The Golden Builders

by Tobias Churton

  After her husband's death in 1632, Elizabeth's court continued to be a magnet both for those who believed that the Reformation had been betrayed, and for those who saw it entering a new phase of educational and philosophical enlightenment.

  Comenius enjoyed other connections to Frederick and Elizabeth. Of his Heidelberg tutors, Abraham Scultetus had accompanied Frederick to Prague in 1619 as his chaplain, while Johannes Henricus Altingus remained Frederick's close friend until the latter's death. These connections deepened further after meeting the reformers Samuel Hartlib and John Dury in Poland, both of whom, like himself, were encouraged by Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles Louis.

  Comenius first met Hartlib when he went to Poland in 1628 to form a community of exiled Bohemian Brethren. Both Comenius and Hartlib wrote educational works extolling the liberation of knowledge. Hartlib the Pole had also met the Scot John Dury at Elbing in Poland and decided that England was the best place to get the new reforms under way, encouraged by the writings of Rosicrucian-readers Dr Robert Fludd and Sir Francis Bacon.

  Dury and Hartlib had good contacts. Sir William Boswell, Queen Elizabeth's diplomatic supporter, was not only Britain's ambassador to the Hague but was also Sir Francis Bacon's executor (Bacon had died in 1626). Was it co-incidence that Hartlib set out for England within a year of the publication of Bacon's fable of a perfected spiritual and scientific society, the New Atlantis (1627)? The story told in Bacon's New Atlantis is not only strongly reminiscent both of Andreae's Christianopolis (1619) - including a journey by sea to reach it and the appearance of a cross and cherubim's wings on an official scroll (the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross was “under Jehovah's wings”)-but it also presents us with the image of a new temple of science:

  Ye shall understand, my dear friends, that amongst the excellent acts of that king [of the island], one above all hath the pre-eminence. It was the erection and institution of an order, or society, which we call Saloman's House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.

  ‘Saloman’ is explained as a corruption of ‘Solomon’. The House (so similar in concept to the vault of Christian Rosenkreuz: “a compendium of the universe”) is a kind of distant temple, housing not so much God Himself as the knowledge of His creation in all its aspects, physical and spiritual. New Atlantis sends out agents (again like the Fraternity of Christian Rosenkreuz) to gather new discoveries:

  we have twelve that sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations (for our own we conceal), who bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants of Light.

  I suspect that Samuel Hartlib, when he left his Christian mystical and philanthropic society in Poland for England in 1628, saw himself as a figure not at all unlike a “Merchant of Light”. After founding a school for Protestant refugees in Chichester, Hartlib went to London in 1630, establishing himself as a leading reformer in England, keeping in close touch with both Comenius and the Hague72.

  In 1640 he addressed A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria to the newly instated ‘Long’ Parliament. Hartlib compared his ideal tolerant state to the Macaria of Pico della Mirandola-enthusiast S. Thomas More's Utopia, and to Bacon's New Atlantis. Hartlib, in telling words, hoped that Parliament would “lay the corner Stone of the world's happinesse before the final recesse thereof…”

  A general clamour for reform was fuelled by a profound excitement that a new Elizabethan age or Great Instauration (to use Bacon's words) might be returning to shower her blessings on a thirsty nation. The poet and later revolutionary Parliamentarian John Milton (1608-1674), friend of Hartlib, was moved to song:

  Yea Truth, and Justice then Will down return to men, Th'enamelld Arras of the Rain-bow wearing, And Mercy set between, Thron'd in Celestiall sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing, And Heav'n as at som festivall, Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall. (Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity)

  Would King Charles I, brother of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, get off the fence of political expediency and declare for Britain's rôle of defending and expanding the Reformation, bringing all Britons together of whatever religious persuasion in peace and prosperity? Would he welcome the Merchants of Light? For a heady moment it seemed so.

  Hartlib wrote to Comenius and begged him to come to England. As Frances Yates put it in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972): “he [Comenius] believed that he had a mandate from Parliament to build Bacon's New Atlantis in England.” In 1641 John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, welcomed Comenius to England with a great banquet and informed Parliament that in considering much-needed reform the names of Comenius, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury should be considered exemplary73.

  Inspired, Comenius wrote Via Lucis (the Way of Light) in London. Via Lucis presents the world as a comedy in which the divine wisdom plays with men of many lands. The play is not yet over, for the highest light - like the dénouement of a play - is reserved for the end. In order to bring this Light forth, Comenius advocated the establishment of a College or sacred society devoted to the common welfare of man. The idea had clearly lingered in Comenius' brain since the time of the Rosicrucian manifestos over two decades since. According to Comenius, a new science needs a universal spiritual and educational reformation to go with it:

  When all instances and rules have been collected, we may hope that an Art of Arts, a Science of Sciences, a Wisdom of Wisdom, a Light of Light shall finally be established.

