Civil War: The History of England Volume III (62 page)

So began the career of the most remarkable mathematicians of the seventeenth century and one who, more than anyone else, has shaped the perceptions of the modern world. The scientists of NASA, in the United States, still use the calculations of Isaac
Newton. The two years after he purchased the prism at Stourbridge Fair were his years of glory, during which he penetrated the mysteries of light and gravitation. The story of the falling apple may or may not be accurate but it is true enough that, at the age of twenty-three, he began his exploration of the enigma of that force which held the world and universe together. John Maynard Keynes was to call him ‘the last of the magicians’.

The time came when he was obliged to enter the public world of seventeenth-century science and, at the end of 1671, he allowed his 6-inch reflecting telescope to be displayed to the Fellows of the Royal Society. Newton had made the instrument himself, fashioning his own tools for the purpose, and it was taken in triumph to Charles II, who marvelled at it. Newton was duly elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to which institution he was attached for the rest of his life.

The Royal Society may be deemed to be the jewel of Charles II’s reign. At the end of November 1660, a group of physicians and natural scientists announced the formation of a ‘college for the promoting of physic-mathematical experimental learning’; they were in part inspired by Francis Bacon’s vision of ‘Solomon’s House’ in
The New Atlantis
, and they shared Bacon’s passion for experimental and inductive science. They were men of a practical and pragmatic temper, with a concomitant interest in agriculture as well as navigation, manufactures as well as medicine. All questions of politics or religion were excluded from the deliberations of the Fellows, and indeed their pursuit of practical enquiry was in part designed to quell the ‘enthusiasm’ and to quieten the spiritual debates that had helped to foment the late civil wars. They met each week, at Gresham College in Bishopsgate, where papers were read on the latest invention or experiment. It was in their company that Sir Isaac Newton first propounded his revolutionary theories of light.

The last four decades of the seventeenth century in fact witnessed an extraordinary growth in scientific experiment to the extent that, in 1667, the historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, could already celebrate the fact that ‘an universal zeal towards the advancements of such designs has not only overspread our court and universities, but the shops of our mechanicks, the fields of our gentlemen, the cottages of our farmers, and the ships of our merchants’.

An enquiring and inventive temper was now more widely shared, whereby the whole field of human knowledge became the subject of speculation. The Fellows of the Royal Society debated a method of producing wind by means of falling water; they explored the sting of a bee and the feet of flies; they were shown a baroscope that measured changes in the pressure of the air and a hygroscope for detecting water in the atmosphere; they set up an enquiry into the state of English agriculture and surveyed the methods of tin-mining in Cornwall. They conducted experiments on steam, on ventilation, on gases and on magnetism; thermometers, pumps and perpetual motion machines were brought before them. The origins of the industrial and agricultural ‘revolutions’, conventionally located in the eighteenth century, are to be found in the previous age. In the seventeenth century, providentially blessed by the genius of Francis Bacon at its beginning, we find a general desire for what Sprat described as ‘the true knowledge of things’.

At a meeting of the society in the early months of 1684 Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were discussing the dynamics of planetary motion. Halley put a question to them. Could the force that keeps the planets moving around the sun decrease as an inverse square of its distance? Wren and Hooke agreed that this was very likely, but no one had as yet been able to prove the point. So Halley travelled to Cambridge, where he consulted Newton on the problem of the sun and the revolving planets. Newton readily concurred in Halley’s hypothesis.

‘How do you know this?’

‘Why, I have calculated it.’

This was a reply that, as in Halley’s words, struck him ‘with joy and amazement’. No one had ever done it before. By the end of the year Newton had revisited his calculations and had produced a short treatise,
De motu corporum in gyrum
, that deciphered and proved mathematically the motion of bodies in orbit. He pressed on with his deliberations and, within the space of eighteen months, had completed the treatise that would confer upon him the acclamation of the world. He formulated the three laws of motion that are the foundation of his theory of universal gravitation, a revolutionary principle that proclaims the universe to be bound together by one force that can be mathematically promulgated and understood. It
was the great revelation of the seventeenth century. Newton had understood the cosmos, and made it amenable to human laws. There was indeed a force that bound the sun and all the stars. ‘It is now established’, he wrote, ‘that this force is gravity, and therefore we shall call it gravity from now on.’

Newton was eventually chosen to become president of the Royal Society and for the last twenty years of his life governed its meetings with a somewhat forbidding dignity. He ruled that there should be no ‘whispering, talking nor loud laughters. If dissensions rose in any sort . . . they tended to find out truth, but ought not to arise to any personality.’ These were to be the new truths of science, objective and impersonal, as adumbrated in seventeenth-century London. One Fellow, William Stukeley, recalled that ‘everything was transacted with great attention and solemnity and decency’ for in truth this was the century in which science became a new form of religion with its laws and principles treated as matters of unassailable dogma. Newton himself declared that natural philosophy now ‘consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature and reducing them, as far as may be, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things’. This is our inheritance from the seventeenth century.

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The casual deviousness of the king soon became apparent when at the beginning of 1668 he negotiated a ‘Triple Alliance’ with the Dutch republic and Sweden to oppose the French armies that had already occupied part of the Spanish Netherlands; it was a general defensive league against the encroaching power of the French and, at the time, it was regarded as a great stroke of policy. It was considered to be better to be allied with two Protestant powers against a common Catholic enemy. It was, more pertinently, meant to prove to Louis XIV that England still possessed significant influence in the game between the states.

