“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I said.
“Yes, I remember it wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. You had other plans then, didn’t you?”
“This is unfinished business, I think,” I said.
Yes. I had really thought I could finish you off. Exorcise. Dispossess you. Lay my ghost. But there doesn’t seem to be a finishing in sight anymore. Kit wanted an explanation that day, a defence even, but I didn’t have much of one to give her. I tried: “It was a kind of dare to myself: the haunted house I had to just step back inside.”
“Yes, I know you and I know the next bit,” she said. “Once you were inside, the door slammed shut and the candle went out. You always did have to prove that you were brave.”
I found no records of Elizabeth’s glasshouse except on one of those wayside markers on the riverbank near the house, which included a scrap of a seventeenth-century map on which appeared the word glasshouse where Elizabeth’s house now stood, and a tiny picture of a simple single-story building with a flight of steps leading down to a landing stage on the riverbank. I never found the original map. So there was no proof, unless you are prepared to count as evidence the light that sharded around The Studio, light that was, by the beginning of November, full of shadows, passing across the light like shoals of fish. You never saw them. I never saw them directly; they were always just to the side, just beyond my vision—something would move across the light on the wall, a figure, a hand, a shoulder, a sudden break in the beam that wasn’t a beam.
The riverbank in Chesterton was a likely enough place for a glasshouse, I thought—woodland to keep the furnace going, far enough outside the town for the furnace fire not to cause any trouble with local farmers, and a town that would provide a rich market for the glassware (almost certainly mirrors, beer glasses, beer bottles—not the fancy twisted glass and cristallo whose production the Venetian glassmakers monopolised). Elizabeth had put together enough notes on seventeenth-century glassmaking for a book on the subject. She’d only needed enough information to write her opening chapter, but she was thorough. She read everything. Her bibliography for that chapter alone ran to seven books and fifteen articles.
Glass, alchemy, and politics. You couldn’t separate them out in the 1660s. Once I’d started to see through Elizabeth’s eyes, I could discern all these networks and corruptions and conspiracies. There are other historians who have seen that too, understood that there was something peculiar about the 1660s and the restoration of the monarchy. It was a time of reckoning, especially so because of the comets and the plague. Many of the royalists expected to be rewarded for their loyalty to the king in the civil war, and many were. The Duke of Buckingham, for instance—the glass monopolist, the king’s friend, and an alchemist—was caught up in all sorts of deals and scams stretching across Europe. And when the patrons were caught up in deals and conspiracies, their protégés got caught up too. Sometimes, when I was meandering around in Elizabeth’s notes, it seemed as if everything passed through Trinity in one way or another, at some point or another. Buckingham was at Trinity College in the 1640s and he became the poet Abraham Cowley’s patron around that time. He was a powerful Trinity benefactor. These glassmakers and alchemists and Trinity fellows seemed to be all in cahoots in one way or another.
Twenty-two
I went back to the chapter in The Alchemist in which Elizabeth described Newton’s initiation into alchemy. I had resolved to track down Mr. F., find some trace of him, somewhere in this book. Elizabeth had called this chapter “The Green Lion,” a reference to the alchemical code for mercury, or quicksilver.
The arguments in the later chapters of her manuscript were increasingly dependent upon evidence from the elusive Vogelsang Papers, frequently referred to in the footnotes, but I had still not been able to track down this archive of materials among the papers at The Studio. This time, following Elizabeth through the thickets of her prose, I resolved to keep my eyes on the undergrowth, look for marks in the ground where the soil might have been disturbed. The chapter began:
The Green Lion
There are many complex and contradictory myths about Isaac Newton. There are those who would have his life expunged from all associations with the occult in the quest to establish him as the hero of the Enlightenment, the first scientist to separate natural philosophy from superstition. Then there are also those who have co-opted Newton as the great sorcerer and magician, in possession of secret arts. Whatever the accuracy or otherwise of these accounts, it is the older Newton who is described as the member of these quasi-Masonic groups, not the boy.
