by Uglow, Jenny
The promised visit, perhaps luckily, never happened. Nonetheless, the interest of the king and the Duke of York and Prince Rupert gave their work status and won eminent members for the society, aristocrats, bishops and statesmen who boosted its reputation abroad.
Soon they had foreign Fellows, the first being Samuel Sorbière, in June 1663, and Christiaan Huygens, who visited England several times after his first trip in 1661. Sorbière, a French protestant who had translated More’s Utopia and Hobbes’s De Cive, caused a storm on his return to France by writing an account of the society, which their spokesman, Thomas Sprat, considered insulting. His worst fault was that he revered Hobbes, and saw him as heir to the society’s idol, Bacon. Supporting Hobbes, he also managed to insult Boyle, Wallis and Clarendon (whom he described as knowing the law, but understanding little else). He even implied that in conversation, Charles himself had shared his views: ‘’tis agreed on all sides that if Mr Hobbes were not so Dogmaticall, he would be very useful and necessary to the Royal Society, for there are few people that can see farther into things than he, or have applied themselves so long to the Study of Natural Philosophy.’22 Uproar followed. Sprat replied vehemently, and the two kings – Charles and Louis – had to intervene to cool tempers on both sides of the channel.
The unfortunate Sorbière had, however, found the society’s proceedings astonishingly orderly, describing their meetings in a large room at Gresham College, with a table by the fireplace and two rows of simple wooden benches, one higher than the other, as in an amphitheatre. The President sat in his elbow-chair behind the table:
They address their Discourse to him bare-headed, till he makes a sign for them to put on their Hats…He is never interrupted that speaks, and Differences of Opinion cause no manner of Resentment, nor as much as a disobliging Way of Speech. There is nothing seemed to me to be more civil, respectful and better managed.23
Many meetings focused on the ‘strange’ in terms of the bizarre or the freakish, like the objects collected by dilettanti for their cabinets: an exotic new fruit, the pineapple from Barbados; a report of a woman who sweated so much that you could take a quart of ill-smelling water from the palms of her hands; a miraculous varnish that would defy rust.24 But technical innovation was also of interest. One aspect of the society’s work was a patriotic drive towards the ‘improvement’ of crafts, trades and agriculture, and at a meeting on 15 October 1662 Moray reported the king’s wish that no patents for new inventions should pass, until the society had approved them. Of their eight committees, established in 1663, the greatest enthusiasm was roused by those for mechanics, the history of trades, and agriculture.
The mechanical committee was particularly concerned with inventions and carriage improvements, vital for transport, and in 1663 the agricultural committee were busy discussing a recent petition to the king ‘for a patent to practise a secret of making all grain grow plentifully in any barren ground, without laying on any dung or compost’; and ‘for spurring vines and orange trees into sudden growth’.25 There were also explorations of technology, including the development of the silk industry, and whenever members of the society went abroad as envoys, they were asked to bring back reports about everything from mountain ranges to local diseases, from the design of palaces to the growth of plants.
The first complete volume actually published by the society was Evelyn’s Sylva, which prompted a nationwide interest in landscaping and tree-planting. Its second publication revealed entirely new realms. This was Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published early in 1665, superbly illustrated in copper plates, showing the world hitherto unseen but now visible through a microscope, from the tip of a needle to the scales on a fish. The exchange and spread of such information was invaluable, although several of the most brilliant Fellows actually did their experiments elsewhere. The naturalist John Ray, whose pioneering work on the classification of plants was so vital to the history of botany, was hampered by painful leg trouble and could rarely come to meetings, but sent in his reports by letter. Robert Boyle eventually set up his own laboratory in his sister Lady Ranelagh’s house in Pall Mall, where he lived, and wrote directly for the public rather than for the Fellows, while Isaac Newton – still a skinny, lank-haired student in 1660 – wrote his works on optics and mechanics in isolation at Cambridge. The society pushed for their publication, but tension always remained between the fiercely materialist enquirers like Hooke and those like Newton who still sought truth in the old hermetic texts and the mysteries of alchemy. Arguments also often surfaced as to who had made key discoveries or inventions first.
