the intellectual origins of the royal society. london or oxford?

The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society. London or Oxford?Author(s): Christopher HillSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 144-156Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/530983 .

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I44

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY-LONDON OR OXFORD?

By CHRISTOPHER HILL

Master of Balliol College, Oxford

T HE ROYAL SOCIETY was founded in I660 at Gresham College. Even in the seventeenth century divergent views arose among its

founders as to its intellectual origins and the events which led up to its foundation. So it is not surprising that echoes of these divergences were heard when the Society was celebrating its Tercentenary in 1960. The main

points in debate were the extent of Francis Bacon's influence on its foundation, and the respective contributions of the related groups in London and Oxford. Miss Syfret had already successfully challenged Thomas Birch's view that the 'Invisible College' mentioned by Boyle and centring round Hartlib was in any direct way linked with the foundation of the Royal Society. Professor Douglas McKie in Origins and Founders brought both the London and Oxford groups into his account, and his and Miss Syfret's interpretations seemed to fit one another (I). However, a booklet from Oxford written by Miss (now Dr) Margery Purver and Dr E. J. Bowen claimed that John Wilkins and the Oxford group were the only begetters of the Royal Society, and rejected John Wallis's claims for the earlier London

group around Gresham College. Dr Purver has elaborated the arguments in favour of this view in a recently published book (2). The Editor of Notes and Records has now asked me to put on record my own views, since I had

already discussed this aspect of the intellectual history of the period in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965).

Two chapters and an appendix in this book discuss London science and the universities, and Bacon's importance for many of the supporters of Parliament. In the main I was summarizing the views of other scholars, but the body of evidence seemed to me to point decidedly towards London as the centre in which scientific ideas mainly originated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before I640 Oxford and Cambridge were backwaters so far as science was concerned. Minorities in both universities were Baconians, but men like John Wallis and John Pell had to go to London to learn mathematics; eminent mathematicians like Briggs, Gunter and Gellibrand left Oxford and Cambridge for the newly-founded centre of scientific adult education at Gresham College, around which a



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group or groups of scientists and mathematicians collected. After Parlia- ment's victory in the Civil War the universities were purged of Royalists and drones, and into Charles I's headquarters of Oxford in particular, scientists and mathematicians were imported, mainly from London. The new

philosophy was introduced into the universities from outside. In the I650's Oxford, and to a lesser extent Cambridge, were for a short time important centres of scientific activity. At Oxford the lead was taken by John Wilkins, intruded Warden of Wadham, a former member of the London group about which Wallis tells us.

But science and the scientists in Oxford and Cambridge did not survive the restoration of Charles II in I660. The intruded heads and fellows of colleges were expelled: they regrouped in London around their old centre, Gresham College. Many of them had been supporters of Parliament in the Civil War, like Wallis himself, Wilkins, Goddard and Petty; others had

co-operated with the Commonwealth and Protectorate to an extent that

proved embarrassing in I660. A cover-up was needed. The Gresham group sought royal and aristocratic patronage. The twelve who met at Gresham

College on 28 November I660 decided on the names of another 41 persons 'judged willing and fit to join in their design'. The majority of these were known Royalists, and some, as Sprat naively put it, 'to their immortal honour, had followed the King in his banishment' (3). (Sprat meanwhile had been eulogizing Cromwell as the Moses of his people.)

The former Royalist exile Sir Robert Moray undertook the negotiations with the Court, displacing the goldsmith's son John Wilkins, who had been so unfortunate as to register with the Stationers' Company, five days after the execution of Charles I in 1649, A Discourse concerning the Beauty of Providence, in which he declared that 'every particular event is most beautiful in that time which the Providence of God hath allotted to it' (4). The timing could have been better. Anthony Wood listed the future Bishop of Chester as an Independent in the I65o's (5). Wilkins had presented Oxford's con-

gratulations to Oliver Cromwell when he became Lord Protector, and himself married Cromwell's sister. We can see why it was necessary that 'our company at Gresham College', in Wallis's words, should be 'much again increased by the accession of divers eminent and noble persons upon his Majesty's return'. The first President of the Society was a peer who had some scientific pretensions but would scarcely have obtained the office for that reason alone. Peers were admitted to Fellowships without scrutiny, and the door was opened wide to gentlemanly amateurs. The ultimate results of this social dilution were unhappy; but in the short run it won Charles II's patronage for the Royal Society, which continued to be run by John



