by Uglow, Jenny
17 The Royal Society
Where dreamy Chymicks is your pain and cost?
How is your oyl, how is your labour lost?
Our Charles, blest Alchymist (though strange
Believe it future times) did change
The Iron age of old,
Into an age of Gold.
ABRAHAM COWLEY, ‘In Commendation of the Time…’
SOME OF THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS who gathered at Oxford were among the crowds hurrying back to London at the Restoration. Wren was there already, having been recommended by Wilkins to Cromwell, at the age of twenty-five, as the new Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College. The college, on the edge of the City of London, between Bishopsgate and Broad Street, had been founded in the 1590s by the City merchant Thomas Gresham and was very different from the traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Its professors lectured in English as well as Latin, to anyone who chose to come, and it had strong links to the City, with its interest in navigation and mathematics. Petty was also now at Gresham and in 1660 the London and Oxford groups began to merge.
Wilkins, who lost his Cambridge post but was soon given a London parish, was still a central figure. On 28 November 1660, after an astronomy lecture by Wren, ten of these men met and determined to form a society, with Wilkins in the chair; twelve more, including Sir Kenelm Digby, were elected a fortnight later. The initial club included a smattering of courtiers, notably Viscount Brouncker, a mathematician and translator of Descartes, and Sir Robert Moray, who would be Charles’s chief link to the group. Moray was one of those interesting characters whom Charles always enjoyed talking to. Born and educated in Scotland, he had a lifelong interest in mathematics, chemistry and engineering: as a soldier in the French army in the 1640s, he had spent fifteen months in prison in Bavaria, studying the works on magnetism of Athanasius Kirchner. After Worcester, he worked with the royalist resistance before joining the court in exile. He was fifty at the Restoration, a man of strong presbyterian principles and a firm, though more moderate, ally of Lauderdale. Moray was one of the first courtiers to be given rooms in Whitehall. A laboratory was next to his rooms, and he and Charles would work there together. When Samuel Sorbière visited three years later, he found it ‘very edifying’, he said, ‘to find a Person imploy’d in Matters of State, and of such Excellent merit, and one who had been engaged a great Part of his Life in Warlike Commands, and the Affairs of the Cabinet, apply himself in making machines in St James’s Park and adjusting Telescopes’.1
After the royalists’ exile in Paris and the Low Countries, especially Leiden, it was fashionable for aristocrats to be interested in instruments, clocks, and experiments. Prince Rupert, who had been acclaimed as a genius at mathematics in his youth, was fascinated by mechanics, and his library was full of works on anatomy, chemistry and physics. As well as Moray and Brouncker, early courtier members of the society included Pepys’s boss, Lord Sandwich, Sir Alexander Bruce and Sir Paul Neile. In October 1660 Charles himself spent an evening at Gresham, ‘where he was entertained with the admirable long Tube, with which he viewed the heavens, to his very great satisfaction, insomuch that he commanded Sr P Neile to cause the like to be made’.2 The thirty-five-foot telescope was set up in the Privy Garden. On the day after Charles’s coronation, Christiaan Huygens (who had skipped the Coronation to watch the transit of Mercury) spent the day with the Duke of York and others, observing ‘the conjunction of Saturn with the moon, in the garden at Whitehall, with Mr Neile’s long telescopes’.3
At the new club the courtiers were joined by old experimenters like Kenelm Digby and Ashmole, by London lawyers, doctors and intellectuals, by writers like Dryden, and Oxford and Cambridge scholars like Wallis and Ward. Several were brilliant amateurs, like John Evelyn, who had been working for years on his great, unpublished book on gardening, Elysium Britannicum, and whose voluminous manuscripts show an interest in art, poetry and theology as well as alchemy, medicine, mathematics, physics, mechanics, natural history and chemistry.4 The new society was really an extension of the kind of clubs that met in the coffee-houses or in private houses: over the next fifteen years, the membership was top-heavy with noblemen, politicians and country gentlemen, with a solid body of clergymen, lawyers, doctors and civil servants and a small sprinkling of City merchants.
