purges were reinstated (although not to the exclusion of former Roundhead sympathisers). Yet the university authorities maintained a hold over the town hardly changed since medieval times. Since the reign of Henry VIII, the King had the legal right to shut down any college in the realm and claim its possessions. Consequently the university remained loyal to the Crown, and as a monarchist institution it was rooted in tradition and notions of a glorious past.
To Isaac Newton – a country boy who had never visited a town larger than Grantham – Cambridge was Avalon. He left Woolsthorpe on the second or third day of June 1661 and set out along the Great North Road on the fifty-mile trip to the town that would be his home almost without a break for the next thirty-five years. En route, he broke his journey first at Sewstern, where he took his first look at a piece of land bequeathed to him in Barnabas Smith’s will (the annual income from which would pass to him after his twenty-first birthday), and then at Stilton on the approach to the Great Fens, a day’s ride from Cambridge.
According to Stukeley, on Newton’s last day under Stokes’s tutelage the proud headmaster made his prize student stand in front of the school while he delivered a speech praising the boy and, with tears in his eyes, urged Newton’s fellow pupils to follow his academic example. Apparently the other boys were as moved as their headmaster. More believable is Stukeley’s admission that the farm hands and servants at the manor were glad to see Newton leave home and ‘rejoiced at parting with him, declaring, he was fit for nothing but the “Versity”’.6
Hannah, however, had ensured that her son would not be allowed fully to escape the mundanity of ‘real life’ and the hardships he may have thought he was leaving behind.
When Newton enrolled at Trinity College, on 5 June 1661, he entered the college on the lowest rung of the social ladder, as a subsizar (becoming a sizar after he had matriculated at Trinity a month after his arrival). Subsizars and sizars were little more than servants who paid their way by emptying the bedpans and cleaning the rooms of the more privileged students. These included the elite – fellow-commoners, young men from noble families, and pensioners (usually the sons of wealthy businessmen).
The exact form that sizarship took for Newton remains unclear. Traditionally, sizars waited on other students, but there was another type who worked solely for one fellow, invariably their tutor. It has always been supposed that Newton’s sizarship was of the first type, and this may be true, but there is evidence to suggest that he was in fact sizar to Humphrey Babington, brother of Mrs Clark, the Grantham apothecary’s wife, and fellow of Trinity.
It may even have been that Newton was only able to attend the university thanks to Babington taking him on as his personal servant. Babington had himself been a Cambridge student. As a royalist sympathiser, he had been sacked from his fellowship under the Puritan purge of the Commonwealth years but was reinstated with the Restoration. After Newton’s death, Ayscough family tradition had it that ‘the pecuniary aid of some neighbouring gentleman’7 had enabled Newton to study at Cambridge.
If Newton was Babington’s sizar his duties would have been particularly easy, because his master was in college for only a few weeks a year and would have demanded little of him. What is clear is that the conflict of interests between Isaac’s mother and those who saw scholarly potential in the young man did not end when Hannah complied reluctantly with the wishes of Babington, Ayscough and Stokes. Newton’s academic fees at the university were in the region of £10 to £15 per year, and he was given an allowance of a further £10. Both of these expenses were met by Hannah. But, considering she commanded a very comfortable annual income of around £700, it is evident that she wanted deliberately to make life hard for her son at Cambridge.
Sizarship was bad enough for those who could afford nothing better, and the failure rate of sizars was naturally much higher than that of the more privileged pensioners and fellow-commoners. But for Newton the shame of having to empty the chamber-pots of rich contemporaries, or the stigma of running errands for his tutor, must have weighed heavily.
Although he may have had an easier time of it than most subsizars, Newton was still, in the eyes of the college and his contemporaries, on the lowest rung of the social ladder. As a consequence, he would have been treated with contempt by those in superior social positions or else ignored by the sons of the wealthy who considered the university a playground – a place in which to waste a few years before accepting undemanding roles in the upper reaches of society.
Aside from making him even more determined to create an impression, this new humiliation did little for the positive aspects of Newton’s personality as a youth. It fuelled the flames of his insecurity and led to a desire to improve his social status and to sever further the links with his family, to leap at any chance of social improvement. If Hannah had imagined that by deliberately making life difficult for her son he might be persuaded to give up notions of an academic life and return to the family farm, she clearly did not know him. If her actions created anything positive it was to convince him he had to break away from Woolsthorpe, to turn even further in upon himself and to excel within his vocation.
The academic pattern at Cambridge had been set by the Elizabethan Statutes of 1571, which not only dictated the manner of dress and conduct of students and academic staff but also determined the structure of degree courses. To obtain a BA, all students had to reside in the university for a minimum of twelve terms of tuition (four years) and to attend all public lectures given by the members of the college faculty. There was really only one course. The first year covered rhetoric, the art of eloquent oral and written communication, encompassing classical history, geography, art, scripture and literature. Also, by the end of their first year students were expected to be fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.
For a time, Newton became a conscientious and dedicated student, but, initially at least, he neither shone nor attracted the attention of his masters. In fact, he was all but invisible. Like most of his fellow students, he had little intellectual guidance. Upon his arrival, he was assigned a tutor who was both his teacher and a surrogate parent – one Benjamin Pulleyn, of whom little is known except that he entered Trinity in 1650 as a sizar and rose to the position of Regius Professor of Greek, a seat he occupied for twelve years. Pulleyn was a lax tutor in an academically sterile university. Known as a pupil-monger – he took on as many students as possible, to bolster his meagre income – he did almost nothing to help Newton, who was just one of over fifty undergraduates in his care.
Within weeks of his arrival, Newton had cut himself off from the other sizars and, following the pattern of life at school in Grantham, he began a very lonely first year at the university. It is significant that not one anecdote of Newton’s earliest period at Trinity has been passed on to us from fellow students. There is no record of a personal relationship with any other student even in the most vague terms, except that he appears to have detested his room-mate. We only know this from two ‘confessions’ which appear in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. The first of these is ‘Using Wilford’s towel to spare my own’; the other involves Newton owning up to the sin of ‘Deceiving my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot’.8 From the first of these we can glean that Newton’s first room-mate was the otherwise unknown Francis Wilford, who appears in the Alumni Cantabrigienses as a pensioner admitted to the college on the same day as Newton. It is also clear that Newton did little to endear himself even to the unfortunate Wilford; small wonder his first year was a lonely one.
Apart from the frustration his mother had caused him, Newton had two other problems during his early days at the university. The first was his age. Almost nineteen that first autumn, he was two years older than the average student. Although some have suggested that this may have been to his advantage academically, in terms of helping him to mix with the other students it could only have been a hindrance. The second and more serious difficulty, and one which was