I46

Wilkins, Cromwell's brother-in-law, and Henry Oldenburg, Cromwell's admirer. I therefore took the view that the Oxford episode was a brief interlude in the history of English science, a historical accident. The Royal Society rightly called itself the Royal Society of London.

Until recently it appeared that historians had reached some sort of agreement along the lines of Miss Syfret's and Professor McKie's articles. This interpretation made sense of the available evidence, and of all the evidence. But it is always dangerous when views harden into orthodoxies: Dr Purver has thrown out a challenge, and it is perhaps not a waste of time to review the present state of the discussion.

Dr Purver's book makes many valuable contributions to our under- standing of the development of science in seventeenth-century England. She widens our horizons by insisting that 'the effective scientific revolution of the seventeenth century owed a considerable debt to an intellectual revolution of a far more conscious kind than has hitherto been indicated' (p. 3) (6). She sensibly suggests that the very success of the Royal Society has led historians to fail to appreciate that 'strenuous action had ever been necessary ... to build a sound foundation for a new Systeme of Naturall Philosophy' (p. 239). Dr Purver shows that 'an entire system of sciences, stultified and

incapable of growth, still prevailed in the universities' before the mid- seventeenth century (p. 28). 'The natural sciences in their existing form were subservient to a particular intellectual concept in which directed research could find little place' (p. 34). A break-through was needed. This is of course not an original view, but Dr Purver is right to re-emphasize it against Professor Mark Curtis's recent attempt to challenge it (7). Chapter 2 of Dr Purver's Part One contains a salutory statement of Bacon's significance as the philo- sophical founder of the scientific revolution. What mattered was not merely the introduction of'the experimental method', 'the inductive method', but the context in which these methods were to be employed. Bacon's aim was 'the creation, from the foundations, of a completely new system of sciences' (p. 52; cf. pp. 45, 55-56). Dr Purver refutes recent attempts to denigrate Bacon's role, and this again is timely and salutory. She clarifies Bacon's attitude to Copernicus (pp. 40, 46-47), to Harvey (pp. 59-60), to contem-

porary mathematical developments (pp. 56-57). She shows that Bacon did not, as is often alleged, expect the scientific revolution to be completed in a few years (pp. 48, 53); and she easily convinces us that he was no narrow utilitarian (p. 49). In Chapter 3 she shows how the Royal Society gave 'a local habitation and a name... to Bacon's vision of a new system of Natural Philosophy' (p. Ioo). Naturally the universities, after I660 as before 1640, were hostile (pp. 63-75, ioo, 157-158).



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Part One of Dr Purver's book is thus an excellently argued restatement of the historical significance of Bacon and the Royal Society. In Part II the tone changes, and we have an elaborate argument to suggest that historians since Birch have been wrong to accept John Wallis's statements in 1678 and I697-that the nucleus of the Royal Society originated in meetings in London before the participants moved to Oxford. The significance of this issue is not very great, since many were members of both groups; but in pursuing it Dr Purver makes some assumptions and omissions which should perhaps be noted lest historians accept her arguments too easily and in toto.

Dr Purver argues that the much-quoted passage from Wallis occurred in a polemic against another Fellow of the Royal Society, which is true, and can therefore be disregarded, which is a non sequitur. She points to discrepancies between Wallis's two accounts and triumphantly produces a third (later) version in which the London meetings are not mentioned at all. Wallis's list of the activities of the London group is 'obviously worthless as evidence of an earlier date for the prototype of the Royal Society' because it suggests that the group discussed and tested the experiments of others, and original research is not mentioned (pp. I67-I73). Dr Purver does not, if I understand her aright, question Wallis's facts, but his interpretation of them. Indeed she presses his text rather hard to conclude that 'Bacon had no particular significance to this group', though elsewhere she accepts Wilkins (a member of the group) as Baconian in 1638 (pp. 105-107).

