Copyright
The epigraph on page 292 is from The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, edited and translated by H. T. Mason. Published by Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1967.
The epigraph on page 646 is from Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994.
The epigraph on page 707 is from G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Hackett. Published by Hackett, Indianapolis, 1989.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE CONFUSION. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition APRIL © 2004 ISBN: 9780061793387
Version 08162013
FIRST EDITION
06 07 08 09 10
Map
Dedication
To Mildred
Contents
Map
Dedication
Epigraph
The story thus far…
BOOK SIX
Solomon’s Gold
Dartmoor
Crockern Tor
The Saracen’s Head
Southern England
Crane Court
London
Mr. White’s Baiting-Ring
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell
Bloomsbury
Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London
Leicester House
The Kit-Cat Clubb
Crane Court, London
River Thames
Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
Sloop Atalanta, Gravesend
Cold Harbour
Sloop Atalanta, the Hope
The Monument, London
Sloop Atalanta, off the Isle of Grain
Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London
The City of London
Sloop Atalanta, off the Shive
The Monument
Worth’s Coffee-house, Birchin Lane, London
Shive Tor
The White Tower
Shive Tor
BOOK SEVEN
Currency
Hanover
Westminster Palace
Garden of Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover
Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber, Herrenhausen Palace
Between Black Mary’s Hole and Sir John Oldcastle’s, North of London
Clerkenwell Court
Westminster Palace
Westminster Palace
The Kit-Cat Clubb
The Carriage
The Launch Prudence
Royal Society, Crane Court
Clerkenwell Court
Golden Square
Leicester House
Newgate Prison
Golden Square
The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison
Monmouth Street
Leicester Fields
The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison
Bolingbroke’s House, Golden Square
The Italian Opera
Golden Square
Billingsgate Dock
Sophia, Mouth of the Thames
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
Billingsgate Dock
A Tavern, Hockley-in-the-Hole
BOOK EIGHT
The System of the World
Marlborough House
The Temple of Vulcan
The Kit-Cat Clubb
Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe
Surrey
Library of Leicester House
London Bridge
Greenwich
Roger Comstock’s House
The Castle, Newgate Prison
The Black Dogg of Newgate
Fleet Prison
The Tap-Room, Fleet Prison
Under a Pile of Lead Weights, the Press-Room, Newgate Prison
Westminster Abbey
The Court of the Old Bailey
The Tower of London
A Letter
Mint Street, the Tower of London
A Letter
The Condemned Hold, Newgate Prison
The Gallows, Tower Hill
The Press-Yard and Castle, Newgate Prison
Clerkenwell Court
The Chapel, Newgate Prison
Halfway Along Cheapside
Poop Deck of Minerva, the Pool of London
The Temple of Vulcan
Newgate Prison
Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s
Friday
29 October 1714
Westminster Abbey
Chapel of Newgate Prison
New Palace Yard, Westminster
The Stone Anvil, the High Hall, Newgate Prison
The Trial of the Pyx
The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison
Star Chamber
Church of St. Sepulchre
Star Chamber
Holbourn
Star Chamber
EPILOGS
Leibniz-Haus, Hanover
Gardens of Trianon, Royal Château of Versailles
Blenheim Palace
Carolina
Cornwall
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
Epigraph
But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandring feet
The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight
Upborn with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Ile…
MILTON, Paradise Lost
The story thus far…
In Boston in October 1713, Daniel Waterhouse, sixty-seven years of age, the Founder and sole Fellow of a failing college, the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts, has received a startling visit from the Alchemist Enoch Root, who has appeared on his doorstep brandishing a summons addressed to Daniel from Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, thirty.
Two decades earlier, Daniel, along with his friend and colleague Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, knew Princess Caroline when she was a destitute orphan. Since then she has grown up as a ward of the King and Queen of Prussia in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, surrounded by books, artists, and Natural Philosophers, including Leibniz. She has married the Electoral Prince of Hanover, George Augustus, known popularly as “Young Hanover Brave” for his exploits in the recently concluded War of the Spanish Succession. He is reputed to be as handsome and dashing as Caroline is beautiful and brilliant.
The grandmother of George Augustus is Sophie of Hanover, still shrewd and vigorous at eighty-three. According to the Whigs—one of the two great factions in English politics—Sophie should be next in line to the English throne after the death of Queen Anne, who is forty-eight and in poor health. This would place Princess Caroline in direct line to become Princess of Wales and later Queen of England. The Whigs’ bitter rivals, the Tories, while paying lip service to the Hanoverian succession, harbor many powerful dissidents, called Jacobites, who are determined that the next monarch should instead be James Stuart: a Catholic who has lived most of his life in France as a gue
st and puppet of the immensely powerful Sun King, Louis XIV.
