Through some fluke of circumstance, Gresham College and its precious library were spared, but its facilities were temporarily lost to the Royal Society. In order that the merchants and businessmen could maintain the trading economy of London, the College became an interim Royal Exchange. Hence, the Fellows’ research activities were curtailed for a time and the alchemical crucibles were placed on the back burner.
To mark the Great Fire of London as a constant reminder for the generations to come, Robert Hooke designed and built the 202-ft Doric-style Monument (the tallest of its kind in the world) in Fish Hill Street, close to where the fire started, and where the edifice remains a popular visitor attracton (see plate 25). Given the nature of the Royal Society’s cause, however, Hooke also contrived a practical purpose for the Monument, designing it with an internal spiral staircase to double as an astronomical viewing station.14
Gone was the city of Chaucer and Shakespeare; gone was the beautiful old St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall, the Custom House and the Post Office, along with 87 city churches and the halls of 44 livery companies. Indeed, four-fifths of the city was destroyed, and this accounted for one-tenth of the nation’s wealth production. Quite suddenly it was an age of architects and designers, and none was more prominent than the Royal Society’s Christopher Wren, who entered the fray together with his colleague Robert Hooke. With the clearing of the debris completed by early December, Wren and Hooke began to measure the streets and sites, marking them up for restoration as great piles were driven into the ground.
The Act for Rebuilding was given royal assent in February 1667, stipulating new wider streets; also that buildings were to be of brick or stone, with slate or tiled roofs and no overhanging jetties or exterior woodwork. While Wren considered the more complex architectural work, Hooke was appointed Chief Surveyor, also gaining architectural commissions for the Royal College of Physicians, Montague House and the Bethlehem Hospital. Additionally, he worked on plans for various city companies: Grocers, Merchant Taylors and Mercers, along with Christ’s Hospital School and Bridewell. In preparing the design for the physicians’ college, Hooke made good use of his previous work with pulley-wheels and counterweights for wheel barometers, inventing the first ever sash windows.
Meanwhile, the 34-year-old Surveyor General, Christopher Wren, was faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of replacing innumerable buildings of the greatest magnitude and complexity—so many of which (though he built them to last for ever) were to be lost in the 1940 German air-raid blitz of World War II. Prized as the best known of his city masterworks is St Paul’s Cathedral, but he also rebuilt 51 other churches of the 87 that were lost in the fire. While thousands of new houses and business premises were rising like a phoenix from the ashes, another Wren masterwork was the new Royal Exchange. When this opened for business, the Royal Society moved once more to Gresham College. At the same time, Wren was working on other London buildings outside the central city, including the Chelsea Hospital, St Clement Danes, the Strand, and the area of St James’s where the Royal Society Club was subsequently installed.
If Freemasonry is about geometry, architecture, building, stonemasonry and all such things as are supposedly at its core (via Hiram Abiff, Prince Edwin, King Athelstan and the rest), then no one in the course of masonic history—not even King Solomon— has done so much as Sir Christopher Wren to further the masonic cause. And yet, for all that, James Anderson—the very man who compiled the Constitutions on which modern Freemasonry rests—wrote in those Constitutions that Wren had allowed Freemasonry to fall into ‘decay’. Even the librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England expressed his bewilderment at this some years ago.15
Gravity on a Plate
The greatest of all misfortunes to settle upon the Royal Society followed Isaac Newton’s arrival on the scene in 1672. From the very beginning, Newton and Hooke were on a wrong footing, which began with a disagreement over light refraction; also because Newton lodged a formal objection to Hooke’s fee-exempt status as Curator. After only a few months, Newton threatened to leave the Society, but the Secretary, intelligence agent Henry Oldenburg, pleaded for him to stay, waiving his dues too, much to the annoyance of the other Fellows.
A major argument ensued in 1675 when Newton gave a lecture entitled Discourse on Colour, claiming originality when, as Robert Hooke stated, ‘The main of it was contained in Micrographia.’ This set Oldenburg firmly against Hooke, leading to regular disputes. In 1678, Oldenburg died and Robert Hooke was elected to become the new Secretary, which upset Newton even further.
Isaac Newton was a man of incredible talent and, like Boyle, Wilkins, Ashmole and others, he was an ardent alchemist. He was, however, a curious character and the others could not fathom him at all. Having embarked on a translation of the Emerald Text of Hermes, Newton recalled from his youth that phoenix was an old Graeco-Phoenician word for ‘crimson’, and his quest for the great enlightenment led to a new decoration of his quarters—crimson furniture, carpets, curtains, quilts, cushions and hangings. At his eventual death, no other colour was mentioned in the inventory of his furnishings.16
Newton’s religious leaning was distinctly Arian, a form of early Christianity which rejected any concept of the Holy Trinity.17 One of his foremost studies concerned the structure of the ancient kingdoms, and he claimed the pre-eminence of the Judaic heritage as an archive of divine knowledge and numerology. Although he was a deeply spiritual man and a true authority on early religion, he refused (like Boyle) to take Holy Orders, and constantly maintained that the New Testament had been strategically distorted by the Church before its publication.
In January 1684, Robert Hooke was in London at Garaway’s coffee house, off Cornhill, with Newton, Wren and the debonair Edmund Halley who (as an honorary Oxford graduate) had become a Society Fellow four years after Newton. They were discussing celestial harmony—the relationship between heavenly bodies and ratios in accordance with Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres. In the course of this, the questions were posed: What kept the planets suspended in their orbital positions around the sun? Why do they not fall down?
Letters written by Hooke to Newton between 1677 and 1680 make it clear that in his earlier research Hooke had discovered gravitational law to be based upon the principle of an Inverse Square (the force of the attraction is proportionate to the inverse square of the distance), but Newton had responded stating that he was not interested because he was working on other things. Nevertheless, at Garaway’s the matter was raised again, with Wren and Halley agreeing with Hooke’s Inverse Square principle, while Newton apparently did not—and so the matter rested.
Then, in 1685, Hooke’s long-standing ally King Charles II died, and within two years Newton produced his Principia Mathematica in which he stated the very same Inverse Square principle that Robert Hooke had handed to him on a plate. It became known as the Law of Gravity and, with no acknowledgement of Hooke’s research, it gained Newton a primary place in scientific history. Since no one knew how he had come to his discovery, the antiquarian William Stukeley explained in 1752 (25 years after Isaac Newton’s death) that Newton was inspired by an apple falling from a tree—the same dubious tale that students are taught to this day.18
In practice, the big difference between Hooke and Newton (and Hooke and Halley) was that so many aspects of research begun by Robert Hooke were never properly concluded. He made some amazing discoveries, and his Micrographia is acknowledged as one of the greatest scientific works ever written. But comet periodicity and gravity fell into the same pending tray as his marine chronometer. It is perfectly true that Hooke theorized the Inverse Square principle—but it was Newton who proved it.
Genius of the Few
The rebuilding of London continued through 42 years, during the course of which Isaac Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1703. Christopher Wren had been knighted by King Charles II in