Here we are in the world of metaphysical distinctions: Dr Purver's idea of what the Royal Society 'really' was versus Wallis's idea. If I am asked to choose between distinctions drawn by a contemporary and those drawn by a historian, however gifted, 300 years after the event, I start with a prejudice in favour of the former. Wallis was not contradicting Sprat: he was adding to and amplifying his narrative. It is of course possible that the former assistant to the Clerks of the Westminster Assembly of Divines was an un- principled liar, though this would need proving: but we should also have to assume that he was very foolish to tell lies in public about matters known to many still alive, and extraordinarily lucky to get away with it for nearly three centuries. Dr Purver has to admit that none of the many persons who could have contradicted Wallis did so-not even Lord Brouncker, to whom Wallis's letter was addressed, a younger man than Wallis, who lived for another six years. That 'the Royal Society issued no public rebuttal of Wallis's account', Dr Purver explains rather lamely, 'was in keeping with its established policy of dissociating itself as an institution from the private opinions of its members' (p. I79). This is indeed now the Society's established



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policy, but the only examples of it which Dr Purver gives from the seventeenth century are its refusal to take sides in a dispute between Henry Stubbe and Joseph Glanvill, and its refusal to disclaim Sprat's official History of the

Society (p. 14). If the convention already existed and prevented the Society from officially contradicting lies, this was surely all the more reason for

arranging that one of its members should refute Wallis in a personal capacity -supposing he had been regarded as inaccurate in any significant way. If Dr Purver could find a single one of Wallis's contemporaries who said he was wrong it would strengthen her case.

I should wish to emphasize the internal consistency of Wallis's accounts, which justify historians in accepting them. He gets the right people in the

right places at the right times, and many of his details are confirmed by other sources. Miss Syfret quotes Hooke: "Tis well known who were the

principal men that began and promoted the design, both in this city [London] and in Oxford; and that a long time before Mr. Oldenburg came into

England' (8). Hooke puts London before Oxford: Oldenburg came to

England in 1653 at latest; it may have been earlier (9). The discrepancies between Wallis's two accounts are of the kind that confirm rather than discredit them. He forgot Haak in 1678; in I697 he made amends by saying that Haak 'I think gave the first occasion and first suggested these meetings'. Wallis's third account, not printed in his lifetime, omitted any reference to the London group because its subject was university education, to which

only the Oxford phase of the origin of the Royal Society was relevant. But none of these arguments would convince Dr Purver, since her case

is not really against Wallis, but against the London group which he describes and which historians have accepted as a nucleus of the later Oxford group and so of the Royal Society. The London group, Dr Purver argues, was non-Baconian in her sense of that word. This really amounts to saying that Wallis did not understand Baconianism in Dr Purver's definition (pp. I68-

I73). So many members of the London group were later members of the Oxford group, with Wilkins prominent in both, that any distinction between the two would need a lot of evidence to substantiate it. What we have seems to me to point the other way. All those members of the London

group who were alive after the Restoration became Fellows of the Royal Society. Miss Purver's only positive reasons for marking down the London group are that it had no rules (p. I65) and did not, as a body, conduct original research (pp. 168-170). The first accusation contradicts Wallis, and is at best unproven. Wallis certainly dropped the rules in his second account, so he may have thought he had referred them back from Oxford to London, so closely linked were the two groups in his mind. But in any case it seems



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remarkably scholastic to define Baconianism in terms of formality of pro- cedure. (The Oxford group did not keep minutes.)

