Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  43 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 22, p.606.

  44 See Leopold, ‘Christiaan Huygens, the Royal Society and Horology’, p.39.

  45 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 4, p.278. See also Christiaan to Lodewijk, 18/28 December 1662, ibid., pp.284–5.

  46 Bruce to Huygens, 2/12 January 1663. Ibid., pp.290–1.

  47 Leopold, ‘Clockmaking in Britain and the Netherlands’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989), 159.

  48 See Huygens to Moray, 1 December 1662 (n.s.), Oeuvres Complètes 4, pp.274–5, and Huygens to Moray, 10/20 December 1662, ibid., pp.280–1.

  49 Moray to Huygens, 9/19 January 1663. Ibid., p.296.

  50 Huygens to Moray, 2 February 1663 (n.s.). Ibid., p.304.

  51 Bruce to Huygens, 16/26 January 1663. Ibid., pp.301–2.

  52 Huygens to Bruce, 9/19 January 1663. Oeuvres Complètes 22, p.593 (this is a letter from the Kincardine papers, so is out of order in the Oeuvres Complètes).

  53 See J.H. Leopold, ‘Clockmaking in Britain and the Netherlands’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43 (1989), 155–65; 159.

  54 Moray to Huygens, 19 February/1 March 1663. Oeuvres Complètes 4, p.318.

  55 Ibid.

  56 This suspicion is confirmed by the fact that Hooke’s evaluation of the Huygens longitude clocks, as recorded in the minutes of the Royal Society in 1665, repeats these criticisms in very similar words.

  57 In A Description of Helioscopes and some other Instruments (London: T.R. for J. Martyn, 1676) (conveniently to be found cited at length in Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 7, pp.517–26), Hooke gives the date of this trial as 1662. In BL Sloane MS 1039, fol. 129v, in his Cutlerian lecture on the subject he recalls the date as March 1664. I am confident that the actual date is March 1663.

  58 Conveniently to be found cited at length in Oeuvres Complètes 7, p.519.

  59 On 22 December 1665 Pepys recorded in his diary: ‘I to my Lord Brouncker’s and there spent the evening by my desire in seeing his lordship open to pieces and make up again his watch, thereby being taught what I never knew before.’ Cit. Leopold, ‘Christiaan Huygens, the Royal Society and Horology’, p.39.

  60 In 1663 Christiaan Huygens was again in London with his father, and frequented the Royal Society, which made him a foreign Fellow.

  61 See e.g. Pepys diary, cit. note 59 above, and Moray’s exchanges with Huygens about the new-design clock he is trying to get William Davidson to collect from The Hague for him in early 1665.

  62 See L.D. Patterson, ‘Pendulums of Wren and Hooke’, Osiris 10 (1952), 277–321; 283.

  63 Having examined the Trinity College Cambridge Hooke papers myself, I am now confident that sheets A–L of the longitude papers are from the early 1660s, but that everything thereafter is from the 1670s, possibly as late as 1678–79. I am grateful to the Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge, for giving me access to these papers.

  64 Richard Waller, Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (1705), p.v. On the Moray negotiations with Bruce and Huygens see the Kincardine papers (RS transcript), pp.406–7.

  65 I base this account on the important article by Michael Wright, ‘Robert Hooke’s longitude timekeeper’, in M. Hunter and S. Schaffer (eds), Robert Hooke: New Studies (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), pp.63–118. Wright’s compilation of key recorded moments in Hooke’s spring-regulated timekeeper development is at pp.76–8.

  66 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, pp.503–4 (letter 1481). This is one of the two letters Hooke considered to constitute a betrayal of his confidence to Huygens on Moray’s part. The other is that of 22 July 1665. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, pp.426–8 (letter 1436).

  67 ‘Mr. Hooke having made a proposition of giving the discovery of the longitude, as he conceived it, to the society, it was ordered, that he should choose such persons to commit this business to, as he thought good, and make the experiment; that by such persons chosen, the council might be satisfied of the truth and practicableness of his invention, and proceed accordingly to take out a patent for him.’

  68 Richard Waller, Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (1705), p.v.

  69 Ibid.

  70 I am extremely grateful to Felix Pryor for assisting me in tracking down this document, and giving me sight of a legible photocopy.

