by Don Jordan
Moreover, following the death of his sisters husband, William II, in 1650 Charles saw the subsequent removal of power from the House of Orange, to be ceded to a regime based on elected regional authorities, as an attack on royalty itself. His view worked against any viable, long-term alliance between two countries that might – given their Protestantism and similar mercantile histories – have seemed natural allies.
During his time abroad, Charles had had an opportunity to study the forms of government in several countries, and especially to compare the Dutch United Provinces and France. Contemporary commentators later pointed out that Charles spoke favourably of France, where the king, his cousin, ruled with absolute power. Charles’s mother, Henrietta Maria, was the daughter of a French king, and had professed her religion and culture in a very open way, processing publicly to her private chapel on the Strand. When the English Civil War turned against the Crown, it was with his mother that the young Prince had initially gone to live near Paris. Charles had grown up learning the habits of the French court.
While some in Whitehall thought France, with its expansionist ambitions, was England’s real adversary, Charles kept up cordial relations with the French through his younger sister Henrietta Anne, wife of the French king’s brother, Philippe. This familial connection was of genuine importance, for Henrietta was party to French state secrets and was Charles’s lifelong confidante. Charles’s onlv connection to the Dutch stadtholder, or prime minister, Johan de Witt was through Downing, who as English ambassador maintained a hostile front. Charles’s personal experiences and preferences thus helped colour a foreign policy that was now moving somewhat recklessly towards war.
As Downing’s anti-Dutch policies took hold, the English put pressure on the Dutch, raiding their ships and attacking their trading ports. This scheme, run in tandem with Holmes’s exploits in Africa, was designed to goad the Dutch into declaring war. In August a squadron of Royal Navy ships arrived off the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in North America and demanded the colony be surrendered. The governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was made of stern stuff and at first resisted. But with ammunition and gunpowder low and the population fearfid, he had no alternative but to surrender. New Amsterdam was renamed New York after the heir to the throne.
Downing’s arguments in favour of war proved persuasive for the King’s brother James and the current royal favourite, the politician Henry Bennet, ist Earl of Arlington, whom Charles had appointed – largely because of his success in procuring young women for the royal bed – to replace the elderly Sir Edward Nicholas as Secretary of State two years earlier. York and Bennet in turn won the argument with the King. In October, the Commons voted the enormous sum of £2.5 million to prepare the navy for war.
Holmes was the agent by wirich the conflict would be engineered. His written orders, drafted by the Duke of York’s secretary William Coventry and signed by James himself, were to ‘promote the Interests of the Royall Company’ and to ‘kill, take, sink or destroy such as shall oppose you’.14 The Duke’s unwritten orders were to foment as much trouble as possible for the Dutch, forcing them to retaliate and enabling the English to claim Dutch aggression as an act of war.
With a flotilla numbering twenty-two warships, Holmes appeared off Cape Verde on 25 December 1664. In a lightning campaign he captured or sank two dozen Dutch ships and wreaked havoc at Dutch forts and other strongholds along swathes of the continental coastline. By the time Holmes reached London with news of the strongholds he had taken, a Dutch fleet under Admiral Michiel de Ruyter had recaptured all but one. The fact that the English held on to that one fortress nevertheless provided them with a foothold they would go on to exploit in future years.
Astonishingly, the military reverses had no great immediate effect on the British slave trade in West Africa. The numbers of slaves exported remained fairly constant. Perhaps the Dutch could not afford to maintain a strong naval presence for long so far from home. But the political damage was done. Full-scale war between the English and the Dutch was not far off.
* Ashanti were chiefly taken to Jamaica. To avoid fending, their neighbours and traditional enemies the Fante, from present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast, were taken to Barbados.
† For Mun’s twelve-point plan on how to be a good London merchant, see Appendix I.
‡ If every country strives for it, free trade becomes the serpent that devours its own tail. As no one has yet succeeded in working nut what to do about this cannibalistic phenomenon, it is hardly surprising it was a hot issue in the seventeenth century.
§ Debate on wbat to measure and how to measure it goes on among economists today. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, 1776, argued that it was unnecessary to worry about the balance of payments as in the long term it did not matter, a view that would have horrified many both in seventeenth-century London and today.
¶ For the partial text of the Navigation Act of 1660, see Appendix II.
# This view held at the centre of British politics until Britain voted in the referendum of 25 June 2.016 to withdraw from membership of the European Union.
CHAPTER 10
A NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE
Around die end of 1664, two Frenchmen died in Covent Garden of suspected plague. There had already been a few cases in London during the year, perhaps twelve in all, but in seventeenth-century London this was nothing to worry about. Plague never completely went away; it ebbed and flowed, changing with the seasons and occasionally building up to an epidemic.
Common at the time in England and other European countries, bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium carried by fleas that live off rats. There had been many epidemics. In the fourteenth century plague had wiped out between 30 and 60 per cent of the population of Europe. More recently, during 1663-4, an epidemic had taken hold in Holland. The English authorities were therefore wary. A period of quarantine was imposed on shipping coming up the Thames from Holland in case it carried the infection. The winter of 1664-5 was particularly cold, and it was known that plague did not spread much, if at all, in cold weather. Nevertheless, throughout the winter, vigilance was the watchword. Meanwhile, London continued about its business.