England and an alliance of mostly Protestant countries have just finished fighting a quarter-century-long world war against France. The second half of it, known as the War of the Spanish Succession, has seen many battlefield victories for the Allies under the generalship of two brothers in arms: the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless France has won the war, in large part by outmaneuvering her opponents politically. Consequently, a grandson of Louis XIV now sits on the throne of the Spanish Empire, which among other things is the source of most of the world’s gold and silver. If the English Jacobites succeed in placing James Stuart on the English throne, France’s victory will be total.
In anticipation of the death of Queen Anne, Whiggish courtiers and politicians have been establishing contacts and forging alliances between London and Hanover. This has had the side-effect of throwing into high relief a long-simmering dispute between Sir Isaac Newton—the preëminent English scientist, the President of the Royal Society, and Master of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London—and Leibniz, a privy councilor and old friend of Sophie, and tutor to Princess Caroline. Ostensibly this conflict is about which of the two men first invented the calculus, but in truth it has deeper roots. Newton and Leibniz are both Christians, troubled that many of their fellow Natural Philosophers perceive a conflict between the mechanistic world-view of science and the tenets of their faith. Both men have developed theories to harmonize science and religion. Newton’s is based on the ancient proto-science of Alchemy and Leibniz’s is based on a theory of time, space, and matter called Monadology. They are radically different and probably irreconcilable.
Princess Caroline wishes to head off any possible conflict between the world’s two greatest savants, and the political and religious complications that would ensue from it. She has asked Daniel, who is an old friend of both Newton and Leibniz, to journey back to England, leaving his young wife and their little boy in Boston, and mediate the dispute. Daniel, knowing Newton’s vindictiveness, sees this as foreordained to fail, but agrees to give it a try, largely because he is impoverished and the Princess has held out the incentive of a large life insurance policy.
Daniel departs from Boston on Minerva, a Dutch East Indiaman (a heavily armed merchant ship). Detained along the New England coast by contrary winds, she falls under attack in Cape Cod Bay from the formidable pirate-fleet of Captain Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, who somehow knows that Dr. Waterhouse is on board Minerva, and demands that her Captain, Otto Van Hoek, hand him over. Captain Van Hoek, who loathes pirates even more than the typical merchant-captain, elects to fight it out, and bests Teach’s pirate fleet in a day-long engagement.
Minerva crosses the Atlantic safely but is caught in a storm off the southwest corner of England and nearly cast away on the Isles of Scilly. Late in December she puts in at Plymouth for repairs. Dr. Waterhouse goes ashore intending to travel to London by land. In Plymouth he encounters a family friend named Will Comstock.
Will is the grandson of John Comstock, a Tory nobleman who fought against Cromwell in the middle of the previous century and, after the Restoration, came back to England and helped found the Royal Society. Subsequently, John was disgraced and forced to retire from public life, partly through the machinations of his (much younger) distant cousin and bitter rival, Roger Comstock. Daniel served as a tutor in Natural Philosophy to one of the sons of John. This son later moved to Connecticut and established an estate there. Will was born and grew up on that estate but has lately moved back to England, where he has found a home in the West Country. He is a moderate Tory who has recently been created Earl of Lostwithiel. Queen Anne has recently been forced to create a large number of such titles in order to pack the House of Lords with Tories, the party that she currently favors.
Daniel has spent the twelve days of Christmas with Will’s family at his seat near Lostwithiel, and Will has talked him into making a small detour en route to London.
Book 6
Solomon’s Gold
Dartmoor
15 JANUARY 1714
In life there is nothing more foolish than inventing.
—JAMES WATT
“MEN HALF YOUR AGE and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold,” said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers.
The wind had paused, as though Boreas had exhausted his lungs and was drawing in a new breath of air from somewhere above Iceland. So the young Earl was able to say this in matter-of-fact tones. “Mr. Newcomen and I are very glad of your company, but—”
The wind struck them all deaf, as though the three men were candle-flames to be blown out. They staggered, planted their downwind feet against the black, stony ground, and leaned into it. Lostwithiel shouted: “We’ll not think you discourteous if you return to my coach!” He nodded to a black carriage stopped along the track a short distance away, rocking on its French suspension. It had been artfully made to appear lighter than it was, and looked as if the only thing preventing it from tumbling end-over-end across the moor was the motley team of draught-horses harnessed to it, shaggy manes standing out horizontally in the gale.