  71 See Waller, Posthumous Works, p.vi.

  72 Holmes was already carrying out tests of deep-sea sounding devices for the Royal Society.

  73 Holmes’s account of this incident is recorded in the Journal Books of the Royal Society for 11 January 1665. See Birch 2, pp.4–5.

  74 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.204 (letter 1315). See also ibid., pp.222–3 (letter 1324).

  75 Ibid., p.224 (letter 1325).

  76 Philosophical Transactions 1, 6 March 1665.

  77 The grave outbreak of plague in July 1665, which necessitated the removal of the Court first to Hampton Court and then to Oxford, and the dispersal of the Royal Society members to the safety of the country, marked the end of this phase in Hooke’s longitude timekeeper aspirations.

  78 See below, Chapter 12.

  79 It is via the Isle of Wight route that Holmes’s path crossed that of Robert Hooke (born on that island). It has been plausibly argued that Grace, Robert’s niece, was the mother of Holmes’s illegitimate daughter Mary. See L. Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (London: HarperCollins, 2003).

  80 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.224 (letter 1325). Huygens’s attitude to his first longitude clocks was entirely consistent: he doubted their suitability from the start (Oeuvres Complètes 4, p.285).

  81 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.256 (letter 1345).

  82 Birch 2, p.21.

  83 For a clear sense of the concern caused by Holmes’s conduct on that voyage, and Pepys’s lack of trust of him, see Pepys, Diary 6, p.43.

  84 Ibid., p.56.

  85 Birch, A History of the Royal Society 2, p.23.

  86 Moray also added two further experiments Holmes claimed to have carried out with the clocks (ibid.).

  87 Ibid., p.26.

  88 I owe this discovery to C.H. Wilson, ‘Who captured New Amsterdam?’, English Historical Review 72 (1957), 469–74: ‘Fortunately our answer [to the question of whether Holmes was involved in the capture of New Amsterdam in 1664] need not rest on surmise, for we have Holmes’s own account of his movements during the months when he is supposed by some historians to have been on his way to America, and capturing New Amsterdam [Captain Robert Holmes his Journalls of Two Voyages into Guynea in his M[ajesty’]s Ships The Henrietta and the Jersey, Pepys Library Sea MSS. No. 2698]’ (pp. 472–3).

  89 For Holmes’s buccaneering style, see Captain Robert Holmes his Journalls of Two Voyages…, p.168.

  90 See Patterson, ‘Pendulums of Wren and Hooke’, pp.302–5.

  91 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 7, pp.323–4. Bruce’s response to receiving his own complimentary copy of Huygens’s Horologium Oscillatorium was similarly critical. See Leopold, ‘Clockmaking in Britain and the Netherlands’, p.41.

  11: Science Under the Microscope

  1 I am extremely grateful to Dr Jan Broadway for this reference.

  2 On the history of discovery and development of the microscope in the Netherlands see E.C. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and S. Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).

  3 It received the imprimatur of the Royal Society on 23 November 1664.

  4 For a fuller version of this episode see L. Jardine, ‘Robert Hooke: A reputation restored’, in M. Cooper et al. (eds), Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies (Ashgate, 2006), pp.247–58.

  5 13 February 1665. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.236.

  6 Ibid., p.245.

  7 On Huygens’s annotations of his copy see M. Barth, ‘Huygens at work: Annotations in his rediscovered personal copy of Hooke’s “Micrographia�
��’, Annals of Science 52 (1995), 601–13.

  8 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.240.

  9 See the letter of thanks sent by Auzout to Sir Constantijn Huygens. I accept McKeon’s redating of this letter: R.K. McKeon, Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision et Oeuvre d’Adrien Auzout (2 fascicules), Thèse présentée pour le Doctorat du Troisième Cycle (Paris, 1965).

  10 5 June 1665 (n.s.). Huygens archive, Leiden.

  11 Auzout proposed setting up the Observatory in the dedicatory letter to Louis XIV which prefaced his L’Ephéméride du comète de 1664 (1665).

  12 Hooke, Micrographia, fol. e1v.

  13 Such a printed report is equivalent, in the period, to a priority claim, preceding an application for patent.

  14 A. Auzout, Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé Charles, sur la Ragguaglio di nuove Osservationi da Giuseppe Campani (Paris, 1665). Campani’s book was reviewed in the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions in London in March 1665.