  Comenius hoped that his educational primers, his “universal books”, would become available to all. The word of enlightened learning must be spread over the earth: “For though it is true that the world has not entirely lacked intercourse, yet such methods of intercourse as it has enjoyed have lacked universality.” The principle of universality is an important one, suggesting both the pristine wisdom of the ancients and the possibility of finding a common basis in knowledge that will transcend religious divisions, social divisions and national divisions; fraternity is the keynote. Comenius believes the “agents of general happiness and welfare” should be many. These agents must be guided by some kind of order (reminiscent of the Rules for the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross), “so that each of them may know what he has to do, and for whom and when and with what assistance, and may set about his business in a manner which will make for the public benefit.”

  Nevertheless, King Charles had little interest in national reform, while parliament was in any case divided on what reforms were necessary. There was, however, one area of broad unanimity, that Charles should relinquish absolute authority over the collection of taxes, that is, that there should be no separate law to that established by parliament.

  It is clear that the eirenic approach of such men as Hartlib and Comenius forebore partisanship in the burgeoning conflict. Comenius left for Sweden to undertake that country's educational reform while Dury left for the Hague in 1641. Samuel Hartlib stayed in England.

  On 20 May of that same year, Hartlib's friend Robert Moray, quarter-master to the Royal army of Scotland, entered the Scottish Old S. Mary's Chapel Lodge (No.1) of Masonry at a place near or in Newcastle. This was one of the earliest masonic initiations on record. Moray, learned enthusiast both of the Rosicrucians and of alchemy, was the first president of the Royal Society.

  The Royal Society

  The precise origins of the Royal Society are still debated. There is in its earliest history (that of Thomas Sprat, published in 1667) a certain cut-and-dried yet nonetheless vague quality as to its genesis, suggesting there may have been much more to the matter than met the eye. Some of this vagueness is due to the fact that the institution (originally called the ‘Royal Society of London, for Improving of Natural Knowledge’) was born at a time when the Restoration of Charles II seemed insecure. Furthermore, many linked science with diabolic magic or utopian, revolutionary reform.

  There is
general agreement that the Society was conceived in the 1640s, arising from discussions which took place during the Civil War and its aftermath. These activities, regardless of the political views of its earliest proponents, were then linked firmly to the Restoration of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia's nephew Charles II. Thanks to Sir Robert Moray, who had laboured tirelessly for the exiled Charles between 1654 and 1657 in France, Holland and Scotland, it became the Royal Society.

  According to Royal Society member John Wallis, writing in 1678 and 1697, the Society grew out of meetings held in London in 1645 in private homes and at Gresham College. The meetings included founder members Dr John Wilkins (later bishop of Chester), but then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine in London, and Theodore Haak, a German from the Palatinate. These men were, like Comenius and Hartlib, patronised by Elizabeth of Bohemia. According to Wallis, it was Haak “who, I think, gave the first occasion, and first suggested these meetings and many others.”

  Further evidence comes from the letters (1646-1647) of alchemist and experimental scientist Robert Boyle. Boyle, a correspondent of Hartlib, mentions an ‘Invisible College’, a phrase with which we should be familiar, recalling how Descartes was held in suspicion in Paris in the 1620s for being a member of the “Invisibles”, that is, the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross74. In one letter, Boyle asks his tutor to send him some books, a favour “which will make you extremely welcome to our Invisible College”, while in a letter for February 1647 Boyle writes excitedly about his having made the acquaintance of a quite remarkable group of people:

  The best on't is that the cornerstones [my emphasis] of the Invisible or (as they term themselves) the Philosophical College, do now and then honour me with their company… men of so capaceous and searching spirits, that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge… as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than an universal good-will can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind to their care.

  This almost sounds as if Boyle has entered the bosom of Andreae's Christian Fraternity or Societas Christiana - or even the Rose-Cross Fraternity itself! Somebody or bodies were presumably living out the ideals which Andreae, Comenius, Hartlib, Dury and Elizabeth of Bohemia held so dear: courage, spiritual idealism, open-mindedness, loving care and systematic science. To be fair this does not sound quite like the Royal Society, but it does sound like the kind of atmosphere in which such an undertaking could develop. It begins to look as though Comenius and Hartlib had played their part as “Merchants of Light” very well.

  According to Thomas Sprat's official history, the Royal Society grew out of meetings held in John Wilkins' rooms at Wadham College, Oxford between 1648 and 1659. Regular visitors included the polymath Christopher Wren, William Petty75 and the famous diarist John Evelyn. Evelyn described the rooms as having been filled with “many artificial, mathematical and magical curiosities.”

  Wilkins, who as we have seen was chaplain to Elizabeth's son Charles Louis was also the author of a book called Mathematical Magick (1648) based on the work of both John Dee (Mathematical Preface, 1570) and on a section on mechanics from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia (Oppenheim, 1619). Wilkins cites the magician-scholar and Hermetic enthusiast Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) as his authority for employing the term “mathematical magick” for that branch of science dealing with mechanical invention. This was a fairly bold statement to appear in an era of regular witch-trials - for both Agrippa and Dee had been accused of diabolical pacts. Wilkins also demonstrates a loose knowledge of the Rosicrucian material. In describing an underground lamp (an example of mathematical magick), he compares it to the lamp “seen in the sepulchre of Francis [sic, clearly taking Fra., ie: frater to mean ‘Francis’] Rosicrosse, as is more largely expressed in the Confession of that Fraternity.” (still unpublished in English at that time).

