If Milton had been hanged with the Regicides at Charing Cross, or carted to Tyburn! And more than once during the passage of the Bill it seemed possible that it might be so. As it was, with the passing of this Act of Oblivion, and the emerging of a blind Puritan into the murky sunshine of the old London streets, Milton drops out of the story of Lady Ranelagh and the Boyle family. For a little while after the passing of the Act (his hiding-place having apparently been discovered) he seems to have been detained in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Perhaps he was safer so. His offending tracts were duly burnt; his regicide comrades were duly hanged, drawn and quartered; and in December Milton was at large. Staunch friends he had had; Andrew Marvell was perhaps bravest and most indefatigable of them all; but it must have required more powerful influence than Marvell’s and Davenant’s to save John Milton. Had Lady Ranelagh done him one more service greater than all before? Had she enlisted the interest of her powerful brother Broghill, and of such Privy Councillors as she knew best—men like Sandwich and Manchester, and Annesley[260] and Morrice, and the old Lord Goring, poor Lettice’s father-in-law,[261] and the young Charles Howard, who had married “Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and was going to be first Earl of Carlisle? Had Lady Ranelagh’s silken strings reached the little private Junto about the King himself—Hyde, and Ormonde, and Southampton? One remembers that Mr. Boyle had been “treated with great civility and respect by the King, as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” And it is good to think that the Boyle family—perhaps Boyle himself, whose memories went back to the Milton of Comus and Eton, the Milton of the Epitaphium Damonis and the Villa Diodati in Geneva, may have had a hand in saving Milton, the blind Republican,—to write Paradise Lost. But if to any of them, it was certainly to Lady Ranelagh that Milton owed his life and freedom. There is no record of any further visits from Lady Ranelagh to Milton after that date, but it is difficult to believe her friendship for Milton ended with the Restoration. The garden-house in Petty France was to be no more his home: his blind steps turned eastward, to Holborn again, and Jewin Street, and then to Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, where he was to resume and finish his great poem, and where he was to end his days. It is difficult to believe that Lady Ranelagh never again knocked at the blind man’s door; and it must be taken for granted that one day in late August or early September 1667 a presentation-copy of Paradise Lost arrived at the house in Pall Mall.
On a November afternoon—Nov. 28, 1660—the usual little audience of philosophers had assembled to listen to one of Dr. Christopher Wren’s astronomy lectures at Gresham College, in Basinghall Street.[262] Wren, who had been astronomy professor there since 1657, lectured on Wednesday afternoons during Term-time from two to three—and it was a custom for the little company to stay on after the lecture, adjourning to another room for “mutuall converse.” The political disasters of the last year or two had somewhat interrupted the advancement of learning; the soldiers had, in fact, for a time, been quartered in Gresham College. But by the end of November 1660 things were settling down again, and the lectures were going on as usual. At this particular lecture the virtuosi present were Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Mr. Ball, Mr. Rooke, Mr. Wren, and Mr. Hill; and their “mutuall converse” turned on the formation of a scientific society, on a broader basis than had been hitherto attempted—a society “for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall-Experimentall Learning,” to consist of weekly meetings, which were to be held every Wednesday from that date onwards.
This, it must be remembered, was no outcome of the Restoration. It was fifteen years since the Invisibles had begun their meetings, “precluding matters of theology and state affairs,” sometimes at Gresham College, oftener in Dr. Goddard’s house in Wood Street, or at the Bull’s Head Tavern in Cheapside. Robert Boyle at that time had been a boy of eighteen, just back from Geneva, and introduced into the little Hartlib-Durie-Comenius circle to find that the Parliament men were already interested in a scheme of “Verulamian education.” In November 1660 the Invisibles were fifteen years wiser than they had been in 1645. And what a fifteen years it had been! Had there ever been such a fifteen years in English History? Some of them, after the visitation of Oxford, had migrated there, taking posts vacated by Royalists, and forming the Oxford branch of the Invisible Society; and now again these same men, removed at the Restoration from their posts in Oxford University, were turning back to London. It was the old Invisible College of 1645 that was to merge itself in the Royal Society.
