In 1693 he would also descend into mental instability. One day John Locke received an odd letter scrawled at the Bull Inn in Shoreditch:
‘Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women ... I answered ‘twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness ... [and] I beg your pardon ... that I took you for a Hobbist.’23*
The charge of Hobbism hovered over all those who dabbled in materialist philosophy, as it hovered over Locke. And it was one to which Robert Boyle himself had been particularly sensitive. He had been unable to ignore the possibility that science might undermine faith – a world ruled by Newton’s laws might not be ruled so firmly by God. In defence of faith Boyle had become embroiled in a quarrelsome exchange of letters with Europe’s most notorious atheist, Benedict de Spinoza, and in defence of faith he had added a codicil to his will shortly before he died. It founded a lecture series ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz. atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mahometans’. It may have been Newton who read between the lines and suggested the theme for the first series: the challenge was to reconcile faith with the expanding intellectual world.
The monthly sermons alternated between Wren’s new St Mary-le-Bow (where Dudley North had frightened his brother by swinging outside the columns) and the modernised medieval church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and attracted the attention of most who lived (or believed themselves to live) in the intellectual world. Richard Bentley, the first Boyle lecturer, was chaplain to Edward Stillingfleet. He was a classicist, in fact, rather than an experimental philosopher, but he was a powerful thinker and a crushing debater, and to prepare his lectures he had the assistance of ‘that very excellent and divine theorist Mr Isaac Newton’.24*
Bentley’s eight sermons, published across Europe as A Confutation of Atheism, attempted to reconcile Christian faith with those recently discovered facts about the world which were nowhere mentioned in scripture: microscopic seed pods, the earth tugging at the moon. People lived in a world which turned out to be quite different from anything they, or any saint or prophet, had ever imagined, and thinking Christians could only feel a need to explain it. Bentley drew a good deal from the argument by design which the botanist John Ray had published the year before in a pamphlet called Wisdom of God in the Works of the Creation. In it Ray had proposed the intricacies of natural design, from whales to plant stamens, as evidence of a supreme designer. Bentley, too, argued that science did no more than shed light on a universe created by God and operating harmoniously under his laws. Gravity was God’s finger. The experimental philosophers merely celebrated a world whose intricacy and balance, whose variety, interconnectedness and power all evidenced the Creator’s hand.
‘They are incurable Infidels, that persist to deny a deity, when all creatures in the world ... from the human race to the lowest of insects ... from the vast globes of the sun and planets to the smallest particles of dust, do declare their absolute dependence upon the first author and fountain of all being and motion and life, the only eternal and self-existent God; with whom inhabit all majesty and wisdom and goodness for ever and ever.’25
John Evelyn, a trustee of the Boyle lectures, thought Richard Bentley’s second sermon ‘one of the most noble, learned and convincing discourses that I had ever heard’.26 For some reason, then, even conservatives of his stamp felt the need to compromise with the insights of the Moderns. The fact was that thinking men and women could not dismiss out of hand what they read in Newton. William Molyneux wrote to Locke about a bishop he knew who accepted even Locke’s most radical thoughts but couldn’t let it be known lest his lawn sleeves be ‘torn from his shoulders’.27 ‘There is an infinite desire of knowledge broken forth in the world,’ wrote Simon Patrick, vicar of St Paul’s Covent Garden (made Bishop of Ely after the Revolution), ‘and men may as well hope to stop the tide, or bind the ocean with chains, as hinder free Philosophy from overflowing.’28 Thoughtful Christians had no choice but to reinterpret their faith in the light of new discoveries.
As it happened, the Church of England after the Revolution found itself under the leadership of a man who was particularly open to such a reinterpretation. John Tillotson, who took over Lambeth Palace from Archbishop Sancroft in 1691, was a fellow of the Royal Society, a friend of Halley and Locke, and his brother was a City businessman – in other words, he was at home in the modern world as William Sancroft was not. When he died prematurely in 1694 Locke’s grief for a ‘great and candid searcher after truth’ was sincere.
