Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  Wren visited Paris on behalf of Charles II, to inspect new building projects in train there, on 28 July 1665. We know he was frequently in the company of Auzout.48 From then on he provided a direct epistolary route for information from Auzout and his circle in Paris to both Oldenburg and Boyle.49

  So we have an epistolary circuit of transmission, detailed explication, claim, counter-claim, assertion, surmise and response, which by mid-1665 has effectively developed a life of its own. The participating correspondents and the readers of the published versions are actually aware of only a small part of the network of exchanges which constitute the ‘controversy’, and the complex webs of influence these create.

  Auzout and Oldenburg’s investment in all of this is pretty clear. From the Journal des sçavans in Paris and Philosophical Transactions in London was emerging an entirely new form of intellectual debate, one which reached beyond the bounds of coterie and nation into what was apparently a genuine Republic of Scientific Letters. Both Auzout and Oldenburg had a stake in establishing such an intellectual organ to enhance their own reputations, and both were remarkably successful at doing so. Hooke was more or less caught in the crossfire. As a result of Oldenburg’s letter-writing, translating and publications he acquired a reputation for making boastful claims he could not sustain. Controversy also became associated with his name on the Continent, at just the moment when Micrographia was establishing him as a formidable scientific presence.

  The story of the simultaneous attempts in London, Paris and The Hague to develop a machine-method for manufacturing optical lenses is a minor one for the history of science. But we should note that this correspondence, circulating vigorously in Hooke’s absence, and without his knowledge, contains the ‘insider’ remarks supplying clues to the construction of his balance-spring watch which were later to cause him such personal grief and anger.

  Indeed, the first ‘leaked’ information concerning the use of a coiled spring to regulate a pocket watch comes in a letter from Moray to Huygens which forms part of the lens-grinding exchanges, sent shortly after Hooke had left London. Hooke, Moray explains, has not yet been able to complete the collating of data on the 1664 comet, collected by virtuosi across Europe, which Huygens has asked for.50 As if to distract his somewhat demanding friend from the fact that he is unable to supply information on this topic, Moray changes the subject:

  Up to now I have not ever spoken to you about another thing that he has suggested in his lectures on mechanics (which he gives every Wednesday outside the University term).51 It is an entirely new invention […]52

  And Moray proceeds to explain how Hooke uses a spring (’un ressort’) as the regulator for his new watch. Like the ‘iron circle’ Huygens seized on for his lens-grinding equipment, this was quite enough to set Huygens off on the right track – particularly since, as in that case too, Moray proceeded to describe the balance-spring watch to Huygens in increasing detail in succeeding letters.

  Hooke and Auzout, by the way, remained on cordial terms during this sequence of events and orchestrated controversies, despite Oldenburg’s promptings to the contrary. Throughout the exchanges, Auzout continued to refer to Hooke in the most respectful of terms, and Oldenburg consistently deleted these from his racy English translations. On 18 December 1666, for instance, writing to Oldenburg to communicate an important astronomical observation, Auzout wrote: ‘I think that Mr Hook, whom I salute wholeheartedly, as well as Mr Wren, will be very interested.’ Oldenburg omitted the phrase ‘whom I salute wholeheartedly’ from the version he published in Philosophical Transactions.53

  By contrast with Oldenburg’s tendency to edit the two protagonists’ pronouncements, so as to present Hooke’s work as controversial and his relationship with Auzout as abrasive, the issue of the Journal des sçavans published on 20 December 1666 contained a review of Micrographia, praising it unreservedly and at length, in extravagant terms. Uniquely for the Journal up to that point, the review reproduces two reduced-size versions of the ‘cuts’ or plates for which it expresses enormous admiration (the louse and blue mould).54

  The controversy conducted in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des sçavans, and in Auzout’s pamphlet publications issued in the course of 1665, achieved what Auzout wanted: to bring his astronomical expertise to the attention of Colbert and the King of France and secure himself a royal appointment. His opportunism is clear, and is supported by the fact that within two years he had quarrelled with other members of the Paris Académie and left France for Italy.