So, on that November afternoon 1660, in Gresham College, a new Society was formed. It was arranged that its “original members” were to be those present, with some others then and there proposed as eligible, thirty-nine names being suggested and written down. Among them were John Evelyn, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Seth Ward, Dr. Willis, Dr. Bathurst, Sir Kenelm Digby, Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Mr. William Croone, Mr. Richard Jones, and Henry Oldenburg. Robert Boyle’s influence was already making itself felt. Most of these men were Oxford colleagues, personal friends, and old Invisibles. The last three must have been his special nominations, and two of them were his own kinsmen. Dick Jones, his hopeful nephew, had just returned with Henry Oldenburg from their foreign tour. William Croone, who was nominated in absentia for the post of Registrar of the Society, was presumably a son of the old Earl of Cork’s “Cozen Croone”, the vintner of the King’s Head in Cheapside;[263] because the “Croonian Lecture Fund,” long afterwards bequeathed to the Royal Society by Mr. Croone’s widow, was derived from “one fifth of the clear rent of the King’s Head Tavern in or near old Fish Street, London, at the corner of Lambeth Hill.”[264] This makes William Croone a cousin of Robert Boyle’s; and he was a creditable relative, this heir of old Cozen Croone the vintner, for he was afterwards Doctor of Physic and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric; and the Royal Society owes its Croonian Lecture Fund to his and his widow’s generosity, and to the takings at the old King’s Head in Cheapside.
Other original members—they were afterwards “Fellows”—were added at later meetings. And what a list it was! There was Aubrey of the “Lives,” and Ashmole, of museum celebrity, and Dryden and Waller the poets, and old Haak the originator of the Invisible College, and Robert Hooke, whose services at Oxford Boyle amiably dispensed with so that he might be Curator,[265] and Peter Pett the Naval Commissioner, and Thomas Sprat, the Society’s enthusiastic first biographer, and Governor Winthrop from Connecticut, and Isaac Barrow the scholarly divine,[266] and John Graunt, the “tradesman” who drew up the Bills of Mortality. Peers there were in plenty,—the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northampton, and Sandwich, among them; and Bishops—present and future. Doctors of Physic, of course, and Lawyers of the Temple; Churchmen, Statesmen, Army-men, Navy-men, and City-men. “It is to be noted,” says Sprat, “that they have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life. This they were obliged to do, or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they openly profess not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind.”[267]
Sir Robert Moray, a Scotsman and a favourite at Whitehall, had quickly “brought in word from the Court” that the King approved of the aims of the Society. Moray, who had a laboratory of his own at Whitehall, acted for a time as interim-President, and was certainly the life and soul of the infant Society; and on May 3, 1661—not many days after his coronation, Charles II was shown, through his own great telescope, Saturn’s rings and Jupiter and his satellites. His Majesty became really interested, and began to discourse astronomy as he sat at supper in Whitehall.[268] And a few weeks later—Sir Robert Moray still acting as go-between—the King granted the Society’s petition for a Royal Charter, and was “pleased to offer himselfe to be entered one of the Society.” On July 15, 1662, the Charter of Incorporation passed what Evelyn calls the “Broade Seale.” Lord Brouncker was elected first President and Henry Oldenburg Secretary.[269] The King presented the Society with its mace,[270] on which were emblematically embossed the Crown and Royal Arms, the rose, harp, thistle, and fleur de lys. In April 1663, however, a second and improved Charter passed the Great Seal.[271] The King in this declared himself Founder and Patron; Arms were granted to the Society, and a motto from Horace was chosen—Nullius in Verba. And the Royal Society kept its first anniversary on November 30, 1663, St. Andrew’s Day having been selected partly as nearest to November 28, the day of its first meeting, but also in compliment, it is believed, to Sir Robert Moray, the popular Scotsman who from the very beginning had been one of its most energetic members.
Strange times! It has been rightly said that the foundation of the Royal Society was one of the few creditable events of the Restoration. Exactly a month before the Charter of Incorporation passed the Great Seal, Sir Henry Vane had been beheaded on Tower Hill, “the trumpets brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard”; and little more than a month later came the dreaded St. Bartholomew’s Day, which turned nearly two thousand rectors and vicars—one-fifth of the English clergy—out of their parishes. The doings of “Our Society”, meantime, read like a little oasis in a desert of intolerance. The old Earl of Cork, who had sent his sons to fight the “rebelleows” Presbyterian Scots, and spent the last days of his own life in fighting the rebellious Irish Papists, would have rubbed his eyes if he could have seen his Robyn walking in procession, side by side with the Roman Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby, each wearing a St. Andrew’s Cross pinned into his hat!
“It being St. Andrew’s Day, who was our patron,” says Evelyn complacently, “each fellow wore a St. Andrew’s Crosse of ribbon on the crowne of his hatt. After the election we din’d together, his Majesty sending us venison.”[272]
Some difference of opinion, however, there seems to have been among the philosophers about the choice of their patron saint. Pepys did not care much who the saint was, but he grumbled at having to pay two shillings for the badge.[273] Aubrey once confided to Sir William Petty that he would have preferred St. George, or, failing him, St. Isidore—“a philosopher canonised.”