Their aim, said the first historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, was to enjoy ‘the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being engaged in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age’.5 The group now established hoped, they announced, to begin ‘a more regular way of debating things; and that, according to the manner in other countries, where there were voluntary associations of men into academies for advancement of the various parts of learning, they might do something answerable here for the promoting of experimental philosophy’.6 In its stated aims and its hope to match the private academies of Paris and Florence, the new club was a step towards answering the calls for a permanent college that had been made by Bacon, Hartlib, Wilkins and others. (Evelyn was one of many who had dreamed of some form of college – in his case an idealistic, even monastic centre somewhere in the country.) The new era, with its promise of stability, seemed the right time to set up the society on a firm basis. Moreover the country now had, William Petty declared with comic inaccuracy, ‘a Philosophicall and Mathematico-Mechanical King, one that cared not for the vulgar exercise of the body’.7
To succeed, they knew they had to win the goodwill of the king. Moray told him straight away about their first gathering and brought back a warm message of approval. Immediately they set to work, drawing up a list of contributions and experiments. Dr Merret was to talk on the history of refining, Dr Goddard to show his experiments ‘on producing colours by mixing chemicals’, and Mr Boyle was asked to bring in his cylinder and ‘to shew at his best convenience the experiment of the air’ – his air-pump was the great attraction, wheeled out to entertain the Danish ambassador a few weeks later.8 The group embarked on experiments with pendulums as well as papers on shipping. On 16 January 1661, at the ‘Philosophic Club’, Evelyn saw a demonstration of the Torricellian experiment, using a mercury tube to show that the atmosphere had weight (the basis of the barometer). The Society set up a committee to plan a ‘quicksilver experiment’, an investigation into air pressure, testing how a mercury barometer would work on the summit of the 12,000ft Pica de Tenerife. In early January, over a pot of ale, Ralph Greatorex impressed Pepys with the plans for this expedition and next day Pepys went with him to Gresham College ‘(where I never was before) and saw the manner of the house, and find great company of persons of Honour there’.9 Everyone involved felt exhilarated.
There were also more practical initiatives, like drawing up a ‘history of Mechanical trades’. Evelyn provided a list of headings, and the detailed work was done later, sporadically, by others. Evelyn also found support for publishing his own work, Sculptura: or the History and Art of Calcography and Engraving on Copper, for which Prince Rupert, a man with a passion for experiment, promised to teach him the secret of mezzotint which he had practised himself in 1658; this had been developed in the early years of the century but never publicly explained.10 Every week there were new experiments, particularly with the air-pump. ‘We put in a Snake but could not kill it, by exhausting the aire,’ wrote Evelyn cheerfully, ‘onely made it extreamly sick, but the Chick died of Convulsions out right, in a short space’. The other great diarist, Pepys, also suggests how widespread the interest was, dining with acquaintances who describe the habits of snakes or tarantulas, or who show off after dinner with ‘Chymical glasses, which break all to dust by breaking off the little small end – which is a great mystery to me’.11 These small blown-glass bubbles, which exploded when punctured and crumbled to dust, had been demonstrated at the Royal Society the year before, and had also been studied by Margaret Cavendish while in exile in Antwerp in 1657.12 They became known as ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, and the London o
nes were probably by-products from the glasshouses that Rupert had set up in Chelsea and Windsor, where he supervised the furnaces himself in a sooty old apron. In March 1661 Charles himself sent one of these drops for the society to investigate: ‘the reasons were considered, but so many objections made, as was hard to solve’.13
The society’s concerns ranged wide. They undertook tests at the Minories – the furnaces of the Mint, in the Tower of London – to see if materials became heavier when burnt. They discussed barnacles and snowflakes, the reproduction of vipers and the nature of gravity. In the summer they tried out a diving bell in the dock at Deptford, letting down by cable a heavy contraption of cast lead, in which a brave pioneer spent nearly half an hour under water. They puzzled over poisons, watched plants flash like gunpowder in a fire, and tried to capture a spider within a circle of ‘ground unicorn’s horn’. The forward-looking Dr Clarke described the ‘manner of injecting into the veins’ while the alchemists talked of ‘sympathetical cures’. A matter of great debate was a letter received from Huygens concerning the rings of Saturn. When Wren read of his discovery of Saturn’s first moon he dashed off a long reply, claiming that he and others had observed this two years before.