As regards the second accusation, even after 1662, experiments were as often as not performed by individuals in the first instance, and then repeated for the Royal Society. This had been true of the Oxford group too. It is

dangerous to argue e silentio that nothing of this sort took place in the London group of I645. We have in fact evidence of more than one experiment conducted by the London group, and Wallis mentions weekly contributions raised to pay for them. One experiment which Haak described for Mersenne Dr Purver dismisses as 'an attempt to repeat a set-piece of scientific discovery ... put on before men of letters and rank who were present not as scientists but as persons eminent in various walks of life, assembled for instructive diversion' (p. I75). Again the distinction between what is here described and Royal Society experiments put on before Samuel Pepys, John Dryden and Sir John Berkenhead seems very tenuous.

Dr Purver tries to discredit the London group by referring to Theodore Haak as its 'leader' and organizer (pp. 175-176 and portrait opposite p. I74). Since Haak was no scientist, there would be a point here if it were true. But it is not, as Miss Barnett made clear many years ago (io). Wallis was so far from thinking Haak the leader of the group that he forgot him altogether in in his account of 1678; in I697 he said only that Haak (whose name he got wrong) first suggested the meetings. Haak does indeed appear (from other evidence confirming Wallis) to have acted as corresponding secretary to the London group, as Dr Purver suggests that Gerald Langbaine (no scientist) did for the Oxford group in the I65o's, and as Henry Oldenburg (no scientist) did for the Royal Society for many years. It is true, too, that Wallis in his accounts 'telescoped the events at the beginning of the Oxford club'

(p. I77). But so did Sprat. Dr Purver ignores the evidence given by Professor McKie and Miss Barnett of continuing scientific activities by the London group (which, as Wallis said, went on meeting at Gresham College) and of contact between them and the Oxford group (II). 'The usual custom of most of them', of meeting at Gresham College, which the Royal Society's Journal Book records on 28 November I660, almost certainly goes further back than the year I658 (or I659, as Dr Purver interprets this confused passage) which Sprat gives.

Dr Purver's denial of the importance of the London group is accom- panied by a denial that either Gresham College or Hartlib and the Comenian group should be associated in any significant way with the origins of the Royal Society. Most historians recently have thought otherwise. I am an interested party, and will not repeat the arguments for Gresham College (12).



I50 I merely note that Sprat had a much higher opinion of Gresham College than Dr Purver, despite his desire to stress the role of Oxford University (I 3). Whether or not Dr Purver is right in her argument that the London group focused on Gresham performed no experiments, the Royal Society was

glad to make use of the College's collection of scientific instruments. Of the twelve founders of the Royal Society and the 41 names first suggested for membership, seven were or had been Gresham professors (Baines, Croone, Goddard, Petty, Rooke, Whistler, Wren, though Rooke died a few weeks before the granting of the Charter).

Nor shall I attempt to restate the case for Hartlib and the Comenians (14). Dr Purver rightly indicates differences of approach between them and the Royal Society. But to describe this as a 'fundamental misunderstanding by Hartlib and his collaborators of Bacon's conception of science' (pp. 202, 206) is to beg a lot of questions. Dr Purver's attitude to the Comenians appears to derive from a light-hearted jeu d'esprit of Professor Trevor-Roper's (I5): she seems to me seriously to underestimate their continuing interest in and

appreciation of science. John Pell's Idea of Mathematics was written for Hartlib in I639. Boyle's intimate friendship with Hartlib suggests that Dr Purver is again drawing impossible lines in order to dissociate them. Several scholars have recently stressed Hartlib's importance in the history of chem-

istry (i6). (The absence of chemistry from the list of Gresham's professors was one of Dr Purver's reasons for regarding the College as non-Baconian, notwithstanding the close association of Sir Kenelm Digby and Hans Hunneades with it.) Hartlib was kept fully informed of the activities of the Oxford group (pp. 121, 125-126). Haak had a deep and lifelong interest in mathematics (I7). The extensive correspondence which Haak (partly on behalf of the London group) and Hartlib carried on with foreign scientists was in pursuance of one of Bacon's recommendations and was an essential

preliminary to the Royal Society. It anticipates the correspondence conducted by that body's secretary, Henry Oldenburg, Hartlib's friend, Dury's son-in-law and admirer. Much of Oldenburg's correspondence with foreigners indeed reads more like that of the secretary of Hartlib's Office of Addresses than of the secretary of a modern scientific society.

