by Don Jordan
Hooke and Boyle carried out many experiments using the vacuum pump. They made observations on the change in levels of mercury in a barometer according to the amount of air withdrawn. They observed what happened when various flammable materials were inserted into the sphere and set alight; Hooke recorded his surprise when the flames were ultimately extinguished. He thought the vacuum should have allowed more space for what he termed – in relation to an experiment involving burning coal – ‘the stifling steams’ to expand into. Hooke’s surprise was understandable, for it would be more than a hundred years before Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen.
Boyle s vacuum pump had the ability to demonstrate several of the characteristics of air. The fact that sound could not travel through a vacuum was demonstrated by placing a striking clock inside the vacuum glass. As the air was extracted the chimes became inaudible. The pump was also used to demonstrate categorically that air was necessary for life. A cat was placed in the jar, the air sucked out and the cat .died. This experiment gave rise to two of the most deliciously cruel lines ever written about empirical science:
Out of the glass the air being screw’d,
Pus died and never so much as mew’d.13
The vacuum pump lent itself to other macabre experiments. Inserting insects, a lark, a sparrow, a mouse and so on, Boyle and Hooke recorded how the animals would drop down and cease activity as the air was extracted, only to revive when it was readmitted. When a creature was subjected to the withdrawal of air a second time, it did not revive. Hooke reached the conclusion that the creatures required air to breathe. These experiments were all demonstrated in the medieval surroundings of Gresham’s old house, the hunched and contorted Hooke dextrously operating the machine as the tall, aristocratic Boyle provided a running commentary. Their presentations held the distinguished members of the society in a state of wonder.
To explain the springiness in the air, Boyle explained that it was like fleece – when compressed and then released, it bounced back. Based on the work of others as well as his own observations, he also explained that air had weight and pressure. In 1662, partially egged on by criticisms of his 1660 publication of his experiments using the vacuum pump, Boyle published a further work which contained his groundbreaking law on gases – Boyle’s Law. This revolutionary work demonstrated how the pressure of a gas decreased as its volume increased. Today, Boyle’s law is expressed by the statement ‘the absolute pressure exerted by a given mass of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to the volume it occupies if the temperature and amount of gas remain unchanged within a closed system’; this can be expressed in the formula PV = k, where P is the pressure of the gas, V is the volume and k is a constant.
Helped by the mathematically superior Hooke, Boyle’s work created a great stir. Without Hooke, it is unlikely that he could have directed the manufaeture of the pump, let alone have done the mathematics to formulate his eponymous law.
There was no doubting the society had got off to a fine start. Inspired by Boyle, other members of the society, with perhaps more enthusiasm than understanding, began to suggest myriad experiments they would like to see. It became obvious that the society would require a permanent employee to oversee its programme of experiments and demonstrations. It also became clear that this man was Hooke, if his patron Boyle could be persuaded to release him.
In the terms agreed by the twelve who had gathered in Dr Rooke’s rooms, the society had first been known as a college for the promotion of physic-mathematical experimental learning’. Since the summer of 1661 the members had discussed a new name for the society and how they might obtain a royal charter. After further petitions to the King, a charter of incorporation gained the Great Seal on 15 July 1662 and the Royal Society of London officially came into existence. The King presented the new society with a silver mace on which were engraved the emblems of England, Ireland, Scotland and France (for the English monarchy still quaintly made claim to the French throne). As a sign of its potential importance to Charles, the courtier Lord Brouncker was appointed the society’s first president.
Charles had little interest in the more arcane experiments that interested most of the empiricists; he hoped the society would apply natural philosophy to questions of commerce and navigation, vital for the expansion of trade and foreign territory. And at the same time that Boyle published his famous law, just such a development was made by one of the Fellows. Sir William Petty invented a dual-hulled ship, or catamaran, which he claimed would prove to be a huge advance over traditional ships in speed, stability and carrying abilities. The King, who knew a great deal about ship design, disagreed. Samuel Pepys was present at the Duke of York’s apartments when the King entered into a long discussion with Petty about his recently launched double-hulled ship. When he began teasing Petty about the novel design of the new vessel, Petty offered to place odds in a bet that his boat could outpace any ship the King liked to offer for comparison. Charles refused the bet but continued to tease Petty. Then, turning his attention to the activities of Petty’s fellow members of the Royal Society, he made fun of their failure to come up with anything more interesting than ‘weighting of ayre’, a reference to the experiments of Boyle and Hooke.
Later in the year, the activities of the society’ were placed on a firm empirical footing. On 12 November, at one of its weekly meetings, the society unanimously voted for Robert Hooke to become its curator of experiments. Boyle was thanked for letting Hooke go and the society ordered that Hooke should come and sit amongst them’.
The arrangement was hardly to Hooke’s advantage: his brief was such that he would soon find himself overloaded with work. He was instructed to ‘bring in every day of the meeting 3 or 4 experiments of his own and take care of such others as should be mentioned to him by the Society.’14 On the same day, the aristocratic virtuosi Lord Brouncker and Sir Robert Moray proposed an experiment to measure the velocity of different falling bodies. The gentlemen would do none of the measuring themselves. Ever helpful, and keen as mustard, Hooke would carry out the work.