Collaboration was often spiced with competition and argument. As the minutes show, the society’s varied interests and haphazard exploration often led them into curious cul-de-sacs, as much as solid achievement, but they always maintained their belief that knowledge gained from observation and experiment had to be preferable to the dubious conclusions derived from preconceived theories. In 1661 Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a dialogue between an old-style hermetic philosopher and a modern sceptic who wants to question the Aristotelians, Paracelsians, alchemists and other theorists, in an effort to drag ‘the chymists’ doctrine out of their dark and smoakie laboratories’ and bring it ‘into the open light, and shew the weaknesses of their proofs’.14
In March 1661, Sir Robert Moray was elected president of the society, an ideal link between Gresham and the court. Very cannily, knowing of Charles’s old link with the family, and also of his love of intricate inventions, Moray intrigued Charles by describing the work of their talented young star, Christopher Wren, who had now left Gresham to become Professor of Astronomy in Oxford. Wren had already sent the king some drawings of a flea and a louse, as seen through a microscope. Charles was entranced and in May, Moray and Neile instructed Wren that ‘The King hath commanded us to lay a double Charge upon you, in his Name’.15 He had asked him to make:
a Globe representing accurately the figure of the Moon, as the Best Tubes represent it: and to delineate by the Help of the Microscope the Figures of all the Insects, and small living Creatures you can light upon…If it were needful to add any further Excitement to your industry, we should tell you how much our whole Society is rejoiced, that his Majesty has a just Esteem of your Parts, and honours you with his Commands.
Wren declined to make the microscopic drawings, but he did set about his lunar globe. In earlier Oxford days Wilkins and Wren had built an eighty-foot telescope to observe the entire face of the moon and to map this, Wren had developed a special eye-piece. Now he put these beautiful maps onto a globe of painted cardboard, and had it mounted and presented it to Charles (without showing it to the society), inscribed with the dedication, ‘To Charles II, King of Great Britain, France and Scotland, for the expansion of whose Dominions since no one Globe can suffice, Christopher Wren dedicates another in the Lunar Sphere’. Charles placed this elegant, evocative lunar globe, showing all the hills and valleys, gleaming surfaces and shadows, on its stand in his cabinet, and showed it to all who came.
Wren’s portrait, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, shows him pointing to the new skyline of London. He holds his plan of St Paul’s, and his mathematical instruments, celestial globe and telescope are by his side.
The society became another of Charles’s diversions. In January 1661 he sent Moray down to a meeting, with two magnets and a message ‘that he expected an account from the society of some of the most considerable experiments upon them’. In March he sent Sir Paul Neile with his ‘five little glass bubbles’, two filled with liquid and two solid; in July he sent Sir Samuel Tuke, with a paper of seeds that had been sent to him from Warwickshire, where it had ‘rained wheat’.16 He chatted to Evelyn, as he sat at supper at Whitehall, about the recent viewing of Saturn through Neile’s large telescope, and kept Petty in conversation for half an hour in front of forty lords, ‘upon the philosophy of Shipping, loadstone, skreen’d guns, the feathering of arrows, the vegetation of plants, the history of trades, etc.’17
Charles was quick to notice any work that might have a practical use like Evelyn’s book Fumifugium, about smoke pollution in London. This touched on his own dreams of rebuilding London as a city to rival Paris, free from the smoke that belched from lime kilns and breweries, tanneries and soap boilers, coating everything with soot, indoors as well as out, making tapestries yellow and oil-paintings brown and choking the flowers and fruit. One solution might be to move the trades downriver, creating a new river frontage with fine houses instead of warehouses; another would be to surround the city with a belt of greenery, with flowering shrubs and herbs. This was an attractive idea that caught Charles’s attention. He discussed it with the author as they sailed upriver on the way back from his yacht race to Greenwich in October 1661 and asked Evelyn to prepare a bill for the next session of parliament, saying he was determined to have something done about it, but in the end this was yet another plan too ambitious and costly to realise.