The Hartlib group can do nothing right for Dr Purver. Their desire for Protestant reunion marks them off from the religious toleration of the Royal Society (pp. 238-239), notwithstanding Oldenburg's support for their schemes at least as late as 1657-1658 (18). When Hartlib and Haak exactly anticipate the Royal Society by corresponding regularly with Catholic scientists like Mersenne (19), Dr Purver complains that the latter was not a Baconian (pp. 174-175)! One wonders how she feels about Boyle's and



i5I

Hartlib's 'worthy friend ... Mr. Gassend', about Hartlib's veneration for the Dominican Thomas Campanella, about Haak's friendship with the high Laudian William Alabaster, and about Haak's correspondence in 1663 with the Catholic Oberhofsmarschall of the Catholic Archbishop Elector of Mainz, the object of which was to inform the latter about the Royal Society (20). The Comenian group cannot be dismissed as religious bigots (2I). The Royal Society's religious policy was indeed Baconian (22), but it was also related to the political complications of i660 and after, when so many of the scientists had Puritan antecedents, and when Charles II was pro-Papist. It was also a necessary consequence of the desire for international scientific contact, as Hartlib and Haak had long since found.

It is then misleading to draw hard and fast lines between the 'Baconians' of the Oxford group and the Royal Society, and the 'non-Baconians' of the London and Comenian groups. Was Wilkins not a Baconian in London in 1645? Was Boyle not a Baconian when he associated with the Invisible College? Did Wren, Rooke and Goddard cease to be Baconian when they moved back from Oxford to the London group in the I65o's? Had Haak become a Baconian when Wilkins proposed him for a Fellowship of the Royal Society (23)? How many early Fellows of the Royal Society were 'really' Baconians? Was Wallis? How many indeed were really scientists? Was the Society itself 'really' Baconian? The preamble to its statutes is frankly utilitarian, and one has only to turn over the pages of Birch to see how much of the Society's time was taken up with potato-growing and mechanical gadgets. Nearly all the papers which Sprat and his advisers chose for reproduction in the History-i.e. to use for publicity purposes-deal with technological, often indeed commercial problems (24). All this was Baconian enough, no doubt, though not quite in Dr Purver's sense of the word. But the number of experiments performed for the Society was already dwindling when Sprat published (25). And Oldenburg's correspondence reveals how preoccupied the gentlemen virtuosi were with monstrous births, dreams, and hawthorns miraculously blooming in winter-'occa- sional aberrations', as Dr Purver charmingly calls them (p. 84).

We are brought back to definitions. Professor Kargon and Mr Webster have recently stressed the very different kinds of 'Baconianism' to be found among the Fellows (26); we recall the number of alchemist and astrologer Fellows. Dr Purver side-steps 'the failure of some Fellows to grasp the essential principles of its scientific policy, and a degree of dilettantism' by emphasizing 'the element which may be called the leaven in the lump' (p. 283). She is quite right: but did Wilkins leaven no lumps in London in 1645-1648? Did Wren, Rooke and Goddard leaven no lumps at Gresham



I52

College in the I65o's? The discussion becomes hopelessly scholastic if we

try to press metaphysical distinctions too hard. When we come to ask why Sprat's great History of the Royal Society

should wish to slur over its London beginnings, we are in the realm of historical fact. Dr Purver, unlike her predecessors, almost totally ignores the most unusual political circumstances which prevailed in the early I660's.