  Oldenburg was more than content that the Philosophical Transactions should have become essential reading among virtuosi across Europe as soon as he began publishing them – by the fourth issue, the one containing the first adversarial exchange of letters between Auzout and Hooke, there was an absolute scramble to get hold of copies immediately they appeared. The élite, high-minded virtuosi Moray and Huygens cemented their intimate Anglo–Dutch friendship by exchanging sought-after information, and keeping each other ‘in the know’.

  In spite of his forebodings, after his breakdown of 1676 Christiaan Huygens did return to the Académie des sciences in Paris for a brief period in late 1678. In spring 1681, however, he collapsed again. This time it was his sister Susanna, accompanied by her husband and their three children, who was sent to rescue him. She stayed three weeks – finally realising her dream of visiting the French capital – then brought Christiaan home for the last time. In 1684 the Académie, tired of his absence, dismissed him. He joined his father in the big family house in The Hague, keeping the aged Sir Constantijn company until his death in 1687.

  Thereafter, Christiaan retired to his father’s estate, with its wonderfully serene and restorative garden, at Hofwijk. But with the Dutch invasion of England, his reputation as a brilliant scientific innovator enjoyed one final flowering abroad. For while Hooke was an old-style divine-right-of-kings man (like his close friend Sir Christopher Wren), and had, right up to William of Orange’s arrival, steadfastly backed James II as England’s legitimate monarch, Christiaan Huygens, his scientific adversary, was the clever younger brother of William’s private secretary, Constantijn Huygens junior, who had played a prominent role in the successful invasion.

  In London, Constantijn junior was now a senior figure in the new administration, with real political power. The fact that all Sir Constantijn Huygens’s children spoke excellent English was now a further distinct asset. The young English scholar Thomas Molyneux, visiting Christiaan during his final period in Paris, reported that he had received a warm welcome: ‘When he understood after a few words that I was English, he spoke to me in my own language, beyond all expectation, and moreover, extremely well.’55

  Constantijn’s new position in England tempted his brother Christiaan out of retirement, with the prospect that he could now be assured of real respect from the English virtuosi, and could finally take his place among the Fellows of the Royal Society (he had been elected an overseas member in 1663 – the first foreigner to receive that honour).

  Christiaan had a further reason for allowing himself to be tempted away from the seclusion of Hofwijk. For two years he had been poring over Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or the Principia, of which the author had sent him a presentation copy, working painstakingly through its mathematical calculations. Shortly after he read it, Huygens told Constantijn that he had enormous admiration for ‘the beautiful discoveries that I find in the work he sent me’.56 When John Locke came to visit him, and asked him if he thought Newton’s mathematics, which he admitted he could not himself follow, were sound, Christiaan told him emphatically that they were certainly to be trusted. Newton, to whom Locke recounted this, proudly repeated the Dutch mathematician’s endorsement in London. A visit to London would enable Huygens to meet Newton face to face.

  In preparation for his trip, Christiaan resuscitated and rewrote his ten-year-old treatise Traité de la lumière (Treatise on Light), to provide him w
ith his credentials for re-entering English intellectual life. He wrote to Constantijn:

  I had intended to stay here at Hofwijk for the whole winter … However, you might have an opportunity to see Mr. Boyle. I would like to visit Oxford, if only to make the acquaintance of Mr. Newton [in fact, of course, Newton was at Cambridge] for whose excellent discoveries I have the greatest admiration, having read of them in the work [Principia] which he sent me.57

  Christiaan arrived in London on 6 June 1689. He joined Constantijn junior and Constantijn junior’s son in lodgings close to Whitehall. A week later the three of them went together to stay at Hampton Court Palace, where the new King and Queen were in residence. On 12 June Christiaan travelled by boat back along the Thames to London for a meeting of the Royal Society. He recorded in his diary:

  Meeting at Gresham College in a small room, a small cabinet of curiosities, over-full but well kept. Hoskins President, Henshaw Vice-President, Halley Secretary. Van Leeuwenhoek’s letter was read. Newton and Fatio were there too.58

  In the period of uncertainty leading up to the Dutch invasion and William’s claiming the English throne, Isaac Newton had already begun to emerge from his sheltered position as a solitary scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1687, when James II’s interference with the university roused even those as aloof as Newton from their political indifference, he found himself nominated to act for the university in what turned out to be a critical piece of resistance to James II’s policy of installing Catholic cronies in key administrative positions. Newton was one of nine prominent members of Cambridge University who in April 1687 – at the very moment when Edmond Halley was seeing the Principia through the press – confronted the notorious ‘Hanging Judge’ Lord Jeffreys, and refused to allow James II to appoint his personal nominees, without qualification or oath, to senior academic positions.59

  So at the beginning of 1689, Isaac Newton was already one of the most prominent, Protestant-supporting members of the university community, with impeccable credentials to serve the incoming regime. On 15 January he was elected one of the three university representatives to the national Convention appointed to settle the legitimacy of William and Mary’s claim to the English throne.60

  Two weeks after his arrival in London, having returned to Hampton Court, Christiaan Huygens had an audience with King William and dined with his Dutch favourite, William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, the most powerful man at court. It had been suggested beforehand that, as an esteemed virtuoso particularly well-connected with the Dutch royal household, Christiaan might put a word in with William III on Isaac Newton’s behalf, putting the mathematician’s name forward for a senior academic promotion. Two days later, on 10 July, Christiaan, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Newton met at seven in the morning in London, ‘with the purpose of recommending Newton to the King for the vacant Mastership of a Cambridge College’.61 On 28 July, Christiaan attended a fashionable concert at which he was introduced to the Duke of Somerset, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Newton’s preferment was once more discussed.62

  So Christiaan Huygens was directly involved in the political game of snakes and ladders, in which Newton – hitherto a small player, politically – moved centre-stage, while formerly powerful intellectuals like Wren and Boyle were nudged to the margins.

  The Cambridge college whose headship Newton had ambitions to fill was King’s, and John Hampden, the court lobbyist on Newton’s behalf who approached Huygens, was a leading Parliamentary player. Huygens’s approach evidently had the desired effect. Shortly thereafter, William wrote to the Fellows of King’s College, informing them of his desire that they appoint Newton as their new Provost. The new foreign King was, however, roundly rebuffed by the Fellows, who selected another candidate. This was probably just as well for Newton’s future career as a public figure, since imposed royal appointments were deeply unpopular.63

  Even though this personal intervention of Huygens’s to advance Newton’s career did not succeed, the scientific relationship between the two men was thereby significantly strengthened. In August, before he left for home, Huygens received two papers from Newton on motion through a resisting medium. At some point during the visit they also had lengthy discussions of optics and colour.64 Huygens told the German mathematician Leibniz that Newton had communicated ‘some very beautiful experiments’ to him – probably his experiments with thin films similar to the ones Huygens himself had performed twenty years earlier, and to those Hooke had recorded in his Micrographia even earlier.65

  After Christiaan Huygens had returned to The Hague, at the end of August 1690, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier spent a month with Newton in London, followed by fifteen months in the Netherlands, mostly with Huygens.66 Over the next several years, Fatio facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two men. Huygens came to regard Fatio as his direct link through which he learned Newton’s latest thoughts on mathematics, gravity and light.

