekiel went to call on the young subsizar in 1662.34 That first meeting was undoubtedly awkward, for Newton, both competitive and territorial, would have instinctively bridled to meet More’s brilliant Cambridge protégé, Foxcroft. In time Foxcroft forged a friendship with Newton, over late-night discussions of Euclid and of Descartes and of geometry and algebra. It would not have taken Ezekiel long to divine the heat and steel of Newton’s mind, the way he turned numbers into spirits, made them do magic. He saw Newton’s fury in the sequences of calculations spread out over the floor of his rooms. God, Ezekiel understood, had chosen this charmless and driven young man, and was now dragging him through night and day to truths never before glimpsed, even by Euclid or Descartes.

  In 1664, Newton began a new notebook, entitled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophiae.”

  Struggling against his own envy, for he had been raised by his mother and by her friend Henry More to believe himself to be the greatest of the next generation of alchemists, Ezekiel Foxcroft saw himself dethroned. He came to understand that it was his part to play lieutenant to this general, John the Baptist to this Messiah. He would do so willingly, he told the older men, More and Barrow and Babington; he would show Newton where to acquire the tools he needed, he would bring him alchemical manuscripts from London or from More’s library in Ragley. He would accelerate the pace of Newton’s discoveries. He was true to his word, at least at first, for this was a new kind of power.

  Foxcroft flattered Newton. He told him that he had been chosen, that he was invincible, that he was a kind of god. He pushed him further and further, bringing him manuscripts at night, when Wickins slept and when he and Newton could be invisible. Ezekiel insisted that Newton keep their friendship flawlessly secret. No one must know that the two men met or that they assembled alchemical formulas together in Trinity College rooms. He set Newton initiatory tasks to test his mettle and to strengthen his alchemical powers. Under Ezekiel’s influence, Newton came to believe that he could do anything, that everything he did was sanctioned by divine authority, that nothing could stop the flood of knowledge passing through him—secrets about light, colour, gravity, numbers. As the conduit of divine knowledge he was untouchable. Ezekiel had said so.

  In 1665–66, Newton scratched out the fundamentals of what would come to be called the calculus.

  Foxcroft listened to Newton. When Newton complained that he had no power, that soon he would be forced to leave Trinity and go back to farming, Foxcroft undertook to clear Newton’s path to a fellowship. It was a grave decision and one that he made alone. For Newton to be assured of the fellowship, there had to be a high number of vacancies among the existing fellows. Ezekiel realised quickly that there was only one way to achieve this. It would not be easy and the risks were high, but with careful planning and care, murders might be made to look like accidents.

  In 1665, in his rooms in Trinity, Newton proved that white light was made up of colours and took to his bed, temporarily blinded.

  Foxcroft drew in a draper’s delivery boy, Richard Herring, who had friends who worked in the Trinity kitchens. Knowing of the boy’s fascination with alchemy, he sought him out in the Red Hart in Petticury, promising to teach him the secret of the philosopher’s stone. Instead, telling the boy about initiation rituals, he taught him how to gather and process the leaves of the belladonna plants growing in Newton’s physic garden at Trinity. He showed him how belladonna skillfully administered produced an effect that looked like drunkenness: hallucinations, dilated pupils, respiratory distress, and disorientation. Under the right conditions, it could produce a fatal fall. In time and with more promises and some threats, the boy agreed to slip small amounts of poison surreptitiously into the food of two Trinity fellows. In the shadows of a Trinity staircase Foxcroft moved the plot to its completion. Greswold died from a fall in 1665, Valentine in 1666; the plague outbreak gave Foxcroft an additional cloak behind which to work.

  In 1666, working by candlelight late into the night, Newton devised a method of calculating the exact gradient of a curve, a method which would come to be known as differentiation.

  Not everything went according to plan. In May 1665, Abraham Cowley’s fall down a staircase did not result in his death. The poet, suspecting a plot, fled Cambridge to his house in Surrey. It took two years for Herring and Foxcroft to reach him, and to succeed where they had earlier failed. The effects of belladonna also proved to be unpredictable. In 1666, when Herring tried to poison Francis Barton, another fellow at Trinity, Barton fell into a deranged and insane state; he was so sick that it was impossible to entice him onto the staircase outside his rooms. The master of Trinity, convinced that Barton was a danger to himself, sent him away to his family home in the countryside. It was a plague year. No one asked any questions. Foxcroft let Herring believe that the plot had worked, that the boy had succeeded in his final act of initiation, that this was the last death.

