Irrespective of the new-style Freemasonry, the Royal Society prevailed into Hanoverian times, and thence after Queen Victoria’s death into the Edwardian reign of Saxe Coburg-Gotha—the Germanic house of Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, that was obliged to change its name in 1917. After the accession of Victoria’s grandson King George V in 1910, World War I was looming, and people began to believe there was a German fifth column in Britain. Notwithstanding the immediate royal family with its roots in Hanover, shopkeepers and business people of German extraction—even the Lord of the Admiralty, Louis Battenberg—found themselves at the wrong end of public opinion. By 1917, with the war well under way, the situation was so bad that King George changed his Saxe Coburg-Gotha family name to Windsor (in allusion to the royal castle in Berkshire). At the same time, Lord Louis changed his Battenberg of Hesse name to the more English-sounding Mountbatten.
Through all this, the Royal Society pressed on regardless, and today remains one of the world’s foremost scientific institutions. But things did change after 1688, and more especially after 1714 when the enthusiastic flair of the early pioneers was subsumed by a more austere Georgian regime.
The Gresham Days
The life and times of England during the early years of the Royal Society were recorded by two of Britain’s best-known diarists: John Evelyn, a cultivated man of means and lawyer of the Middle Temple who became Commissioner of the Privy Seal,2 and Samuel Pepys, who became Secretary to the Admiralty.3 In fact, Evelyn and Pepys joined forces to plan the Naval Hospital at Greenwich—one of the supreme achievements of Restoration architecture. Although not so well known as the others, Robert Hooke’s diary is equally informative.4
Pepys recalled in his journal how, on 15 February 1665, he first visited Gresham College where he met with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and others of the Royal Society who were not content to view the world through the eyes of Ptolemy and Aristotle. By 1664, Pepys was a regular visitor, and although he lacked personal training and experience in matters of mathematics and science, he found the meetings enthralling. What he loved most were the laboratory gadgets and gizmos, soon acquiring his own telescope, microscope, thermometer, scales and geometric instruments, which he said were a great help to his work at the Navy Board.
At a professional level, Pepys found his greatest ally to be the tenacious Robert Hooke, whose work with springs, pulleys and the like led him to invent a depth-sounding device, a diving bell and the marine barometer—all of which were of great significance to the Navy. However, not everything was straightforward for Hooke, especially when it came to giving unpractised public demonstrations. In one experiment concerning respiration, he was sealed in a large cask from which the air was gradually extracted, but things went badly wrong. By virtue of the cask’s inner environmental change towards a vacuum state, his colleagues could not undo the seal quickly enough, and the near frantic curator finally emerged, gasping, with permanent damage to his ears and nose!5
Nevertheless, mishaps or otherwise, London was bustling again in the 1660s after its 11 years of puritanical suppression. Charles II was skilful, well-liked and perfectly suited to the mood of the era. His primary concern was to allow the nation considerable freedom. In this regard, 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