  Although Christiaan Huygens retreated rapidly to his self-imposed life as an intellectual invalid at Hofwijk, his brother Constantijn continued to be a person of influence at the court of William and Mary.67 Newton, meanwhile, became Master of the Royal Mint, and a formidable figure in London political circles. He was also by now an international celebrity as the author of the Principia – the man who had finally unlocked the secret of the motion of the heavens. In terms of his own continuing career, Hooke now found himself between a rock and a hard place: between the City and the Royal Society. In neither did he any longer command any kind of authority, and in neither could he find powerful protectors who had survived the change of dynasty.68

  So when, on 12 June 1689, Huygens, Newton and Hooke found themselves together at a meeting of the Royal Society, Newton and Huygens were, unbeknown to Hooke, about to embark on a new, yet more intense phase of their intellectual relationship. Hooke, meanwhile, was increasingly ill at ease with the Royal Society, where all but a few of his oldest friends among the members seemed to take him less and less seriously.69

  Of all Hooke’s claims to scientific breakthrough, and to have anticipated Huygens’s and Newton’s ideas, those in optics were probably the most convincing and well-documented. Both Newton and Huygens had started their work on thin coloured films in 1665–66 after having read Hooke’s suggestive discussion in Micrographia.70 Similarly, both men had pursued the wave theory of light proposed in that book, and the associated calculation of the velocity of propagation of light. In the early 1670s, when Newton first wrote to the Royal Society with his theory of colour, and first crossed swords with Hooke, who inevitably challenged him, Newton was open about having been influenced by Hooke’s work.71 By 1675, however, egged on by Oldenburg, Newton was denying Hooke’s influence and claming that any ideas the two men shared were simply ‘common thoughts’: ‘I desire Mr Hooke to shew me therefore … [that] any part of [my hypothesis] is taken out of his Micrographia.’72 Nevertheless, Hooke’s experiments in optics were an authoritative contribution to the reputation of the Royal Society, and some important intervention from him at that auspicious meeting of the Society in which Huygens and Newton participated was to be expected. None is recorded.

  Following the meeting of the Royal Society on 12 June, Hooke worked through the arguments propounded in Huygens’s Treatise on Light with even more than his usual punctiliousness. We can surmise that he was discouraged and depressed by the confident authority with which Huygens and Newton had conducted themselves at the Royal Society meeting. He responded by drafting two lectures defending in detail his own ‘philosophical’ views: the first dealing with those concerning light and its properties (wave theory and thin films), the second dealing with planetary motion (orbits of the planets, and shape of the earth). Hooke’s health that year was particularly bad. According to Richard Waller, he was ‘often troubl’d with Head-achs, Giddiness and Fainting, and with a general decay all over, which hinder’d his Philosophical Studies’.73

  Eight months later, on 19 and 26 February 1690, Hooke deli
vered his response to the Society.74 The first lecture includes a particularly poignant restatement of his own originality, which appeals to his listeners to assess his own contribution before deciding that Huygens’s competing views are correct:

  This is in brief what I thought necessary to be considered before what I have formerly Deliverd concerning Light be rejected and before what is here Deliverd be Received, for though I doe readily assent that Monsieur Huygens & others much more Able than myself may penetrate farther into the true causes of the Phenomena of Light than I had done at that time; yet I confesse I have not yet found any phenomenon or hypothesis propounded by any writer since that time that has given me cause to alter my sentiments concerning it. However I should be very gladd to meet with any such and shall be as Ready to Relinquish this Upon the meeting with a better as I was in making choice of it for the best at the time of publication.75

  In the second lecture, Hooke went on to analyse Huygens’s Discours sur la cause de la pesanteur (Discourse concerning the cause of weight). Here Hooke fastens onto Huygens’s treatment of gravity:

  For what follows afterwards is additionall to that Discourse as he himself Declares in his preface, which is concerning those proprietys of Gravity which I myself first Discovered and shewed to this Society many years since, which of late Mr. Newton has done me the favour to print and Publish as his own Inventions. And Particularly that of the Ovall figure of the earth was read by me to this Society about 27 years since upon the occasion of the Carrying the Pendulum Clocks to Sea And at two other times since, though I have had the Ill fortune not to be heard, and I conceive there are some present that may never well Remember and Doe [not] know that Mr. Newton did not send up that addition to his book till some weeks after I had read & shewn the experiments & Demonstration thereof in this place.76