Hooke’s drawing of a louse, made with the aid of a microscope for Micrographia 1665
At the start the Fellows had ambitious plans to collect knowledge in all spheres, involving elaborate questionnaires. The whole universe, their secretary Henry Oldenburg claimed, would be ‘taken to taske’.26 This great scheme proved impossible, but Oldenburg’s own massive correspondence, backed up by the Philosophical Transactions which he founded in 1665, provided a web of scientific intelligence stretching across Europe. This desire to communicate was combined with a wish to clear aside the rhetoric and mystification of the scholastic tradition. A new interest in language led to deep, vexed questions of perception, expression and the relation of human consciousness to the world itself. The society also confronted the idea put so powerfully by Hobbes that as language was always the construction of a society, it could never approximate to the ‘things’ themselves. Two strands came together here. One was the desire of the scientists to describe their findings clearly, to avoid what Sprat (in a paradoxically rhetorical outburst) called ‘this visious Abundance of Phrase, this Trick of Metaphor, this Volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a Noise in the World…’ The other strand derived from the attempt of puritan preachers to speak directly and simply to their congregations – seen in the sermons of Wilkins, and his follower John Tillotson. In Wilkins’s words, ‘Obscurity in the discourse is an argument of ignorance in the minde. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness. The more nearly we understand any thing our selves, the more easily we expound it to others.’27
As a remedy to linguistic extravagance, wrote Sprat, the society resolved:
to reject all Amplifications, Digressions, and Swellings of Style; to return back to the primitive Purity and Shortness, when Men deliver’d so many Things, almost in an equal number of Words. They have exacted from all their Members, a close, naked, natural way of Speaking; positive Expressions, clear Senses; a native Easiness; bringing all Things as near the mathematical Plainness as they can; and preferring the Language of Artizans, Country-Men, and Merchants, before that of Wits, or Scholars.28
This, then, was another important route of access to mysteries, of which Charles would have approved. Yet it had an interesting political slant, looking to the plain speech of the people rather than the wit of the court, and a practical one, putting science at the service of trades and crafts. Wilkins went even further than this, attempting to find a universal language, comprehensible to all nations, almost with the precision of mathematics.
Although he was intrigued, Charles was not exactly forthcoming with funds. In October 1662 he sent orders for a small grant to be made out to Moray and Boyle, in trust for the society, from funds in Ireland, but it turned out that these funds had already been promised to other claimants. A few years later, in 1669, he granted the society Chelsea College, which had been founded by his grandfather to train protestant priests. The idea was that they should use this as a base, but the society never moved in and the property caused them nothing but headaches. Charles eventually bought it back in 1682, as a home for old soldiers, the Royal Chelsea Hospital, and the society then invested the proceeds in the East India Company. Beyond this was that there was simply no government money to be had. When Colbert and Louis XIV, who had instructed his ambassadors to find out about the Royal Society, established the state-funded Académie des Sciences in 1666 the Fellows made bi
tter comparisons. Charles’s special interest in navigation, however, did prompt him to found the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in 1673, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich two years later, two significant achievements.
After his initial burst of interest he sat back and let the Royal Society run its own affairs, while enjoying his own alchemical experiments at Whitehall, and sending his good wishes and a side of venison for their annual dinners. Although he was made a Fellow, he was never so involved as James and Prince Rupert. The latter deluged the society with papers, submitting ideas for testing ‘a gunpowder eleven times stronger than normal; a novel water pump; an early machine gun; a perspective aid for artists; and improved sea charts and navigational instruments’.29 By contrast Charles’s enquiries grew ever more flippant. In July 1663 Sir Robert Moray ‘mentioned that the King had made an experiment of keeping a sturgeon in fresh water in St James’s Park for a whole year: it was moved to kill it and see how it would eat’.30 Charles’s interest was still largely in curiosities of the natural world, plants, bees, fish. Once he sent ‘that wonderful horne of the fish, which struck a dangerous howle in the keele of a ship, in the India seas’ (in fact off Barbados) ‘which being broake off with the violence of the fish, & left in the timber, preserv’d it from foundring’. Some months later Moray turned up with ‘a discourse on coffee written by Dr Goddard at the King’s command’ and in August 1666 mentioned ‘that the King had been discussing of ant’s eggs, and inquiring how they came to that bigness, which sometimes exceeded that of the insect itself’.31
The Royal Society suffered because their scientific researches seemed so abstruse, while their social schemes proved too ambitious and expensive, whether it was Evelyn’s ambitious plan for London or Petty’s desire to reform taxation. Petty was mocked at court as a conjuror or a fanatic. In February 1664 Pepys recorded that ‘the King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W Petty, who was there about his boat, and at Gresham College in general…for spending time only in weighing of ayre and doing nothing else since they sat’.32 He once called the Fellows his ‘fous’, his court jesters, and took substantial bets on the results of their experiments: Moray reported that ‘the King has laid a wager of fifty pounds to five for the compression of air by water: and that it was acknowledged, that his Majesty had won the wager’.33
Hollar’s frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, 1667, shows the bust of Charles II being crowned by Fame, with the Society’s first President, Viscount Brouncker, in a classical robe on the left, and Francis Bacon on the right.
The society had shown that a forum could be created where debate was open yet contained, and posed no threat to the state, and although Charles had wanted more practical results and less pure research, he was pleased to be called ‘Patronus et fundator’. In Hollar’s frontispiece to Sprat’s propagandist History of the Royal Society of 1667, the King’s bust, crowned with a laurel wreath by Fame, stands on a plinth with Lord Brouncker on his left and Francis Bacon on his right, and the air-pump, quadrants, and other instruments in the background.34 Quizzically, he raises an eyebrow at posterity.
