Those who have written on the life of Newton have touched with the utmost
reserve upon the connexion which existed between his half-niece Catherine
Barton, and his friend Charles Montague, who died Earl of Halifax. They
seem as if they were afraid that, by going fairly into the matter, they
should find something they would rather not tell. The consequence is, that
when a writer at home or abroad, Voltaire or another, hints with a sneer
that a pretty niece had more to do with Newton's appointment to the Mint
than the theory of gravitation, those who would like to know as much as can
be known of the whole truth find nothing in any attainable biography except
either total silence or a very awkward and hesitating account of half
something.
On looking again into the matter, the juxtaposition of all the
circumstances induced in my mind a strong suspicion that Mrs. C. Barton was
_privately married_ to Lord Halifax, probably before his elevation to the
peerage, and that the marriage was no very great secret among their
friends. As yet I can but say that the hypothesis of a private marriage is,
to me, the most probable of those among which a choice must be made:
farther information may be obtained by publication of the case in "N. &
Q.," the most appropriate place of deposit for the provisional result of
unfinished inquiries.
Charles Montague (born April, 1661, died May 19, 1715) made acquaintance
with Newton when both were at Trinity College in 1680 and 1681. Newton was
nineteen years older than Montague, and had been twelve years Lucasian
professor. At the beginning of their friendship, the Lucasian professor
must be called the patron of the young undergraduate, who was looking for a
fellowship with the intention of taking orders, a design which he did not
find sufficient encouragement to abandon until after he had sat in the
Convention. By 1690, the rising politician had become the patron of the
author of the _Principia_, who in that {430} year or the next became an
aspirant for public employment. The friendship of Newton and Montague
lasted until the death of the latter, interrupted only by a coolness (on
Newton's side at least) in 1691, arising out of a suspicion in Newton's
mind that Montague was not sincere in his intentions towards his friend.
Catherine Barton (born 1680, died 1739) was the daughter of Robert Barton
and Newton's half-sister, Hannah Smith (Baily's _Flamsteed, Supplement_, p.
750.). Lieut.-Col. Barton, usually called her husband, was her brother. The
pedigrees published by Turnor recognise this fact: Swift distinctly states
it, and Rigaud proves it in various ways in letters to Baily, which lately
passed through my hands on their way to the Observatory at Greenwich. The
mistake ought never to have been made, for _Mrs. C. Barton_ (as she was
usually denominated) must, according to usage, have been reputed single so
long as her Christian name was introduced.
Mrs. C. Barton married Mr. Conduitt, then or afterwards Newton's assistant,
and his successor: this marriage probably took place in 1718, the year in
which Newton introduced Conduitt into the Royal Society. Among the Turnor
memorials of Newton, now in possession of the Royal Society, is a watch
leaving the inscription "Mrs. C. Conduitt to Sir Isaac Newton, January,
1708." This date cannot be correct, for Swift in 1710, Halifax in 1712,
Flamsteed in 1715, and Monmort in 1716, call her Barton: all but Flamsteed
were intimate acquaintances. Any one who looks at the inscription will see
that it is not as old as the watch: it is neither ornamented nor placed in
a shield or other envelope, while the case is beautifully chased, and has
an elaborate design, representing Fame and Britannia examining the portrait
of Newton. Moreover, "Mrs. Conduitt" would never have described herself as
"Mrs. C. Conduitt."
Montague was not, so far as usual accounts state, what even in our day
would be called a libertine. He married the Countess of Manchester (the
widow of a relative) before his entry into public life, and was deeply
occupied in party politics and fiscal administration. I am told that
Davenant impugns his morals: this may be the exception which proves the
rule; some of the lampoons directed against the Whig minister are
preserved, and these do not attack his private character in the matter
under allusion, so far as I can learn.