Sprat and his colleagues of the Royal Society were interested in propaganda at least as much as in truth. (The History is not necessarily the worse for that: Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity had shown that a com- missioned work of propaganda could rise above its immediate occasion.) Their object was to show that science was dangerous neither to the universities (who 'look upon it as obnoxious') (27), to the Church of

England nor to government and social subordination; that on the contrary it was a proper and desirable occupation for nobles and gentlemen. These facts are well known, but Dr Purver chooses to assume that Sprat's History must be true because it had the authority of committees of the Royal Society behind it. On the contrary: in the tricky political circumstances of 1663-1667 (the History was an unconscionable time in gestation) committees may have been necessary to prevent the History being too truthful (28). The fact that Sprat's account is confirmed by some contemporary evidence

(pp. Io8-I09, 178) merely proves in a circular way that the History is official, and that all concerned stuck to their story. As Sprat himself warned his readers, his book is 'not altogether in the way of a plain history, but some- times of an apology'. The future Bishop of Rochester was not the type of

person to resist pressure. In I685 he wrote another propagandist work, this time against the Rye House plotters, and is said to have admitted that

King James II altered various passages before the book was printed (29). There is of course no suggestion that Sprat and his advisers were lying:

if we accept every word that Wallis wrote, we are left with nothing more than venial sins of omission. The eighteenth-century historian of Gresham

College thought that Wallis complemented Sprat: there is no need to adopt Dr Purver's view that he contradicts him. But we must not overlook the difficult political situation which had to be faced by the leaders of the Oxford and London groups, so many of whom had complied in one way or another with the governments of the interregnum. The lateness of Wallis's testimony, I suggested in my Intellectual Origins, may be a reason for giving greater weight to it than to Sprat's (30).

It seems to me one-sided to contrast Wallis, who wrote 'in passionate self-defence' with Sprat, whose 'work had been subject to a methodical scrutiny by a wide range of informed persons, whose business was a calm



I53

appraisal of facts' (p. 162). Contemporaries were well aware of the propagandist nature of Sprat's History, and historians have been right to follow them. Dr Purver omits a significant sentence from a letter of Oldenburg's which she quotes. One of the History's objects, he said, is 'to assert the advantage and innocence of this scientific work, in respect of all professions, and of religion itself; and how proper, above others, it is for the present temper of the age wherein we live' (3 I). 'The far greater number' of Fellows, Sprat had insisted, 'are gentlemen, free and unconfined' (32). Oldenburg regularly stressed this propagandist point in recommending the History to foreigners: 'the Society has an august monarch as its founder, and, as Fellows, many men distinguished by their birth, learning and wit'; 'it has elected as Fellows many men . . . outstanding in nobility, doctrine, intelli-

gence and practical usefulness'; 'the Society ... is continually adorned by the addition of bishops and other notable men to its membership'-as was natural, thanks to the patronage of the King, the Duke of York and Prince

Rupert. 'It is very important', Oldenburg assured the Hon. Robert Boyle, 'to choose persons into that chair [the President's], in whom birth and ability are in conjunction' (33). The presence of these gentlemanly amateurs makes it difficult to accept Dr Purver's sharp distinction between the 'Baconianism' of the Royal Society and the 'non-Baconianism' of the London group. When in 1664 Pell sent Haak a paper for the Royal Society he asked that it should not be read to the whole Society but only to those who were interested (34).

Finally, more generally, Dr Purver's argument seems to me, if not self- contradictory, at least to contain an internal illogicality. She very rightly insists on the deplorable intellectual state of the universities before 1640, on the need for drastic change. Oxford was changed, from outside, by men intruded upon it by the Parliamentary Commissioners after the Civil War. But where had these men come from? Whence came the impetus to trans- form the universities? From London, whose pre-eminence in mathematics Wallis so strongly emphasized. From London, where the whole scientific

reforming movement was centred (35). The main objection to Wallis's

amplification of Sprat seems to me to lie in its modesty rather than in its excess. Wallis mentions only one London group-that which met at Gresham College. But there were others, all in their different ways con-

tributing to the origins of the Royal Society-the group round William Gilbert; the Deptford group; Gresham College itself; the Physicians' Club