And so it would be from then on. In return for his industry, Hooke earned a stipend of £30 a year, and was given rooms in Gresham College, where he was made a professor on a stipend of £50 a year for life, thanks to the beneficence of Sir John Cutler, who earned for himself an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society. Further on the debit side, Cutler rarely paid Hooke his money; the great scientist had to plead for it on many occasions. On the plus side, however, Hooke was now a resident of London, a 27-year-old bachelor with a salary (albeit small), his own lodgings and the world of science at his feet. He set about making the most of the city that was now his home.
For a young man with Hooke’s intelligence and genius for devising experiments, there was no better place to be. From his diaries we see that he was a gregarious individual, regularly meeting friends and colleagues, daily frequenting the city’s ordinaries (dining rooms), taverns and coffee houses. On his rounds he gossiped and exchanged philosophical and scientific ideas with the Fellows of the Royal Society and anyone else who was interested. Hooke’s life was perhaps as sociable as that of the equally gregarious Pepys. They both moved daily around the city in a way that put them at the centre of its activity. Where Hooke and Pepys differed was in their preoccupations. Hooke led an intellectual life of the kind that his friend the administrator never did. Pepys, with his complicated sexual exploits, had a personal life separate from his professional one; Hooke, without a wife, was married to the coffee house and the Royal Society. Within a year he would be elected a Fellow himself.
The year 1662 saw great changes not only in science, but in the royal household. In May, Charles married Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of the King of Portugal. The choice of consort had not been easy. Many in the royal court had favoured a marriage connecting England with a northern European Protestant power. In the end, no suitable partner could be found. Portugal, though Catholic, was an old ally and promised an enormous dowry, while the King’s d
aughter was available. As part of the Queen’s dowry, Portugal gave Charles Tangiers in North Africa near the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, and Bombay on the west coast of India. The ambitious merchant Sir William Rider, with his experience of trading in the Mediterranean, was appointed to the committee tasked with developing Tangiers as a trading port. Yet in the long run it was the apparently strategically insignificant Bombay that was to play a decisive role in expanding London’s foreign influence.
Charles and Catherine married in both Catholic and Anglican ceremonies at Southampton and honeymooned at Hampton Court. The new Queen quickly learned that she was far from the only woman in her husband’s life. The King’s mistress Barbara Palmer had already ensconced herself at the palace and was pregnant. With a callous disregard for his new Queen’s feelings, Charles insisted that Barbara become one of Catherine s ladies-in-waiting.
Charles was to exhibit a similar cold disregard for others in his dealings with two of his political enemies. Two formerly influential adversaries, Harry Vane and John Lambert, had been imprisoned since the Restoration, Vane on the island of St Mary in the Scilly Isles and Lambert in Guernsey. Neither had been involved as judges in the trial of Charles I, so both should have been subject to the general pardon promised by Charles in the Declaration of Breda in 1660. Later that same year, Charles had stated in Parliament that if either man were subsequently accused of treason he would pardon him.15
In 1662, when both men were accused of treason, Charles failed to keep his word. Vane, an unabashed republican, was falsely accused of’compassing and imagining the King’s death’ – in other words, plotting to murder the King – and Lambert was accused of having rebelled against the King by leading troops into battle against the forces of George Monck the year before Charles came home. As at that time Charles was still in exile, the charge of treason was fatuous.
Charles did finally keep his word regarding Lambert. After undergoing a trial for his life Lambert was returned to exile on Guernsey. With Parliament and the courts anxious to settle old scores, however, he buckled and lost his resolve to pardon Vane. Famously, he told his chancellor that Vane was ‘Too dangerous a man to let live’. Vane was spared the grisly death of a traitor by hanging, drawing and torturing and was instead beheaded. The death of Vane was the second time Charles had broken the promises made in the Declaration of Breda. It would not be the last.
* Today, free publie lectures are still given by the current holders of the original seven chairs, which have been augmented by professorships in commerce, technology and the environment.
† In the seventeenth century an intelligencer was someone who collected and imparted information. The term could equally apply to a spy or one who assembled academic knowledge.
‡ Galileo (1564–1642) was arguably the central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, producing evidence to support the Copernican system of the universe, declaring that the ‘book of nature’ was written in mathematics and becoming the first genuine experimentalist. He worked at Padua and Pisa and his work was known internationally in his lifetime.
CHAPTER 8
FOREIGN ADVENTURES
Slavery was the most baleful of London’s overseas trades. To create wealth from the new territories across the Atlantic, a cheap – or preferably free – labour force was required. That labour force farmed the new cash crops of tobacco, sugarcane, cotton and indigo.
To begin with, London’s underclasses made up the bulk of it. In the early 1600s, prostitutes were shipped, along with criminals and orphaned children. This ‘cleansing’ operation was not enough. A new breed of trader grew up – the spirits’, men and women who kidnapped the unwary and spirited them away into slavery. To begin with they were dispatched to the sugarcane farms of Barbados. Later they were sent to other islands and to the American mainland. The spirits loitered in and around the docks, waiting to entice unwary boys, girls and young men and women into locked rooms or ships about to sail.
