CHAPTER XIV. The Restoration and the Royal Society

THE RESTORATION AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY

“Thence to Whitehall; where, in the Duke’s chamber, the King come and stayed an hour or two laughing at Sir W. Petty, who was there about his boate, and at Gresham College in general; at which poor Petty was, I perceive, at some loss, but did argue discreetly, and bear the unreasonable follies of the King’s objections and other bystanders with great discretion; and offered to take oddes against the King’s best boates, but the King would not lay, but cried him down with words only. Gresham College he mightily laughed at, for spending time in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.”—PEPYS’S Diary, February 1, 1664.

“Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last, The barren wilderness he past, Did on the very border stand Of the blest promis’d Land, And from the Mountains-top of his Exalted Wit Saw it himself and shew’d us it. But life did never to one man allow Time to discover Worlds and Conquer too: ... For who on things remote can fix his sight That’s always in a Triumph or a Fight?”

Lines to the Royal Society, by ABRAHAM COWLEY.

(Prefixed to the History of the Royal Society of London, by THOS. SPRAT, 1667.)

Two of the Boyle brothers were among the recipients of King’s Honours at the Restoration: the old Earl would have been proud of his sons. “Dear Broghill,” who, with each shake of the political kaleidoscope, showed himself like a bright central bit of glass, about which the smaller pieces fell together into a new combination,—was created Earl of Orrery, with a brilliant career of soldier-politician and dramatist before him. As President of Munster, and one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, he was to make his headquarters at Charleville, with frequent visits to England. And the sweet-spirited Frank, the boy hero of Liscarrol, became Viscount Shannon, and a Privy Councillor. Not much is known of Frank’s after life, except that he lived and brought up his family on his Irish estate at Shannon Park. He seems, following the example set by his literary brothers, to have ventured, at least once, into print. His wife, the “black Betty” of the letters, is better known to posterity than her husband, for she is remembered not only as Viscountess Shannon, the mother of Frank’s children, but as the brilliant sister of Tom Killigrew, the wit and profligate, and as the mother of one of Charles II’s natural daughters.

The fortunes of the Royalist elder brother, Lord Cork, who had been diligently nursing the family fortunes through the Protectorate, were now so far reinstated that he was able to do for Charles II what the Great Earl had done for Charles I. He assisted an impecunious king with sums of money; and in recognition of his services he was, in 1663, to be created Earl of Burlington in the English Peerage. Presently, the great town house—Burlington House in Piccadilly—was being built, next door to the Lord Chancellor’s. The families of Cork and Clarendon were to be further united by the marriage of Lord Clarendon’s son and Lord Burlington’s daughter; and another daughter was to marry Lord Hinchinbroke, son of the Earl of Sandwich, who, as Admiral of the Fleet (with Pepys as his secretary), had brought Charles back from The Hague. The prosperous and good-natured Earl of Burlington, treading softly with his compeers in the Matted Gallery at Whitehall, or making one of the group of courtiers about my Lord Duke in his Chamber, was of all the Cork family the likest to the great Earl in his ingenuous love of comfort and display. He thoroughly enjoyed his position as head of the family. It is told of him that, sailing down the Thames in some gay barge-load of noble company, he would never forget to raise his hat when he came in sight of Deptford Church. “Have I not reason?” he would say; and he would tell how there, in Deptford Church, little Hodge, the first-born, lay buried, and how by this child’s death, so many years before, he, Richard Boyle, the second son, had come to be Earl of Cork. Lady Ranelagh, back from Ireland, had her reservations about the luxurious living at “my brother Corke’s.” “Alas!” she wrote to Robert Boyle, not long before the Restoration, “the Entertainment of Lords, Ladies, and Reasonable Creatures are yet several things, to the great grief of your K. R.”