All the cotemporary evidence yet adduced as to the relation between Lord
Halifax and Catherine Barton, is contained in one sentence in the _Life_ of
the former, two codicils of his will, and one allusion of Flamsteed's. The
_Life_, with the will attached, was appended to two different publications
of the works of Halifax, in 1715 and 1716. The passage from the _Life_ is
as follows (p. 195.):
"I am likewise to account for another Omission in the Course of this
History, which is that of the Death of the Lord _Halifax's_ Lady; upon
whose Decease his Lordship took a Resolution of living single thence
forward, and cast his Eye upon the Widow of one Colonel _Barton_, and
Neice to the famous Sir _Isaac Newton_, to be Super-intendent of his
domestick Affairs. But as this Lady was young, beautiful, and gay, so
those that were given to censure, pass'd a Judgment upon her which she
no Ways merited, since she was a Woman of strict Honour and Virtue; and
tho' she might be agreeable to his Lordship in every Particular, that
noble Peer's Complaisance to her, proceeded wholly from the great
Esteem he had for her Wit and most exquisite Understanding, as will
appear from what relates to her in his Will at the Close of these
Memoirs."
This sentence is an insertion (the _first_ omission is as far back as p.
64.). It speaks of Mrs. C. Barton as if she were dead: and it is worthy of
note that this lady, who lived to communicate to Fontenelle materials for
his _eloge_ of Newton, had excellent opportunity, had it pleased her, to
have contradicted or varied any part of the account given by Halifax's
biographer; and this without appearing. The actual communication made to
Fontenelle by her husband, Mr. Conduitt, is in existence, and was printed
by Mr. Turnor; it contains no allusion to the subject. Farther, it appears
by the biographer's account that she had passed as a widow, which is not to
be wondered at: the _Colonel_ Barton who was the son of circumstances, must
have been created before her brother (who died in 1711) attained such rank,
perhaps before he entered the army at all.
The will gives very different evidence from that for which it is
subpoenaed: it is dated April 10, 1706. In the first codicil (dated April
12, 1706) Lord Halifax leaves Mrs. Barton all his jewels and 3000l. "as a
small token," he says, "of the great love and affection I have long had for
her." In a second codicil (dated February 1, 1712) the first codicil is
revoked, and the bequest is augmented to 5000l., the rangership, lodge, and
household furniture of Bushey Park, and the manor of Apscourt, for her
life. These are given, says Lord Halifax, "as a token of the sincere love,
affection, and esteem, I have long had for her person, and as a small
recompense for the pleasure and happiness I have had in her conversation."
In this same codicil "Mrs. Catherine Barton" is described as Newton's
niece, and 100l. is left to Newton "as a mark of the great honour and
esteem I have for so great a man." The concluding sentence of the codicil
is as follows:
"And I strictly charge and command my executor to give all aid, help,
and assistance to her in possessing and enjoying what I have hereby
given her; and also {431} in doing any act or acts necessary to
transfer her an annuity of two hundred pounds _per annum_, purchased in
Sir Isaac Newton's name, which I hold for her in trust, as appears by a
declaration of trust in that behalf."
This codicil immediately became the subject of remark, and the terms of it
seem to have been understood as they would be now. Flamsteed, writing in
July, 1715 (Halifax died in May), says:
"If common fame be true, he died worth 150,000l.; out of which he gave
Mrs. Barton, Sir I. Newton's niece, for her _excellent conversation_
[the Italics are Baily's, the original, I suppose, underlined], a
curious house, 5000l. with lands, jewels, plate, money, and household
furniture, to the value of 20,000l. or more."
I pay no attention to the statement that (_Biogr. Brit._, Montague, note
BB.) Lord Halifax was disappointed in a second marriage. It amounts only to
this, that Lord Shaftsbury, having a certain lady in his heart and in his
eye, was afraid he had a rival, and described the person talked of in terms
which make it pretty certain that Halifax was intended. But it by no means
follows that because a certain person is "talked of" for a lady, and a
lover put in fear by the rumour, the person is really a rival: and not even
a biographer would have shown himself so unfit for a novelist as to have
drawn such a conclusion, unless he had been biassed by the wish to show
that Halifax was attached to another than Mrs. Barton.
