Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (32 page)

Moray had clearly not at this point met Christiaan Huygens in person, but he was aware of his reputation. Since Christiaan’s father, the diplomat and lifelong servant of the Princes of Orange Sir Constantijn Huygens, boasted about his son – his ‘Archimedes’, as he called him in letters to the eminent French thinkers Mersenne and Descartes – on every possible occasion, and Moray and he moved in the same circles, this is not surprising.
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It is likely that Bruce already knew the Huygens family too, as they were supporters of Charles II and his sister Mary Stuart, and frequenters of the social and cultural court circle of Elizabeth of Bohemia. By September that year he certainly had met Christiaan, and they had established a shared interest in maritime timekeepers. Bruce was one of the recipients of a presentation copy of Huygens’s
Horologium
(1658), the book in which he announced his invention of the pendulum clock.
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In any case, it is Moray who is urging Bruce to take an active interest in the new pendulum clocks, which he himself clearly understands a good deal about already. And Bruce soon had ample occasion to follow his friend’s advice.

The following year, in 1659, Alexander Bruce married Veronica van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, daughter of Cornelis van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijck, the wealthiest man, and one of the most politically prominent, in the United Provinces, and set up home in The Hague. The van Aerssens were a distinguished diplomatic family, who had served the house of Orange for three generations. They were neighbours of the Huygenses in het Plein, the smartest quarter of The Hague, close to the Mauritshuis.
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On the eve of the Restoration of Charles II, Bruce – now the Earl of Kincardine – became an extremely rich and influential man in Holland, and a family friend of one of the most celebrated horologists in Europe. He retained his Scottish rank and position also – Samuel Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell was a direct descendant.

From Moray’s correspondence we learn that Alexander Bruce and Christiaan Huygens began working on clocks together almost as soon as they met. In early 1660 Moray (now in Paris, probably helping negotiate the terms of the return to the English throne of Charles II), wrote responding to a description of this work by Bruce:

If all Mr Zulicom’s addition to his invention be no more but the making of a clock of the size that the pendule beats the seconds, that is every stroak takes up a second, I do not considder that of all. For I know the pendule must be about a yard long to do that, and it is believed here that all the church clock’s in The Hague are made after his way, so that they ever strike all at once, for so it hath been said here to our Queen [Henrietta Maria]. I have not seen his book, nor think it can be bought here. therefore think of sending me one. If you recommend it to Sir Alexander Hume
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and bid him send it by some of the Earl of St Albans’s servants it will come safe. If I see him here I will talk to him of his perspective glasses, and mean to make my court with him upon your account.
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So Moray and Huygens had still not met, though Moray was intent on their doing so, to discuss lenses and telescopes, and in order that he might ‘make [his] court’ on Bruce’s account.

In summer 1660, Sir Robert Moray returned to London, where he was given a senior Scottish appointment in the new government of Charles II, and became part of the close inner circle of courtiers, with lodgings within Whitehall Palace itself.
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By now Bruce has ordered a Huygens-designed clock for Moray, at his own expense, the delivery of which Moray was eagerly awaiting:

I am well pleased with Mr Zulicem’s ordering of my clock. Let it be so, and I will thank him when I see him. I have not time now to talk of that curiosity you mention,
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but where people think it needless and that those watches are best that have the pendule fast to the axeltree that hath the two pallets,
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but I am not yet of their mind, nor for that advantage he speaks of in the stoppers
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you mention. I shall onely say more of this that if the watch do not mark the inequality of the days, it goes not equally.
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Alexander Bruce and his Dutch wife, meanwhile, settled into a well-to- do international lifestyle which involved moving between the family home in The Hague, London, and Bruce’s family home (and coalmines) at Culross (Fife) in Scotland.
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In 1668, for example, Veronica’s mother, in a letter to Constantijn Huygens congratulating him on the marriage of his son Constantijn junior, tells him that she is currently staying with her daughter and son-in-law at Culross:

[Dutch] I shall be going home shortly, because the winter is coming on. I regret that I did not come here three months earlier, then I would have made a little progress with the language. [French] And I would have had the contentment of spending [more] time with the Count of Kincardine and my daughter, and this agreeable peace and civility. [Dutch] It is very beautiful and fruitful here. The Lord of Kincardine’s house lies on a high hill and the park is delightfully close by. My daughter is extremely sad that I am leaving.
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To make herself feel more at home, Veronica laid out the garden at Culross in the Dutch style, and planted it with imported Dutch tulips.

The Royal Society was established in London on 28 November 1660 by a group of scientific enthusiasts that also included John Wilkins, Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren.
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Sir Robert Moray and Alexander Bruce were founder members. The records show them to have been extremely active, usually together, in the Society’s early meetings.
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Precision timekeepers were on the agenda of these from the outset, particularly Huygens’s new pendulum clocks. The pendulum improved the accuracy of mechanical clocks dramatically: from a variance of fifteen to thirty minutes a day, to less than a minute.
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Its potential for naval and military use looked extremely promising.

Throughout the 1660s, the records of the Royal Society document a steady sequence of experiments involving pendulums and other isochronous oscillators in timekeeping.
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Moray was not the only enthusiast, but his prominent position (he chaired the meetings) meant that his encouragement of improvements to Huygens’s published designs was important.