The problem of how and when Newton became an alchemist has vexed Newton scholars. Both questions are difficult to answer because alchemical practice and alchemical networks have always been shrouded in secrecy and because so little documentation and correspondence has survived. Most scholars argue that Newton began making alchemical experiments between 1667 and 1669 in Cambridge, although some would set the date a little earlier, at the point at which he began to put together the beginnings of an alchemical library, soon after he arrived in Cambridge, almost certainly purchased from the specialist booksellers who put up their stalls along Cheapside at Stourbridge Fair.
Certain facts, however, suggest that Newton’s initiation into alchemy began before he arrived in Cambridge. There is an alternative history—a story about a “sober, silent thinking lad” being initiated into secret arts by a group of older men, a story in which a series of European alchemical networks run through an apothecary’s shop in Grantham, where Newton was schooled. After all, as Richard Westfall points out, “an alchemist was not made; he was chosen.”18
Alchemists rarely worked alone. Alchemical experimentation was sometimes a solitary activity—the man working alone at a furnace late at night—but acquiring the secret knowledge necessary to begin depended upon being connected to a network that stretched across Europe and had numerous geographical centres, many of them in towns built on Rosicrucian or Knights Templar sites at crossing points on the great Roman roads. Grantham, where Newton was schooled, was one such place. It was one of two or three major stopping points on the Great North Road (now the route of the A1); Grantham’s largest inn, the Angel, had been built on the site of a former Knights Templar hostel and grounds. Alchemical practice almost always required patronage.
At the age of twelve, Newton was sent to the King’s School at Grantham at his uncle William Ayscough’s instigation. Because the school was seven miles away from his home at Woolsthorpe, his uncle and mother arranged for him to board with a friend of the family’s, Katherine Clark, the wife of William Clark, the apothecary in Grantham, who had premises next to the George Inn, on the High Street. Newton lodged here for the best part of seven years, growing up alongside the other children living in the house: the children of Katherine Clark’s first marriage, the boys Arthur and Edward Storer and a sister whose first name has been lost. There were also young apprentices working alongside Clark, according to an early draft of William Stukeley’s memoirs.
William Clark, the apothecary, had a younger brother called Joseph Clark, who was the physician in Grantham when Newton was a lodger there and was a daily visitor to the apothecary’s house. Joseph had also attended the King’s School at Grantham and then studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he had been tutored by Henry More, the man who would become an important mentor to Newton at Cambridge. Joseph kept a small library of books in the garret of his brother’s house, just next to the room where Newton lodged, and it was undoubtedly books from this small collection that inspired Newton’s first experiments. Stukeley, Newton’s first biographer, described Isaac’s activities in Grantham as a young man:
insted of playing among the other boys, when from school, he always busyd himself in making knick knacks, & models of wood in many kinds: for which purpose he had got little saws, hatchets, hammers & a whole shop of tools, which he would use with great dexterity.19
Stukeley collected tales of N
ewton’s machines and contraptions: a model of a windmill to which the boy added a treadmill run by a mouse, doll’s furniture for Clark’s stepdaughter, a four-wheeled cart run by a crank, a lantern of “crimpled paper” to light his way to school on dark mornings and which also doubled as a burning kite at night, and a range of different clocks powered by water moving between different contraptions. Who provided Newton with his “shop of tools”? It was almost certainly not his mother.
These inventions, which were made by Newton over these years and were reputed to have spilled out of the attic and into the downstairs rooms and hallway of the apothecary’s house, were inspired by a book he read at the time, borrowed from the attic library and from which he copied many chemical experiments, recipes for mixing colours, and instructions for building models: John Bate’s The Mysteries of Nature and Art, a “book of secrets” first published in 1634.
