Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (58 page)

56
This suspicion is confirmed by the fact that Hooke’s evaluation of the Huygens longitude clocks, as recorded in the minutes of the Royal Society in 1665, repeats these criticisms in very similar words.

57
In
A Description of Helioscopes and some other Instruments
(London: T.R. for J. Martyn, 1676) (conveniently to be found cited at length in Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
7, pp.517–26), Hooke gives the date of this trial as 1662. In BL Sloane MS 1039, fol. 129v, in his Cutlerian lecture on the subject he recalls the date as March 1664. I am confident that the actual date is March 1663.

58
Conveniently to be found cited at length in
Oeuvres Complètes
7, p.519.

59
On 22 December 1665 Pepys recorded in his diary: ‘I to my Lord Brouncker’s and there spent the evening by my desire in seeing his lordship open to pieces and make up again his watch, thereby being taught what I never knew before.’ Cit. Leopold, ‘Christiaan Huygens, the Royal Society and Horology’, p.39.

60
In 1663 Christiaan Huygens was again in London with his father, and frequented the Royal Society, which made him a foreign Fellow.

61
See e.g. Pepys diary, cit. note 59 above, and Moray’s exchanges with Huygens about the new-design clock he is trying to get William Davidson to collect from The Hague for him in early 1665.

62
See L.D. Patterson, ‘Pendulums of Wren and Hooke’,
Osiris
10 (1952), 277–321; 283.

63
Having examined the Trinity College Cambridge Hooke papers myself, I am now confident that sheets A–L of the longitude papers are from the early 1660s, but that everything thereafter is from the 1670s, possibly as late as 1678–79. I am grateful to the Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge, for giving me access to these papers.

64
Richard Waller,
Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke
(1705), p.v. On the Moray negotiations with Bruce and Huygens see the Kincardine papers (RS transcript), pp.406–7.

65
I base this account on the important article by Michael Wright, ‘Robert Hooke’s longitude timekeeper’, in M. Hunter and S. Schaffer (eds),
Robert Hooke: New Studies
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), pp.63–118. Wright’s compilation of key recorded moments in Hooke’s spring-regulated timekeeper development is at pp.76–8.

66
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, pp.503–4 (letter 1481). This is one of the two letters Hooke considered to constitute a betrayal of his confidence to Huygens on Moray’s part. The other is that of 22 July 1665. Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, pp.426–8 (letter 1436).

67
‘Mr. Hooke having made a proposition of giving the discovery of the longitude, as he conceived it, to the society, it was ordered, that he should choose such persons to commit this business to, as he thought good, and make the experiment; that by such persons chosen, the council might be satisfied of the truth and practicableness of his invention, and proceed accordingly to take out a patent for him.’

68
Richard Waller,
Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke
(1705), p.v.

69
Ibid.

70
I am extremely grateful to Felix Pryor for assisting me in tracking down this document, and giving me sight of a legible photocopy.

71
See Waller,
Posthumous Works
, p.vi.

72
Holmes was already carrying out tests of deep-sea sounding devices for the Royal Society.

73
Holmes’s account of this incident is recorded in the Journal Books of the Royal Society for 11 January 1665. See Birch 2, pp.4–5.

74
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, p.204 (letter 1315). See also ibid., pp.222–3 (letter 1324).

75
Ibid., p.224 (letter 1325).

76
Philosophical Transactions
1, 6 March 1665.

77
The grave outbreak of plague in July 1665, which necessitated the removal of the Court first to Hampton Court and then to Oxford, and the dispersal of the Royal Society members to the safety of the country, marked the end of this phase in Hooke’s longitude timekeeper aspirations.

78
See below,
Chapter 12
.

79
It is via the Isle of Wight route that Holmes’s path crossed that of Robert Hooke (born on that island). It has been plausibly argued that Grace, Robert’s niece, was the mother of Holmes’s illegitimate daughter Mary. See L. Jardine,
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London
(London: HarperCollins, 2003).

