The Stuart Restoration gave form to Evelyn’s fantasy. Charles II was fascinated by scientific instruments: his bedroom contained seven clocks, while an eighth, in his ante-room, showed the direction in which the wind was blowing. The king conducted experiments in alchemy with his friend the Duke of Buckingham, an amateur chemist. Later in his reign, he encouraged the work of John Flamsteed, appointing him the first Astronomer Royal in 1675, when the foundation stone of the Royal Observatory was laid at Greenwich. Charles also had a passion — and genuine gift — for the science of naval design.
When the Philosophical Society approached him, soon after his Coronation, the king was happy to give it his enthusiastic encouragement. In 1662 it was rebranded as ‘the Royal Society’ and its charter was sealed. The following year, in April, a second charter was incorporated, with Charles proclaiming himself ‘Fundator’ (founder) and patron. As a sign of his special attachment to the new body, Charles gave a large silver mace, embossed with the symbols of his kingdoms on its head, with instructions that it be present at all subsequent meetings of the Royal Society.
In return for his patronage, Charles received a glowing commendation from the Society’s Fellows: ‘Sir, Of all the Kings of Europe, Your Majesty was the first, who confirmed this noble design of experiments, by your own example, and by a public establishment. An enterprise equal to the most renowned actions of the best princes. For, to increase the powers of all mankind, and to free them from the bondage of errors, is greater glory than to enlarge Empire, or to put chains on the necks of conquered nations.’[521] The Fellows decided to match the king’s enlightened mindset and forbade the discussion of religion or politics at their meetings.
Prince Rupert was one of the twenty-one councillors who oversaw the workings of the Royal Society, after its inception. There were a further 119 original Fellows, who included Boyle, Evelyn and Robert Hooke. ‘Their purpose is’, recorded the Royal Society’s first historian, ‘in short, to make faithful Records of all the works of Nature, or Art, which can come within their reach; that so the present Age, and Posterity, may be able to put a mark on the errors, which have been strengthened by long prescription; to restore the truths, that have lain neglected; to push on those, which are already known, to more various uses; and to make the way more passable, to what remains unravelled. This is the compass of their design.’[522]
So envious were the French of this prestigious body that they soon attempted to copy it. In 1666, Colbert founded the Academie des Sciences. However, Louis XIV’s imitation was not the construction of like-minded amateurs advocated by Evelyn. It was, rather, a state-controlled entity with a penchant for pretentiousness that the Anglo-Saxon original found ludicrous: ‘I know indeed,’ wrote the Bishop of Rochester in 1680, ‘that the English Genius is not so airy and discursive, as that of some of our neighbours, but that we generally love to have reason set out in plain undeceiving expressions; as much as they to have it delivered with colour and beauty.’[523]
Rupert’s nature was perfectly suited to the straightforward, English model. He was a respected scientist and inventor, whose combination of high birth and inquisitiveness were topped off by a determination to dirty his hands in the laboratory and to sweat in the foundry. One poet paid tribute to Rupert’s efforts in verse:
Thou prideless thunderer, that stooped so low
To forge the very bolts thy arm should throw,
Whilst the same eyes great Rupert did admire,
Shining in fields and sooty at the fire:
At once the Mars and Vulcan of the war.[524]
One of the first demonstrations that the Royal Society witnessed, at the command of Charles II, was of the extraordinary qualities of ‘Prince Rupert’s Drops’. These were globules of green glass that had been dropped into cold water while still molten. They solidified on impact, forming elongated bubbles. On 14 August 1661, the records of the Royal Society noted that: ‘A blow with a small hammer ... will not break one of the glass drops made in water, if it be touched no where but upon the body. Break off the top of it and it will fly immediately into very minute parts with a smart force and noise; and these parts will easily crumble into a coarse dust.’[525] At the time the ‘Drops’ were seen as puzzling creations — even Pepys conceded that the ‘chymicall glasses’ were ‘a great mystery to me’— whose properties became part of everyday language. In Hudibras we read:
Honour is like that glass bubble
That finds philosophers such trouble,
Whose least part crack’d, the whole does fly
And wits are crack’d to find out why.[526]
The Royal Society contained a rich crop of enquiring minds, not all of them from the gentlemanly stock that Evelyn had envisaged. These academics sometimes looked down on their aristocratic colleagues: the astronomer Thomas Streete once told Rupert that he was ‘no mathematician’. The prince was indignant and Streete was ever after referred to as: ‘the man that huffed Prince Rupert.’[527]
Among Rupert’s abler Fellows was William Petty, the son of a clothier, who was to become one of the most respected and influential statisticians of his age. Petty had studied on the Continent during the Civil War, mastering the Classical languages and mathematics at an early age. In France he learnt about anatomy. He also read philosophy with a young Thomas Hobbes. Petty never allowed his poverty to hinder his studies: once, his money spent, he staved off starvation for a week by living off a diet of walnuts, foraged in the wild.