Thus began Newton’s obsession with time and light. He kept an almanac and taught himself how to chart the equinoxes and solstices by the different periods of the sun. He made a series of complex sundials in the apothecary’s house, driving pegs into the walls of the hallway, his own room, all rooms with sufficient light to cast sharp enough shadows, and then he tied strings with running balls on them to the pegs so that he could measure the shadows and mark the hours and the half hours. They were so accurate that Grantham neighbours came to consult “Isaac’s dials.”20
Katherine Clark’s brother, Humphrey Babington, a Trinity fellow and a future patron and benefactor of Newton at Cambridge, came and went through this household, visiting his sister’s children and tripping over the strange contrivances the boy lodger had made; so, by apparent coincidence, did Newton’s second supposed Cambridge patron, Henry More, the leading member of a group of philosophers who would become known as the Cambridge Platonists.21 Most scholars argue that Newton came to know More in Cambridge in the 1670s.22 But it is more than likely that Newton met More before he arrived in Cambridge—in Grantham—for when More visited Grantham, his hometown, he lodged in William Clark’s house.23 More had also attended the King’s School and, as a fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had tutored Joseph Clark. Did his friendship with his ex-pupil, now a Grantham physician, merit his staying in William Clark’s house, or were there other reasons for lodging with the apothecary rather than at the perfectly respectable inn next door?
Humphrey Babington, Henry More, and the Clark brothers are all linked to the Grantham apothecary’s house and to Cambridge. Might there have been a kind of knot in the network here, a small group of alchemists working out of Grantham with the chemicals provided by Clark, perhaps even using a secret laboratory at the apothecary’s house?
Newton left Clark’s house at the age of seventeen and returned to Woolsthorpe with the expectation that he would now run his mother’s estate there. But despite his expensive schooling, Hannah Smith found that while her son’s handwriting and reading were excellent, he was absentminded, inept in practical matters, and lacking in business sense. He infuriated everyone around him. Every time he returned to Grantham on his mother’s business he would disappear into the attic library in Clark’s house for hours at a time and fail to remember what he had been sent for.
John Stokes, Newton’s Grantham schoolmaster, probably at the instigation of Humphrey Babington and the Clark brothers, wrote to Newton’s mother to ask that her son be allowed to return to school to prepare for university entrance. When Newton’s uncle William Ayscough also intervened, Hannah Smith reluctantly agreed. Newton returned to Grantham, where he lodged with John Stokes and was given private tuition in order to prepare him for entry to Cambridge. Humphrey Babington, fellow of Trinity, knowing that Newton’s mother would not provide much towards her son’s education, suggested that the boy might enter the university as a subsizar in his own employment. Trinity was to be his future.
Among them, these men—John Stokes, the schoolmaster; William Clark, the apothecary, and his doctor-brother; and the apothecary’s friends, Humphrey Babington and Henry More—had almost certainly already introduced the clever solitary boy to the beginnings of alchemical practice and alchemical philosophy before he came to Cambridge, either through direct tuition or in conversation, or by giving him access to a specialist library or hidden laboratory.24 Certainly the maturity of the knowledge Newton displayed later in his chemical dictionary, written in 1667–68, serves as evidence that he had had substantial laboratory experience before he came to Cambridge. After all, “an alchemist was not made; he was chosen.”
Henry More was well connected in alchemical circles and would have been a powerful patron. When he was not in Cambridge he spent most of his time at the country estate of his friend and patron Anne Finch, the Viscountess Conway, at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, where he had a suite of rooms and where he hosted meetings of European alchemists and natural philosophers. He also had access to vast specialist libraries—his own, those at Ragley Hall, and those at Cambridge—though it is doubtful that he undertook any alchemical experiments of his own until the 1670s.
My instinct had not failed me. This reference to Ragley Hall was the first sign of disturbed earth in this chapter, a glimpse of something buried, perhaps a name or even a paragraph removed. Ezekiel Foxcroft had been here in these lines once, I was sure of it. According to the card I had found in Elizabeth’s Bible, Ezekiel’s mother, Elizabeth Foxcroft, was the mysterious alchemist companion of Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, close friend of Henry More and owner of Ragley Hall. Elizabeth Foxcroft lived at Ragley Hall and worked with More. Ezekiel Foxcroft was a linchpin between these people, a Cambridge alchemist living both at Ragley Hall and at King’s College Cambridge, perhaps also visiting Grantham regularly as the protégé of Henry More’s. He was practically More’s adopted son. But why did Elizabeth not mention Ezekiel here? Why was this linchpin missing?