Yet the king wrote to his sister residing at the French court, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, that ‘I have done nothing to prejudice France in the agreement’. Even as he allied himself with the Dutch, in fact, he was preparing to move ever closer to France in a secret plan to destroy their republic. He had the ability to pursue two different, and indeed opposing, policies at the same time. Feeling great admiration for his cousin, Louis XIV, he also needed the French king’s money and perhaps, in some future contingency, his men. Louis ruled the most powerful state in Europe, and it was much better to be his ally than his enemy; he was also part of the family and, in dynastic terms, family was more important than country.

Suspicion was in the air. Pepys reported that in London ‘people do cry out in the streets . . . that we are betrayed by people about the king and shall be delivered up to the French’. In the ‘bawdy-house riots’ of the spring, the apprentices of London revised the ancient custom of attacking brothels on Shrove Tuesday. But this was no ritual performance; fifteen of their leaders would be tried for high treason, and four of them were hanged. The demonstrations involved thousands of people, and lasted for five days.

The riots began on Easter Monday when some brothels in Poplar were attacked and demolished; the insurrection spread on the following day to Moorfields, East Smithfield and Holborn. On Wednesday the apprentices, swelled by an appreciable force from Southwark, attacked the bawdy-houses of Moorfields. They did not form an inchoate crowd: they were mustered into regiments and marched behind flags; they carried iron bars and axes. Some of the more notorious prisons were also besieged.

The king himself professed not to understand the motive of the apprentices in attacking the brothels. ‘Why, why, do they go to them, then?’ he is reported to have asked. But in fact the brothels were a sign, or token, of what was for many a larger problem. In attacking the brothels the Londoners were attacking the perceived morals of the court and, in opposing its morals, they were disowning its principles. One of their cries was that ‘ere long they would come and pull Whitehall down’.

The king’s favourite mistress, Lady Castlemaine, had converted to Roman Catholicism at the end of 1663. She was a sign, therefore, of the court’s leaning towards papistry and was a target of much virulent comment as a ‘whore’ and worse. That is another reason why the brothels were attacked. The bishops were also condemned for keeping mistresses, and the archbishop of Canterbury was rumoured to retain a prostitute; other prelates were ‘given to boys’. When the apprentices called out for ‘reformation’ they were giving voice to the pleas of the dissenters who distrusted or hated the established Church.

So sexual laxity was associated with papistry, and papistry with treason, and treason with the king of France. It was an unstable compound of rumour and fear, but all the more potent for that. The rioters could not have discerned the king’s secret purposes but, in
their distrust, they were in fact close to the truth. Soon after the formation of the ‘Triple Alliance’ Buckingham entered negotiations with the duchess of Orléans in France. Charles meanwhile apologized to the French envoy for having entered the treaty with Holland and Sweden insinuating that he would like to establish a much closer union with Louis. In the spring of 1668 the king decided to prorogue parliament for what turned out to be the unprecedented period of seventeen months; in its absence he might more easily plot and plan.

At the beginning of 1669 he sprang a surprise. He called his brother, James, and three of his most important councillors to his private chamber where with tears in his eyes he announced his desire for conversion to the Catholic faith. His brother was soon to be received into that communion, and would remain a staunch and indeed almost hysterical Catholic for the rest of his life. The honesty and fidelity of the king are more doubtful. If Charles was preparing himself for negotiations with the devout French king, what could be better than to declare his espousal of the same religion?

A secret emissary was sent to the French court in March with the offer of an offensive and defensive alliance together with a request for men, money and ships in the event of a war with the Dutch. Charles also promised to declare himself a Catholic if, in return, Louis XIV would give him the sum of £200,000 to secure himself against public wrath. He never did make any such announcement, and it seems that he was converted only on his deathbed; he was adept at the arts of dissimulation and hypocrisy even in the great affairs of state.

Throughout this year, and the first half of the next, negotiations between the two kings continued in absolute secrecy. The English ambassador in Paris, and the French ambassador in London, were not informed. Charles’s anti-Catholic ministers were not told. The king continued negotiations with the Dutch as if nothing in the world had changed. By late summer or early autumn 1669, Charles and Louis reached agreement. Louis would come to Charles’s aid whenever the English king announced his Catholicism, and the two would join together in an assault upon the Dutch.

Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, arrived at Dover in the middle of May 1670, with diverse documents from the French court that
she gave to her brother. Among these was a secret paragraph which read that ‘the king of England, being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion, is resolved to declare it, and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the state of his country’s affairs permit’. Charles hoped and believed that the majority of his subjects had such affection for him that they would not protest ‘but as there are unquiet spirits who mask their designs under the guise of religion, the king of England, for the peace of his kingdom, will avail himself of the assistance of the king of France’. The king was still engaged in subterfuge against his most intimate councillors. He allowed Buckingham, for example, to negotiate a version of the treaty that did not contain this important paragraph concerning the king’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Instead he was asked to press on with a treaty of alliance that made no mention of the secret. He was not aware of the collusion. It is unlikely that Charles ever had any intention of announcing his conversion, however, and the commitment was in large part a ploy to bind the French king more tightly to him.