“I am astonished that you should call this an extremity of cold,” answered the old man. “In Boston, as you know, this would pass without remark. I am garbed for Boston.” He was shrouded in a rustic leather cape, which he parted in the front to reveal a lining pieced together from the pelts of many raccoons. “After that passage through the intestinal windings of the Gorge of Lyd, we are all in want of fresh air—especially, if I read the signs rightly, Mr. Newcomen.”
That was all the leave Thomas Newcomen wanted. His face, which was as pale as the moon, bobbed once, which was as close as this Dartmouth blacksmith would ever come to a formal bow. Having thus taken his leave, he turned his broad back upon them and trudged quickly downwind. Soon he became hard to distinguish from the numerous upright boulders—which might be read as a comment on his physique, or on the gloominess of the day, or on the badness of Daniel’s eyesight.
“The Druids loved to set great stones on end,” commented the Earl. “For what purpose, I cannot imagine.”
“You have answered the question by asking it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dwelling as they did in this God-forsaken place, they did it so that men would come upon these standing stones two thousand years after they were dead, and know they had been here. The Duke of Marlborough, throwing up that famous Pile of Blenheim Palace, is no different.”
The Earl of Lostwithiel felt it wise to let this pass without comment. He turned and kicked a path through some stiff withered grass to a strange up-cropping of lichen-covered stone. Following him, Daniel understood it as one corner of a ruined building. The ground yielded under their feet. It was spread thin over a shambles of tumbledown rafters and disintegrating peat-turves. Anyway the angle gave them shelter from the wind.
“Speaking now in my capacity as Lord Warden of the Stannaries, I welcome you to Dartmoor, Daniel Waterhouse, on behalf of the Lord of the Manor.”
Daniel sighed. “If I’d been in London the last twenty years, keeping up with my Heraldic Arcana, and going to tea with the Bluemantle Pursuivant, I would know who the hell that was. But as matters stand—”
“Dartmoor was created part of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1338, and as such became part of the possessions of the Prince of Wales—a title created by King Edward I in—”
“So in a roundabout way, you are welcoming me on behalf of the Prince of Wales,” Daniel said abruptly, in a bid to yank the Earl back before he rambled any deeper into the labyrinth of feudal hierarchy.
“And the Princess. Who, if the Hanovers come, shall be—”
“Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Yes. Her name keeps coming up. Did she send you to track me down in the streets of Plymouth?”
The Earl looked a little
wounded. “I am the son of your old friend. I encountered you by luck. My surprise was genuine. The welcome given you by my wife and children was unaffected. If you doubt it, come to our house next Christmas.”
“Then why do you go out of your way to bring up the Princess?”
“Only because I wish to be plain-spoken. Where you are going next it is all intrigue. There is a sickness of the mind that comes over those who bide too long in London, which causes otherwise rational men to put forced and absurd meanings on events that are accidental.”
“I have observed that sickness in full flower,” Daniel allowed, thinking of one man in particular.
“I do not wish you to think, six months from now, when you become aware of all this, ‘Aha, the Earl of Lostwithiel was nothing more than a cat’s paw for Caroline—who knows what other lies he may have told me!’ ”
“Very well. For you to disclose it now exhibits wisdom beyond your years.”
“Some would call it timidity originating in the disasters that befell my father, and his father.”
“I do not take that view of it,” Daniel said curtly.
He was startled by bulk and motion to one side, and feared it was a standing-stone toppled by the wind; but it was only Thomas Newcomen, looking a good deal pinker. “God willing, that carriage-ride is the closest I shall ever come to a sea-voyage!” he declared.
“May the Lord so bless you,” Daniel returned. “In the storms of the month past, we were pitched and tossed about so much that all hands were too sick to eat for days. I went from praying we would not run aground, to praying that we would.” Daniel paused to draw breath as the other two laughed. Newcomen had brought out a clay-pipe and tobacco-pouch, and Lostwithiel now did the same. The Earl clapped his hands to draw his coachman’s eye, and signalled that fire should be brought out.
Daniel declined the tobacco with a wave of his hand. “One day that Indian weed will kill more white men, than white men have killed Indians.”
“But not today,” Newcomen said.
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 222
