The Last Revolution Read online

  A long-running musical controversy, also with political overtones, would have been the other main subject under discussion. After the chapel at Middle Temple burnt down, Roger North had commissioned a Dutch organ builder, ‘Father’ Schmidt, to construct a new organ. Unfortunately the Temple was riven with in-fighting, and Inner Temple lawyers at once signed Renatus Harris to build a rival organ. A contest was declared. Roger North called in Henry Purcell to give a demonstration on Father Smith’s instrument while Renatus Harris employed Gian Battista Draghi, the Italian organist from Somerset House. No one had been able to agree on the outcome; there were accusations of sabotage, and watchmen had been employed to guard the two instruments. Even as the rival parties buried their differences that St Cecilia’s Day, they were preparing for a second contest between Purcell and Draghi in the New Year. George Jeffreys had agreed to act as judge.

  As the musicians picked up their violins and trumpets and basses, as the choir settled into place and the great bass John Gostling cleared his throat, the evening’s composer stepped forward. Gian Battista Draghi took his place at the front of the hall.

  Henry Purcell was mesmerised from the first soft, rising chords of the overture, which contained drama, suppressed emotion, and the promise of revelations to come. As Draghi developed his theme, the audience became aware that this was no mere introductory flourish, but a full orchestral symphony, grave in its slower sections, sweet when the violin introduced the melody for John Dryden’s opening words, From harmony, from heavenly harmony. Perhaps Purcell was already dreaming up the string opening he would write immediately afterwards for his Christmas anthem, Behold, I bring you glad tidings. The setting of Dryden’s words might have sounded crude; some of the effects might have been too obvious; but the range of the piece, its grandeur, its drama all broke new ground. And there were more novelties to come. Trumpets had been used only sparingly in English orchestras, but now Draghi used the trumpet to introduce the three-time melody of The Trumpet’s loud clangor / Excites us to arms. Suddenly the string band had become a full orchestra with a whole new world of sounds to be explored, sounds which could paint scenes, create moods, and lead their listeners on a vivid musical journey. Draghi’s Ode expanded the universe of musical possibilities.

  Henry Purcell’s feelings, however, cannot have been simple. His rival had scored a major triumph. ‘Signor Baptist’ had set down a marker for English music.

  It must have seemed like a triumph, as well, for the court. John Dryden, the poet laureate, was one of James’s most high-profile converts; he had supported the King’s policies earlier that year in his poem The Hind and the Panther. Draghi himself was an Italian Catholic from the circle of the Italian Queen. In fact, St Cecilia’s Day crowned an auspicious month for Mary of Modena. For as the musicians spread out into nearby taverns and coffee houses after the feast, they must have been uncertain which revelation to talk about first: Draghi’s musical triumph, or the other news which gripped England that November.

  The waters of Bath had worked. The Queen was pregnant, James would have an heir, and England faced the prospect of a Catholic dynasty.

  XV

  ‘A TOTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE’

  ‘Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendom) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? That more ... useful experiments in Philosophy have been made, more noble secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover’d, than in all those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to us?’

  John Dryden, 1668

  As 1687 came to an end, England found itself contemplating unknown territory. The ground had not only shifted in politics, however. As disturbing, and carrying implications still more enormous than the Queen’s pregnancy, was the breakthrough in science which had been published earlier that summer. In 1687, not only were new political prospects opened up, but an entirely new universe.

  On 24 September 1687, the Venetian General Morosini landed at the old harbour of the Piraeus. Athens had decayed a long way from its old glory. Setina, as it was now called,* was home to perhaps 10,000 Greek and Turkish inhabitants huddled around the temples of the Acropolis. Apart from a minaret, those temples, at least, looked unchanged from the hills where Morosini set up his batteries. For two thousand years they had dominated the city, just as, for two thousand years, Greek learning had been unchallenged at the pinnacle of Western ideas.

  It was to the Acropolis that the Ottoman commander in the City withdrew his forces. He sent women and children to shelter in the Parthenon itself, which he hoped would be respected by the Venetians if not for its antiquity, then because it had once been Athens’s cathedral. Either the commander misjudged the besiegers’ piety or their accuracy. On the evening of 26 September a mortar shell crashed through the temple roof and landed among the gunpowder barrels which he had stored there. An explosion echoed flatly off the surrounding mountains, and when the cloud of black smoke over Setina cleared, Morosini saw through his telescope that the roof, two thirds of the walls and half the columns on one side had gone. The Parthenon was in ruins.

  Perhaps it was appropriate that the Parthenon should fall now, for 1687 also brought to a climax the far more devastating onslaught on ancient ideas which had been building for the past century. 1687 was the year Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis.