Petty attracted public attention in London after the execution of a woman called Anne Green. She was found guilty of murdering her illegitimate child, and hanged. While she was lying in a mortuary, somebody noticed that she was still breathing: in a superstitious age, such an escape from death was seen to be the work of God, intervening to spare a wrongly convicted innocent. After an onlooker had pummelled her rib cage and stomach, Petty was one of two doctors summoned to administer gentler restorative measures. They ‘gave her cordial spirits, took off five ounces of blood, tickled her throat with a feather, and put her to bed with a warm woman’.[528] A complete — and seemingly miraculous — cure followed.
Petty’s scientific studies were of a broad range and his famed brilliance secured him a founding Fellowship of the Royal Society, as well as a knighthood. His debut as a lecturer was a talk on the history of shipbuilding. Many of the early talks had a military or naval focus, demonstrating that Rupert was not the only man of war intrigued by science: indeed, even the peace-loving Petty was to serve as Physician General to the army in Ireland. ‘Our greatest captains and commanders have enrolled their names’, boasted the Bishop of Rochester in his 1680 history of the Royal Society, ‘and have regarded these studies: which are not, as other parts of learning, to be called the studies of the gown; for they do as well become the profession of a soldier, or any other way of life.’[529] Rochester must have had Rupert very much in mind when he wrote that: the prince was the archetypal soldier-scientist.
There were others of a similar bent: Lord Brouncker, the first president and (in Evelyn’s words) ‘that excellent mathematician’, gave a popular talk on ‘Experiments of the Recoiling of Guns’. His practical demonstration involved the firing of a full charge (that is, ‘about a four-penny weight’) of gunpowder in the Society’s courtyard at Gresham College. ‘The History of Making Gunpowder’ was another talk that would have appealed to the prince. The Register of the Royal Society records Rupert’s ‘mode of fabricating a gunpowder of ten times the ordinary strength at that time used’.[530] There were also examinations of the effect of rust on metal weapons and attempts to measure the different volume of artillery fire from the top and bottom of hills.
The prince harnessed the burgeoning scientific knowledge of the day in order to assist him in mechanical advances. His interest in art led to the introduction of a device that helped the onlooker to judge perspective, but the majority of his studies had a military focus. In March 1663, he wrote of the best way ‘To make small shot of different
sizes’, the handwritten record of which remains in the Royal Society’s archives today. It is clear that the experiment was well practised by the prince and he advised those following his directions to be careful throughout the process: ‘When it is done, take your shot out of the pale of water and put them in a frying pan over the fire to dry them, which must be done warily, still shaking them that they melt not, and when they are dry you may separate [them].’[531] From this level of detail, it seems evident that the prince had suffered a few setbacks late in the process in his own laboratory.
Similarly, he shared with the Royal Society ‘A Description of the Way of Making Good Gunpowder’, in July 1663. He gave directions on the optimum blend of saltpetre, brimstone, and coal, ending with the warning: ‘Note only, because this powder is pretty strong, you must make your charge somewhat less, in all small guns; and especially in pistols, for else they will break.’[532] The prince’s powder was reckoned to have ten times the strength of regular gunpowder.
Rupert also improved the technique of laying and detonating mines, both for blowing up rocks and for use underwater. His list of discoveries and experiments is impressive because of its range, rather than being glamorous in its content. He improved the locks on firearms and developed a form of grape shot (referred to as ‘hail shot’) for use by artillery at close range. He also presented a gun that fired repeated rounds at high speed; a handgun with rotating barrels; as well as an explosive charge that could be powered through water towards its target. These last three innovations were extremely primitive ancestors of, in turn, the machine gun, the revolver, and the torpedo.
Rupert’s experiences — and frustrations — during his marathon sea voyage encouraged him to make naval experiments. He developed a ‘diving engine’, designed to retrieve sunken objects (treasure or lost cargo) from below the surface. Similarly, he remembered the long days he and his captains had spent during their voyage, unsure of where they and their colleagues were. The prince’s naval quadrant was a mildly successful attempt to find bearings in the ocean’s water wilderness.
Rupert was less interested in the biological experiments of the Royal Society. Hooke talked on ‘A Method For Making a History of the Weather’. He also gave an ‘Account of a Dog Dissected’: ‘In prosecution of some inquiries into the nature of respiration in several animals’, the Royal Society recorded, ‘a dog was dissected, and by means of a pair of bellows, and a certain pipe thrust into the wind-pipe of the creature, the heart continued beating for a very long time while after all the thorax and belly had been opened.’[533]
By 1671, when Sir Isaac Newton was elected to its ranks, the Royal Society consisted of 187 ordinary Fellows, as well as its royal ones. Rupert, by that stage, was experimenting with a new substance, to improve the effectiveness of naval artillery. Known as ‘Prince’s metal’, it contained a higher proportion of zinc than that found in brass. This followed a stint as an admiral: a period when, instead of attacking British shipping as a buccaneer, as he had done in the Interregnum, he helped to lead it with distinction.
Chapter Twenty - Man of War
‘It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late War, when our Navy engaged the Dutch: a day wherein the two most mighty and best-appointed Fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the Globe, the commerce of nations, and the riches of the Universe.’