But the Earl and his Countess had always been popular people. After the Restoration, when their daughter Anne married young Lord Hinchinbroke, the Earl of Sandwich’s son, Lady Sandwich’s gratification in this alliance knew no bounds: “They are very good condition, wise and chearfull people,” she wrote just after the wedding. “She” (the bride) “hath a very fine free kind way of writing soe have they all, something Mr. Boiles styll.” And poor Pepys, much hurt by not having received “a favour” after the Hinchinbroke wedding, was mollified when he met my Lord of Burlington at Whitehall; for Lord Burlington, “first by hearing the Duke of York call me by my name did come to me and with great respect take notice of me and my relation to my Lord Sandwich, and express great kindness to me.” And not long after this little interview Pepys was at Burlington House, burning his periwig in the candle out of sheer nervousness. Little wonder; for he had just seen for the first time and saluted my Lady Burlington—the Lady Dungarvan of the old Dublin days, for whom the plums on the Lismore plum tree had been kept when she was expecting her first baby. “A very fine-speaking lady, and a good woman,” says Pepys; “but old and not handsome, but a brave woman.” He was to see more of her daughter, young Lady Hinchinbroke. “I cannot say she is a beauty, nor ugly,” wrote the truthful Pepys; but he had saluted her too, and she had been “mighty civil” on the occasion; a very good-humoured young niece, this of Robert Boyle’s, “a lover of books and pictures and of good understanding.” In honour of the young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys ventured on a little dinner-party, which Pepys had “much in his head” till it was successfully over, and for which he purchased his new “pewter sesterne.” The dinner was good and plentiful, and the company mighty merry. “Most of the discourse,” Pepys adds naïvely, “was of my Lord Sandwich and his family, as being all of us of the family.”

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Burlington—Orrery—Shannon. Robert Boyle, in Oxford, was, of all the great Earl’s sons surviving, to remain “Mr. Boyle”—a virtuoso and an “Honourable Person.” He could have been a peer, he could have been a bishop, he could have been Provost of Eton. It is said he repeatedly refused a peerage. He certainly, not long after the Restoration, declined to take Orders with a view to a Bishopric. “He was treated with great civility and respect,” says Birch, “by the King as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” But to Robert Boyle the heirdom of a great family was “but a glittering kind of slavery,” and “titular greatness” seemed to him “an impediment to the knowledge of many retired truths.” He believed that the less he participated in the patrimonies of the Church the more influence he should have in things religious. And besides—as he explained in after years to Bishop Burnet—he had felt “no inward motion to it by the Holy Ghost.” For the same reason he would not be Provost of Eton. How little Sir Henry Wotton, sitting on the bank by Black Pots in the company of Izaak Walton, could have foreseen that the “Spiritay Robyn” would one day be asked to be his successor as Provost of Eton! Robert Boyle had chosen his way of life: he desired to be free to pursue knowledge for the good of mankind in the service of God. He would not fetter himself by tests and oaths; he could not alter his character. He had, as he himself expresses it, “a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.” And so there is no record of him in the Matted Gallery, no glimpse of him in lawn sleeves, or with diamond hatband among the Courtiers, or among the nice critics of the Restoration Drama, who no longer cared for Shakespeare: “I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played,” says Evelyn, “but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesties being so long abroad.” It is extremely doubtful if Robert Boyle ever witnessed a performance of “dear Broghill’s” Mustapha, even when Betterton and Ianthe took the chief parts, and the King and Lady Castlemaine, and “pretty witty Nell” were there to see it.