“The Green Lion” chapter continued with a description of Newton’s first months at Cambridge, months marked by secrecy. Elizabeth described how, for instance, the young undergraduate bought a lock for his desk and in his rooms at Trinity continued to practise the secret code he had been taught at Grantham. He also observed the complex purification rituals essential to the practise of alchemy, recording his sins meticulously in code, rarely socialising, drinking and eating almost nothing, and keeping mostly to his rooms and his books.
Newton’s Cambridge connections saw to it, she argued, that he was given rooms in Trinity which were of particular value to an alchemist. His first-floor rooms butted against Trinity Chapel, but through an external door he also had access to a physic garden and a laboratory, a shedlike building constructed up against the external walls to the chapel. The significance of this, she suggested, was that Newton’s garden, filled with herbs and medicinal plants, would have been shared with other botanists and alchemists, a further point of connection with a larger, largely secretive community. The drawing of Trinity completed by mapmaker David Loggan in 1690 shows a garden and a laboratory exactly at the place where Newton is said to have had his rooms, between the Great Gate and the chapel.
The physic garden was important. If it was a private garden, in Newton’s care but shared with others, it would have been locked. Anyone using that garden regularly would have had a key. Trinity was full of keys. Keys to the tennis courts, the bowling green, keys to rooms, hidden keys to gardens, secret keys to locked desks, ciphers to codes.
By the time Newton arrived in Cambridge, Elizabeth claimed, purification had become an obsession for him. Whereas modern biographers might have seen Newton’s behaviour, particularly his records of his sins, as evidence of some psychological disorder, Elizabeth read it as essential to his alchemical practise. For her, the fact that Newton had listed his sins in 1662 made perfect sense. It indicated that he had begun the next stage of his apprenticeship. He had also begun to read every alchemical book and manuscript he could find.
Throughout these later chapters of The Alchemist Elizabeth deftly, assuredly conne
cted Newton to a group of semivisible Cambridge men who had links across Britain and Europe, collapsing the lone-genius-in-isolation myth piece by piece, summoning other figures—mostly hooded and shadowy—onto the historical stage. Some had names, some didn’t, but one had a special significance: Ezekiel Foxcroft, who brought him alchemical manuscripts from London and Ragley Hall.
These manuscripts were important. Like Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists, Newton believed that certain ancient philosophers were in possession of all knowledge. This lost knowledge (what was called the prisca sapientia) could be dug out of codes and symbols embedded in a number of ancient, secret kabbalistic texts. From his first days at Cambridge, Newton, searching for these truths, pored over virtually the entire literature of the older alchemy in a way that no one had studied and assimilated it before. In this he had guidance. He wrote over 166,000 words on alchemical matters before 1675, one-sixth of his total writings on alchemy.25 He was taking notes on books which included, for instance, Michael Sendivogius’s New Chemical Light (1608), Jean D’Espagnet’s The Secrets of Hermetic Philosophy (1638, translated 1650), Michael Maier’s Symbola Aurea (1617), George Ripley’s Opera (1649), and Basil Valentine’s Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (1604).
Trinity was Newton’s kingdom, and in 1664, after he had embarked on this course of powerful reading, he came dangerously close to exile from it. His mother still wanted him back at Woolsthorpe to run the farm; she couldn’t see the point of all this time spent with books. By 1664 Newton had moved into rooms with John Wickins, a fellow student, and the two men would have discussed their future in the college. Newton knew that to escape a Woolsthorpe fate, he would have to be elected a fellow at Trinity—this would give him an income, rooms, food, and libraries, for life. To be eligible for a fellowship at Trinity he would first have to win a Trinity scholarship, for only Trinity scholars could compete for the fellowships. But this would not be easy. The system of promotion to scholarships and fellowships at Trinity, as in other colleges, depended upon corrupt systems of patronage. Students from Westminster School in London automatically received at least a third of the Trinity scholarships, and as the scholarship elections took place only every three to four years, Newton had only one chance to compete—in the spring of 1664. If he did not succeed, he would have had to return to Woolsthorpe and give up alchemy and his ripening experiments on light, gravity, and motion, and in mathematics and physics, and become either a farmer or a country clergyman like Humphrey Babington.
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