  Classical learning had dominated Europe for as long as the Parthenon had stood. Only in religion did men and women of the seventeenth century feel able to look down on pagan Greece and Rome. In every other field, in architecture and art, in poetry, sculpture and philosophy, seventeenth-century man lived at a baser level than his predecessors, and knew it. No modern writer claimed to equal Homer or Vergil. No modern town matched the scale or grandeur of ancient Rome. For centuries, indeed, visitors to the Eternal City found Rome a squalid village occupying a fraction of the area encompassed by its ancient walls. Seventeenth-century men and women lived amid the ruins of giants. This decline in human existence was widely accepted as inevitable. Nature was in a perpetual state of decay, and so was knowledge. And so, in the universities, students picked over an atrophied body of learning which they could hope only to memorise, not surpass, a curriculum at whose core were the writings of Aristotle, which had been placed at the summit of philosophy in the Middle Ages and remained there ever since.

  Increasingly, though, during the Renaissance, such assumptions had come under attack. Modern Europeans could point to technological achievements which self-evidently surpassed those of the ancient world. No Greek or Roman had ever seen America, gazed at the moon through a telescope, pored over a printed page or, like General Morosini, fired a mortar with gunpowder. Meanwhile, the Reformation called into question the very deepest of human certainties. It cracked open not just individual orthodoxies, but the idea of orthodoxy itself – and the church authority which had always protected it. Among the shibboleths overturned in this upheaval was man’s understanding of the world around him.

  In England, the key figure in the ‘scientific revolution’ was seen as Francis Bacon, who promoted the abandonment of classical learning as a vital first step towards true knowledge. Philosophers like Aristotle had not truly observed the world, Bacon argued. Their systems were fictions, impressive-looking edifices built on shallow foundations and held together by a merely verbal logic which didn’t describe how the world was. His own ‘experimental philosophy’ proposed something quite different. Scientists should proceed cautiously, step-by-step, through the sequence of observation, hypothesis, and verification by careful experiment which has become familiar to us as the basis of scientific method.

  They should begin by admitting how little they knew already. Bacon’s science began from a tabula rasa; it was a starting-over, a scheme ‘to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of the sciences, arts, and all human know
ledge, raised upon the proper foundations’.1 Old errors were to be swept away in a flood of Biblical proportions. ‘Philosophy comes in with a springtide’, proclaimed the Baconian Henry Power. ‘All the old rubbish must be thrown away ... These are the days that must lay a new foundation of a more magnificent philosophy, never to be overthrown.’2

  By the 1660s, four decades after Bacon’s death, the project of a ‘more magnificent philosophy’ was under way not only in England, but, under different influences, all over Europe. Virtuosi exchanged results between Paris and Leipzig, Amsterdam and London, peered down microscopes and up telescopes, dissected, collected and labelled. They met at London’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, or at Louis XIV’s Académie des Sciences, read the latest mathematics of Christian Huygens, debated Descartes, observed comets and invented new kinds of clock. They called themselves the Moderns, and their publications trumpeted Modern achievements: Galileo’s telescope, Robert Boyle’s air pump, Dr Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. They lauded, above all, the transformations in communications and travel brought about by printing and the compass, without which ‘the commerce and communication of [the ancient] days was very narrow; their famed travels in comparison were but domestic; and a whole world was to them unknown’.3

  Travel, in fact, provided the Moderns with their favourite image. The pillars of Hercules which closed the Mediterranean had been the geographic boundary, the ne plus ultra, of the Ancient world. By contrast, plus ultra – ever further – became the motto of the Moderns, for whom knowledge, as well as the world, had become open-ended. ‘There is an America of knowledge yet unfound out!’4 one cried. Suddenly the city of knowledge, like Nicholas Barbon’s London, could grow unchecked, and just as Barbon and John Locke (in their different ways) saw America progressing to match and then surpass the civilisation of Europe, so advocates of the new philosophy glimpsed ‘an inexhaustible variety of treasure which Providence hath lodged in things, that to the world’s end will afford fresh discoveries’.5*

  This dizzying prospect induced in some Moderns a kind of triumphant vertigo which did not, of course, go unchallenged. ‘Sordid and phantastickall’ was the ‘Ancient’ verdict on the age of inventions. ‘Like fanatick travellers,’ wrote a former chaplain to Charles I, ‘[these new philosophers have] left the old beaten and known path, to find out ways unknown, crooked and impassable, and have reduced ... comely order into the old chaos.’6 The political timbre of this language was no coincidence. To the Modern vision there was, indeed, a strong revolutionary charge; it could hardly be otherwise in this age of challenges to both monarchical and papal authority. The Moderns wanted to escape the Ancients’ ‘tyranny over our judgements’,7 and it was easy enough to conflate that with other kinds of tyranny. Galileo’s persecution by the Catholic church was notorious.

  Conversely, the challenge to monarchy and the Catholic church could be credited with the more general upheaval in human ideas.