It must of course be supposed that the introduction of Montague to Newton's
niece was a consequence of his acquaintance with Newton, and took place in
or near 1696, when Newton came to London, where his niece soon began to
reside with him. And since, in 1706, the connexion, whatever it was, had
been of long standing, we may infer that it had probably commenced in 1700.
The case is then as follows. Montague received into his house, as
"superintendent of his domestic affairs" after the death of his wife, the
niece of his old and revered friend Newton, a conspicuous officer of the
crown, a member of Parliament, and otherwise one of the most famous men
living. This niece had been partly educated by Newton; she had lived in his
house; we know of no other protector that she could have had, in London;
and the supposition that she left any roof except Newton's to take shelter
under that of Montague, would be purely gratuitous. She was unmarried,
beautiful, and gay; and probably not so much as, certainly not much more
then, twenty years old. A handsome annuity was bought for her in Newton's
name, and held in trust by Halifax: if it had been bought _by Newton_,
Conduitt would have mentioned it in his list of the benefactions which
Newton's relatives received from him, especially after the publicity which
it had obtained from Halifax's will. That she did not tenant the
housekeeper's room while the friends of Halifax were round his table, may
be inferred from the epigrams, poor as they are, which were made in her
honour as a celebrated beauty and wit, in a collection of verses (reprinted
in Dryden's _Miscellanies_) on the best known toasts of the day. Halifax
bequeathed her a provision which might have suited his widow, in terms
which must have been intended to show that she had been either his wife or
his mistress; while in the same document he brought prominently forward his
respect for Newton, the fact of her being Newton's niece, and the annuity
which he had bought for her in Newton's name. An uncontradicted paragraph
in the life of Halifax, published immediately after the will, and evidently
not intended to bring forward any fact not perfectly well known, records
her residence in the house of that nobleman and the consequent rumours
concerning her character, affirms that she was a virtuous woman, and refers
to the will to prove it: though the will denies it in the plainest English,
on any supposition except that of a private marriage. Finally, the lady
married a respectable man after the death of Lord Halifax, and lived with
him in the house of her illustrious uncle.
That she was either the wife or the mistress of Halifax, I take to be
established; it is the natural conclusion from the facts above stated, all
made public during her life, all left uncontradicted by herself, by her
husband, by her daughter, by Lord Lymington her son-in-law, and by the
uncle who had stood to her in the place of a father. It is impossible that
Newton could have been ignorant that his niece was living in Montague's
house, enjoyed an annuity bought in his own name, and was regarded by the
world as the mistress of his friend and political patron. The language of
the codicil shows that, be the nature of the connexion what it might,
Halifax meant to tell the world that it might be proclaimed in all its
relation to the name of Newton. To those who cannot, under all the
circumstances, believe the connexion to have been what is called platonic,
the probability that there was a private marriage is precisely the
probability that Newton would not have sanctioned the dishonour of his own
niece: and even if the connexion were only that of friendship, Newton must
have sanctioned the appearance and the forms of a dishonourable intimacy:
the co-habitation, the settlement, and the defiance of opinion. Now there
is no reason to suppose of Newton that he would be a party to either
proceeding, which would not apply as well to any man then alive: to Locke,
for instance. Looking at the morals of the day, we are by no means
justified in throwing off at once, with disgust, the bare idea of the
possibility of a distinguished philosopher consenting to an illicit
intercourse between his friend and his niece: we are bound, {432} in
discussing probabilities, to distinguish 1850 from 1700. But, even putting
out of view the purity of Newton's private life, and of the lives of his
most intimate friends, there is that in the weaker part of his character
which is of itself almost conclusive. Right or wrong, Newton never faced
opinion. As soon as he found that publication involved opposition, from
that time forward he published only with the utmost reluctance, and under
the strongest persuasions; except when, as in the case of some of his
theological writings, he confided the manuscript to a friend, to be
anonymously published abroad. The _Principia_ was extorted from him by the
Royal Society; the first publication on fluxions was under the name of
Wallis; the _Optics_ were delayed until the death of Hooke; the first
appearance against Leibnitz was anonymous; the second originated in a hint
from the King. This morbid fear, which is often represented as modesty,
would have made him, had he acted a part with regard to his niece which he
could not avow, conduct it with the utmost reserve. The philosopher who
would have let the theory of gravitation die in silence rather than
encounter the opposition which a discovery almost always creates, would not
have allowed his _name_ to be connected with the annuity which was the
price of his niece's honour, or which carried all the appearance of it,
even supposing him base enough to have connived at the purchase. And in
such a case, Halifax would have taken care to respect the secrecy which he
would have known to have been essential to Newton's comfort: he would not
have published to the world that his mistress was Newton's niece, and that
Newton was a party to a settlement upon her. There seems to me, about the
codicil as it stands, a declaration that the connexion with Newton's niece
was such as, if people knew all, Newton might have sanctioned. And the
supposition of a private marriage, generally understood among the friends
of the parties, seems to me to make all the circumstances take an air of
likelihood which no other hypothesis will give them: and this is all my
conclusion.