‘Others will make known sufficiently how great a man the English public weal has lost, how great a pillar the Reformed Church. I have assuredly lost, to my very great hurt and grief, a friend of many years, steadfast, candid and sincere.’29
Tillotson’s sermons would be reprinted long into the next century. They were written in a famously simple and direct manner borrowed from science, and described a Christianity explicable, unmysterious, wrapped up not in high-flown rhetoric or biblical controversy, but in plain arguments for virtuous conduct.
‘The laws of God are reasonable, that is, suitable to our nature and advantageous to our interest ... He hath commanded us nothing in the gospel that is either unsuitable to our reason, or prejudicial to our interest.’30
Traditional religion faced challenges to its most fundamental certainties. Instead of moving to defeat that threat, Tillotson and the ‘latitude-men’ or latitudinarians, as they were called, were prepared, in effect, to modernise their own faith, not to deny the new discoveries but to find an accommodation with them.
Such a project could only be divisive, and as if to underline the depth of that conflict, the 1690s also saw the battle between Ancients and Moderns joined with renewed vigour. In France, Charles Perrault began his series of Parallèles des Anciens et Modernes, the first of which appeared in England in 1688. Two years later Sir William Temple responded with a gentlemanly little essay in defence of the Ancients, which not only dismissed Newton’s discoveries (‘sense can very hardly allow them!’31) but cited the glories of classical literature to prove irreversible human decline. Richard Bentley, the Boyle lecturer (who happened to be the leading classical scholar of his day) then launched into the controversy on the Modern side by proving that the text Temple held up as the founding document of Greek prose was actually a second-century forgery. Bentley went on to convene what must be one of the most impressive committees ever assembled in England, ‘Wren, Locke, Newton etc (and I hope when in town Mr Evelyn)’,32 while the Royal Society commissioned a brilliant young scholar, William Wotton, to compile a detailed case for the Moderns. The ensuing Battle of the Books would continue for years and spread across the continent. At issue was whether men still lived within a recognisable world or had moved beyond it into a new era.
Many had no sympathy with the new era and saw no need to yield ground to it. One critic of Archbishop Tillotson spluttered that he was ‘owned by the atheistical wits of all England as their true primate and apostle’.33 Another, yet more vitriolic, thought the Archbishop of Canterbury had ‘contributed more to the spreading and rooting of atheism than fifty Spinozas [or] Hobbeses’.34 It was hardly surprising that many in the church refused to follow Tillotson’s lead. To traditionalists, Tillotson’s argument from ‘natural law’ was heretical, his limitations of God’s sovereign power treacherous, his contention that there was nothing in God’s laws ‘but what if we were to consult our own interest and happiness ... we would chuse for ourselves’35 nauseatingly self-serving. They were appalled to see the English establishment sitting in St Martin’s and nodding sagely as Richard Bentley set out a compromise with ideas which appeared to undermine the most basic articles of their faith.
But the truth was that a successful counter-attack on the new ideas was no longer possible. Tillotson would be succeeded as Archbishop of Canterbury by Thomas Tenison, who was perhaps less extreme a moderate, but was still not one to defy the new discoveries. More importantly, the ch
urch itself had lost control over ideas. The church in Europe was divided, and even in England the church establishment, diminished by both schism and toleration, no longer had the legal teeth it had once bared at all challengers. In the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning which he published in 1694, William Wotton not only surveyed all human knowledge (in exhaustive detail), he also tried to explain why mankind had broken the traditional circle and set off on its new course. He dated the shift to the Reformation, and ascribed it to competition between alternative powers.
