The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins
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With the aid of his friends Raleigh equipped fourteen ships, and with these he sailed (March 17, 1617) to the mouth of the Orinoco. A Spanish settlement, Santo Tomás, barred the way up the river to the supposed—quite legendary—mines. Raleigh’s men (he himself staying on board) landed, attacked and burned the village, and killed its governor. Then, discouraged by further Spanish resistance, the depleted force abandoned the gold quest and returned empty-handed to the ships. Raleigh was disheartened to learn that his son had been slain in the assault. He reproved his second in command, who thereupon committed suicide. His men lost confidence in him; vessel after vessel deserted his fleet. Returning to England and finding that the King was in a rage against him, he negotiated for escape to France; he was arrested; he tried again to escape and got as far as Greenwich; there a French agent betrayed him. He was captured and sent to the Tower, and the King, pressed by Gondomar, ordered the death sentence carried out.
Tired at last of life and welcoming the boon of a sudden death, Raleigh walked to his execution (October 29, 1618) with a calm dignity that made him the hero of a people that hated Spain. “Let us dispatch,” he asked the sheriffs. “At this hour mine ague comes upon me; I would not have mine enemies to think I quaked from fear.” He tested with his thumb the edge of the ax. “This,” he said, “is a fair sharp medicine to cure me of all diseases and miseries.”73 His loyal widow claimed the corpse and had it buried in a church. “The Lords,” she wrote, “have given me his dead body, though they denied me his life. God hold me in my wits.”74
Raleigh’s expedition was one of many that took James’s subjects hopefully to America. Peasants hungry for land of their own, adventurers seeking fortunes in trade or spoils, criminals fleeing the cruelty of the law, Puritans resolved to plant the flag of their faith on virgin soil—these and others bore the risks and the tedium of the sea to make new Englands everywhere. Virginia was settled in 1606–7, Bermuda in 1609, Newfoundland in 1610. “Separatist” clergymen refusing to accept the Prayer Book and the ritual of the Anglican Church fled to Holland with their followers (1608). From Delft (July 1620), Southampton, and Plymouth (September) these “Pilgrims” took sail across the Atlantic; after three months of ordeal, they set foot on Plymouth Rock (December 21).
In Asia the English East India Company, confined to £30,000 and seventeen ships, tried in vain to capture trading ports and routes from the Dutch East India Company, sailing sixty ships and sinewed with £ 540,000. But in 1615 the mission of Sir Thomas Roe resulted in the establishment of trade depots at Ahmadabad, Surat, Agra, and elsewhere in India; and Fort St. George was built and armed to protect them (1640). The first steps had been taken toward the British Empire in India.
Despite all temptations of mercantile interests, parliamentary prodding, and popular chauvinism, James for sixteen years kept to his policy of peace. The House of Commons begged him to enter the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the endangered Protestants of Bohemia and Germany. It pleaded with him to marry his sole surviving son not to a Spanish but to a Protestant princess. It condemned James’s relaxation of the anti-Catholic laws, urged him to order all Catholic children to be separated from their parents and brought up as Protestants, and warned him that toleration would lead to the growth of a Catholic Church frankly pledged to intolerance.75
In 1621 the divergence of views between Parliament and King almost rehearsed the conflict (1642) between the Long Parliament and Charles I. The Commons denounced the extravagance of the court and the persisting monopolies in restraint of trade; it fined and banished monopolists, rejecting their plea that a nascent industry had to be protected from competition. When James rebuked it for meddling in executive business, it issued (December 18) a historic “Great Protestation,” which again affirmed that “the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England,” and added that “the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the king, state, and defense of the realm … are proper subjects and matter of council and debate in Parliament.”76 James angrily tore from the journal of the Commons the page containing this protestation; he dissolved the Parliament (February 8, 1622), ordered the imprisonment of four parliamentary leaders, Southampton, Selden, Coke, and Pym, and defiantly proceeded with Buckingham’s plea for a marital alliance with Spain.