  15 Auzout and the Royal Society (i.e. Oldenburg) had been corresponding since early January 1665, following the publication of Auzout’s L’Ephéméride du comète. See A.R. and M.B. Hall (eds and trans.), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 volumes: vols 1–9 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–73); vols 10–11 (London: Mansell, 1975–76); vols 12–13 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1986) 2, pp.341; pp.359–68. The Journal des sçavans began publication in January 1665, but ceased after three months. It began again in January 1666. Thus Auzout’s published letters may well have been intended for publication in the Journal, where indeed a review of the Campani (probably by Auzout) was eventually published in January 1666.

  16 See Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, pp.383–410.

  17 Ibid., p.384. See also Preface fol. b1r.

  18 Ibid., p.420.

  19 Ibid., p.429.

  20 M. Hunter, A. Clericuzio, and L.M. Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001) 2, p.387.

  21 Moray also explained to Huygens that Hooke was having to put a lot of effort into preparing the lectures he had undertaken under the sponsorship of Sir John Cutler. So Cutler (another who dogged Hooke’s career, and caused him long-running difficulties) is already involved in this episode.

  22 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.213.

  23 Huygens had already made a note to himself to make the iron circle a modification in his own machine six months earlier.

  24 13 September 1664 (Huygens archive, Leiden). In October 1665 Moray (in Oxford) reported to Huygens that Oldenburg had informed him by letter that trials were revealing further problems (Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, pp.503–6).

  25 For the intimate (indeed, passionately affective) tone of these letters, at least in the early days of the correspondence, see the first letter sent by Moray, 31 May 1661 (Huygens archive, Leiden; also transcribed in Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes).

  26 This is confirmed by the fact that on 2 November 1664 Hooke was admonished to ‘endeavour to have his new instrument for grinding optic-glasses ready against the next meeting’ (T. Birch, A History of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, from its first Rise, 4 vols (London, 1756) 1, p.483).

  27 McKeon, Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision 2, pp.209–10.

  28 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.156. See McKeon 1965 2, pp.111–12.

  29 This interest in Campani’s techniques for making high-accuracy telescopes formed part of a larger debate about the Copernican theory of planetary motion, and the Inquisition’s attitude towards it. See for instance the review of Auzout’s Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé Charles (Paris, 1665) in the Journal des sçavans of 11 January 1666.

  30 See McKeon, Établissement de l’Astronome de Précision 2, p.211.

  31 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.174, 25 December 1664. McKeon 1965 2, p.112.

  32 Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.198, minute of a letter dated 15 January 1665.

  33 On 2 January 1665 Huygens wrote to Moray impatiently asking for more information about Hooke’s working model of the lathe. He described how, in his own trials, he did better by keeping the circle fixed. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.186. See also ibid., p.346, and Oeuvres Complètes 22, pp.82–4.

  34 This was not the only ‘leak’ of Hooke’s lens-grinding machine. See Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.306.

  35 Ibid., pp.441–2.

  36 Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, p.493.

  37 During the early months of the plague exchange of letters between London and the rest of England was hampered by anxieties over infection.

  38 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.529.

  39 Ibid., p.538.

  40 Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, pp.610–11.

  41 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.474. The original is bound in the back of a copy of A. Auzout, Réponse de Monsieur Hook aux considerations de M. Auzout. Contenue dans vne lettre écrite à l’auteur des Philosophical Transactions, et quelques lettres écrites de part & d’autre sur le sujet des grandes lunetes. Traduite d’anglois (Paris, 1665), in the BL.

  42 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.516 (author’s translation).

  43 Ibid., pp.447, 448, 452–3.

  44 The Halls’ annotations to the letters in the Oldenburg Correspondence treat Hooke’s contribution consistently as if it were an ill-conceived and botched project, and as if Auzout were self-evidently correct in all his criticisms.

  45 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.83. Wren’s position was presumably not helped by the fact that he had recently had to concede Huygens’s superior talent as an observational and theoretical astronomer, when Huygens’s model for the rings of Saturn was demonstrably more plausible than the one Wren had himself come up with.