‘Disputes in religion have ... helped rather to increase the stock of learning than otherwise. It is most certain, that the different political interests in Europe have done it a mighty kindness. During the establishment of the Roman Empire, one common interest guided that vast body ... whereas now every kingdom standing upon its own bottom, they are all mutually jealous of each other’s glory, and in nothing more than in matters of learning.’36
Europe was divided politically. Christianity was in schism, and even its schismatic halves were divided, the Catholic church over the dominance of France, the Anglican Church over the Revolution. In a continent of competing power-bases, no one authority could enforce unity of mind or belief. Within his own realm Louis XIV might have imposed such control, but his power ended at the border, and from the free presses of Amsterdam, Huguenot exiles went on spreading the subversive message of new ideas. A new age of enquiry was dawning, and no power in Europe was able to control it. The revolution in knowledge which Locke, Newton and the scientists had unleashed could no longer be contained.
VII
‘ONE HUNDRED PER CENT IMMEDIATELY!’
‘Gaming ... hath this ill property above all other vices that it ... makes [a man] always unsatisfied with his own condition. He is either lifted up to the top of mad joy with success, or plung’d to the bottom of despair by misfortune.’1
Charles Cotton, 1674
On 10 February 1689 the East Indiaman Modena dropped anchor after a voyage from Bombay. She had been five months on the passage – not a bad speed – but her round trip had returned her to a new world: the King gone, Parliament sitting, and an unknown future ahead. Perhaps, though, the Modena was harbinger of returning prosperity (despite her politically inconvenient name). The East India Company certainly hoped so. ‘The coming of the Prince of Orange’, they reported, ‘and general fear forerunning it hath caused a great deadness of trade all winter. We hope now the nation is a little settled, trade will begin to mend.’2 Not only did the Modena’s captain have news of hopeful peace negotiations with the Great Mogul, the ship’s hold was packed with luxury goods, £100,000-worth of them: chests of coffee and tea, cotton yarn, raw silk, 5,666 porcelain bowls (‘25 ditto large’), 427 dishes, 8,670 plates. At least the taste for such novelties had not gone away. ‘So soon as the articles of peace [with the Mogul] be mutually ratified and exchanged,’ the Orange Gazette predicted happily, ‘the Company will gain as flourishing a trade ... as in any time past.’3
Dudley North certainly hoped so. Dudley had done well in the boom of the 1680s, and had invested heavily in the great companies. Their share prices had soared. John Evelyn bought £250 of East India stock in 1657 and sold it in 1682 for £750, to ‘my extraordinary advantage: & by the blessing of God’.4 Had he hung on until the Revolution he would have made even more. The 1680s had stirred up a boom in luxury goods of all kinds, particularly such as the Modena carried, and East India merchants had prospered.
‘Above all things war’, Pieter de la Court had written, ‘is most prejudicial’5 to merchants, and uncertainty was just as bad. The Revolution brought both. For Dudley, the boom of the 1680s ended when his East Indiaman, the Chandos, collided with the Dutch man-of-war which had escorted Mary to England for the coronation. After war with France was declared, privateers lurked in every bay on the Breton coast, waiting to dart out and snatch prizes like the Modena within sight of home. Insurance premiums soared – up 36 per cent, Dudley gloomily told his brother. The Government organised convoys, but then began to worry about prime seamen disappearing over the horizon just as the fighting season began; Roger Morrice heard of hundreds of merchant vessels stuck in the Thames awaiting permission to sail. In the end, fearing for their customs revenues, the Government introduced an unhappy compromise whereby convoys sailed in the off season, and brought sailors home by summer to fight. That, however, meant Caribbean typhoons and an Atlantic winter for the merchantmen on their way home. Meanwhile war shut off French ports, French fashions, French exports and French markets, and the share price of the companies fell ever lower; news that the Great Mogul had taken Bombay in February 1690 saw East India stock crash to just £80. And amid all this gloom Dudley faced disaster too. ‘One of his great ships,’ Roger reported, ‘homeward bound, and little insured, was taken by the French ... His estate was less by ten thousand pounds than it was when the French war first broke out.’6
Other merchants suffered as well, among them a rising city star whom one onlooker pointed out in the ranks of gaily-attired volunteers at the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1689: ‘Among these troopers ... was Daniel [De]foe, at that time a hosier in Freeman’s Yard, Cornhill.’7 Twenty-nine years old, voluble, plausible, quick to brag about his role in Monmouth’s rebellion, and well-connected in the City, Daniel Defoe cut a brave figure as he processed along Cheapside, but his affairs were already hopelessly entangled. He was burdened by debt, and his only assets were seventy civet cats which he had bought to capitalise on the cosmetics boom. In the months that followed, one ship he invested in was captured by the French, while another failed to pick up its cargo of tobacco in Boston. He, too, stared ruin in the face.