  The Return of the Fama

  Perhaps it was due to Wilkins' inaccurate rendering of the substance of the Rosicrucian manifestos that led Thomas Vaughan to publish (for the first time in English) a printed version of both the Fama and Confessio in 1652. Indeed it appears that the 1650s, with their uncertainty regarding the future of the nation after the execution of Charles I in 1649, saw both a revival of interest in the Rosicrucians76, as well as a ferocious attack on the Renaissance spiritual tradition which fed into that interest. Thomas Vaughan, twin-brother of the poet Henry Vaughan, author of the beautiful poem Peace, is an example of a second-generation ‘Rosicrucian’ -English-style - a man who made no apology for his magical interests:

  That I should profess magic… and justify the professors of it withal is impiety to many but religion with me …Magic is nothing but the wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the creature. It is a name - as Agrippa saith - not distasteful to the very Gospel itself. Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He Himself discovered. (Quoted by Francis King in his Magic, the Western Tradition, (BCA, 1975).

  Thomas Vaughan was connected with the first English version of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Moule, 1651)77, writing an Enconium on the magus of Nettesheim under the same pseudonym by which he published the Fama the following year, Eugenius Philalethes, ‘Lover of Truth’. This name also appeared in Andreae's Christian Mythologies (1619). Vaughan's ideological position lies firmly in the extra-curricular school:

  Now a new East beyond the stars I see Where breaks the Day of thy Divinitie : Heav'n states a Commerce here with Man, had He But gratefull Hands to take, and Eyes to see. Hence you fond School-men, that high truths deride, And with no Arguments but Noyse, and Pride; You that damn all but you your selves invent, And yet find nothing by Experiment; Your Fate is written by an unseen Hand, But his Three Books with the Three worlds shall stand.

  Vaughan would plainly like to have seen a reform of science, but is doubtful whether even the Baconian approach would yield the kind of spiritual awareness he found in Agrippa. The magician was suspicious of the imminent move towards a scientific method that would exclude the wonders of spiritual magic. For him these wonders constituted the heights of human perception. Within the context of the hopes of such as Hartlib and Comenius - that in seeking the truth through the works of God manifest in nature one may return to the Light – Vaughan's is an almost refreshingly sceptical view. One senses that Vaughan is waging a (not quite) private war for the place of Magic in the reform programme, and he does it explicitly since it might appear that few others would dare to. This was a very dangerous area, especially for those in the universities (such as Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren) who were attempting to establish reformed science as an academically legitimate activity.

  The faltering ecclesiastical domination of the universities (during the Protectorate) and the particularly Aristotelian bent of Oxford meant that Magic in its fullness was regarded by some as a suspect deviation from what was considered to be a sound classical, theological and humanistic education, or, simply, diabolical witchcraft. The nature of this conflict would have a definite effect on the exoteric character of any established scientific society.

  Witch Hunt

  Vaughan's publication of the Fama and Confessio may have emboldened the puritan divine John Webster to write an extraordinary plea for the teaching of Hermetic and Paracelsian philosophy, along with Jacob Böhme, in British universities. These subjects were “in some measure acknowledged” by the Rosy Cross Fraternity, he writes, while mathematics as described by John Dee (from whose Mathematical Preface he quotes) is also recommended78. Webster was obviously very well versed in the field of contemporary Hermetic studies, including Bacon and Fludd in his programme, believing them to be in agreement. (Bac
on did not accept the micro-macrocosmic philosophy.) The book received a stinging reply from Seth Ward, an habitué of Wilkins' philosophical discussions in Oxford79.

  Ward had no time for the Hermetic tradition in its Rosicrucian form and ridiculed Dee and Fludd. Frances Yates' Rosicrucian Enlightenment (p.187) takes the view that this work indicates some kind of change of tack in the core group which was to become the Royal Society, veering away from the magic which Wilkins had been happy enough in 1648 to attach to the word mathematics. I doubt this. Ward's work is clearly titled to be a vindication of the academic establishment; Webster's book was an attack on the universities' core curriculum. Furthermore, there may have been some smarting from Vaughan's tirade against “fond school-men”. The last thing Oxford needed was a witch-trial drummed up because some felt threatened by science.

  The men who were to make up the eventual 114 founder members of the Royal Society were men of very different outlooks, as one might expect. Furthermore, the Royal Society was not at its inception a purely academic institution or university society. It included men from different backgrounds who doubtless held contrary opinions on many matters. Nevertheless one can see why spiritual magic might not be placed at the centre of the Royal Society's interests. The subject was contentious, by its nature a private pursuit, from which knowledge of natural science might come but, as with the Fama's conception of gold deriving from spiritual alchemy as a parergon, such knowledge would be a by-product of the spiritual opus.

  The aim of the Royal Society was to present in good conscience a universality of natural knowledge, that on which all men could agree. Spiritual experience, whether magical or otherwise, goes beyond reason. The men of the Society would obviously differ in their ability to grasp the rational but they were not setting up reason as a god, only as a yardstick.