80
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, p.224 (letter 1325). Huygens’s attitude to his first longitude clocks was entirely consistent: he doubted their suitability from the start (
Oeuvres Complètes
4, p.285).

81
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, p.256 (letter 1345).

82
Birch 2, p.21.

83
For a clear sense of the concern caused by Holmes’s conduct on that voyage, and Pepys’s lack of trust of him, see Pepys,
Diary
6, p.43.

84
Ibid., p.56.

85
Birch,
A History of the Royal Society
2, p.23.

86
Moray also added two further experiments Holmes claimed to have carried out with the clocks (ibid.).

87
Ibid., p.26.

88
I owe this discovery to C.H. Wilson, ‘Who captured New Amsterdam?’,
English Historical Review
72 (1957), 469–74: ‘Fortunately our answer [to the question of whether Holmes was involved in the capture of New Amsterdam in 1664] need not rest on surmise, for we have Holmes’s own account of his movements during the months when he is supposed by some historians to have been on his way to America, and capturing New Amsterdam [
Captain Robert Holmes his Journalls of Two Voyages into Guynea in his M[ajesty’]s Ships The Henrietta and the Jersey
, Pepys Library Sea MSS. No. 2698]’ (pp. 472–3).

89
For Holmes’s buccaneering style, see
Captain Robert Holmes his Journalls of Two Voyages…
, p.168.

90
See Patterson, ‘Pendulums of Wren and Hooke’, pp.302–5.

91
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
7, pp.323–4. Bruce’s response to receiving his own complimentary copy of Huygens’s
Horologium Oscillatorium
was similarly critical. See Leopold, ‘Clockmaking in Britain and the Netherlands’, p.41.

11: Science Under the Microscope

1
I am extremely grateful to Dr Jan Broadway for this reference.

2
On the history of discovery and development of the microscope in the Netherlands see E.C. Ruestow,
The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and S. Alpers,
The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).

3
It received the imprimatur of the Royal Society on 23 November 1664.

4
For a fuller version of this episode see L. Jardine, ‘Robert Hooke: A reputation restored’, in M. Cooper et al. (eds),
Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies
(Ashgate, 2006), pp.247–58.

5
13 February 1665. Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, p.236.

6
Ibid., p.245.

7
On Huygens’s annotations of his copy see M. Barth, ‘Huygens at work: Annotations in his rediscovered personal copy of Hooke’s “Micrographia”’,
Annals of Science
52 (1995), 601–13.

8
Huygens,
Oeuvres Complètes
5, p.240.

9
See the letter of thanks sent by Auzout to Sir Constantijn Huygens. I accept McKeon’s redating of this letter: R.K. McKeon,
Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision et Oeuvre d’Adrien Auzout
(2 fascicules), Thèse présentée pour le Doctorat du Troisième Cycle (Paris, 1965).

10
5 June 1665 (n.s.). Huygens archive, Leiden.

11
Auzout proposed setting up the Observatory in the dedicatory letter to Louis XIV which prefaced his
L’Ephéméride du comète de 1664
(1665).

12
Hooke,
Micrographia
, fol. e1v.

13
Such a printed report is equivalent, in the period, to a priority claim, preceding an application for patent.

14
A. Auzout,
Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé Charles, sur la Ragguaglio di nuove Osservationi da Giuseppe Campani
(Paris, 1665). Campani’s book was reviewed in the first issue of the
Philosophical Transactions
in London in March 1665.

15
Auzout and the Royal Society (i.e. Oldenburg) had been corresponding since early January 1665, following the publication of Auzout’s
L’Ephéméride du comète
. See A.R. and M.B. Hall (eds and trans.),
The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg
, 13 volumes: vols 1–9 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–73); vols 10–11 (London: Mansell, 1975–76); vols 12–13 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1986) 2, pp.341; pp.359–68. The
Journal des sçavans
began publication in January 1665, but ceased after three months. It began again in January 1666. Thus Auzout’s published letters may well have been intended for publication in the
Journal
, where indeed a review of the Campani (probably by Auzout) was eventually published in January 1666.