If there were a marriage, the most probable reason for the concealment was,
that it was contracted at a time when the birth and station of Mrs. Barton
would have rendered her production at court as the wife of Montague an
impediment to his career. He was raised to the peerage in 1700, and as the
connexion was of long standing in 1706, it may well be supposed that it
commenced at the time when (in his own opinion at least) his prospects of
such elevation might have been compromised by a decided misalliance. The
lower the tone of morals, the greater the ridicule which attaches to
unequal _marriages_. Montague, though of noble family, was the younger son
of a younger son, and not rich: it was common among the Tories to sneer at
him as a _parvenu_. He had made his first appearance in the great world as
the husband of a countess-dowager, and it may be that the _parvenu_ was
weak enough to shrink from producing, as his second wife, a woman of very
much lower rank, the granddaughter of a country clergyman, and the daughter
of a man of no pretension to station. That Mr. Macaulay has not underrated
the position of the country clergy, is known to all who have dipped into
the writings of the seventeenth century. It is not, however, necessary to
explain why the supposed marriage should have been private. As the world is
constituted, no rules of inference can be laid down in reference to the
irregular relations of the sexes.
With reference to the insinuation that Newton owed his official position
rather to his niece than to his ability, it can be completely shown that,
on the worst possible supposition, the office in the Mint could have had
nothing to do with Mrs. C. Barton. Newton was appointed to the lower office
(the _Wardenship_) in March, 1695-96, when the young lady was not sixteen
years old, and before she could have been a resident under her uncle's
roof. The state of the coinage had caused much uneasiness; it was one of
the difficulties, and its restoration was one of the successes, of the day.
The best scientific advice was taken: Locke, Newton, and Halley were
consulted, and all were placed in office nearly at the same time; Newton in
the London Mint, Halley in the Chester Mint, Locke in the Council of Trade.
Neither Locke nor Halley had any nieces. Before Newton's appointment there
was some negociation of a public character: the Wardenship was not vacant,
and the government seems to have tried to induce Newton to take something
subordinate. March 14, Newton wrote to Halley, in reference to a current
rumour,--"I neither put in for any place in the Mint, nor would meddle with
Mr. Hoar's [the comptroller's] place, were it offered me." On the 19th,
Montague informs Newton that he is to have the _Wardenship_, vacant by the
removal of Mr. Overton to the Customs. Four years afterwards, when the
great operation on the coinage, by many declared impracticable, had
completely succeeded, Newton, a principal adviser and the principal
administrator, obtained the Mastership in the course of promotion. Montague
was raised to the peerage in the following year, and mainly, as the patent
states, for the same service. So that, though Montague was the patron as to
the Wardenship, yet scientific assistance was then so sorely needed, that
no hypothesis relative to any niece would be necessary to explain the
phenomenon of Newton's appointment: while, as to the Mastership it may
almost be said that Montague was more indebted to Newton for his peerage,
than Newton to Montague for that promotion which any minister must, under
the circumstances, have granted. {433}
In no account of Newton that I ever read is it stated that Mrs. Barton was
an intimate friend of Swift, probably through Halifax. Having been told
that there is frequent mention of her in Swift's _Journal to Stella_, I
examined that series and the rest of the correspondence, in which her name
occurs about twenty times. One letter from herself, under the name of
Conduitt (November 29, 1733), is indorsed by the Dean, "My old friend Mrs.
