by Uglow, Jenny
16 The Spring of the Air
Since that this thing we call the world
By chance on atoms is begot,
Which though in daily motions hurled
Yet weary not,
How doth it prove
Thou art so fair, and I in love?
JOHN HALL, ‘An Epicurean Ode’
CHARLES WAS FAR MORE AWARE than Clarendon and his other older advisers that ways of thinking were changing. This was most obviously the case with religion, where so many sects appealed to individual judgement rather than the guidance of a minister in their relationship with their God. But it was also true in the wider realm of philosophy, especially natural philosophy. Here too, there were competing systems explaining the ways of nature. The ancient Aristotelian thinking and the medieval hermetic tradition of the alchemists clashed and overlapped with newer Paracelsian chemical theories and the mechanical theories of Descartes. There were arguments, in particular, about the nature of space. Was the empty space between objects a vacuum, or was the universe full of invisible but touching and intermingling bodies, a ‘subtle aetherial fluid’?
This might seem to have little to do with kingship, but Thomas Hobbes, Charles’s teacher in Paris, had made natural philosophy overtly political – and anti-clerical – in Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes had given a fair copy of the manuscript to the young King on his return to France after the defeat at Worcester, and his views and anti-Catholic stance were found so dangerous by Henrietta Maria that within a couple of months he was hounded from court. But although Charles was briefly upset by Leviathan, ‘his majestie had a good Opinion of him, and sayd openly that he thought Mr Hobbes never meant him hurt’.1
Hobbes was a ‘plenist’, belonging to the camp that believed the universe was full of matter. There could be no such thing therefore as ‘incorporeal bodies’, the very term was a contradiction. So when priests referred to souls, to spirits, to angels and divinities in these terms they were talking nonsense. But it was useful nonsense, as it allowed them to set up an invisible authority in opposition to the civil power, the sovereign. For Catholics, this invisible power was embodied in the Pope but the protestant sects, even more dangerously, appealed directly to the Bible. Hobbes saw this as one of the causes of civil war, a point he repeated in his condemnation of clerics in Behemoth in 1668, alluding to ‘Ministers, as they called themselves, of Christ; and sometimes, in their sermons to the people, God’s ambassadors; pretending to have a right from God to govern every one in their parish, and their assembly the whole nation’.2
The material world was also the great concern of Robert Boyle, the seventh son of the Earl of Cork and younger brother of Lords Burlington and Orrery. ‘I could be very well content’, he wrote, ‘to have scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.’3 But Boyle – like Newton – found no conflict between nature, subjected to the enquiries of reason, and his religious faith. Reason itself was a divine light, granted to mankind. The main aim of his enquiries, Boyle said, was to raise in himself and others ‘vaster thoughts of the greatness and glory, and of the wisdom and goodness of God’.4 In terms of natural philosophy, he rejected all governing philosophical theories like plenism, in favour of a new experimental science that would gather information through observation and experiment and then make deductions as to cause and effect. Telescopes and microscopes had shown that things long taken for granted were other than what they seemed. In 1660 Boyle was making claims about the nature of the prime element, the air, and using his new, expensive air-pump. Nothing could be certain: everything had moved into the realm of probability.
Robert Boyle, engraved with his air-pump below left, and furnace, crucibles and instruments to the right
Was this also a dangerous challenge to ideas of authority? This approach did not only question established systems but the preeminence of reason itself. Simply in terms of the way these philosophers thought, an attack on the hierarchy of understanding could also have political undertones, as shown by Robert Hooke’s suggestive language: ‘The Understanding is to order all the inferiour services of the lower faculties; but yet it is to do this only as a lawful Master, and not as a Tyrant…It must watch the irregularities of the Senses, but it must not go before them, or prevent their information.’5 Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical was published in June 1660, the honeymoon month of the Restoration. In it Boyle explained what his air-pump could do, its failures as well as successes, establishing himself as a modest man of good faith who had no wish to hoodwink his readers – just as Charles initially presented himself as a ‘sober man’ who wished not to impose rigid systems but to heal rifts that were not of his making. Charles was intrigued by the new knowledge. He wanted to accommodate different views, to be open and accessible to all his subjects while still claiming the authority that Hobbes saw as vital to stability.
Like Boyle, Charles was convinced that the way to create a consensus, a platform for agreement and inclusion, was to create a forum where men of all persuasions could come to discuss new ideas without rancour. The church, for example, had been split by profound animosities, ‘which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed, or better understood’.6 In this case the ‘free air’ of discussion was supposed to be the Worcester Conference, while in natural philosophy it was the club at Gresham College which quickly developed into the Royal Society. Boyle and his allies – who included clerics like John Wilkins – used a language similar to that of the moderate churchmen, being wary of ‘enthusiasts’ and sectaries, ‘dogma’ and doctrine. Like Charles at Breda, Boyle wanted to embrace dissidents within the group, rather than creating enemies outside. And, he insisted, they could only be persuaded by a positive use of language: showing the alchemists, for example, how close their practice was to experimental chemistry, while being careful not to attack their underlying ideas. ‘Quarrelsome and injurious’ words must be abjured; courtesy was vital:
For if I civilly endeavour to reason a man out of his opinions, I make myself but one work to do, namely, to convince his understanding; but, if in a bitter or exasperating way I oppose his errors, I increase the difficulties I would surmount, and have as well his affections against me as his judgment.