The reckless minister now urged the King to let him take Prince Charles to Madrid to show him off, to see the Infanta, and to conclude the match. James consented reluctantly, for he feared that Philip would send Charles back to England the laughingstock of Europe.
Arrived in Madrid (March 1623), Prince and Duke found the lovely Infanta unapproachable, and the Spanish populace as furious at the thought of her marrying a Protestant as the English were at the idea of Charles bringing home a Catholic. Philip and his minister Olivares gave the visitors every courtesy; Lope de Vega wrote a play for the welcoming festivities; Velazquez painted a portrait of Charles; and Buckingham wooed the Spanish beauties almost to the point of honor. But it was made an indispensable condition of the marriage that English Catholics should receive religious freedom. Charles at once, James at last, agreed; the marriage treaty was signed; but when James further required Philip to promise the use of Spanish arms, if needed, to restore the Palatinate to Frederick, Philip refused to commit himself, and James ordered his son and his favorite home. We see the human side of a king in his letter to Charles (June 14, 1623): “I now repent me sore that ever I suffered you to go away. I care [neither] for match nor nothing, so I may once have you in my arms again. God grant it! God grant it! God grant it!”77 The Infanta, in bidding Charles farewell, made him promise that he would have a care for the Catholics of England.78 The returning Prince was hailed by England as a hero because he brought no bride. He brought a set of Titians instead.
And now Buckingham, angry at having made a fool of himself in Spain (as Olivares had assured him), turned to France for a marital alliance, and secured for Charles the youngest daughter of Henry IV—that Henrietta Maria whose Catholic faith was to be one of many thorns in the side of coming Parliaments. Then the rash young minister regained popularity with the House of Commons by importuning James—failing in health and in mind—to declare war against Spain. Reassembled in February 1624, Parliament followed policies formed in part by mercantile interests eager to capture Spanish booty, colonies or markets, and in part by a resolve to deflect Spain from lending aid to the Catholic Emperor against the Protestants of Germany. The people, having called James a coward for loving peace, now called him a tyrant for conscripting men to military service. The regiments raised, the funds voted, were inadequate, and James had the bitterness of concluding a peaceful reign with a futile war.
His ailments crowded upon him in these final years. He had poisoned his organs with Gargantuan and indiscriminate food and drink; now he suffered from catarrh, arthritis, gout, stone, jaundice, diarrhea, and hemorrhoids; he had himself bled every day until the least royal of his troubles made this superfluous.79 He refused medicine, received the sacraments of the Church of England, and died (March 27, 1625) murmuring the last consolations of his faith.
Despite his vanity and coarseness, he was a better king than some who excelled him in vigor, courage, and enterprise. His absolutism was mainly a theory, tempered with a timidity that often yielded to a powerful Parliament. His pretensions to theology did not impede a will to tolerance far more generous than that of his predecessors. His brave love of peace gave England prosperity, and checked the venal bellicosity of his Parliament and the vicarious ardor of his people. His flatterers had called him the British Solomon because of his worldly wisdom, and Sully, failing to embroil him in Continental strife, termed him “the wisest fool in Christendom.” But he was neither philosopher nor fool. He was only a scholar miscast as a ruler, a man of peace in an age mad with mythology and war. Better the King James Bible than a conqueror’s crown.
* * *
I. Aubrey i
nforms us that Coke’s second wife, the widow of Sir William Hatton, “was with child when he married her. Laying his hand on her belly (when he came to bed), and finding a child to stir, ‘What,’ said he, ‘flesh in the pot?’ ‘Yea,’ quoth she, ‘or else I would not have married a cook.’ “19—for so his name was pronounced. We might add that she had already refused Bacon.
II. Some undistinguished prose acquired historical distinction: the newssheets that fluttered about Jacobean London graduated in 1622 into the first English newspaper, The Weekly Newes.