The royal household was not immune to such diseases. Another scourge of the time, smallpox, had nearly carried off the Queen late in 1663 and by the following year she was still recovering. By the time of her illness Catherine and Charles both knew’ she was most unlikely to carry a child to full term; to add to the Queens sorrow, Barbara had given Charles four children. Then, in a fever, Catherine had imagined giving birth to a baby boy, an heir to the throne. Charles was reported to have comforted her in her delirium, tenderly going along with her fantasy.
With ill-health circling London and the royal family, it might have been a timely moment for the Royal Society or the Royal College of Physicians to make some breakthrough in medicine, but that did not happen. Medical science was insufficiently developed to find remedies for most ailments, a fact that was soon to become all too clear. However, two books which appeared in London bookshops that winter, and which could not have been more different in appearance, were both of great and lasting importance. One was large, with imposing leather binding; the other was a slight thing of only a few pages, like a newsletter. The small publication was the first edition of Philosophical Transactions, a journal recording developments in the field of natural philosophy, or science, in which medicine markedly played almost no part. The larger book bore the odd title Micrographia. It was written by the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, Robert Hooke, and u’as published by the society in January 1665, when the Thames was still frozen over.
It was not the first book to be published under the imprimatur of the Royal Society’. That honour had gone the previous year to Sylva, John Evelyn’s learned discourse on the properties and propagation of forest trees. Evelyn was born in Surrey and had grown up in the family home of Southover Grange in Lewes, Sussex, where he developed a lifelong love of trees; he was, he later said, ‘wood born, wh
ich accounted for his interest in plants. His book was a call to arms, asserting that a rigorous programme of replanting was necessary. According to Evelyn, Britain was in danger of running out of suitable wood with which to manufacture ships – our floating castles’ – and to make charcoal for the key manufacturing industries of iron and glass.
English forests truly were being depleted at an-unsustainable rate. One cause was the burden the shipbuilding industry put on the stock of oak trees. A first-rate warship required the felling of a hundred acres of oak forest, or up to 2000 oak trees, each of which had taken on average 150 years to grow to maturity.1 Another reason, according to Evelyn, was that during the interregnum Cromwellians had taken over estates owned by royalists and wantonly grubbed up the forests.2 The chief reason for the depletion of the forests was both prosaic and irreversible: during the previous hundred years England’s population had doubled. Forests were being ripped out to make way for agricultural land. The enormous growth of London had gone hand-in-hand with that of the entire population. The expansion of agriculture, however, had outstripped that of the population, for food production had to sustain not only the agrarian population and connected rural communities but London itself, which was essentially non-productive in terms of food, except for the baking of its daily bread.
Unfortunately, Sylva was a dry read – a fact accidentally acknowledged by the author in his florid introduction to the reader – ‘if these dry sticks afford him any sap . . . ‘ Sylva had but one illustration, a dull diagram of how to pile wood to burn for charcoal. Possibly because of its worthy subject, and worthier prose, it was received with no great enthusiasm by the book-buying public, nor did the navy’s shipbuilding programme expand, as he had hoped, via a national oak forest planting scheme.
While Sylva failed to excite, the Royal Society’s second publication caused a sensation and become an instant best seller. Unlike Sylva, Robert Hookes Micrographie, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, was not only revolutionary but lavishly illustrated. Thirty-eight full-page copperplate engravings contained dozens of illustrations such as its readers would never have seen before – the grid-like eye of a fly in extreme close-up, the cell-like structure of vegetation, those scourges of domestic London life, the flea and the louse, both reproduced at over a foot long, and even frozen human urine, all seen under the microscope.
Hooke was twenty-seven when he began the observations for Micrographie. He realised that this had to be his work, his book, his moment to show what he could achieve in many different fields of study. He even included a section at the end about observations that could be made with a very different type of optic tube from the microscope – the telescope – with a description of ‘the different types of stars’ one could sec. The final plate, no. 38, is a beautiful engraving of craters on the moon.
The idea behind the work was not Hooke’s, however, but that of the King. It had come to Charles’s attention that Christopher Wren had observed several small creatures though a microscope and made drawings of them, including a louse and a flea. The King was so amused by the drawings that he asked for more. A collection of illustrations would make a worthy book for the King’s cabinet of curiosities. Wren was engaged in so many other projects that he had to decline the commission. The task was passed to Hooke, who dedicated his work to the King and gave generous acknowledgement to Wren’s prior work in his introduction, describing his friend’s drawings as one of the ornaments of that great Collection of Rarities in the King’s Closet’.3
Hooke’s book was a triumph for the Royal Society. Although it did not set out to do so, it advertised to the world that the society had great ambition; its extraordinary goal being no less than the exploration of almost everything. Yet the Fellows had few tools to aid them in their explorations. New experiments generally required the manufacture of new apparatus. Hooke was alone among the virtuosi in having the technical ability to make such equipment. Having been elected a full Fellow of the society in 1663, he remained its key employee. He was a busy man with too many different calls on his time. As curator of experiments he had to do everything from conducting experiments and overseeing the manufacture of equipment, to recording results, meanwhile coming up with presentations of newly observed phenomena with which to amuse the Fellows at their weekly meetings. All this put Hooke in the unusual position of being at once the society’s resident scientific genius and its performing seal.