In his own laboratory Charles dabbled with Moray and the ‘King’s Chymist’, Nicaise Le Fèvre (often called Lefebure), whose interests were more alchemical. Charles was intrigued by the old secrets of alchemy, whose philosophy of transformation, regeneration and purification embraced both matter and spirit, finding a universe of hidden correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm. Like all alchemists he felt the lure of quicksilver, the mercury that flowed and collected and pooled and separated, and showed such dramatic and varied transformations, turning into red crystals when mixed with nitric acid, into poisonous white powder when heated, into amalgams with other metals. It seemed to transcend solid and liquid, heaven and earth. Anything that might change base metal into gold was bound to appeal, but Charles was also moved by the human and spiritual analogies, the transformation of man to a state of perfection, and of society from an iron to a golden age.
18 Card Houses
Thou sayst I swore I loved thee best
And that my heart lived in thy breast;
And now thou wonderst much that I
Should what I swore then now deny,
And upon this thou taxest me
With faithlessness, inconstancy;
Thou hast no reason so to do:
Who can’t dissemble, ne’er must woo.
JOHN DANCER, The Variety
CATHERINE RELAXED as her English improved and she enjoyed herself more. She did, however, have to put up with constant small humiliations. When Henrietta Maria arrived in the autumn of 1662 she brought with her Charles’s son by Lucy Walter, who was still being introduced – with no one fooled – as James Crofts, the nephew of William Crofts, his guardian in France. Fascinated observers noted the shifting alliances in the queen mother’s evening circle. Here was the queen, wrote Pepys in September, ‘not very charming, yet she hath a good, modest and innocent look…here I also saw Madam Castlemayne and, which pleased me most, Mr Crofts the King’s bastard, a most pretty spark of about 15 year old’ (he was thirteen), ‘who I perceive doth hang much upon my Lady Castlemayne and is alway with her.’1 The royal party stayed until dark and when they left, into the leading coach piled the king and queen, young James – and Barbara.
Although the autumn of 1662 was troubled by fear of plots after the ejection of the nonconformist ministers, for the court, there was always time for pleasure. Towards the end of November Londoners woke to find their rooftops covered with snow, the first for three years. It was the start of weeks of icy cold. Charles took Catherine to St James’s Park to watch people skating on the new canal. This was a novel diversion, learnt in Holland by many exiles who had brought back their iron and steel skates. The watchers were entranced, among them John Evelyn who waxed lyrical about the ‘strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders’, how fast they sped by, ‘how sudainly they stop in full carriere upon the Ice, before their Majesties’.2 Evelyn went home by water, ‘but not without exceeding difficultie, the Thames being froze, greate flakes of yce incompassing our boate’.
Appropriately, the snow coincided with the arrival of three envoys from Tsar Alexis of Russia. Charles greeted them warmly, acknowledging the Tsar’s kindness during his years of exile and his boycott of trade with Cromwell’s Commonwealth. York House was fitted out for the Russians at considerable cost, the City’s trained bands and the King’s Guards turned out to escort them, and the people flocked to admire them, or to laugh and jeer. The tall Russians in their great fur hats were dashing figures as they rode in their coaches through the crowded streets, their attendants following with hawks on their wrists to present to the King. At their audience in the Banqueting House the gallery was so packed that people feared it might fall. They wore tunics embroidered with gold and pearls and bore gifts of furs – sable, black fox and ermine – Persian carpets, cloths of gold and velvet and even ‘sea-horse teeth’.3 Charles was given a gold glove, on which he held three hawks, while the chief envoy raised the letters from the Tsar ceremoniously on high and then prostrated himself full length at the king’s feet. The envoys had come to bring congratulations and to ask for a loan. They did not get one, but Charles did repay the money that the Tsar had lent him twelve years before, when he was at his lowest ebb.
Rebellions forgotten, the mood at court was festive. Charles and Catherine watched plays in the Cockpit, and as Christmas approached the builders put up scaffolding for seats in the Great Hall and made a stage for the King’s Company. Not everyone approved. On Christmas Day old Bishop Morley preached in the Chapel Royal on ‘goodwill towards men’, distinguishing between true Christian joy and the ‘mistaken jollity’ of the court, particularly their ‘excess in playes and gameing’. In Morley’s view the groom porter, who supervised the court gambling in the twelve days of Christmas, was no better than a second in a duel. ‘Upon which’, noted Pepys, ‘it was worth observing how far
they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses.’4
Dancing was as much part of court life as gambling and plays, and on New Year’s Eve Charles gave a great ball. For the first dance, the French branle, he led out Anne, Duchess of York, while James led the Duchess of Buckingham, and the young James Crofts took the hand of Barbara Castlemaine. This was followed by a stately courante, and then, impatient for livelier tunes, Charles ordered country dances, ‘the King leading the first which he called for; which was – says he, Cuckolds all a-row the old dance of England’.5 Between Christmas and Lent, every night saw a different kind of entertainment. In late January Ambassador Cominges reported rather primly to Louis XIV that there was a ball and a comedy every other day, and the rest of each day was spent in play, either in the queen’s rooms or Lady Castlemaine’s ‘where the company does not fail to be treated to a good supper. In this way, Sire, is the time occupied in this country.’6