(Purver, p. I85) and other groupings round the College of Physicians; the College of Graduate Physicians (36); Boyle's Invisible College, whatever that was; and other groups centred round Surgeons' Hall and its lectures. More



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shadowy, but perhaps also important, were the Mathematical Society at Gresham College and the Astrologers' Society, if indeed they are distinct (37). If Dr Purver had argued that Wallis's London group was only one of many from which the Royal Society derived, one of many aspects of that 'conscious intellectual revolution' which she so rightly began by stressing (p. 3), she could have made out an interesting case. It is the erection of partheno- genesis at Oxford into a dogma that makes one wish for less theological rigidity of definition.

We have far too little information about any of these groups and their contacts with the Baconian minorities in the universities. But they cannot be left out of the history of English science or of the origins of the Royal Society of London. When Wilkins and Goddard returned to Oxford in the I65o's it was surely because they had enjoyed the stimulus of London that they brought back a new spirit. To suppose that men like Wallis and Petty were somehow infected with Baconianism in Oxford contradicts all that we know of that university in the seventeenth century. Baconianism was im- posed on Oxford from outside, and as soon as possible Oxford ejected the reformers (38). It was natural that they should return to London, whither three Gresham professors had preceded them (Wren, Rooke and Goddard). Whether we accept every detail of Wallis or not, his story not only fits all the contemporary evidence we have, it also fits the logic of the story of Baconianism in seventeenth-century England, as Sprat's attempt to hush up the role of revolutionary London and emphasize only that of Oxford does not. London is crucial to this story: Oxford is not only peripheral, it is positively hostile to Baconianism except for the brief period after Oxford, the King's headquarters in the Civil War, had been conquered by Parlia- mentarian London.

NOTES

(i) R. H. Syfret, 'The Origins of the Royal Society', Notes and Records, Roy. Soc. Lond. 5; Douglas McKie, 'The Origins and Foundations of the Royal Society', ibid. 15. I am most grateful to Miss Syfret for reading and commenting on a first draft of this note. I have incorporated some of her valuable suggestions. She was so kind as to

express general agreement with my argument, but is of course in no way responsible for it.

(2) M. Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (I967).

(3) T. Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London (1667), p. 58. (4) Op. cit. p. Io.

(5) A. Clark (Ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (Oxford Historical Soc.), I, p. 148 (I89I).



I55

(6) This view was elaborated, between the completion of Dr Purver's thesis and the publi- cation of her book, by J. F. West in The Great Intellectual Revolution. London:

Murray (1965). (7) M. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642. Oxford Univ. Press (1959). (8) Syfret, op. cit. p. 8I; cf. p. 83 for other confirmations.

(9) A. R. and M. B. Hall (Eds.), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg. Wisconsin Univer-

sity Press (1965- ), I, pp. xxxi-xxxiii.

(io) P. R. Barnett, 'Theodore Haak and the Early Years of the Royal Society', Ann. Sci. 13, 213.

(ii) McKie, op. cit. pp. 30-31; P. Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. 's-Gravenhage (1962), Chapter Io.

(12) See my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford Univ. Press (1965), Chapters II and III passim, and references there cited: especially F. R. Johnson, 'Gresham

College: Precursor of the Royal Society', J. Hist. Ideas, I; Sir H. Hartley and Sir C. Hinshelwood, 'Gresham College and the Royal Society', Notes and Records, Roy. Soc. Lond. 16, 136-146.

(I3) Sprat, History, p. 93.

(14) See my Intellectual Origins, pp. IOO-IO9, and references there cited, especially Syfret, op. cit. and Barnett, op. cit.

(15) H. R. Trevor-Roper, 'Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution', first published in Encounter and reprinted in Religion, the Reformation and Social

Change (1967), pp. 237-293.

(i6) C. Webster, 'English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: a Background to the "Society ofChymical Physicians" ',Ambix, 14, esp. pp. 29-41; R. S. Wilkinson, 'The Hartlib Papers and I7th Century Chemistry', ibid. pp. 54-69; J. J. O'Brien, 'Samuel Hartlib's Influence on Robert Boyle's Scientific Development', Ann. Sci. 21, esp. p. I.