There is a faint feeling of a tease about some of his requests to the society, a suspicion that Charles rather enjoyed making the learned men scurry. Sometimes his questions were good ones. On 17 July 1661 Neile mentioned that ‘the king had, within four days past, desired to have a reason assigned, why the sensitive plants stir and contract themselves upon being touched’. Immediately Wilkins, Clarke, Evelyn and Goddard were appointed as a sub-committee to examine the nature of this little plant that shrinks back when touched, mimosa pudica, and a group including Brouncker and Moray spent an afternoon bent over the specimens in Thomas Chiffinch’s garden near St James’s Park.
This was not a waste of time, either botanically or in terms of pleasing Charles. In October the society petitioned the king for a charter, which was granted on 15 July 1662, for a Royal Society ‘for the Improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment’. A second, more precise charter replaced this nine months later.18 The charter meant that the society now had a constitution, and certain rights and privileges, the most important being that it could license books under the 1662 Licensing Act – a way of freeing the Fellows’ work from potential censorship by the church. The king also donated a mace, which was placed before the president at all meetings.
The society was now put on a formal footing. Members paid a subscription of ten shillings when elected, and a shilling a week for meetings, ‘whether present or absent’. To begin with they planned to do all the work themselves, providing papers and lectures as well as demonstrating experiments. This soon turned out to be too much and too chaotic, and in November 1662 Robert Hooke, cross-tempered, thorough to a degree and at times inspired, who had been working as Boyle’s assistant, was appointed as Curator of Experiments. This was the one salaried post, from which Hooke earned £80 a year, plus £50 for a lectureship. Hooke organised the demonstration of experiments, helped by a laboratory assistant, and was also supposed to look after the society’s collections, for which he cared very little. In the side-rooms and attics of the old half-timbered house, built by Gresham a century before, equipment and material piled up and collected dust: birds’ nests and honeycombs and wasps’ nests, jars and pots with human foetuses and lizards’ lungs; lode-stones of all shapes and sizes, ‘Sympathetic Powder’ to heal wounds, rhino-horns and hair-balls.
Charles heard of Hooke’s demonstrations. In July 1663 he threw the society into a flurry when he threatened to descend on a
meeting at Gresham in person. What should they show him, what experiments should they put on? A committee was formed and resolutions made: Colonel Long promised ‘to bring in his apparatus of insects, some snakes eggs, his collection of curious stones…some ermines and lizards, natives of England; as also some exotic beasts skins’.19 Dr Clarke ‘promised to shew that a frog will live above twenty minutes after his heart hath been taken out, and ceased to move’. Another Fellow was asked to ‘prepare the dissection of an oyster and a lobster’. The greatest burden, as usual, fell on Hooke:
MR HOOKE was charged to shew his microscopical observations in a handsome book to be provided by him for that purpose: to weigh the air, both in the engine and abroad; to break empty glass balls; as also to let the water ascend into them after they have been emptied; to provide the instrument for finding the different pressure of the atmosphere in the same place, as likewise the hygroscope made of the beard of a wild oat.20
But was this what was needed? Wren thought the whole project of a royal display too difficult: chemical experiments would be too dirty and slow, anatomical demonstrations too gruesome, mathematical proofs and astronomical measurements too bewildering, while a display of agricultural and industrial machinery would take too long to organise. Knowing Charles’s love of theatre, Wren suggested that his interest was in surface display rather than the laborious underlying research: ‘the key that opens treasures is often plain and rusty: but unless it be gilt, the key alone will make no shew at court.’21 He therefore suggested to the President, William, Viscount Brouncker, that they needed something surprising and spectacular but nothing resembling a fairground conjuror. How about a circular barometer, or an artificial eye? Or a compass in water, on springs, so that Charles could ‘sail by land’, navigating in his coach?