Glimpses of Robert Boyle there are, however, in those first years of the Restoration. Up to the very end of 1659 he had been living in Oxford, making the journey by coach now and then between Oxford and the London of his tastes. He was busy with his air-pump and his laboratory experiments and the publication of his Seraphick Love, and he was in correspondence with Dick Jones and Henry Oldenberg in Paris, and with Evelyn and Hartlib in London. “Your most noble letter,” writes Hartlib to Boyle at Oxford; but Boyle’s letters of this date to Hartlib do not seem to be extant. Hartlib’s to Boyle were full of all sorts of gossip, home and foreign, and political even more than scientific. For Hartlib, in his old character of universal newsagent, was still able to pick up little bits of information at Westminster and in the City; and he sent Boyle a good deal of gossip about the intrigues and factions of those last months of anarchy under Monk’s dictatorship; about Bradshaw’s death, and the movements of Lambert, Desborough, Fleetwood, Vane, and Monk himself; and the mysterious person of whom he wrote as “C. S.,” over the water. And when “C. S.” was actually back in London and the Restoration was a fait accompli, Robert Boyle and his air-pump were in London also, both to be received with open arms by the Invisibles, and especially by Evelyn and the good Hartlib, now old and ill, and very poor, since his pension under a Commonwealth Government had stopped.

“I went to Chelsey to visit Mr. Boyle,” writes Evelyn, “and see his pneumatic engine perform divers experiments.” And, “To visite Mr. Boyle in Chelsey, and saw divers effects of the Eolipile for weighing aire.”

But, meantime, the weeks and months that followed immediately on the Restoration—weeks and months occupied with the passage of the Indemnity Bill through the Convention Parliament and with the trial of the Regicides—must have been a painful time for Robert Boyle and for his sister Ranelagh. Lord Broghill, Cromwell’s right-hand man in Ireland and in Scotland, was, it is true, safe, and to come off with honours; but some other people—old family friends and political comrades—were not so happily placed. Robert Boyle had held aloof from sectaries and armies, though some of his best friendships had been among the Puritans; but Lady Ranelagh, whose house ever since the early days of the Long Parliament had been a rendezvous of the Parliamentarian Party, and whose personal sympathies and fortunes had been bound up with Cromwell’s Protectorate, must have followed with a heavy heart the deliberations of the Houses which were to determine the fates of many political and personal friends. The Regicides: why, in the last ten years England and Ireland had been governed by Regicides! Some of them, it is true, were beyond reach. Cromwell—chief graves; but there were to be a great many exceptions to the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion. There were those who were to be excepted as actual “Regicides”; and those who were to be excepted as “Non-regicides,” and those classed as “miscellaneous exceptions.” There were men to be excepted “absolutely”—which meant their execution; and men to be excepted “non-capitally,” which meant everything but execution; and men to be excepted “for incapacitation only,” which meant a lifelong obscurity. There were men who had absconded, and men who had remained on the spot; men who had pleaded and extenuated, and men who steadfastly maintained the righteousness of their acts. How was it to fare with all and each of these? What was to be the fate of Richard Cromwell, so lately “his now Highness,” and Henry Cromwell, the broadminded and melancholy young Lord Lieutenant of Ireland—poor Henry, who had been in love with Dorothy Osborne, who was in love with Sir William Temple? And what was to become of Cromwell’s widow—“Old Noll’s wife,” the Londoners called her now: the voice of the people had strangely changed its tone. And the great men of the Party—so many of whom had been among Lady Ranelagh’s personal friends—how was it to fare with Lambert, Ludlow, St. John, Fleetwood, Haselrig, Lenthall, Whitlocke, Vane, Desborough, Pennington, Thurloe, and President Lawrence? Henry Lawrence, the President’s son, had been young Lord Barrymore’s friend ever since they were pupils together with Milton, in the Barbican. And Henry Lawrence was still one of Milton’s disciples—a constant visitor to the garden-house in Petty France. And young Lord Barrymore’s second wife was a Lawrence—Martha Lawrence. How is it possible to unravel the cruel intricacies of civil war? And what would be done with Goodwin and Hugh Peters, and the blind Milton himself, whose Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Defensio were by order of the House—issued within a week or two after the Restoration—to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman?

Hangings, drawings and quarterings were not extraordinary events in those days; but it would be interesting to know how the sentence pronounced on Major-General Harrison—first sentenced of the Regicides—affected so humane and sensitive a man as Robert Boyle. His sister Ranelagh, woman as she was, had more of the old soldier-earl in her composition, and perhaps, like her Elizabethan father, looked upon such a death as an inevitable “cloudy end.”