CHAPTER VII
The Summons to Reason
1558–1649
I. SUPERSTITION
ARE people poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor? It is a question that divides political philosophers between conservatives stressing heredity (inborn inequalities of mental capacity) and reformers relying on environment (the power of education and opportunity). In societies knowledge grows, and superstition wanes, with the increase and distribution of wealth. And yet even in a widely prosperous country—and especially among the harassed poor and the idle rich—thought has to live in a jungle of superstitions: astrology, numerology, palmistry, portents, the evil eye, witches, goblins, ghosts, demons, incantations, exorcisms, dream interpretations, oracles, miracles, quackery, and occult qualities, curative or injurious, in minerals, plants, and animals. Consider, then, the intellectual miasma poisoning the roots and wilting the flowers of science in a people whose wealth is scant or centered in a few. To the poor in body and mind superstition is a treasured element in the poetry of life, gilding dull days with exciting marvels, and redeeming misery with magic powers and mystic hopes.
Sir Thomas Browne, in 1646, required 652 pages to list and briefly treat the superstitions current in his day.1 Nearly all these occultisms flourished among the Britons under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. In 1597 King James VI published an authoritative Demonologie, which is one of the horrors of literature. He ascribed to witches the power to haunt houses, to make men and women love or hate, to transfer disease from one person to another, to kill by roasting a wax effigy, and to raise devastating storms; and he advocated the death penalty for all witches and magicians, and even for their customers.2 When a tempest nearly wrecked him on his return from Denmark with his bride, he caused four suspects to be tortured into confessing that they had plotted to destroy him by magic means; and one of them, John Fain, after the most barbarous torments, was burned to death (1590).3
In this matter the Kirk agreed with the King, and lay magistrates lenient to witches were threatened with excommunication.4 Between 1560 and 1600 some eight thousand women were burned as witches in a Scotland having hardly a million souls.5 In England the belief in witchcraft was almost universal; learned physicians like William Harvey and Sir Thomas Browne shared it; the hardheaded Elizabeth allowed her laws of 1562 to make witchcraft a capital crime; eighty-one women were executed for it in her reign.6 James moderated his fanaticism after passing from VI to I; he insisted on fair trials of the accused, exposed false confessions and accusations, and saved the lives of five women charged by a hysterical boy.7 The hunt nearly ceased after Charles I, but it was resumed, and reached its height, under the rule of the Long Parliament, when in two years (1645–47) two hundred “witches” were consumed.8
One voice, amid the fury, appealed to reason. Reginald Scot, an Englishman despite his name, published at London in 1584 The Discouerie of Witchcraft, second only to Johann Wier’s De praestigiis daemonum (Basel, 1564) in the dangerous attempt to moderate the sadistic superstition. Scot described the “witches” as poor old women who could harm no one; even if Satan did work through them they were rather to be pitied than to be burned; and to ascribe miracles to these crones was an insult to the miracles of Christ. He exposed the awful tortures that made witchcraft confessions worthless, the lax irregularity and injustice of trial procedure, the incredibilities gulped down by judges and inquisitors. The book had no effect.
In this atmosphere science tried to grow.
II. SCIENCE
Nevertheless, the expansion of commerce and industry were compelling the development of science. The Platonic and artistic strains in the Renaissance hardly harmonized with the swelling economy; the demand grew for a mental procedure that would deal with facts and quantities as well as with theories and ideas; the Aristotelian empiricism revived, shorn of its Alexandrian and medieval masks. The emphasis of Italian humanism on the glories of ancient literature and art made way for a less ethereal stress on current practical needs. Men had to count and calculate, measure and design, with competitive accuracy and speed; they needed tools of observation and recording; demands arose which were met by the invention of logarithms, analytical geometry, calculus, machines, the microscope, the telescope, statistical methods, navigational guides, and astronomical instruments. Throughout Western Europe lives were henceforth dedicated to meeting these needs.
