The Last Revolution Page 13

  Halley was on a quest which had begun at the Royal Society that January, when he found himself discussing with Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren the most fundamental problem in astronomy: the motions of the planets. Astronomy was at the very heart of the Modern agenda, but the orbits of the planets were still unproven. Robert Hooke had resolved the trajectory of an orbit into an inertial straight-line motion distorted by a centripetal motion but he could neither provide a proof, nor support his intuition that their orbits might be governed by the inverse square law (that their centripetal force towards the sun decreased in proportion to the square of their distance from it). This was the seemingly intractable question to which Halley sought an answer in Newton’s foul-smelling rooms at Trinity. A friend later recounted what followed:

  ‘After they had been some time together, the Doctor asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets, supposing the force of attraction to the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipsis. The Doctor struck with joy & amazement asked him how he knew it.’

  ‘“Why,” saith he, “I have calculated it.”’14

  Shying away from publication, Newton then claimed to have lost his calculations among the notebooks, alembics, crucibles, phials, tools, alchemical tracts and half-finished experiments which littered his rooms. He promised to send it to Halley in London. What Halley actually received three months later, however, was a nine-page treatise entitled De Motu Corporum. The question of planetary motion had ignited Newton’s scientific interest.

  It linked two interweaving lines of Newton’s thought: his earlier insight (whether or not inspired by a falling apple) into the attractions between objects, and the ‘method of fluxions’ he had developed to calculate complex curves. Newton had come to conceive each curve not as a static line, but dynamically, as the path drawn by a point moving under specified conditions (like the trail of a mortar shell falling towards the Parthenon). While England lapsed into political crisis, Newton flung himself into his work with his usual inhuman concentration, ‘so intent, so serious upon his studies’, as his servant recalled,

  ‘that he eat very sparingly, nay, oftentimes he has forgot to eat at all, so that going into his chamber, I have found his mess untouched, of which, when I have reminded him, [he] would reply, “Have I?” & then making to the table would eat a bit or two standing.’15

  Newton had not stopped with the mathematical proof of inverse square orbits. His initial insight opened up undreamed-of possibilities: ‘the curves that must be described by bodies attracted according to any given laws, the motions of several bodies with respect to one another, the motions of bodies in resisting mediums, the forces and densities and motions of mediums, the orbits of comets, and so forth’.16 Unfortunately these new lines of enquiry delayed publication. Halley cajoled; he wrote flattering letters; he did what he could to access the records which Flamsteed was compiling at Greenwich (hindered by the fact that Flamsteed was not on speaking terms with him). He did his best to stave off Hooke’s claim of priority – a claim which triggered the familiar slow-burn of paranoia and fury from Newton. In December 1684 Halley alerted the Royal Society to Newton’s work, hoping that the Society would undertake publication. A year later, though, De Motu Corporum had swelled to two books, with Halley too nervous to ask how much more was to come, or how long it would take. Only on 28 April 1686 did Dr Vincent

  ‘present ... to the Society a manuscript treatise entitled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and dedicated to the Society by Mr Isaac Newton.’17

  Halley’s troubles were not over, however. The Royal Society was then in some trouble, having burnt its fingers over publication of Francis Willughby’s monumental History of the Fishes, a lavishly illustrated catalogue whose expense had put off most subscribers, and unsold boxes of which filled the Royal Society’s attics. Halley was himself attacked as clerk to the Society (possibly at Hooke’s instigation), and questioned about the agreement he had made to publish Newton’s work. Although cleared of any misconduct, he was forced to take personal risk on the venture.

  Even then Halley had no idea of the full scope of the work. The last book reached him in April 1687, just as James’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience came off the presses. Only on 5 July 1687 were the finished volumes ready, with Samuel Pepys’s name (as current President of the Royal Society) below Newton’s on the title page. Halley’s task was over at last, but for his heroic four-year act of scientific midwifery he received little thanks. His £50 salary for that year was paid in unsold copies of the History of the Fishes.

  A combination of ability as an experimenter and observer, and creativity as a mathematician underlay Newton’s genius. When Francis Bacon had defined parameters for a ‘history of the heavenly bodies’, he had highlighted ‘the exact revolutions and distances of the planets’;18 Newton had established them. ‘Practical working comes of the sure combination of physics and mathematics’, Bacon had written. Newton’s work was a triumphant vindication of just that method. Baconian, too, was the ‘suspended judgement’ in Newton’s theories. Universal gravitation – the idea that the same force drew apple to ground, moon to earth, and earth to sun – was a startling idea, but Newton refused to speculate what it was. ‘Our only purpose’, he wrote, ‘is to trace out the quantity and properties of this force ... and to apply what we discover in some simple cases as principles ... in a mathematical way ... to avoid all questions about the quality or nature of the force.’

  ‘There’, ran the famous verdict of one undergraduate as Newton walked through Cambridge that winter, ‘goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.’ Reception of the Principia was hindered by the fact that very few could follow the maths. Twenty copies went to the Masters of Cambridge Colleges – ‘some of which’, as Humphrey Newton remarked, ‘said that they might study seven years, before they understood anything of it’. Newton had, in fact, ‘designedly made his Principia abstruse to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics’.19 Pepys, barely even a smatterer, floundered. John Locke, who hadn’t then met Newton, but would become a close friend, wrote to Christian Huygens to ask whether he could take the maths on trust. The leading virtuosi, Huygens and Leibniz, were troubled by the idea of ‘attraction at a distance’, but even they could see the breakthrough the Principia represented.

  It was a breakthrough on two distinct levels. The importance of the Principia to physics is unquestionable, but its impact as Modern triumph was in its way just as significant. Even to the majority of readers who struggled with its mathematics, 1687 was still a turning point for Modern thought. A Modern, employing Modern methods of observation and mathematics, had triumphantly explained the system of the world, as no Ancient ever had. In the Latin ode Edmond Halley wrote as a preface, Newton already took his place as the future hero of the Enlightenment:

  ‘Rise up, mortals! Banish earthly cares!

  The doors which kept us in darkness lie broken!

  The unchangeable order of things is revealed ...

  Sing songs of praise to

  NEWTON, the discoverer of wonders,

  Who has unlocked the casket

  where truth lay hidden.’20

  Suspended from his See, Bishop Henry Compton found time to devote to other activities. ‘Since my misfortune of lying under his Majesty’s displeasure,’ he wrote to William of Orange on 5 September 1687, ‘I frequently retire into the country out of reach of the great news.’21 In the country, though, Compton found himself closer to the great developments of science. For it was not only in the structure of the universe that the ‘scientific revolution’ was starting, by the 1680s, to show its effects. Understanding of the natural world was also being transformed by Modern techniques, and in that field 1687 would see a Modern achievement of a different kind.

  Henry Compton had a passion for gardening, in particular for the collection of rare pl
ant specimens,

  ‘in which he was the most curious man of that time ... He had above 1,000 species of exotic plants in his ... gardens, in which ... he had endenizened a great many that have been formerly thoug t too tender for this cold climate. There were few days in the year, before the latter part of his life, but he was actually in his garden, ordering the direction and directing the removal of his trees and plants.’22

  Gardening, the taming of nature, was one of the great obsessions of the late seventeenth century. At Versailles, Le Nôtre’s vistas had expressed the power of his monarch. In Holland, tulip bulbs had created the extraordinary speculative boom of 1637. Plant collections also vividly demonstrated the expansion of the world, with plant-hunters journeying ‘over mountain and valley, forest and plain, exploring every corner and hidden place of the earth, that they might bring to light what lay concealed there, and display it to our gaze’.23 Locke sent seeds of Foeniculum Sinense to his friend William Courten, whose collection in the Temple was much-visited. In his own collection of rarities Henry Compton had a particular advantage. His See gave him jurisdiction over the American Colonies, whither he despatched the Reverend John Banister not only to save souls, but also to scour first the West Indies then Virginia for plant specimens. In the Bishop’s estate at Fulham, 36 acres surrounded by an old Danish moat, Henry Compton grew England’s first magnolia, its first azalea. He cultivated pelargonium inquirans, one of the parents of the ‘geranium’ which today fills every other hanging basket and roundabout in Britain. The specimens arrived after their long journey across the ocean with roots balled up in sacking, and leaves kept green with fresh water denied to the long-suffering sailors. Compton’s head gardener, George London, unpacked and planted them: the first American Black Walnut in England, the first Senecino Arborescens Virginiana.

  Science came to the rescue of these shivering immigrants in the form of greenhouses and thermometers with which a gardener like George London could ‘keep the air at what degree of warmth he pleases ... [and] make an artificial spring, summer or winter’.24 That was yet another Modern achievement – but there were more important ways in which gardening meshed with the agenda of the Moderns. Roger North had a gardening friend in Parson’s Green who ‘would stamp the name of every plant in lead and make it fast to the stem’.25 The Reverend Banister sent back from America not only specimens but lists and drawings of plants. Through the classification of species, scientists were expanding their domination of the natural world.

  In September 1687, Henry Compton received a visitor at his garden in Fulham. He was an unlikely friend for the self-confident and energetic bishop, but just as St Cecilia’s Day brought together music-lovers of all classes, so botany ignored social distinctions. The man who stepped out of the carriage was the son of a blacksmith, a ragged country clergyman in his sixties, stooped, and evidently in poor health. He might have looked rather dazed by his surroundings; before this trip to London, John Ray had not left his Essex village for two years. But perhaps he was simply intent on the botanical feast awaiting him. For John Ray was the foremost expert on plants in Britain.

  A Puritan-leaning clergyman with no family background, Ray had given up his University place in 1662, abandoning financial and social security in protest against Charles II’s religious policies. In the same year he and his friend Francis Willughby made a pact to classify between them the whole of nature, Willughby the animal kingdom and John Ray the vegetable. From 1679 Ray’s home was the tiny cottage he had built for his mother at Black Notley in Essex. Four small daughters played indoors, or in the little garden (where, he recorded delightedly, Euphorbia Platyphyllus ‘comes up spontaneously’). The neighbourhood was ‘barren of wits’. The Braintree carrier brought packets of sugar from Hans Sloane in London, and presents of sweets for the girls. When Francis Willughby died in 1672, Ray was left to complete the History of Fishes on his behalf. Meanwhile his little cottage was littered with catalogues of plants. Henry Compton had arrived in Black Notley, an unlikely apparition in a village street, bearing lists of Virginian species John Banister had sent from America. Dr John Covel had recorded plants around the Near East during his time as chaplain to the Levant Company, while Hendrik van Rheede van Draakenstein had listed the plants of Malabar. Somehow John Ray had to make sense of this mass of raw material. ‘I am now sensible,’ he wrote at one low point, ‘I have undertaken a task beyond my strength.’ Week after week he sent off his bundles of manuscript in the carrier’s wagon. In June 1686 he finished Volume I, and plunged into his second volume, on the trees. There were many disappointments. After the flop of the History of Fishes, the Royal Society refused to pay for the engravings which Ray thought indispensable to the project. He was all too aware of his work’s shortcomings. ‘What else can be expected’, he would write in his preface, ‘from one mere man who had not even a secretary but must needs plough the whole field with his own hand.’26