(17) Barnett, Ann. Sci. 13, 2Io; Theodore Haak, F.R.S. p. 79.

(I8) Oldenburg, Correspondence, I, pp. 145-147, 15I-153. Cf. ibid. 4, pp. 78, I02, 171, 274 for

Oldenburg's continuing Puritanism and hostility to Jesuits ten years later.

(I9) See Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. Chapters IV and VI, passim. For Mersenne's

sympathy with Comenius's pansophical schemes, see G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, Liverpool University Press (1947), p. 347.

(20) T. Birch (Ed.), The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1772), 6, p. 77; Barnett, Theodore HIaak, F.R.S. pp. 43, 126-127.

(21) Dr Purver's excursus on Skytte (pp. 220-232) is interesting, but there is no reason to hold other Comenians responsible for all his schemes.

(22) I have said nothing about Dr Purver's passing reference to the relation of Puritanism to the origins of modem science (pp. 152-154). Her idea that this relationship 'is refuted by the Society's own testimony' (p. 152) suggests that she has not understood the argument of Merton and others on the subject.

(23) Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. p. 124.

(24) This point was noted by the editors of Sprat's History, J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St. Louis, I959, p. xxi).

(25) 362 in I66I-I665, 276 in 1666-1670 (R. P. Stears, 'The Relations between Science and

Society in the Later Seventeenth Century', in The Restoration of the Stuarts, Blessing or Disaster?, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington (1960), p. 72).



156

(26) R. H. Kargon, Atomism in Englandfrom Harlot to Newton, Oxford Univ. Press (1966), pp. 109-III; C. Webster, 'Henry Power's Experimental Philosophy', Ambix, I, 354.

(27) Wood, Life and Times, I, p. 354.

(28) From quite a different angle, Mr Alvarez has recently stressed the fear which lies behind Sprat's attitude (A. Alvarez, The School of Donne, 1961, pp. 175-186).

(29) State Trials, 9, pp. 364-365, quoted by K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shatfesb,iry, Oxford Univ. Press (1968), p. 714. For Sprat's reputation as a pliable turncoat, see also An Anstwer to the Bishop of Rochester's Second Letter (1689), pp. 37-38; and the

Dictionary of National Biography. (30) Op. cit. p. 128.

(31) Oldenburg, Correspondence, 2, p. 321, quoted in part by Dr Purver, p. II.

(32) Sprat, History, p. 67.

(33) Oldenburg, Correspondence, 3, pp. 193, 339; 2, p. 401; 3, p. 45; cf. 4, p. 538. (34) Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. pp. 130-131. Pell clearly had a higher opinion of Haak

as a scientist than Dr Purver has.

(35) I have argued this at length in Chapter II of my Intellectual Origins, where references will be found for some of the statements in the remainder of this paragraph.

Dr Purver makes some valid criticisms of this book, but I do not think anybody who has read pp. I29-130 could accept her statement that I assume 'that the literary form which emerged' at the Restoration 'derived from the technical idiom of science' (Purver, p. 99). I did not refer to 'the technical idiom of science' at all: I was

trying to put the plain prose of the scientists into the wider context of Puritan sermons and political pamphlets.

(36) Webster, 'English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution', pp. 35-39; R. S. Roberts, review of Sir G. N. Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicianls, Vol. I, in Hist. Sci. 5, 94-95.

(37) For the former see Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) (ed. C. H. Josten), Oxford Univ. Press

(1966), I, pp. 36-37, 417-419; for the latter ibid. Index, passim. (38) Seth Ward, as Dr Purver delicately puts it, 'felt obliged to resign' as President of

Trinity (p. IIo). 'Outed' was Anthony Wood's more succinct phrase (Wood, Life and Times, I, p. 363).



the intellectual origins of the royal society. london or oxford?

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