Newton and the Counterfeiter (6 page)

Newton had his own troubles with his king. When James took the throne after his brother's death in 1685, he began an inept effort to re-Catholicize Protestant England. In 1687, James took aim at Cambridge University, ordering it to grant Father Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, the degree of master of arts—an honor that would permit Francis to take an official position in the governance of the university. The university's leaders refused, and Newton applauded. He broke into the last weeks of work on the
Principia
to argue that a "mixture of Papist & Protestants in y
^e
same University can neither subsist happily nor long together." When King James's Court of the Ecclesiastical Commission ordered the university to send representatives to account for its disobedience to the Crown, Newton was selected as a member of the delegation.

The court threatened and blustered. Newton led his colleagues as they pushed back. The government flinched first. In May 1687 the chief judge of the commission issued his order: the Cambridge delegation should "Go your way, and sin no more." Where it counted, Newton and his colleagues had won: Cambridge never granted the required degree.

This victory made Newton a marked man, at least as far as King James was concerned. He returned to Cambridge and, prudently, kept mostly to himself. The fame that the
Principia
brought him was sweet, but for the moment it remained too dangerous to attempt to savor much of celebrity's rewards.

King James II was a failure at most of the arts of governance. He was, however, a master at enraging his enemies and estranging his friends. It took him just three years on the throne to alienate a critical mass of his subjects. By mid-1688, the traditionally pro-monarchy Tories and their opponents, the Whigs,
were both conspiring to replace James with his nephew and son-in-law William, Prince of Orange, whose wife was the King's elder daughter, Mary. In November, William landed on the south coast of England with an army of between eighteen and twenty thousand men (including about two hundred black soldiers recruited—or acquired—from plantations in the American colonies). James was able to counter with a force of about the same size and gathered his army at Salisbury, blocking William's path to London, but the royalist strength drained away as first James's generals and then his own daughter Anne defected to William's side. After a couple of minor skirmishes, James ran. He fled London on December 9 and, a week later, surrendered to a Dutch detachment. Two weeks later, William turned a blind eye as his father-in-law escaped to France.

To give his seizure of power its necessary veneer of legitimacy, William summoned a Convention Parliament to settle the question of the royal succession. Cambridge University had two representatives at the assembly. One of them was that newly declared anti-Catholic Isaac Newton.

It cannot be said that Newton was much of a parliamentarian. There is no record of any speech he might have made in the Convention Parliament; his only documented statement on any matter during his year in the House of Commons was a request to a servant to close a window against a draft. No matter, he did what his constituency expected of him, voting with the majority on February 5, 1689, to declare the throne of England vacant by virtue of James's abandoning it, and to offer the unoccupied monarchy jointly to William and Mary.

With that, Newton found himself free to enjoy something genuinely new in his experience: being lionized by the good and the great. He accepted homage from the members of the Royal Society. Christiaan Huygens arranged to meet him and introduced him to the exalted circles at Hampton Court, where Huygens's brother was part of William's retinue. Locke's friend the Earl of Pembroke welcomed him into his home. Newton dined and drank in company that lauded him as the wisest of men and a member of the winning side in what its victors were already calling the Glorious Revolution.

Newton first encountered John Locke as one of those admirers toward the end of 1689, but the two men swiftly formed a bond of deep affection that lasted, with one significant break, until Locke's death in 1704. In most ways, the two men could hardly have been less similar. The reclusive Newton made few friends, and he was a prude—he once dismissed a companion from his acquaintance for telling a lewd joke about a nun. In contrast, Locke played politics at the highest level, lived in the houses of the rich, enjoyed conversation, and took pleasure in the company of women. He was an amiable flirt among wives of repute, addressing one of his great passions, Lady Damaris Masham, as his "Governess."

Nonetheless, the two men did have some connections to each other, notably through Robert Boyle, the pioneering chemist and unofficial leader of London's philosophical circles. Newton knew Boyle as a professional colleague, one of the few he genuinely admired. Locke's connection was more intimate: in the 1660s, still in his twenties and newly qualified as a medical doctor, Locke found in Boyle a kind of intellectual patron and adviser.

The links spread from there. For several years, Boyle had employed as his assistant another young man, the poor but brilliant Robert Hooke. With Boyle's help, Hooke made his way into the center of English science. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was initially merely a talking shop, in desperate need (so at least some members believed) of someone who would actually do some practical research. In 1662, with Boyle's support, Hooke became the society's first curator of experiments, charged with offering demonstrations three or four times a week. The next year, the society added to Hooke's duties, asking him to keep a daily record of London's weather. Hooke responded with a characteristically effervescent burst of creation, inventing or improving the basic suite of weather instruments: the thermometer, the barometer, rain and wind gauges, and other, more specialized devices. With those instruments in hand, he began to keep his own weather record. Then the thought occurred to him: how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm.

Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society, emphasizing the need for rigor: data had to be taken at the same time every day, using instruments whose properties were known and carefully recorded. Robert Boyle thought this a brilliant idea, and he advised his young friend John Locke to enlist in Hooke's crusade.

Locke signed on, devotedly measuring wind speeds, checking temperatures, gauging cloud cover. Doing so, he became, in effect, a foot soldier in what he and his contemporaries understood to be a radically new approach to knowledge. We now call this transformation the scientific revolution, and it is often imagined as a series of heroic battles, victories in a war against ignorance led by men whose names resound like those of triumphant generals—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the greatest of them all.