  46 See Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, p.544, Boyle to Oldenburg, 30 September 1665.

  47 Christiaan Huygens’s father is a key figure in the establishing of his official scientific position in Paris. Several letters show Huygens thanking the King for allowing his father’s intercession on his behalf in the matter of the Académie des sciences appointment, and for lavish gifts for his father from the King, sent in appreciation of his efforts.

  48 Auzout to Oldenburg, 1 July 1665. Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, p.428.

  49 See Hunter, Clericuzio and Principe, The Correspondence of Robert Boyle 2, p.504; p.517.

  50 This was yet another responsibility Hooke had taken over from someone else, this time from Wren, who had given up the job on the excuse that he was about to be sent to France by the King.

  51 i.e. Cutler lectures.

  52 1 August 1665. Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes 5, p.427.

  53 Oldenburg, Correspondence 2, pp.294, 297.

  54 My own view is that this review is by Auzout, though it might be by Justel.

  55 Cit. C.D. Andriesse, Titan kan niet slapen: een biografie van Christiaan Huygens (Amsterdam: Contact, 1993), French trans. D. Losman, Christian Huygens (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p.348.

  56 Huygens to Constantijn Huygens, 30 December 1688, cit. R. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.473.

  57 Cit. Andriesse, Christian Huygens, p.377.

  58 From the diary of Constantijn Huygens, cit. ibid., p.378.

  59 This account is based on Westfall, Never at Rest, Chapter 11. See also Westfall, Never at Rest, p.473.

  60 It was during this period that Hooke and Newton met at Halley’s house, and Hooke failed to get satisfaction once again over his being credited with some part in the inverse square law.

  61 Ibid., pp.378–9.

  62 From the diary of Christiaan Huygens, cit. Andriesse, Christian Huygens, p.380.

  63 Westfall, Never at Rest, p.480.

  64 Some scholars maintain that these discussions took place at Hampton Court. The two men were, however, both in London for several months, and had ample opportunity to seek ou
t each other’s company.

  65 Westfall, Never at Rest, p.488.

  66 Ibid., p.496.

  67 Christiaan Huygens died at Hofwijk in 1695.

  68 Wren also found himself largely out of favour, though his ongoing architectural projects, and his usefulness to Queen Mary in her many rebuilding projects, sustained his public position until her death.

  69 Hooke was by now no longer being remunerated as Curator of Experiments, though he continued to appear at meetings, lecture and lead discussions of experiments. It was probably about this time that a letter – evidently orchestrated by Hooke – was sent to Halley as Clerk of the Royal Society, urging him to take Hooke on once more in a salaried position. This letter is reproduced in J.B. Nichols, Illustrating the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1822) 4, pp.66–7.

  70 Westfall, Never at Rest, pp.174–5.

  71 See Newton to Oldenburg, 19 March 1672, cit. Westfall, Never at Rest, p.245.

  72 Newton to Oldenburg, 21 December 1675, cit. ibid., p.273.

  73 Cit. A.R. Hall, ‘Two unpublished lectures of Robert Hooke’, Isis 42 (1951), 220.

  74 Ibid.

  75 Ibid., p.222.

  76 Ibid., p.224.

  77 Ibid., p.220.

  78 For Newton’s detailed marginal annotations in his copy of Micrographia, see G. Keynes, A Bibliography of Robert Hooke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966), pp.97–108.

  79 Jardine, Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Chapter 8.

  80 See Andriesse, Huygens, pp.203–13.

  81 Cit. ibid., p.210.

  82 This account is based on R.S. Wilkinson, ‘John Winthrop, Jr., and America’s first telescopes’, New England Quarterly 35 (1962), 520–3, and J.W. Streeter, ‘John Winthrop, Junior, and the fifth satellite of Jupiter’, Isis 39 (1948), 159–63.

  83 See below, Chapter 12.

  84 Cit. Streeter, ‘John Winthrop’, p.161.

  12: Anglo–Dutch Influence Abroad

  1 T. Sprat, The history of the Royal-Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge (London, 1667), pp.88–9.

  2 On the early history of New Netherland see J. Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), and J. Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Albany and Hilversum: State of New York University Press and Verloren, 2003). For a thoroughly readable general book see R. Shorto, The Island at the Centre of the World: The Untold Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Founding of New York (New York: Doubleday, 2004).