In Restoration London, working men and even children had to beware not only of spirits, but of navy press gangs. These were the bane of London. Naïve young men who lingered too long around the docksides found themselves plied with drink and put on board a warship bound for battle or on a long voyage to India. At the Navy Office, Samuel Pepys was involved with the administration of the press gangs, though privately he was against them, calling them a great tyranny’. He described ‘labouring men and housekeepers leaving poor wives and families, taken up on a sudden by strangers’.1 Given the constant threat to English shipping from the better-equipped Dutch navy, the press gang was seen as a necessary evil. The transportation of foreigners from their own lands was not even remarked upon.
As the plantations grew in size and number, insufficient numbers of enslaved fellow Britons could be persuaded or compelled to make up the workforce. The planters and traders therefore turned to the Spanish for inspiration and began to transport enslaved Africans. Though for the most part the trade was run from London, the slaves never set foot in the city, let alone on British soil, being shipped directly across the Atlantic on the arduous Middle Passage of the triangular slave trade between England, Africa and America or the sugar islands such as Barbados.
The ever-aggressive East India Company wanted a part of the growing African slave trade. It tried to bribe James, Duke of York, in order to procure a monopoly of the trade along the east coast of Africa. A ‘present’ of £1000 of silver plate was given to him to secure his support. As seen earlier, James, however, had gone into business with his cousin Prince Rupert to secure the African monopoly with the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. Virtually every member of the royal family had shares in it, the King included.
For the King to be involved in private enterprise was unheard of, yet here was Charles set up as the major beneficiary of a joint stock company. Something unusual must have led to such a financial novelty – and so it had. When Parliament arranged the King’s income it did so by reintroducing the income stream his father had enjoyed before the civil wars broke out, primarily based on customs and excise tax and estimated at £1.2 million per annum. The actual income generated turned out to be well short of the expected sum. Charles and his family were therefore keen to procure some private income. The commercial structure that had served the City of London so well for generations – the joint stock company – seemed the perfect vehicle for a royal family in need of cash.
Charles did not stop there. In 1662 he successfully entreated Parliament for more income. Parliament responded with a new tax. The hearth tax was a tax levied on most households in the kingdom, at a rate of two shillings a year for each fireplace or stove in the building, with some allowance for those living in properties below a certain value. It was estimated to generate £500,000 a year, the estimated shortfall in the King’s income. In practice, the new tax, like the other components of Charles’s income, did not deliver the expected amount.
The purpose of the Company of Royal Adventurers was, therefore, not only to fulfil Charles’s wish to make England a major world trading and political power, but also to a great extent to provide the Stuarts with a private income stream. Charles was to take half the profits from the cargoes of any ships seized, whether English or foreign, deemed to have broken the company’s monopoly.
The success of the Company of Royal Adventurers’ trade in slaves would depend on three things: a need for slave labour in the expanding agricultural economies of the new semi-tropical colonies; a stable source of slaves from accessible territory where slavery was already culturally acceptable and whose inhabitants could withstand the rigours of manual labour in a hot climate; and a means of connecting need and supply, not only between the parties involved but with a market for the resulting produce in Europe. This last link in the chain was provided by the Atlantic weather system, which north of the equator provided winds circulating in a clockwise direction. Ships were thus able to sail with relative ease south to Africa, then west to th
e Caribbean, finally completing the voyage in front of the winds – now westerlies – home again to England. In this way, the northern trade winds favoured the English, the Dutch and the French, while the southern trade winds, which circulated anticlockwise, favoured the Spanish and Portuguese, who had therefore historically traded and set up colonies in Central and South America.
Long-distance trading voyages took a great deal of planning. First, the cost of the voyage had to be ascertained by calculating the cost of acquiring a ship, fitting it out, hiring a captain and crew and buying the victuals for the journey. Next, the cost of the cargo at its point of acquisition had to be estimated, to offset against its price at sale. In the case of a trading voyage dealing in cloths, metals and spices, this could be worked out quite easily by the known prices the goods currently fetched, multiplied by the quantities carried and traded. When the cargo was human, the sums became more variable. A European ship trading in West Africa depended upon the abilities of its local agents and traders along the coast. A certain quantity of slaves might be required, but it was up to the local traders to find them. These traders acted as middlemen, negotiating between tribal chiefs and the visiting Europeans. There were many hurdles to overcome. There was no guarantee that the desired number of slaves could always he provided.
It is unlikely that the Duke of York, the chairman of the Company of Royal Adventurers, spent much time on such details, but his secretary, Sir William Coventry, would have been closely involved – as would the city merchants who bought shares in the company. Thanks to the tradition of long training apprenticeships within London’s great trading houses, the many considerations for estimating risk in international trade were well understood. For James, the joint efforts of London’s merchants inside the monopolies granted by the Crown were only one facet of what was also intended as an imperial project.