John Dryden, 3 June 1665
Greedy for the same trade, the merchants of England and the Netherlands were bound to collide overseas. The Dutch began their expeditions to the East in 1590 and became the first European power since Spain and Portugal to construct a sizeable commercial network abroad. The English followed in their wake, their activities soon cutting into the United Provinces’ profits. The Dutch saw off foreign competition in Java and Ceylon through the threat of military force. In 1622, though, they showed how far they would go, if their business interests were threatened.
The Dutch had become deeply irritated by English incursions into their spice business (predominantly in cloves) in Amboyna, in the Molucca Islands. The English even erected five factories there, which profited from their merchants’ easy relations with the native inhabitants. Pretending that they had learnt of a plot to overrun their castle on the island, the Dutch garrison rounded up the Englishmen, torturing and then murdering them — ‘An act so horrid!’, a London writer claimed, fifty years later, ‘That the Hollanders are infamous to this very day among the rude and savage Indians, for their barbarous inhumanity.’[534] James I chose to treat ‘the Amboyna Massacre’ as a terrible accident, rather than let it develop into a cause for war. It was said, though, that he prophesied that his grandson would one day seek vengeance from the Dutch for the atrocity.
In fact, the first full-blown war between the maritime nations involved no King of England, Stuart or otherwise: it was fought during the brief period when both countries were simultaneously republics. Given the constitutional and religious similarities on both sides of the North Sea, some in Parliament had hoped to join with the States-General, in a Protestant crusade against European Catholicism, to form ‘the New Jerusalem’. However, the United Provinces dismissed this notion, having had a surfeit of warfare in the preceding centuries. This placing of materialism over religion disappointed many in London and convinced them that the United Provinces were insufficiently godly. Such insincerity invited correction.
The Dutch were unconcerned by the hostility brewing in London. They underestimated England’s naval power, while overestimating their own: the United Provinces’ last significant engagement had been the utter destruction of the Spanish fleet in 1639. Since that glorious victory, however, Cromwell had expanded Charles I’s ambitious shipbuilding programme to create a mighty fleet. Dutch reinforcements had been constructed, but at a gentler pace.
The Lord Protector had planned to unleash his squadrons against Catholic France. However, economic considerations soon eclipsed religious ones. The Commonwealth’s finances were depleted by a succession of blighted harvests and repeated visits by the plague. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of Dutch shipping in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Spanish arenas made matters even more desperate: the trade built up by England while much of Europe was convulsed by warfare was rapidly reclaimed by the United Provinces, when peace returned. Dutch ships contained leaner, tougher crews who could undercut their rivals’ costs. As the Duke of Buckingham observed: ‘The Power of Holland depends upon two things, their Parsimony, and their Liberty. By their Liberty, they are encouraged to trade, and by their Parsimony, they are encouraged to do it cheaper than any other people.’[535]
In an attempt to see off its financial woes, Parliament reached for the blunderbuss. It approved the Navigation Act, which insisted that all goods bound for English colonies should only be transported in English ships. For the States-General this was a highly unwelcome development. However, Parliament’s assertion that all foreigners should acknowledge England’s maritime pre-eminence by saluting her shipping in ‘British Seas’ was insufferable. The definition of these seas was open to interpretation. London’s version was, in Dutch eyes, unacceptably greedy.
The First Anglo-Dutch War began in 1652. Blake, his reputation made by his successes against Prince Rupert, again commanded the English fleet with distinction. The United Provinces’ colonies were infiltrated and their ships — so numerous, that they could not all receive adequate protection — were captured in droves. There were three major naval engagements in 1653. At the battle of Portland, fought over three days, nine Dutch ships were sunk, thanks largely to the fighting skill of George Monck, recently moved from his land command to become one of the three ‘generals at sea’. Monck was also to the fore later in the year, when twenty Dutch vessels were destroyed off the Gabbard shoal. When peace came, the English emerged as victors from a war the United Provinces had assumed would be theirs.
By the time Charles II was restored to the throne, the navy, which had grown from 39 ships in 1649 to
156 in 1660, had amassed debts of £1.3 million. The army, also expensive, but deeply mistrusted, was quickly whittled down from its Commonwealth and Protectorate head count of 50,000 to a token force of a few thousand. But the new monarch had a pride in his fleet that was shared by many of his subjects and he kept the pruning of the navy to a minimum. Not only the Anglo-Dutch war but also the triumphs of the Elizabethan age (which were viewed in a particularly rosy hue) gave the navy a romance and glamour that rendered its massive cost acceptable. It was seen as the one sure defence against Catholic aggression. The Earl of Essex, early in the Civil War, had received instructions from Parliament for England’s safety, of which one of the most fundamental was: ‘That the safest and surest defence of this Kingdom is our Navy, and that we can never be hurt by land by a foreign Enemy, unless we are first beaten at sea.’[536]
Indeed, huge bounty from recent attacks on the Spanish Main, the South American coast that is now Colombian and Venezuelan, convinced many that building up the navy, and letting it loose on weaker foes, made sound financial sense. The navy became the linchpin of English colonial growth — a combined legacy of Cromwell and the two kings whose rules sandwiched his Lord Protectorship.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier Page 34