The only option for merchants who could no longer make profits from overseas trade was to cast about for alternative ventures. London, after all, was not short of capital. Gregory King, herald, surveyor, and a tireless collector of statistics, reckoned trade surpluses had doubled in the quarter century leading up to 1688, most of all in the boom of the 1680s. And a new outlet for that capital was not slow in appearing. William Phips’s treasure haul of 1687 provided the spur. It had returned spectacular profits to its investors simply on the basis of speculation. Speculation, the ‘art and mystery of projecting’,8 would be the commercial novelty of the 1690s. With the Revolution over and conventional trade eclipsed, investors like Defoe turned their attention to the newfangled possibilities of risk.
Opposite the portico of the Exchange, half a block west of Freeman’s Yard and less than fifty yards from Defoe’s front door, two booksellers’ shops flanked the mouth of a narrow alleyway which seemed no different from any other rat-run in the City of London. This one, Exchange Alley, widened out into a pedestrian courtyard with Jonathan Miles’s coffee house on the left hand side, and beyond it a side-alley which housed another coffee house, Garraway’s. These were the favoured meeting places of the traders and fixers of the Exchange and from them, in the early 1690s, could be heard a mounting clamour of deals and proposals. London, like Amsterdam before it, had discovered the precarious joys of dealing in risk.
London’s speculators would construct their pyramids of risk neither on tulip bulbs nor East India Company shares. Their inspiration came, instead, from the inventions of science. Indeed, the progress of the stock market boom of the 1690s would be measured in a flood of patent applications. ‘More have been taken out within these seven years last past’, wrote one commentator in 1695, ‘than in fifty, nay a hundred before.’ Edmond Halley, who had acted as midwife to Newton’s Principia, filed the first of many patents for a diving bell. Designed to help future treasure-hunters raise wealth from the sea bed, it had a prototype diving suit to go with it. Flotillas of underwater gadgets followed, ‘some like a bell, others a tub, some like a complete suit of armour of copper, and leather between the joints, and pipes to convey wind and a Polyphemus eye in the forehead’.9 The ideas of Halley were more practical than most – he tested his diving suit himself. But Diving Halley, as his company wa
s known in Jonathan’s coffee house, set a pattern in more ways than one. It was based on two key principles: first, that the joint stock company, as used by Albemarle for Phips’s expedition, was a successful model for turning business ideas into profits, and second, that technical innovation could create new profits and new markets where none had existed before.
The Scientific Revolution in England had always championed practicality. Bacon himself famously died from a cold caught when stuffing a chicken with snow to investigate freezing. The whole raison d’être of the Royal Society, claimed Robert Hooke, was ‘the ease and dispatch of the labours of men’s hands ... They do not wholly reject experiments of mere light and theory; but they principally aim at such, whose applications will improve and facilitate the present way of Manual Arts.’10 ‘Tis no wonder ... learning has been so little advanced since it grew to be so mercenary’,11 William Temple grumbled. On the contrary, learning would eventually transform the world precisely because it now discovered how to unlock the investment necessary to turn bright ideas into working machines. When the Moderns unrolled projects on the tables of Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, they found investors eager to back them.
In 1692, the Royal Society member John Hough ton began a newspaper he entitled A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. It aimed to forge links between science and investors, and it was in Houghton’s Collection that many read for the first time of the extraordinary developments in Exchange Alley.
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