Barton, now Mrs. Conduitt," and establishes the identity of Swift's friend
with Newton's niece: otherwise, it proves nothing here. The other points to
be noticed are as follows.
1710, September 28, November 30, March 7; 1711, April 3, July 18, October
14 and 25, Swift visited or dined with Mrs. Barton at her _lodgings_. He
was also at this time on good terms with Halifax, and dined with him
November 28, 1710, and with Mrs. Barton on November 30. According to the
idiom of the day, _lodgings_ was a name for every kind of residence, and
even for the apartments of a guest in the house of his host. For anything
to the contrary in the mere word, the lodgings might have been in the house
of Lord Halifax, or of Newton himself. But, on the other hand, the future
Dean, much as he writes to Stella of every kind of small talk, never
mentions Halifax and Mrs. Barton together, never makes the slightest
allusion to either in connexion with the other, though in one and the same
letter he minutes his having dined with Halifax on the 28th, and with Mrs.
Barton on the 30th. There must have been intentional suppression in this.
All the world knew that there was some _liaison_ between the two; yet when
Swift (1711, Nov. 20) records his having been "teased with whiggish
discourse" by Mrs. Barton, he does not even drop a sarcasm about her
politics having been learnt from Halifax. This is the more remarkable as
the two seem to have been almost the only persons who are mentioned as
talking whiggery to him. To this list, however, may be added Lady Betty
Germain, well known to the readers of Swift's poetry, who joined Mrs.
Barton in inflicting the vexation, and at whose house the conversation took
place. It thus appears that Mrs. Barton was received in a manner which
shows that she was regarded as a respectable woman. The suppression on the
part of Swift may indicate respect for his two friends (that he highly
respected Mrs. Barton appears clear), and observance of a convention
established in their circle. But perhaps it is rather to be attributed to
his own position with respect to Stella, which was certainly peculiar,
though no one can say what their understanding was at the date of the
journal. This journal came again into Swift's hands before it was
published; so that we can only treat it as containing what he finally chose
to preserve. Allusions may have been struck out.
There is another point which our modern manners will not allow to be very
closely handled in print, but on which I am disposed to lay some stress. On
September 28, 1710, and April 3, 1711, Swift visited Mrs. Barton at her
lodgings. On each of these occasions she regaled him with a good story,
which there is no need to repeat: there is no harm in either, and they are
far from being the most singular communications which he made to Stella;
but they go beyond what, even in that day, will be considered as the
probable conversation of a maiden lady of thirty-one, with a bachelor man
of the world of forty-three. But they by no means exceed what we know to be
the license then taken by married women; and Swift's tone with respect to
the stories, combined with his obvious respect for Mrs. Barton, may make
any one lean to the supposition that he believed himself to be talking to a
married woman.
The reserve of Swift puts us quite at fault as to the locality of Mrs.
Barton's _lodgings_. They may have been in Lord Halifax's house; but if
not, it requires some supposition to explain why they were not in that of
Newton, with whom she had lived, and with whom she certainly lived after
the death of Halifax. Perhaps, when farther research is made in such
directions as may be indicated by the only unreserved statement of the
existing case which has ever been printed, the conclusion I arrive at, as
to me the _most probable_, may either be reinforced, or another substituted
for it. Be this as it may, such points as I have discussed, relating to
such men as Newton, will not remain in abeyance for ever, let biographers
be as timid as they will.