Christiaan Huygens paid his first visit to London in April 1661, as part of the official United Provinces delegation attending Charles II’s coronation. His existing Anglo–Dutch social connections helped him to develop cordial social relations with those with similar scientific and technological interests to his own in London. Almost the first courtesy call he paid was on Bruce’s Dutch wife Veronica, to fulfil a commission from a Dutch mutual friend he had spent time with in Paris.
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The next day Bruce took Huygens to a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College, at which Moray was presiding, following which Dr Goddard (a prominent member) took Huygens to his Gresham rooms and showed him three handsome pendulum clocks.
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Thereafter Huygens spent much of his time in the company of Bruce and Moray, both of whom, we should remember, spoke fluent French and good Dutch and had many Dutch social connections, and other Fellows of the Royal Society.
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He did not even bother to attend the coronation of Charles II, preferring to observe a lunar eclipse with members of the Society. Bruce showed Huygens pendulum clocks of his own design, in which the Dutchman took a particular interest.
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John Evelyn tells us in his diary that he and Huygens visited the clockmaker Ahasuerus Fromanteel on 3 May, ‘to see some pendules’.
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By the time Huygens returned to The Hague in late May, a deep and lasting friendship had been established between himself and Moray, his relationship with Bruce had been consolidated, and he was also well integrated with other leading members of the Royal Society. Thereafter he took a close personal interest in advancing the cause of pendulum clocks in Britain, both scientifically and commercially. Shortly after his return to The Hague, Huygens asks Moray in a letter how the long-pendulum clock, ordered from Huygens’s clockmaker and paid for by Bruce, was performing (Moray confessed in a separate letter to Bruce a month later that he had still not had time to have it properly set up by a clockmaker);
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Huygens also helped procure clocks for Lord Brouncker, the President of the Royal Society.
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In June 1661 Henry Oldenburg paid a courtesy visit to Huygens at The Hague, on his way back to England from unspecified business in Bremen and elsewhere in the Netherlands (Oldenburg had received his university education at Utrecht). He too conducted a vigorous correspondence with Huygens following his return to London.
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There was talk of Moray and Brouncker visiting The Hague later in the same year. These plans came to nothing, but the point is, there was a regular to-and-fro of like-minded individuals, with Anglo–Dutch interests going back ten or more years, and with an interest in science, between London and The Hague throughout the 1660s.

In October 1662, Bruce arrived in The Hague on one of his regular round trips to and from his home in Culross, having used the journey in both directions to test pendulum clocks modified to his own design for their suitability as longitude timekeepers.
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According to Bruce, it was the success of these first trials which convinced Huygens that it was worth pursuing the possibility of adapting his new clocks to determine longitude at sea. He reminded Huygens later:

At my first arivall at the Hage, after the tryall I had made betwixt Scotland & [The Hague] of my watch, when you did me the favour to see me at my chamber, we fell upon the subject of the going of the pendule watches at sea; & you told me positively then that it was your opinione that it was impossible, that you hade been making experiments of it, and all the effects of them was, to be settled in that opinion by them: you did lykewise urge reasons of the impossibility of it.
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It is not clear whether Bruce’s marine clock had been built for him in Holland or England, by Dutch or English technicians, but it was certainly pendulum-regulated.
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He later told Huygens that this clock of his was the same one he had had in his possession in London eighteen months earlier when he and Huygens met there, and that it differed significantly from Huygens’s:

I came afterwards to see that watch by which you hade made your experiment; & I believe you will acknowledge that it was so farre different from mine in the whole way of it that it is not lyke they should ever have met. And the rather I thinke this, that I showed you at London 18 moneths before that tyme the same watch which receaved very small amendments thereafter; & if you hade thought that way able to bring it to passe, you might from that view have ordered one to be made for your tryell.
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Encouraged by their mutual interest and complementary expertise, Bruce and Huygens now began working collaboratively at The Hague, adapting pendulum clocks for sea travel. Bruce favoured clocks with short pendulums for portability; it was he who added a ‘double crutch’ to keep the pendulum swinging in a single plane, and designed the methods of support and suspension which it was hoped would protect the clocks from the most violent of motions arising from storms and high seas – Huygens had simply tried suspending them from ropes.
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It was the wealthy Bruce who paid for two state-of-the-art pendulum clocks, made by Huygens’s current preferred Dutch clockmaker, Severijn Oosterwyck, which they agreed Bruce would test on his next journey to Britain, this time to London. By December the clocks were almost ready, and the two men were spending a lot of time together. On 4/14 December 1662, Christiaan told his brother Lodewijk that he had been slow responding to a letter ‘because of several visits I have received, and principally by that of Mr Brus [Bruce], who did not leave me alone for a single moment all afternoon. And he has been doing that quite often, ever since we set about perfecting our invention for [measuring] Longitudes.’
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In other words, the earliest trials of pendulum-regulated longitude timekeepers – much discussed by historians of science – began as a robustly Anglo–Dutch venture. And once Bruce arrived in London, the correspondence with Huygens that followed demonstrates an extraordinary level of continuing Anglo–Dutch collaboration, with the English contributors now making the running.

For two weeks Huygens waited anxiously for news from London. He consulted the van Aerssens, but even they had not yet heard from their son-in-law. Eventually he received a letter from Bruce, written on 2 January 1663 (old style). He apologised for having ‘forgotten’ to write, blaming this on the fact that he had nothing very positive to tell Huygens about the performance of ‘his’ (that is, Bruce’s) clocks. The sea trials of the two pendulum timekeepers during his journey to London had not been a success. As they left the harbour, the ‘packet-boat’ which Bruce had secured for the crossing was hit by a contrary wind, ‘and the boat was so small that even though it really was not a storm, the ship was shaken more strongly than one can shake a cradle, so that the suspending shaft [
vis
] that went into the ball and socket [
boule
] broke under the vibrations of the ship, and the older [clock] fell, while the newer [clock] stopped’.
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