he allowed an abandoned gaiety to prevail, reopening the inns and theatres, while at the same time a new romantic spirit of learning and enquiry was born.
The group’s interest in hermetic subjects was notably encouraged by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his pupil Anne, Viscountess Conway of Ragley Hall, who nurtured a group of intel lectuals called the Hartlib Circle,6 to which Robert Boyle and the physician William Petty belonged. They recognized that medieval alchemy, in the way it was generally portrayed (ie, the manufacture of gold from base metal), was a delusion conveyed to the outside world by propagandists and failed adepts. Alchemy, they knew, was a combination of practical and spiritual arts which had its root in metallurgy as practised by the ancient artificers.
Robert Boyle (who refused to take Holy Orders as scientists were expected to do) was as much a mystery to his friends as was John Wilkins. His father was the richest man in Britain and he wanted for nothing, yet few young men worked so hard and long without the need for personal gain. Being such a high-profile figure, Boyle suffered more than the others from clerical harassment, and he was viewed as being highly suspicious by the Church because of his determined research into matters of the occult. The bishops were aware that he had his own specially equipped alchemical workshop, and they watched him closely.
Ostensibly a scrupulous man, it is evident that Robert Boyle confronted a real dilemma in his work. He stated that so much alchemical writing was too obscure to be of any real value, but nevertheless he studied all that he could in order to pursue his research. Whether Boyle actually succeeded in making the Philosophers’ Stone is unclear, but it seems that he did see it in operation after a Viennese friar found a quantity of the mysterious powder secreted in a small casket at his monastery.7 In a related report to the Royal Society, Boyle made particular mention of the powder’s ability to manipulate specific gravity—an attribute which has now been demonstrated in today’s laboratory research.
The Vienna discovery is somewhat reminiscent of a similar box of alchemical powder which John Dee obtained from the Dissolution remnants of Glastonbury Abbey.8 Boyle also managed to find an Eastern source for the Stone in its natural state, without having to go to the trouble of manufacturing it. This, once again, is something which has recently been shown to be possible. In his subsequent Royal Society Philosophical Transactions paper, Boyle noted that his objective was not to make gold but to ‘produce good medicines for general use’. Given the reoccurring importance of this powder in the continuing story of Rosicrucian research (a powder of gold classified by physicists today as ‘exotic matter ‘), it might prove to be the missing link to the otherwise ambiguous King Athelstan legend in the masonic Charges. By virtue of some writing found with the powder, John Dee associated it with St Dunstan, the 10th-century Abbot of Glastonbury, who was attached to King Athelstan’s court. It is also clear that it was an important substance at the Temple court of King Solomon (see page 354).
By virtue of a later programme to sanitize the early Royal Society’s image in the Hanoverian era, Robert Boyle’s alchemical pursuits were strategically lost to academia until modern times. Although he is best remembered for Boyle’s Law concerning the volume of gases, along with his research into the elasticity of air, few have recognized that the tireless work and findings of this wealthy nobleman’s son were fuelled by his overwhelming desire to understand the nature and functions of the great alchemical secret.
In those early days, the Royal Society welcomed members of various philosophical disciplines in the knowledge that all creative pursuits were as much science as those things which were most obviously so. Music was based upon mathematics, as was fine art, architecture and the metre of poetic writing. They were all aspects of the time-hon-oured Liberal Arts. It was decided, therefore, that men of such creative talents had much to offer the fraternity, which expanded to include the poets Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller, along with the poetic dramatist John Dryden and the antiquary John Aubrey.
This practice was severely criticized by the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) who, in making a comparison with the Academie Français, wrote that the Royal Society was badly governed and in need of laws. What he failed to realize was that this was precisely what made the Society work so well and achieve so much. It existed outside the constraints of formal academia and thereby afforded a freedom of research and expression that was not apparent in the strictly regulated French institution.
Fraternal Disputes
Not just confined to the dusty backrooms of Gresham College or to fume-laden laboratory workshops, the world of the founding fraternity was one of committed enthusiasts who took their working debates into every corner of their lives. It was a constant whirl of frock-coated, bewigged gentlemen, embroiled in the fevered conversation of inns and coffee houses. The City of London presented a more colourful stage than they had found in Oxford. It was a world of doctors and merchants, financiers, fine ladies and costermongers—all amid a bustle of carriages in narrow, rutted streets where flower girls cried, paupers begged, and the women of the night plied their trade.
Working colleagues though the Fellows were, it cannot be said that all was friendship and harmony within the group. In fact, there were many disputes—some heated but short-lived, while others rumbled on over the years. At one meeting, the botanist Sir Hans Sloane (whose manuscripts eventually formed the core of the British Museum collection in 1753) was rebuked by the President for making faces at his dissenters, and the medical professor John Woodward even fought a duel on the College steps after a row had disrupted the proceedings.
Within the Sloane collection was Manuscript 3848. Now at the British Library (dated October 1646) it is a constitutional document of old Masonic Charges from 77 years before James Anderson compiled his Constitutions,9 and is one of the pre-1688 documents that Anderson accused Christopher Wren of losing. Also, Sloane Manuscript 3323 is of a similar masonic nature, as is SM 3329—and both are from the latter 1600s. The important document in this group is 3848—the others appear to stem from it. Unlike the Regius and Cooke manuscripts (see page 23), the content of Sloane 3848 is mainly of Scottish origin10 and discusses, among other things, the secret words of Freemasonry and rituals of identification.
In the course of occasional Society arguments, certain important discoveries were shelved and ultimately forgotten—a good example being Robert Hooke’s 1662 marine chronometer for determining longitude. Consequently, a century later, the research was begun again from scratch by the Yorkshire joiner John Harrison. He achieved his result knowing nothing of Hooke’s original design, which was not rediscovered until 1950 in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.11
In contrast, however, there were times when the Fellows would leap to each other’s aid. On one occasion, Christopher Wren was specifically asked to submit the result of an experiment concerning the incubation of chickens’ eggs but, owing to more pressing commitments, he failed to comply. Nevertheless, Hooke told the President that he had indeed received Wren’s submission in part, and he covered for his friend by verbally concocting a most plausible temporary report.
The worst disputes arose by virtue of Robert Hooke’s salaried employment as the Society’s Curator, whereas the other Fellows were all fee-paying members. Because of his specifically defined occupation, it was Hooke’s role to conceive and progress all manner of experiments, passing them over to others for completion, and then helping them when necessary. The problem was that it often became a matter of debate as to who could actually claim credit for any resultant discovery or invention.
In February 1665, Samuel Pepys described in his diary a particular Society meeting at which Hooke (then aged 30) lectured on the nature of comets, proving with dates and examples that comets are periodic. At that time there was a nine-year-old boy living nearby in Shoreditch. His name was Edmund Halley, and he grew to become one of the most famous astronomers of all time—the Astronomer Royal
