If persistence through time can create harmony and charity, then the church of St. Bride’s-only a few yards from Fountain Court-has some claim to good fortune. A prehistoric ritual site, as well as evidence of a Roman temple and wooden Saxon church, have been found within its grounds. So the various forms of divinity have been venerated on one spot for many thousands of years. London is blessed as well as cursed.
CHAPTER 54
Knowledge Is Power
There was, in the city, another way of opening the gate of heaven. The pursuit of knowledge has always been one of the city’s defining characteristics, even though it may take unfamiliar forms. In the reign of Edward III a man was taken “practising with a dead man’s head, and brought to the bar at the King’s Bench, where, after abjuration of his art, his trinkets were taken from him, carried to Tothill, and burned before his face.” During the reign of Richard I one Raulf Wigtoft, chaplain to the archbishop of York, “had provided a girdle and ring, cunningly intoxicated, wherewith he meant to have destroyed Simon [the dean of York] and others, but his messenger was intercepted, and his girdle and ring burned at this place before the people.” “This place” was again Tothill which is supposed to have been the site of druid worship; the tools of conjurors and alchemists were no doubt traditionally destroyed here because it was considered an area of more powerful magic.
But in London it is impossible to distinguish magic from other versions of intellectual and mechanical aptitude. Dr. Dee, the great Elizabeth magus of Mortlake, for example, was an engineer and a geographer as well as an alchemist. In 1312, Raymond Lully, attracted by its scientific reputation, came to London, where he practised alchemy both in Westminster Abbey and the Tower. The magician Cornelius Agrippa arrived in the city at the end of the fifteenth century, in order to associate with the great divines and philosophers of the period; he struck up a particular friendship with John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of St. Paul’s school, who had become interested in magic during his Italian travels. An alchemist named Hugh Draper was imprisoned within the Salt Tower of the Tower of London for sorcery and magic; he inscribed upon his cell wall a great horoscope, which he dated on 30 May 1561, and then added that he had “MADE THIS SPHEER” with his own hands.
By chance, or coincidence, many astrologers came to inhabit Lambeth. The name itself, however, may have drawn them. Beth-el was in Hebrew the name for a sacred place, here fortuitously connected with the Lamb of God. At Tradescant’s house in south Lambeth dwelled Elias Ashmole, who convinced John Aubrey of the powers of astrology. The interment of Simon Forman, the great Elizabethan magus, is entered within the Lambeth parish registers. Lully stated that Forman wrote in a book, found among his possessions, “this I made the devil write with his own hand in Lambeth Fields, 1569, in June or July, as I now remember.” Captain Bubb, who was a contemporary of Forman, dwelled in Lambeth Marsh where he “resolved horary questions astrologically,” a pursuit which led him eventually to the pillory. At the north-east corner of Calcott Alley, in Lambeth, lived Francis Moore, an astrologer and physician, who has now entered the realm of the immortals as the author of the almanac which bears his name. In Lambeth there were many rare devices. In the collection of Tradescant, later to become a museum in the area, were gathered salamanders and “Easter egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem,” dragons two inches long and two feathers from a phoenix, a piece of stone from the tomb of John the Baptist and “Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo. Oglander,” a white blackbird and “halfe a hasle-nut with seventy pieces of household stuffe in it.” Those were once the sights of Lambeth.
The close associations between alchemy and the beginnings of science were also present in the very heart of London. When Newton came up to the city in order to purchase the material for his researches, he took the coach to the Swan Tavern in Grays Inn Lane before walking or riding to Little Britain. Here, through a bookseller called William Cooper, he bought such texts of alchemical knowledge as Zetner’s Theatrum Chemicum, and Ripley Reviv’d by the London alchemist George Starkey. In the process, Newton became acquainted with a secret group of London magicians and astrologers. Many of the original founders of the Royal Society, which in later days was explicitly associated with “modern” scientific research and knowledge, were in fact part of the “Invisible College” of adepts who practised alchemy as well as mechanical philosophy. They were part of that tradition adumbrated by John Dee which saw no necessary disparity between the various forms of occult and experimental understanding. Samuel Hartlib was the prime mover among a group of London experimenters who wished to marry rationality and system with alchemy in order to create a practical magic; among his friends and supporters were Robert Boyle, Kenelm Digby and Isaac Newton himself. They corresponded by means of codenames, and used pseudonyms in the publication of their work; that of Newton was “Jeova Sanctus Unus.”
Yet there emerged out of this a society which was, in the words of Macaulay, “destined to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms.” The Royal Society held its first meetings in Gresham House in Bishopsgate before removing to Crane Court off Fleet Street and beside Fetter Lane; on the nights upon which the members met, a lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court from Fleet Street. The pragmatism and energy of their consultations are evident in some of their earliest labours-“to promote inoculation … electrical experiments on fourteen miles of wire near Shooters Hill … ventilation apropos of gaol feaver … discussion on Cavendish’s improved thermometers.” Not all the experimenters were of London, and not all of them lived in London, but the city became the chief centre of that empirical philosophy and practical experiment which developed out of alchemical research. The pragmatic spirit of London science must be emphasised in all these varied and various areas; it is the spirit that has pervaded its learning ever since.
There were experiments in agriculture and in horticulture; medicine “became an experimental and progressive science,” and the example of the pestilence of 1665 led the members of the society to examine “the defective architecture, draining and ventilation of the capital.” Sir William Petty created the science of political arithmetic, so that we might plausibly suggest London as the nurse of statistical enquiry. It was another form of understanding, and controlling, the population. Yet in a city of commerce the introduction of statistics also had a financial advantage; the Board of Customs in 1696 represented to the Treasury “the need they felt to collect certain basic material if they were able ‘to make a balance of the trade between this Kingdom and any part of the world.’” Newton himself spent many of his latter years as Warden of the Mint, in which capacity he refined and ordered the currency of the kingdom. He brought to the manufacture of coin all the precision and thoroughness of his experimental work, thus creating the scientific economy which exists still. In turn he became the prosecutor of anyone who defied his inexorable laws, despatching to the gallows all who clipped the coins or counterfeited the currency. Science, in London, truly was power.
In the fields of induction and mathematical demonstration, both relying upon a close observation of particulars, the London genius was most successful. John Wallis “placed the whole system of statics on a new foundation,” again according to Macaulay, while Edmond Halley investigated the principles of magnetism and the flow of the sea. So from Crane Court in the city issued lines of thought which connected the earth to the sea and the sky. It may seem fanciful to suggest that any one city can affect the cast of thought, or the science, of its inhabitants but Voltaire himself announced that “A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, in natural science as in everything else … In Paris they see the universe as composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London they see nothing of the kind … For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes. Your chemist performs all its operations with acids, alkalis and subtle matters.” Once more the theoretical spirit of Parisian enquiry is implicitly opposed to the practical bent of London science. “Where finds philosophy her eagle eye?” Cowper wrote, and then answered his own question: