THE RESTORATION AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY
“Thence to Whitehall; where, in the Duke’s chamber, the King
come and stayed an hour or two laughing at Sir W. Petty, who
was there about his boate,[238] and at Gresham College in
general; at which poor Petty was, I perceive, at some loss, but
did argue discreetly, and bear the unreasonable follies of the
King’s objections and other bystanders with great discretion;
and offered to take oddes against the King’s best boates,
but the King would not lay, but cried him down with words
only. Gresham College he mightily laughed at, for spending
time in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they
sat.”—PEPYS’S _Diary_, February 1, 1664.
“Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last,
The barren wilderness he past,
Did on the very border stand
Of the blest promis’d Land,
And from the Mountains-top of his Exalted Wit
Saw it himself and shew’d us it.
But life did never to one man allow
Time to discover Worlds and Conquer too:
...
For who on things remote can fix his sight
That’s always in a Triumph or a Fight?”
_Lines to the Royal Society_, by ABRAHAM COWLEY.
(Prefixed to the _History of the Royal Society of London_, by
THOS. SPRAT, 1667.)
Two of the Boyle brothers were among the recipients of King’s Honours at
the Restoration: the old Earl would have been proud of his sons. “Dear
Broghill,” who, with each shake of the political kaleidoscope, showed
himself like a bright central bit of glass, about which the smaller
pieces fell together into a new combination,—was created Earl of Orrery,
with a brilliant career of soldier-politician and dramatist before him.
As President of Munster, and one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, he
was to make his headquarters at Charleville, with frequent visits to
England. And the sweet-spirited Frank, the boy hero of Liscarrol, became
Viscount Shannon, and a Privy Councillor. Not much is known of Frank’s
after life, except that he lived and brought up his family on his Irish
estate at Shannon Park. He seems, following the example set by his
literary brothers, to have ventured, at least once, into print.[239] His
wife, the “black Betty” of the letters, is better known to posterity than
her husband, for she is remembered not only as Viscountess Shannon, the
mother of Frank’s children, but as the brilliant sister of Tom Killigrew,
the wit and profligate, and as the mother of one of Charles II’s natural
daughters.[240]
The fortunes of the Royalist elder brother, Lord Cork, who had been
diligently nursing the family fortunes through the Protectorate, were
now so far reinstated that he was able to do for Charles II what the
Great Earl had done for Charles I. He assisted an impecunious king with
sums of money; and in recognition of his services he was, in 1663, to
be created Earl of Burlington in the English Peerage. Presently, the
great town house—Burlington House in Piccadilly—was being built, next
door to the Lord Chancellor’s.[241] The families of Cork and Clarendon
were to be further united by the marriage of Lord Clarendon’s son and
Lord Burlington’s daughter; and another daughter was to marry Lord
Hinchinbroke, son of the Earl of Sandwich, who, as Admiral of the Fleet
(with Pepys as his secretary), had brought Charles back from The Hague.
The prosperous and good-natured Earl of Burlington, treading softly with
his compeers in the Matted Gallery at Whitehall, or making one of the
group of courtiers about my Lord Duke in his Chamber, was of all the Cork
family the likest to the great Earl in his ingenuous love of comfort and
display. He thoroughly enjoyed his position as head of the family. It
is told of him that, sailing down the Thames in some gay barge-load of
noble company, he would never forget to raise his hat when he came in
sight of Deptford Church. “Have I not reason?” he would say; and he would
tell how there, in Deptford Church, little Hodge, the first-born, lay
buried, and how by this child’s death, so many years before, he, Richard
Boyle, the second son, had come to be Earl of Cork. Lady Ranelagh, back
from Ireland, had her reservations about the luxurious living at “my
brother Corke’s.” “Alas!” she wrote to Robert Boyle, not long before
the Restoration, “the Entertainment of Lords, Ladies, and Reasonable
Creatures are yet several things, to the great grief of your K. R.”[242]
But the Earl and his Countess had always been popular people. After the
Restoration, when their daughter Anne married young Lord Hinchinbroke,
the Earl of Sandwich’s son, Lady Sandwich’s gratification in this
alliance knew no bounds: “They are very good condition, wise and
chearfull people,” she wrote just after the wedding. “She” (the bride)
“hath a very fine free kind way of writing soe have they all, something
Mr. Boiles styll.”[243] And poor Pepys, much hurt by not having received
“a favour” after the Hinchinbroke wedding, was mollified when he met my
Lord of Burlington at Whitehall; for Lord Burlington, “first by hearing
the Duke of York call me by my name did come to me and with great respect
take notice of me and my relation to my Lord Sandwich, and express
great kindness to me.” And not long after this little interview Pepys
was at Burlington House, burning his periwig in the candle out of sheer
nervousness. Little wonder; for he had just seen for the first time and
saluted my Lady Burlington—the Lady Dungarvan of the old Dublin days,
for whom the plums on the Lismore plum tree had been kept when she was
expecting her first baby.[244] “A very fine-speaking lady, and a good
woman,” says Pepys; “but old and not handsome, but a brave woman.” He
was to see more of her daughter, young Lady Hinchinbroke. “I cannot
say she is a beauty, nor ugly,” wrote the truthful Pepys; but he had
saluted her too, and she had been “mighty civil” on the occasion; a very
good-humoured young niece, this of Robert Boyle’s, “a lover of books and
pictures and of good understanding.” In honour of the young couple, Mr.
and Mrs. Pepys ventured on a little dinner-party, which Pepys had “much
in his head” till it was successfully over, and for which he purchased
his new “pewter sesterne.” The dinner was good and plentiful, and the
company mighty merry. “Most of the discourse,” Pepys adds naïvely,
“was of my Lord Sandwich and his family, as being all of us of the
family.”[245]
* * * * *
Burlington—Orrery—Shannon. Robert Boyle, in Oxford, was, of all the
great Earl’s sons surviving, to remain “Mr. Boyle”—a virtuoso and an
“Honourable Person.” He could have been a peer, he could have been a
bishop, he could have been Provost of Eton. It is said he repeatedly
refused a peerage. He certainly, not long after the Restoration, declined
to take Orders with a view to a Bishopric. “He was treated with great
civility and respect,” says Birch, “by the King as well as by the Earl
of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord
Chancellor of England.” But to Robert Boyle the heirdom of a great family
was “but a glittering kind of slavery,” and “titular greatness” seemed
to him “an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths.”[246] He
believed that the less he participated in the patrimonies of the Church
the more influence he should have in things religious. And besides—as
he explained in after years to Bishop Burnet—he had felt “no inward
motion to it by the Holy Ghost.” For the same reason he would not be
Provost of Eton. How little Sir Henry Wotton, sitting on the bank by
Black Pots in the company of Izaak Walton, could have foreseen that the
“Spiritay Robyn” would one day be asked to be his successor as Provost
of Eton! Robert Boyle had chosen his way of life: he desired to be free
to pursue knowledge for the good of mankind in the service of God. He
would not fetter himself by tests and oaths; he could not alter his
character. He had, as he himself expresses it, “a great (and perhaps
peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.”[247] And so there is no record
of him in the Matted Gallery, no glimpse of him in lawn sleeves, or with
diamond hatband among the Courtiers, or among the nice critics of the
Restoration Drama, who no longer cared for Shakespeare: “I saw Hamlet
Prince of Denmark played,” says Evelyn,[248] “but now the old plays begin
to disgust this refined age, since his Majesties being so long abroad.”
It is extremely doubtful if Robert Boyle ever witnessed a performance of
“dear Broghill’s” _Mustapha_, even when Betterton and Ianthe took the
chief parts, and the King and Lady Castlemaine, and “pretty witty Nell”
were there to see it.[249]
Glimpses of Robert Boyle there are, however, in those first years of
the Restoration. Up to the very end of 1659 he had been living in
Oxford, making the journey by coach now and then between Oxford and the
London of his tastes. He was busy with his air-pump and his laboratory
experiments and the publication of his _Seraphick Love_, and he was in
correspondence with Dick Jones and Henry Oldenberg in Paris, and with
Evelyn and Hartlib in London. “Your most noble letter,” writes Hartlib to
Boyle at Oxford; but Boyle’s letters of this date to Hartlib do not seem
to be extant. Hartlib’s to Boyle were full of all sorts of gossip, home
and foreign, and political even more than scientific. For Hartlib, in his
old character of universal newsagent, was still able to pick up little
bits of information at Westminster and in the City; and he sent Boyle a
good deal of gossip about the intrigues and factions of those last months
of anarchy under Monk’s dictatorship; about Bradshaw’s death, and the
movements of Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, Vane, and Monk himself; and
the mysterious person of whom he wrote as “C. S.,” over the water. And
when “C. S.” was actually back in London and the Restoration was a _fait
accompli_, Robert Boyle and his air-pump were in London also, both to
be received with open arms by the Invisibles, and especially by Evelyn
and the good Hartlib, now old and ill, and very poor, since his pension
under a Commonwealth Government had stopped.
“I went to Chelsey to visit Mr. Boyle,” writes Evelyn,[250] “and see
his pneumatic engine perform divers experiments.” And, “To visite Mr.
Boyle in Chelsey, and saw divers effects of the Eolipile for weighing
aire.”[251]
But, meantime, the weeks and months that followed immediately on the
Restoration—weeks and months occupied with the passage of the Indemnity
Bill through the Convention Parliament and with the trial of the
Regicides—must have been a painful time for Robert Boyle and for his
sister Ranelagh. Lord Broghill, Cromwell’s right-hand man in Ireland and
in Scotland, was, it is true, safe, and to come off with honours; but
some other people—old family friends and political comrades—were not so
happily placed. Robert Boyle had held aloof from sectaries and armies,
though some of his best friendships had been among the Puritans; but Lady
Ranelagh, whose house ever since the early days of the Long Parliament
had been a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party, and whose personal
sympathies and fortunes had been bound up with Cromwell’s Protectorate,
must have followed with a heavy heart the deliberations of the Houses
which were to determine the fates of many political and personal friends.
_The Regicides_: why, in the last ten years England and Ireland had been
governed by Regicides! Some of them, it is true, were beyond reach.
Cromwell—chief graves; but there were to be a great many exceptions
to the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion. There were those who were to be
excepted as actual “Regicides”; and those who were to be excepted as
“Non-regicides,” and those classed as “miscellaneous exceptions.” There
were men to be excepted “absolutely”—which meant their execution; and men
to be excepted “non-capitally,” which meant everything but execution;
and men to be excepted “for incapacitation only,” which meant a lifelong
obscurity. There were men who had absconded, and men who had remained on
the spot; men who had pleaded and extenuated, and men who steadfastly
maintained the righteousness of their acts. How was it to fare with all
and each of these? What was to be the fate of Richard Cromwell, so lately
“his now Highness,” and Henry Cromwell, the broadminded and melancholy
young Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—poor Henry, who had been in love with
Dorothy Osborne, who was in love with Sir William Temple? And what was
to become of Cromwell’s widow—“Old Noll’s wife,” the Londoners called
her now: the voice of the people had strangely changed its tone. And the
great men of the Party—so many of whom had been among Lady Ranelagh’s
personal friends—how was it to fare with Lambert, Ludlow, St. John,
Fleetwood, Haselrig, Lenthall, Whitlocke, Vane, Desborough, Pennington,
Thurloe, and President Lawrence? Henry Lawrence, the President’s son,
had been young Lord Barrymore’s friend ever since they were pupils
together with Milton, in the Barbican. And Henry Lawrence was still one
of Milton’s disciples—a constant visitor to the garden-house in Petty
France. And young Lord Barrymore’s second wife was a Lawrence—Martha
Lawrence. How is it possible to unravel the cruel intricacies of civil
war?[252] And what would be done with Goodwin and Hugh Peters, and the
blind Milton himself, whose _Eikonoklastes_ and _Pro Populo Defensio_
were by order of the House—issued within a week or two after the
Restoration—to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman?
Hangings, drawings and quarterings were not extraordinary events in those
days; but it would be interesting to know how the sentence pronounced
on Major-General Harrison—first sentenced of the Regicides—affected so
humane and sensitive a man as Robert Boyle. His sister Ranelagh, woman
as she was, had more of the old soldier-earl in her composition, and
perhaps, like her Elizabethan father, looked upon such a death as an
inevitable “cloudy end.”
“... The Court doth award that you ... be drawn upon a hurdle to the
place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being
alive, shall be cut down and ... your entrails to be taken out of your
body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your
head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head
and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty; and
the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”[253]
Was Boyle weighing the air with his Eolipile on October 13 when Pepys set
off to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and
quartered? “Which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could
do in that condition.”[254] But in that hungry crowd Pepys could scarcely
have been near enough to hear Harrison’s last words, which sometimes seem
to echo in Charing Cross to this day: “He hath covered my head many times
in the day of battle. By God I have leaped over a wall; by God I have
run through a troop; and by my God I will go through this death, and He
will make it easy to me.... Now unto thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my
Spirit....”
Nor could Mr. Pepys have seen Harrison strike out at the hangman half-way
through the horrible, bloody work.
Mr. Evelyn did not go out purposely to see any of the executions of the
Regicides;[255] but on the 17th he chanced to meet “their quarters,
mangl’d and cutt and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in
baskets on the hurdle. O the miraculous Providence of God!”[256]
But what of Milton all this time—the blind Republican, to whom Lady
Ranelagh had been more than all kith and kin? Had Boyle and Hartlib ever
got from Mr. Milton that prescription they so much wanted?
Milton’s escape from punishment at the Restoration is one of the puzzles
of English history. How was it effected—by what combination of political
influences—who, in fact, pulled the wires? Parliament has always been
very clever in engineering itself, more or less constitutionally, out
of its own tight corners; but there has never been a cleverer piece of
parliamentary engineering than the way in which Milton was brought off
at the Restoration. When, after Cromwell’s death, Lady Ranelagh returned
from Ireland to her house in the Mall, Milton was still living, almost a
neighbour, in his garden-house in Petty France; still in correspondence
with her boy Dick Jones and his tutor Oldenburg, in Paris; still Latin
Secretary to the Council, with Andrew Marvell as his loyal assistant;
and the uneasy dawn of the New Year 1660 had found him, despondent but
undaunted, still fighting hard, by tract-warfare, for a doomed Republic.
Milton the Pamphleteer and Lambert the General are to be remembered
together as the last two opponents of the Restoration. But in March,
after Milton’s printed exhortations to the Council and to Monk himself,
the blind secretary had been discharged from his office, and an order
issued for the arrest of Milton’s publisher. And on May 7—the very day
before Charles II was proclaimed in London—Milton had disappeared from
the garden-house in Petty France. Nobody knows what had been done about
his children, or whose friendly hand guided the blind man’s steps into
his hiding-place. “In the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close”—a
narrow passage, entered from West Smithfield under an archway that was
very old even in Milton’s day[257]—Milton was to lie concealed for more
than three months. His case and Goodwin’s[258] came up together before
the House on June 16, and it was ordered that their books were to be
called in and burnt, and that the men themselves were to be “forthwith
sent for in custody.” But both men were in hiding, and somehow it was
August 13 before the two names came up again; and at that moment the
Indemnity Bill was hanging in mid-air between the Lords and Commons.
Neither of the two men had been found; and though the Proclamation
calling in all copies of their books for burning by the hangman was
then duly placarded all over London, there was no further order for the
arrest of the two men themselves. On August 28 the Indemnity Bill had
passed both Houses; on August 29 it had received the King’s assent, the
Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was on the Statute Book, _and there was no
mention of Milton in it from first to last_. Goodwin’s name appeared;
he was incapacitated for life for any public trust. But of Milton, the
Republican pamphleteer, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, who had done so
incalculably much more, nothing—his name had somehow dropped out. Milton
was saved—“to the surprise of all people,” says Bishop Burnet.[259]
If Milton had been hanged with the Regicides at Charing Cross, or carted
to Tyburn! And more than once during the passage of the Bill it seemed
possible that it might be so. As it was, with the passing of this Act of
Oblivion, and the emerging of a blind Puritan into the murky sunshine of
the old London streets, Milton drops out of the story of Lady Ranelagh
and the Boyle family. For a little while after the passing of the Act
(his hiding-place having apparently been discovered) he seems to have
been detained in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Perhaps he was safer
so. His offending tracts were duly burnt; his regicide comrades were
duly hanged, drawn and quartered; and in December Milton was at large.