  And yet as soon as it appeared, Ray’s Historia Plantarum was hailed as a breakthrough in knowledge. ‘This great performance of his’, wrote one admirer, ‘will be a standing monument of Modern industry and exactness.’27 It was an achievement of a different kind from Newton’s. The Historia was a masterpiece of classification. In Bacon’s vision, the qualities of the ‘modern experimenter’ were accuracy, patience, precision. The natural philosopher could be as humble as Ray himself. ‘Conscious of human frailty,’ as Thomas Sprat put it, ‘and of the vastness of the design of an universal philosophy’, he would choose his subject and then set about the laborious, unheroic task of classifying it. The new science was not to be established through flashes of insight, but through dedicated toil. It would be a project of mass observation in which ‘everything relating both to bodies and virtues in nature be set forth ... numbered, weighed, measured, defined’.28 Classification set modern philosophy apart from the speculations of previous ages. Classification turned science into a field not for amateurs but for experts. It gave science its defining rigour, sweeping away preconceptions to allow observation and hypothesis to proceed from scratch.

  The project of observing nature also inspired the late seventeenth-century developments in instrument-making, for accurate observation demanded accurate measurement. Time-keeping was essential to astronomers like John Flamsteed – and so Christian Huygens, the great Dutch virtuoso working in Paris, developed the pendulum and spring clock mechanisms, while craftsmen like Thomas Tompion made London a centre for precision engineering. There was good reason for the Royal Society’s enthusiasm about Newton’s telescope. Gadgets were not just the most enjoyable part of the new science (Pepys bought a microscope which he couldn’t work). Lenses were means for ‘the adding of artificial organs to the natural’, and so extending the project of observation.

  ‘By the means of telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.’

  Robert Hooke published a volume of his observations through the microscope in 1665. ‘All my ambition is’, he wrote in its preface, ‘that I may serve to the great philosophers of this age, as the makers and grinders of my glasses did to me.’29 John Ray was no microscopist himself, but he knew the pioneering work of Marcello Malpighi which resolved plant stems into cells, moss into a forest of waving fronds – ‘a little world,’ as a review of Micrographia would call it, ‘altogether new’.30 Familiar as we are today with the neat categories which Linnaeus defined two generations after Ray, it is hard to recapture quite how bewildering the natural world seemed before Ray’s Historia Plantarum. Should plants be grouped according to their stems or their leaves? By their habitat, root systems or how they propagated? Should they be linked by country or by size? The pioneering work was not all Ray’s, but nothing at that date matched either the scope or the accuracy of his work. The entries he composed himself were models of precision, each one listing the plant’s charact
eristics in order: root, stalk, leaves, flowers, seeds, flowering times, habit and habitat.

  It was early autumn when Henry Compton showed Ray around the Bishop’s garden at Fulham. The leaves were already starting to turn; George London’s underlings were sweeping grass-cuttings into heaps. Henry Compton showed his visitor his cork tree and American Black Walnut, Nux Juglans Virginiana Nigra. He showed him the Arbor Tulipifera Virginiana, a Virginian Flowering Maple which John Banister had sent from America. John Ray would dedicate a separate chapter in his second volume to Compton’s garden at Fulham. His tribute could not have been warmer for the Bishop ‘who both diverts his own mind from weightier cares by the contemplation of his plants, and contributes to their study by freely allowing other specialists access to observe and describe them’.31

  For Henry Compton, discussing trees must indeed have been a relief from weightier concerns. On the day he welcomed John Ray he had just met Zuylestein and sent off a letter to the Prince of Orange, the first of many. Within weeks, rumours of the Queen’s pregnancy would begin to circulate. Henry Compton would have little enough time for gardening from now on. England’s maladies of church and state were moving towards a crisis.

  XVI

  ‘ANNUS MIRABILIS TERTIUS’

  ‘Post Annum 1588, 1660, 1688, Annus Mirabilis Tertius.’

  John Evelyn, 1688

  Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society, had become, twenty years later, a loyal supporter of James II, Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Rochester and a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission. On Sunday 20 May 1688 he climbed into the pulpit at Westminster Abbey and silence fell among the choristers and boys from Westminster School. Sprat was carrying a sheet of printed paper, but ‘could hardly hold [it] in his hands for trembling,’ one schoolboy noticed as the bishop started to read, ‘and every body looked under a strange consternation’.1