  ‘The late times of civil war, and the confusion, to make recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr’d up men’s minds from long ease, and a lazy rest, and made them active, industrious and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon tempests, and thunders in the state, as well as in the sky, that they purify and clear the air which they disturb.’8

  There certainly were strong bonds between religious dissent and the new philosophical method. The connections between scientific and political revolutions were far from simple, though, and they became still more involved after Charles II was restored in England and Louis XIV strengthened his hold on France. Both Kings were enthusiastic patrons of science. It was to Charles (who liked to dabble in experiments) that Thomas Sprat dedicated his History of the Royal Society in 1667. Royal patronage had established the Greenwich Observatory from which John Flamsteed, first Astronomer Royal, began in 1671 to compile his comprehensive catalogue of the stars. John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys were by no means the only Tories to join the afternoon meetings which the Royal Society held at their home in Crane Court. Sailing back from the Levant, Tory Dudley North had gleefully dropped bottles into the Bay of Biscay to see at what depth they burst. Roger North also delved into the new science, although with limited success, as he ruefully acknowledged (‘I had from all that pains no other profit than a discovery that I did not understand so much as I thought I did ... I find my knowledge to have had a share of everything, but not very deeply of anything’9).

  In France, meanwhile, Louis XIV’s court poet, Charles Perrault, specifically linked Modern scientific triumphalism to the glory of his King:

  ‘I regard the Ancients without falling on my knees.

  They may be great, but they are men as we are

  And it would be no injustice to compare

  The age of Louis to the golden age of Augustus.’

  As Perrault expanded on the merits of telescope and compass, the open-ended, dynamic vision of modern science became a metaphor for Louis’s expansionary and dynamic kingship. By 1687, both ends of the political spectrum claimed the science revolution as their own.

  That revolution was far from secure, however. Many still thought it heretical to challenge the supremacy of the Ancient world. When Racine heard Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, he thought Perrault was joking, and a year later Perrault began a long series of Parallèles des Anciens et Modernes to defend his thesis. One of the bitterest and longest-running of all intellectual controversies, the ‘Battle of the Books’, was under way. From a distance of three centuries its skirmishes seem abstruse enough, but at the time its importance could not have been greater. The issue was whether Europeans still lived in the ruins of the Ancient world, or whether, as the Moderns claimed, they had burst its bounds and passed the pillars of Hercules – whether a new era had begun.

  One modern achievement which Perrault could not celebrate in January 1687 – he missed it by six months – was the greatest breakthrough of the scientific revolution so far.

  Isaac Newton had been free to present Cambridge University’s case to the Ecclesiastical Commission in April 1687 precisely because his mathematical enquiries had, for the moment, come to a halt. His manuscript was in the press. He had completed a sustained and exhausting effort of creativity which had lasted for four years.

  Newton had arrived at Trinity College in 1664 as an extremely odd boy. At home in Lincolnshire he had flown burning kites at night to terrify the locals.* At Cambridge he rebelled, as all Moderns did, against the ossified curriculum which made students engage in bouts of ritualised Latin combat ‘which (if translated into English) signified no more than a heat ‘twixt two oyster-wives in Billingsgate’.10 Newton was probably swept up in the temporary enthusiasm for Descartes which Roger North remembered, ‘some railing at him and forbidding the reading of him as if he had impugned the very Gospel’.11 Descartes, in France, had returned to fundamentals as enthusiastically as Bacon – cogito ergo sum – but recreated knowledge not through cautious experiment but by an a priori exercise of reason (to arrive at what strict Baconians considered a system as arbitrary as the theories of the Ancients).

  Newton’s beliefs were as unorthodox as his manners. He was an Arian, heretically rejecting the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. In October 1669, when he was made Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow, whom he succeeded, had to obtain for him a dispensation from the usual requirement to take holy orders. Other influences on Newton were more dangerous still. Humphrey Newton,* his servant, recalled ‘chymical experiments’ taking place in his rooms, with

  ‘the fire scarcely going out either night or day, he sitting up one night, as I did another, till he had finished ... What his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his pains, his diligence ... made me think, he aim’d at something beyond the reach of humane art & industry.’12‡

  Choking hours in a room poisoned with chemicals took Newton away from more fruitful discoveries, but of these he was quite productive
enough. The years 1664–6 provided the germs of gravity theory, optics (his insight that white was not the simplest colour but – counter-intuitively – the most complex, being composed of all others), and his fluxional method, the basis of calculus. It would be many years, however, before he worked up, let alone published, any of these ideas. Of publication the secretive Newton seemed to have a horror which his first encounter with the scientific world did nothing to allay. In 1669 Newton came to the Royal Society with a reflecting telescope which, like all modern telescopes of any size, used a concave mirror instead of a lens. The Royal Society, which always preferred gadgets to equations, was enthusiastic, but unfortunately passed Newton’s accompanying paper on optical discoveries to their prickliest and most abrasive expert, Robert Hooke. Two years of professional criticism reduced to shreds the nerves of a man whom John Locke would describe later as ‘a nice man to deal with, and a little too apt to raise in himself suspicions where there is no ground’.13 Newton may have had some kind of mental breakdown. For whatever reason, he returned to Cambridge, and to alchemical researches from which he could not be tempted for the next twelve years.

  His reputation as a mathematician, though, was already established. It was said that Trinity undergraduates avoided scuffing any strange indentations in the gravel in case they were Newton’s calculations. And in August 1684 Newton was visited in his rooms by the astronomer and scientific entrepreneur Edmond Halley, of all the virtuosi the most personable, energetic and charming. For the next four years Halley would need all the charm he could muster.