Staunch friends he had had; Andrew Marvell was perhaps bravest and most
indefatigable of them all; but it must have required more powerful
influence than Marvell’s and Davenant’s to save John Milton. Had Lady
Ranelagh done him one more service greater than all before? Had she
enlisted the interest of her powerful brother Broghill, and of such
Privy Councillors as she knew best—men like Sandwich and Manchester,
and Annesley[260] and Morrice, and the old Lord Goring, poor Lettice’s
father-in-law,[261] and the young Charles Howard, who had married
“Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and was going to be first Earl of Carlisle? Had
Lady Ranelagh’s silken strings reached the little private Junto about
the King himself—Hyde, and Ormonde, and Southampton? One remembers that
Mr. Boyle had been “treated with great civility and respect by the King,
as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl
of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” And it is good to think that
the Boyle family—perhaps Boyle himself, whose memories went back to the
Milton of _Comus_ and Eton, the Milton of the _Epitaphium Damonis_ and
the Villa Diodati in Geneva, may have had a hand in saving Milton, the
blind Republican,—to write _Paradise Lost_. But if to any of them, it was
certainly to Lady Ranelagh that Milton owed his life and freedom. There
is no record of any further visits from Lady Ranelagh to Milton after
that date, but it is difficult to believe her friendship for Milton ended
with the Restoration. The garden-house in Petty France was to be no more
his home: his blind steps turned eastward, to Holborn again, and Jewin
Street, and then to Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, where he was to
resume and finish his great poem, and where he was to end his days. It is
difficult to believe that Lady Ranelagh never again knocked at the blind
man’s door; and it must be taken for granted that one day in late August
or early September 1667 a presentation-copy of _Paradise Lost_ arrived at
the house in Pall Mall.
* * * * *
On a November afternoon—Nov. 28, 1660—the usual little audience of
philosophers had assembled to listen to one of Dr. Christopher Wren’s
astronomy lectures at Gresham College, in Basinghall Street.[262] Wren,
who had been astronomy professor there since 1657, lectured on Wednesday
afternoons during Term-time from two to three—and it was a custom for the
little company to stay on after the lecture, adjourning to another room
for “mutuall converse.” The political disasters of the last year or two
had somewhat interrupted the advancement of learning; the soldiers had,
in fact, for a time, been quartered in Gresham College. But by the end
of November 1660 things were settling down again, and the lectures were
going on as usual. At this particular lecture the _virtuosi_ present were
Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile,
Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Mr. Ball, Mr. Rooke, Mr. Wren,
and Mr. Hill; and their “mutuall converse” turned on the formation of a
scientific society, on a broader basis than had been hitherto attempted—a
society “for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall-Experimentall
Learning,” to consist of weekly meetings, which were to be held every
Wednesday from that date onwards.
This, it must be remembered, was no outcome of the Restoration. It
was fifteen years since the Invisibles had begun their meetings,
“precluding matters of theology and state affairs,” sometimes at Gresham
College, oftener in Dr. Goddard’s house in Wood Street, or at the
Bull’s Head Tavern in Cheapside. Robert Boyle at that time had been a
boy of eighteen, just back from Geneva, and introduced into the little
Hartlib-Durie-Comenius circle to find that the Parliament men were
already interested in a scheme of “Verulamian education.” In November
1660 the Invisibles were fifteen years wiser than they had been in 1645.
And what a fifteen years it had been! Had there ever been such a fifteen
years in English History? Some of them, after the visitation of Oxford,
had migrated there, taking posts vacated by Royalists, and forming the
Oxford branch of the Invisible Society; and now again these same men,
removed at the Restoration from their posts in Oxford University, were
turning back to London. It was the old Invisible College of 1645 that was
to merge itself in the Royal Society.
So, on that November afternoon 1660, in Gresham College, a new Society
was formed. It was arranged that its “original members” were to be
those present, with some others then and there proposed as eligible,
thirty-nine names being suggested and written down. Among them were
John Evelyn, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Seth Ward, Dr. Willis, Dr. Bathurst, Sir
Kenelm Digby, Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Mr. William Croone, Mr.
Richard Jones, and Henry Oldenburg. Robert Boyle’s influence was already
making itself felt. Most of these men were Oxford colleagues, personal
friends, and old Invisibles. The last three must have been his special
nominations, and two of them were his own kinsmen. Dick Jones, his
hopeful nephew, had just returned with Henry Oldenburg from their foreign
tour. William Croone, who was nominated _in absentia_ for the post of
Registrar of the Society, was presumably a son of the old Earl of Cork’s
“Cozen Croone”, the vintner of the King’s Head in Cheapside;[263] because
the “Croonian Lecture Fund,” long afterwards bequeathed to the Royal
Society by Mr. Croone’s widow, was derived from “one fifth of the clear
rent of the King’s Head Tavern in or near old Fish Street, London, at
the corner of Lambeth Hill.”[264] This makes William Croone a cousin of
Robert Boyle’s; and he was a creditable relative, this heir of old Cozen
Croone the vintner, for he was afterwards Doctor of Physic and Gresham
Professor of Rhetoric; and the Royal Society owes its Croonian Lecture
Fund to his and his widow’s generosity, and to the takings at the old
King’s Head in Cheapside.