But in fact, the shift in understanding that such men led was carried forward through the daily actions of hundreds, then thousands of people who for pleasure, profit, or both set out to use reason and experimentation to order their surroundings. Practical rationalists such as Jethro Tull and his disciples tried to bring the methods of the new natural philosophy to bear on the farm. Amateur naturalists catalogued the habits of animals painstakingly observed over days, weeks, months. One of the more famous among them was Erasmus Darwin; born four years after Newton's death, he absorbed the Newtonian credo that material events must have discernible material causes, and he grappled with the question of the origin of species that his grandson Charles would solve a century later.

England's sailors measured tides, and traders upholding the power of the Crown across the oceans learned mathematics and developed precision tools to measure the motions of the stars and planets. Instrument makers began to establish the crucial idea of standards, common measures that would enable observers anywhere to trust one another's results. Thomas Tompion, the maker of Locke's thermometer, was the first craftsman known to have used serial numbers to identify his finished pieces—bringing science's tools into the nuts and bolts of efforts to systematize the material world.

This was revolution at the barricades: a headlong charge by its partisans to organize, abstract, and universalize their experience of daily life so that its distilled essence would be accessible to anyone who sought it out. Locke, who documented the details of his precision instruments and checked the amount of rainfall and the barometric pressure each day, noting the time of every measurement, was one more cadre in this growing revolutionary band, adding his tiny increment to the arsenal of knowledge.

In the eventful 1660s, Locke had to abandon his first weather diary within a few months. His political career and his own intellectual work consumed all his time and thought. But the experience stuck with him, and more than three decades later, when he retreated from public life for a time to Lady Masham's house in the Essex countryside, he resumed the habits of his youth. It took him some months to unpack his instruments and set up his weather observatory. At last, on December 9, 1691, he made his first observations. Four days later, his weather check had already become routine, a matter of a few minutes each morning.
It had been two years since he had met the unquestioned leader of the new ways of understanding nature, and while Locke had certainly offered explicit homage to his new friend Newton, his resumed weather diary can be seen as a less obvious compliment to the ways of thinking Newton had championed.

Newton's reasons for returning Locke's sentiments were perhaps more simple. Anyone would take kindly to unstinting praise from an intelligent source—and Locke famously evoked affection. When he and Newton finally met, his warmth had its usual effect. Newton's letters to Locke show the impact of Locke's charm: "how extremely glad I was to hear from you," he writes in one; in another, he values Locke's judgment sufficiently to seek his reaction to what Newton called his "mystical fancies"; once he simply admits of "my desire to see you here where you shall be as welcome as I can make you."

In part, he relished the opportunity to tutor so well regarded a man. He gave Locke a private, annotated edition of the
Principia
and composed for him a simplified version of the proof that gravity makes the planets travel elliptical orbits. But Newton's intimacy with Locke seems to have extended well beyond such benevolent displays of mastery. From the beginning, Newton allowed himself to write openly about secret matters. Both men had subterranean interests—in alchemy, for one, the ancient study of processes of change in nature; and in questions of biblical interpretation and belief, which brought them to the edge of what the established English church would damn as heresy.

Locke responded with equal eagerness and candor. He always emphasized his deference on matters of natural philosophy to the man who wrote "his never enough to be admired book." But for the rest, he took part in what became an extended conversation with an intellectual companion, a partner in the pursuit of knowledge of the true nature of the Trinity, about the history of Scripture, about the transformation of substances. And along with his praise and their intense private exchanges, Locke had one thing more to offer: the use of his considerable influence with the Crown.

In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Locke had become a supremely good man to know. King William cherished him, and he was known and connected by bonds of party and friendship to dozens of the newly ruling elite. He turned down most offers of patronage for himself, but he was perfectly placed to do kindnesses for those he valued.

Newton's service in the Convention Parliament ended on January 27, 1690. He returned to Trinity College and got back to what had once been a satisfactory round of daily life. He worked on corrections to a possible second edition of the
Principia.
He continued to examine the implications of the laws of motion, and he returned to studies of optics and light that had lain fallow for more than a decade. He began to think deeply about the theological consequences of his science, trying to define what kind of God could occupy the universe implied by the
Principia.
It seemed as if he was as much in his natural habitat as ever, wandering through his rooms and his garden, stopping suddenly, when a thought came, to "run up the stairs, like another Archimedes." To outward appearances, this was the man Trinity had sent to London, one who "aim'd at something beyond the Reach of humane Art & Industry."

But the Newton who returned to Cambridge in 1690 was not the same as the one who had set out for the House of Commons the year before. He was not bored, given his impressive productivity over the next few years. But he was restless, unsettled. Cambridge had become small. Its company was dull, uncomprehending of the man in their midst. Notoriously, an anonymous student who passed him on the street said, "There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands." In the face of such indifference (not even disdain!), London's attractions now included company that recognized Newton's worth at something like the value he had come to place on himself. Within months of his return to Cambridge, he let his new friends know he was ready for an escape. There was just one problem: in Cambridge Newton had no material wants. In London he would need to make a living—a good one. How?

Locke knew what to do. Beginning in 1690, he canvassed his most powerful acquaintances to advance his friend's cause. Newton knew what Locke was attempting. In October 1690 he wrote to thank Locke for his efforts; in November he betrayed a hint of urgency, even desperation: "Pray present my most humble service & thanks to my Lord and Lady Monmoth for their so kind remembrance of me. For their favour is such that I can never sufficiently acknowledge it." Such courtesy did not help matters this time—whatever Locke discussed with Monmouth never materialized. But the campaign was under way, with Newton's blessing and ever more urgent hopes.