From his apparently idyllic childhood in a parsonage in the Isle of Wight, Hooke had developed a lasting interest in the world about him, together with a natural aptitude for careful observation, excellent ability as a draughtsman and skill at making things. He once replicated a brass clock in wood, and it worked. As a boy, Hooke was fascinated by the fossils he found in the rocks on the southern shores of his home island, and he remained so as an adult. He explored the beautiful rock strata and lines of sedimentation at Carbis Bay in Cornwall and other beauty spots. From his observations, he began to think about the age of the earth, leading him to question Archbishop Ussher’s strict edict of five and a half thousand years.† Hooke came to the conclusion that the earth was much older, though he was to discover something much trickier than science: the difficulty of putting such an idea across to people unused to hearing the Church’s official line questioned. He knew that if he publicly posited a world of almost unimaginable age, he would be guilty of heresy. This matter of the age of the earth illustrated concisely the social and religious constraints with which the new experimentalists had to grapple in their quest to reveal the secrets of the physical world. On the one hand, they felt duty bound to explore and reveal God’s work; on the other, the evidence could sometimes point to a reality that, if not beyond the work of a supreme being, was at least outside the strictures of religion.
Following encouragement at Westminster School, where he became a lifelong friend of John Locke, and further education at Balliol College, Oxford, where he developed a further lifelong friendship with Christopher Wren, Hooke became involved with the scientific circle in Oxford, employed as a technician who could design the various experiments the virtuosi desired. It was at Oxford that he became chief scientific assistant to Robert Boyle, who became his patron. Hooke lived in Boyle’s house; only with his appointment to the Royal Society would he gain his own home – his rooms at Gresham College. By this time, Boyle and Hooke had become close friends. When Boyle finally moved to London to live with his sister, he and Hooke usually dined together once a week.
While labouring as the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, Hooke continued to work with Boyle. In 1663, he was asked by the society to set in motion a series of observations using microscopes. As requested, he diligently worked away while carrying out his duties for the various Fellows of the society and his primary patron. Fortunately, Hooke was in the prime of his abilities and was a willing workhorse for his various employers.
By late 1664 Hooke had presented so many images produced from observations under the microscope that on 23 November 1664 the president of the society, Lord Brouncker, ordered a book to be printed. It was ready by January. The first customer appears to have been the ever-inquisitive Samuel Pepys, who recorded that on 20 January he bought Hooke’s book, ‘of which I am very proud’. He would most likely have bought it from James Allestry’s bookshop in Duck Lane. Allestry and his partner John Martyn were printers to the Royal Society.
The book made Hooke’s reputation. He was already moving among the scientific and philosophical elite of his day, easily crossing social divides, and was on good terms with a vast array of people, most of whom, owing to his gregarious and engaging nature, he could count on as friends. He opened his great work by explaining his methods, keeping his game-changing illustrations for later. He explained that he generally used a microscope made with a tube between six and seven inches long, with an object lens at one end and an eye glass at the other, with a middle glass between them which could be removed to change th
e magnification and so aid the observation of different types of subject. Hooke did not necessarily know exactly what magnification his different microscopes would afford, so beside the object under the microscope he placed another object of the same type and size, beside which he kept a ruler marked with very small intervals. By this method he could work out the magnification of his images.
Hooke’s first plate was an engraving of the very tip of a needle, one-twentieth of an inch in length, blown up to span six inches on the page, giving a magnification of object to printed image of around 120:1. ‘As with nature,’ he wrote, ‘the most natural way of beginning is from a Mathematical point.’ The result of this magnification was that the needle s point was revealed to be rounded, with a rough surface, studded with cavities and with innumerable imperfections. From this very first illustration Hooke made his own point clear about man-made objects as compared with those in nature: ‘the Mieroseope ean afford us hundreds of instances of points many thousand times sharper: such as those of the hairs, and bristles, and claws of multitudes of insects.’
To ram his lesson home, Hooke followed the needle with an engraving of a printed full stop. Under the same magnification it appeared like an irregular splodge, or an ink blot. Similarly, the edge of a razor became an uneven, wavy line with many indentations and gouges. In the next plate, Hooke moved on to illustrate exceptionally thin hollow glass tubes he had had made – no thicker than a spider’s web, he said – with which to examine the upward capillary movement of liquid. From these experiments he deduced that this could be the same means by which sap moved through plants.
Every plate illustrated new marvels. Micrographia included plates of everything from plants to the head of a drone fly reproduced twelve inches high, via such wonders as the jawbone and teeth of a snail and the eerie beauty of the feather-winged moth. Plate 5 showed how urine that was beginning to freeze took on crystalline star shapes. Hooke said of these that they were extremely curious and wonderful’ and that they deserved the attention of all diligent observers of nature’.