Other original members—they were afterwards “Fellows”—were added at later
meetings. And what a list it was! There was Aubrey of the “Lives,” and
Ashmole, of museum celebrity, and Dryden and Waller the poets, and old
Haak the originator of the Invisible College, and Robert Hooke, whose
services at Oxford Boyle amiably dispensed with so that he might be
Curator,[265] and Peter Pett the Naval Commissioner, and Thomas Sprat,
the Society’s enthusiastic first biographer, and Governor Winthrop from
Connecticut, and Isaac Barrow the scholarly divine,[266] and John Graunt,
the “tradesman” who drew up the Bills of Mortality. Peers there were in
plenty,—the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northampton,
and Sandwich, among them; and Bishops—present and future. Doctors of
Physic, of course, and Lawyers of the Temple; Churchmen, Statesmen,
Army-men, Navy-men, and City-men. “It is to be noted,” says Sprat, “that
they have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and
Professions of Life. This they were obliged to do, or else they would
come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they
openly profess not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish,
Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of _Mankind_.”[267]
Sir Robert Moray, a Scotsman and a favourite at Whitehall, had quickly
“brought in word from the Court” that the King approved of the aims
of the Society. Moray, who had a laboratory of his own at Whitehall,
acted for a time as interim-President, and was certainly the life and
soul of the infant Society; and on May 3, 1661—not many days after his
coronation, Charles II was shown, through his own great telescope,
Saturn’s rings and Jupiter and his satellites. His Majesty became really
interested, and began to discourse astronomy as he sat at supper in
Whitehall.[268] And a few weeks later—Sir Robert Moray still acting as
go-between—the King granted the Society’s petition for a Royal Charter,
and was “pleased to offer himselfe to be entered one of the Society.”
On July 15, 1662, the Charter of Incorporation passed what Evelyn calls
the “Broade Seale.” Lord Brouncker was elected first President and
Henry Oldenburg Secretary.[269] The King presented the Society with
its mace,[270] on which were emblematically embossed the Crown and
Royal Arms, the rose, harp, thistle, and fleur de lys. In April 1663,
however, a second and improved Charter passed the Great Seal.[271] The
King in this declared himself Founder and Patron; Arms were granted to
the Society, and a motto from Horace was chosen—_Nullius in Verba_. And
the Royal Society kept its first anniversary on November 30, 1663, St.
Andrew’s Day having been selected partly as nearest to November 28, the
day of its first meeting, but also in compliment, it is believed, to Sir
Robert Moray, the popular Scotsman who from the very beginning had been
one of its most energetic members.
Strange times! It has been rightly said that the foundation of the Royal
Society was one of the few creditable events of the Restoration. Exactly
a month before the Charter of Incorporation passed the Great Seal, Sir
Henry Vane had been beheaded on Tower Hill, “the trumpets brought under
the scaffold that he might not be heard”; and little more than a month
later came the dreaded St. Bartholomew’s Day, which turned nearly two
thousand rectors and vicars—one-fifth of the English clergy—out of their
parishes. The doings of “Our Society”, meantime, read like a little oasis
in a desert of intolerance. The old Earl of Cork, who had sent his sons
to fight the “rebelleows” Presbyterian Scots, and spent the last days
of his own life in fighting the rebellious Irish Papists, would have
rubbed his eyes if he could have seen his Robyn walking in procession,
side by side with the Roman Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby, each wearing a St.
Andrew’s Cross pinned into his hat!
“It being St. Andrew’s Day, who was our patron,” says Evelyn
complacently, “each fellow wore a St. Andrew’s Crosse of ribbon on the
crowne of his hatt. After the election we din’d together, his Majesty
sending us venison.”[272]
Some difference of opinion, however, there seems to have been among the
philosophers about the choice of their patron saint. Pepys did not care
much who the saint was, but he grumbled at having to pay two shillings
for the badge.[273] Aubrey once confided to Sir William Petty that
he would have preferred St. George, or, failing him, St. Isidore—“a
philosopher canonised.”
“No,” said the irrepressible Petty, “I had rather have had it been St.
Thomas’s Day, for he would not believe till he had seen and putt his
finger into the holes, according to the motto, _Nullius in Verba_.”[274]