A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (24 page)

Charles was quick to notice any work that might have a practical use like Evelyn’s book
Fumifugium
, about smoke pollution in London. This touched on his own dreams of rebuilding London as a city to rival Paris, free from the smoke that belched from lime kilns and breweries, tanneries and soap boilers, coating everything with soot, indoors as well as out, making tapestries yellow and oil-paintings brown and choking the flowers and fruit. One solution might be to move the trades downriver, creating a new river frontage with fine houses instead of warehouses; another would be to surround the city with a belt of greenery, with flowering shrubs and herbs. This was an attractive idea that caught Charles’s attention. He discussed it with the author as they sailed upriver on the way back from his yacht race to Greenwich in October 1661 and asked Evelyn to prepare a bill for the next session of parliament, saying he was determined to have something done about it, but in the end this was yet another plan too ambitious and costly to realise.

There is a faint feeling of a tease about some of his requests to the society, a suspicion that Charles rather enjoyed making the learned men scurry. Sometimes his questions were good ones. On 17 July 1661 Neile mentioned that ‘the king had, within four days past, desired to have a reason assigned, why the sensitive plants stir and contract themselves upon being touched’. Immediately Wilkins, Clarke, Evelyn and Goddard were appointed as a sub-committee to examine the nature of this little plant that shrinks back when touched,
mimosa pudica
, and a group including Brouncker and Moray spent an afternoon bent over the specimens in Thomas Chiffinch’s garden near St James’s Park.

This was not a waste of time, either botanically or in terms of pleasing Charles. In October the society petitioned the king for a charter, which was granted on 15 July 1662, for a Royal Society ‘for the Improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment’. A second, more precise charter replaced this nine months later.
¹⁸
The charter meant that the society now had a constitution, and certain rights and privileges, the most important being that it could license books under the 1662 Licensing Act – a way of freeing the Fellows’ work from potential censorship by the church. The king also donated a mace, which was placed before the president at all meetings.

The society was now put on a formal footing. Members paid a subscription of ten shillings when elected, and a shilling a week for meetings, ‘whether present or absent’. To begin with they planned to do all the work themselves, providing papers and lectures as well as demonstrating experiments. This soon turned out to be too much and too chaotic, and in November 1662 Robert Hooke, cross-tempered, thorough to a degree and at times inspired, who had been working as Boyle’s assistant, was appointed as Curator of Experiments. This was the one salaried post, from which Hooke earned £80 a year, plus £50 for a lectureship. Hooke organised the demonstration of experiments, helped by a laboratory assistant, and was also supposed to look after the society’s collections, for which he cared very little. In the side-rooms and attics of the old half-timbered house, built by Gresham a century before, equipment and material piled up and collected dust: birds’ nests and honeycombs and wasps’ nests, jars and pots with human foetuses and lizards’ lungs; lode-stones of all shapes and sizes, ‘Sympathetic Powder’ to heal wounds, rhino-horns and hair-balls.

Charles heard of Hooke’s demonstrations. In July 1663 he threw the society into a flurry when he threatened to descend on a meeting at Gresham in person. What should they show him, what experiments should they put on? A committee was formed and resolutions made: Colonel Long promised ‘to bring in his apparatus of insects, some snakes eggs, his collection of curious stones…some ermines and lizards, natives of England; as also some exotic beasts skins’.
¹⁹
Dr Clarke ‘promised to shew that a frog will live above twenty minutes after his heart hath been taken out, and ceased to move’. Another Fellow was asked to ‘prepare the dissection of an oyster and a lobster’. The greatest burden, as usual, fell on Hooke:

MR HOOKE was charged to shew his microscopical observations in a handsome book to be provided by him for that purpose: to weigh the air, both in the engine and abroad; to break empty glass balls; as also to let the water ascend into them after they have been emptied; to provide the instrument for finding the different pressure of the atmosphere in the same place, as likewise the hygroscope made of the beard of a wild oat.
²⁰

But was this what was needed? Wren thought the whole project of a royal display too difficult: chemical experiments would be too dirty and slow, anatomical demonstrations too gruesome, mathematical proofs and astronomical measurements too bewildering, while a display of agricultural and industrial machinery would take too long to organise. Knowing Charles’s love of theatre, Wren suggested that his interest was in surface display rather than the laborious underlying research: ‘the key that opens treasures is often plain and rusty: but unless it be gilt, the key alone will make no shew at court.’
²¹
He therefore suggested to the President, William, Viscount Brouncker, that they needed something surprising and spectacular but nothing resembling a fairground conjuror. How about a circular barometer, or an artificial eye? Or a compass in water, on springs, so that Charles could ‘sail by land’, navigating in his coach?

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.