This was also Charles’s preferred approach: affability and courtesy were important weapons in his arsenal, whereas Clarendon made enemies by his quick temper and disdain for opponents. At the Savoy Conference in 1661 the calm air of discussion had quickly broken down into ‘bitter or exasperating’ argument: once they felt openly slighted, the presbyterian ministers threw up their defences.
Charles was therefore intrigued by the approach of the experimental philosophers, especially their call to lay aside factions and unite in a common search for knowledge. The novelty of their work also attracted him. Like many young aristocrats of the time, he liked the oddity of their findings and the mechanical ingenuity of their inventions. He had first become interested at the age of sixteen, when he and Buckingham were spending bored months in St Germain. In the view of his first governor Newcastle, and his earlier gentle tutor Brian Duppa, later Bishop of Winchester, physics and chemistry and mechanics were not part of a gentleman’s education, let alone a future king’s, but Charles was inquisitive by nature, entertained by the new and the strange. In Paris his current tutor, John Earle – author of Microcosmographie, or, A Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters – read with him daily, and Charles also studied mathematics with Hobbes, who was an extremely influential natural philosopher as well as a political thinker. Suddenly inspired, for once Charles worked hard, grappling with the ‘mechanics of physics’ of Descartes, making himself into a competent chemist and poring over the mathematics of navigation, which fascinated him already because of his love of the sea.
When Charles moved into Whitehall at the Restoration, he set up a sundial in the Privy Garden, and his private cabinet contained a huge portfolio of maps of Britain by Dutch engravers as well as a curious model shi
p. His love of clocks was famous, and he was said to have seven clocks in his bedroom, all chiming at different times, as well as one in the antechamber which told the direction of the wind as well as the time. The grandfather clocks of the day were great old monsters, eight foot high, with a huge swinging pendulum and a tendency to bong, bong every quarter of an hour. But in 1660, among the clocks in Charles’s cabinet at Whitehall, there was one ‘that shewed the rising & setting of the son in the Zodiaque; the Sunn represented in a face & raies of Gold, upon an azure skie, observing the diurnal & annual motion, rising & setting behind a landscape of hills, very divertisant’.7
This clock was up-to-date as well as beautiful, having been made by Ahasuerus Fromontal, a Dutch-born clockmaker who was the first to make pendulum clocks in England, following the system that Christiaan Huygens had published as recently as 1658. During the latter days of the exile courtiers like Alexander Bruce (later Earl of Kincardine) and Robert Moray had filled their empty days with their experimental interests: Moray had a chemistry laboratory and both worked on pharmacology and medicine. They were also intrigued by clocks, and in 1658 began corresponding not only about pendulum clocks but about new watches that might keep time well without varying. They worked on improved clocks with great enthusiasm, both before and after the Restoration. Later, in the Hague, Bruce worked with Huygens on marine clocks, ‘pendulum-regulated timekeepers’, an attempt to solve the problem of measuring longitude.8 In days to come Charles would always have the latest technological wonders, like the spring-driven pocket watches designed by Huygens and Hooke – and a servant to wind up all his clocks. Charles also had his own laboratory beneath the Privy Gallery at Whitehall, where doctors undertook occasional anatomical dissections and demonstrators mounted experiments. After his death John Evelyn dismissed him airily as ‘a lover of the sea, and skilful in shipping, not affecting other studies, yet he had a laboratory and knew of many empirical medicines and the easier mechanical mathematics’. But he was more serious than that. On his restoration he was keen to promote the new knowledge, and Sir Paul Neile and Robert Moray kept him abreast of the experiments and arguments among the philosophical clubs of Oxford and London.
He also welcomed his old tutor Hobbes, whom he had spotted in the Strand two or three days after his first arrival in London and quickly invited to court. He enjoyed the irascible Hobbes’s ‘witt and smart repartees’, delivered in his mild West Country tones. Hobbes was good company, and sang bawdy songs, very badly. The wits at court liked to provoke him, remembered his friend Aubrey, but he feared none of them and replied in kind; ‘The King would call him the beare; Here comes the Beare to be bayted.’9 Charles treasured Samuel Cooper’s miniature of the old man and granted him a pension, and Hobbes in turn dedicated his Problema Physica of 1662 to the king.
Thomas Hobbes, by Samuel Cooper
The new natural philosophy and the old overlapped. Chemistry and alchemy were a diversion of the princes of Europe and had been taken up by many courtiers during the exile. Among them was Bristol’s uncle, Sir Kenelm Digby – an ardent Catholic, Chancellor to Henrietta Maria in exile, whose life as a soldier, lover, rake, pirate and scholar reads like a romance. He was a friend of Hobbes and a disciple of Descartes, but also a student of the old Aristotelian systems, and of Paracelsian chemistry and alchemy. For several years, he had set up a laboratory at his house, which became a salon for philosophers and writers, mathematicians and alchemists. Charles was particularly interested in alchemy and in 1660 Elias Ashmole, eager to gain favour at court, presented him with three of his alchemical works, published during the Interregnum: a translation of the works of the astrologer John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I; an anthology of alchemical verse, Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, and his treatise, The Way to Bliss. (Perhaps overdoing things, his gifts to Charles also included a pickled foetus in a bottle.)10 Charles responded generously, making Ashmole Comptroller of the Excise, appointing him Windsor Herald, and, almost more significantly, giving him full powers to collect and transcribe any documents he found useful.
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.11
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.’12 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’.13
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.14 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 C
lubbe’ 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.15 (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.