  Sometime in 1665 or 1666, somewhere between a garden in Woolsthorpe and a garden in Trinity, Newton carved out the rules of gravitation.

  What Foxcroft had started seemed to have no end. When Newton complained that the great alchemical secrets were being spread abroad and that they would soon become diluted and impure, Foxcroft undertook to silence all those who had betrayed such secrets, moving in disguise through London streets, calling on alchemists, clearing the way, purifying—in Newton’s name.35

  The blood on Foxcroft’s hands nullified all his alchemical experiments; he watched them spoil, he told his mother, Elizabeth, keeping from her the terrible reasons for their spoiling, knowing how much she would berate him for his sacrifice. Now, defeated, weakened, he determined to do all that was left to him and in which he might be useful—the translation of alchemical texts. For a few years the translation of Chymical Wedding occupied his mind and compensated in minor ways for his lost powers.

  Then, when he thought he might forget, a tide turned horribly against him. Francis Barton returned to Trinity in 1668. Richard Herring, grown especially superstitious since the Great Plague and burdened with guilt, terrified by the sight of Barton strolling across Trinity Great Court, told Foxcroft that he was going to confess his sins to the fellow who had come back from the dead. Foxcroft, convinced that the whole sequence of deaths would become visible once the boy-poisoner started to talk, slipped belladonna into Herring’s ale as he played dice in the Red Hart in Petticury on the evening of 10 November 1668, then followed him as he wandered, disoriented, along the riverbank towards his death in the river at dawn. There seemed to be no end.

  In 1668–69, Newton, with the help of his friend Wickins, installed an elaborate experimental apparatus in his rooms and constructed the very first functioning reflecting telescope.

  Foxcroft’s embroilments changed him. He received no thanks from the immortal Newton, no preferments. The blood that stained him in Newton’s name went unacknowledged. From the moment Newton had received the Trinity fellowship, he had shunned his old friend, though he had not refused to drink with others and had even played bowls. Foxcroft could see the look of cold contempt the younger man had for him now. He watched Newton rise, saw him appointed to the Lucasian chair, the chair that Foxcroft had been promised; saw More’s and Barrow’s adoration; watched the Royal Society lionise the reclusive, ungracious, arrogant young man.

  In 1669 Isaac Newton was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

  Once Newton had assumed the red robes of the Lucasian professor, Foxcroft changed his direction. He determined that his acts would no longer be in Newton’s name. Now he had only one desire left: to soil the younger man’s reputation and restore his own. He had accounts to settle.

  In 1669, Newton wrote up “De Analysi,” another milestone in the road towards the calculus.

  But still there was no end. After returning to Cambridge in 1668, Francis Barton lived an apparently quiet life in Trinity, but after a strange encounter with a young man on a staircase who confessed that he had po
isoned Barton with belladonna, a young man who was found drowned in the river a few days later, Barton began to make enquiries into who had keys to the Trinity physic garden and access to the poisonous plants that grew there.

  In 1671, dressed in his red robes, Newton unveiled his telescope to the men of the Royal Society in London. It caused a sensation.

  By 1674, Barton’s enquiries about poison had brought him closer and closer to a mathematician at King’s. Then, according to Alderman Newton’s diary, Francis Barton died a violent death from falling:

  25th April, 1674: Saturday morning. St Markes Day. Mr Francis Barton, one of the senior Fellowes of Trinity Colledge in Cambridge was found dead at the bottome of his Stayres in the house in St Edward’s Parish where he dwelt, it being conceived that he fell downe, and had soe laine dead a day or two before it was found out.

  Barton, the fifth Trinity man, died by falling down a staircase, only a few months before Ezekiel himself died in suspicious circumstances in a brawl in a London tavern. That series of seventeenth-century deaths in Cambridge, deaths in which Trinity fellows—apparently drunk, but almost certainly drugged—fell down staircases, came to an end only with the death of Ezekiel Foxcroft.

  Foxcroft was the brilliant usurped son cheated of his birthright, the Lucasian professorship, by an ex-subsizar boy for whom he had repeatedly killed. Those deaths in Trinity, perhaps always unknown to Newton, though they had provided the bridge to his glittering future, embroiled Foxcroft for the rest of his life, to the day of his death. Constantly threatening to become visible, they dragged the poisoner further and further into blood, more deaths, greater damnation. With so much blood on his hands the alchemical formulas would no longer work for Ezekiel Foxcroft, and sooner or later Henry More lost interest in his once promising protégé. Meanwhile, Newton took the Lucasian professorship and drew the scarlet folds of the gown and his glory around him.