In 1614 John Napier in Scotland and in 1620 Joost Bürgi in Switzerland independently proposed a system of logarithms (i.e., a logic of numbers) by which products, quotients, and roots could be quickly calculated from the tabulated relation of the given numbers as powers of a fixed number used as a base. Henry Briggs (1616) modified the method for common computation by proposing 10 as a base, and published tables giving the logarithms of all numbers from one to 20,000. Now two numbers could be multiplied by finding, in such tables, the number whose “log” was the sum of the logs of the numbers to be multiplied; and a could be divided by b by finding the number whose log was the log of b subtracted from the log of a. William Oughtred (1622) and Edmund Gunter (1624) constructed slide rules by which the results of logarithmic calculations could be read in a few seconds. These inventions halved the time given to arithmetical work by mathematicians, astronomers, statisticians, navigators, and engineers, and in effect lengthened their lives.9 Kepler, who used the new method in computing planetary motions, addressed an enthusiastic panegyric to the Laird of Merchiston (1620), not knowing that Napier was then three years dead. Napier himself had made a little miscalculation, having figured that the world would come to an end between 1688 and 1700.10
Mathematicians and astronomers were still closely allied, for the reckoning of celestial motions, the charting of the calendar, and the guidance of navigation required complex manipulations of astronomic measurements. As a mathematician, Thomas Harriot established the standard form of modern algebra, introduced the signs for root, “greater than” and “less than,” replaced clumsy capitals with small letters to indicate numbers, and hit upon the beneficent trick of placing all the quantities in an equation on one side and zero on the other. As an astronomer, he discovered the spots on the sun, and his observations of Jupiter’s satellites were made independently of Galileo’s. George Chapman, himself a monster of learning, thought Harriot’s knowledge to be “incomparable and bottomless.”11
Astronomy was still dripping with astrology. “Horary” astrology decided whether the stars favored the enterprise of the hour; “judicial” astrology foretold affairs in general, usually with judicious ambiguity; “natural” astrology disclosed the destiny of an individual from his horoscope—an examination of the position of the stars at the moment of his birth; all these are found in Shakespeare (though not proving his belief), and in our time. The moon, in astrological theory, produced tides, tears, madmen, and thieves (cf. Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I, ii, 15), and each sign of the zodiac controlled the character and fate of specific organs in the human anatomy (Twelfth Night, I, iii, 146–51). John Dee symbolized the time by mingling astrology, magic, mathematics, and geography: he engaged in crystal gazing, wrote a Treatise of the Rosie Crucean Secrets, was charged with practicing sorcery against Queen Mary Tudor (1555), drew up geographical and hydrographical charts for Elizabeth, proposed a northwest passage to China, invented the phrase “the British Empire,” lectured on Euclid before large audiences in Paris, defended the Copernican theory, advocated the adoption of the G
regorian calendar (170 years before England resigned itself to such a papistical contraption), and died at eighty-one; here was a full life! His pupil, Thomas Digges, promoted the acceptance of the Copernican hypothesis in England, and anticipated Bruno’s notion of an infinite universe.12 Thomas and his father, Leonard Digges, used “perspective glasses” which were probably forerunners of the telescope; and William Gascoigne invented (c. 1639) the micrometer, which enabled observers to adjust a telescope with unprecedented accuracy. Jeremiah Horrocks, a poor Lancashire curate who died at twenty-four, ascribed an elliptical orbit to the moon, and predicted—and observed (1639) for the first recorded time—the transit of Venus across the sun. His speculations on the forces moving the planets helped Newton to the theory of universal gravitation.
Meanwhile the study of terrestrial magnetism was also preparing for Newton. In 1544 Georg Hartmann, a German clergyman, and in 1576 Robert Norman, an English compass maker, independently discovered the tendency of the magnetic needle, when freely suspended at its center of gravity, to “dip” from a horizontal position to one at an angle to the earth’s surface. Norman’s book, The Newe Attractive (1581), suggested that the “joynt Respective” to which the needle dipped lay within the earth.13