“... The Court doth award that you ... be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being alive, shall be cut down and ... your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty; and the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”

Was Boyle weighing the air with his Eolipile on October 13 when Pepys set off to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered? “Which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.” But in that hungry crowd Pepys could scarcely have been near enough to hear Harrison’s last words, which sometimes seem to echo in Charing Cross to this day: “He hath covered my head many times in the day of battle. By God I have leaped over a wall; by God I have run through a troop; and by my God I will go through this death, and He will make it easy to me.... Now unto thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit my Spirit....”

Nor could Mr. Pepys have seen Harrison strike out at the hangman half-way through the horrible, bloody work.

Mr. Evelyn did not go out purposely to see any of the executions of the Regicides; but on the 17th he chanced to meet “their quarters, mangl’d and cutt and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows in baskets on the hurdle. O the miraculous Providence of God!”

But what of Milton all this time—the blind Republican, to whom Lady Ranelagh had been more than all kith and kin? Had Boyle and Hartlib ever got from Mr. Milton that prescription they so much wanted?

Milton’s escape from punishment at the Restoration is one of the puzzles of English history. How was it effected—by what combination of political influences—who, in fact, pulled the wires? Parliament has always been very clever in engineering itself, more or less constitutionally, out of its own tight corners; but there has never been a cleverer piece of parliamentary engineering than the way in which Milton was brought off at the Restoration. When, after Cromwell’s death, Lady Ranelagh returned from Ireland to her house in the Mall, Milton was still living, almost a neighbour, in his garden-house in Petty France; still in correspondence with her boy Dick Jones and his tutor Oldenburg, in Paris; still Latin Secretary to the Council, with Andrew Marvell as his loyal assistant; and the uneasy dawn of the New Year 1660 had found him, despondent but undaunted, still fighting hard, by tract-warfare, for a doomed Republic. Milton the Pamphleteer and Lambert the General are to be remembered together as the last two opponents of the Restoration. But in March, after Milton’s printed exhortations to the Council and to Monk himself, the blind secretary had been discharged from his office, and an order issued for the arrest of Milton’s publisher. And on May 7—the very day before Charles II was proclaimed in London—Milton had disappeared from the garden-house in Petty France. Nobody knows what had been done about his children, or whose friendly hand guided the blind man’s steps into his hiding-place. “In the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close”—a narrow passage, entered from West Smithfield under an archway that was very old even in Milton’s day—Milton was to lie concealed for more than three months. His case and Goodwin’s came up together before the House on June 16, and it was ordered that their books were to be called in and burnt, and that the men themselves were to be “forthwith sent for in custody.” But both men were in hiding, and somehow it was August 13 before the two names came up again; and at that moment the Indemnity Bill was hanging in mid-air between the Lords and Commons. Neither of the two men had been found; and though the Proclamation calling in all copies of their books for burning by the hangman was then duly placarded all over London, there was no further order for the arrest of the two men themselves. On August 28 the Indemnity Bill had passed both Houses; on August 29 it had received the King’s assent, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was on the Statute Book, and there was no mention of Milton in it from first to last. Goodwin’s name appeared; he was incapacitated for life for any public trust. But of Milton, the Republican pamphleteer, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, who had done so incalculably much more, nothing—his name had somehow dropped out. Milton was saved—“to the surprise of all people,” says Bishop Burnet.

If Milton had been hanged with the Regicides at Charing Cross, or carted to Tyburn! And more than once during the passage of the Bill it seemed possible that it might be so. As it was, with the passing of this Act of Oblivion, and the emerging of a blind Puritan into the murky sunshine of the old London streets, Milton drops out of the story of Lady Ranelagh and the Boyle family. For a little while after the passing of the Act (his hiding-place having apparently been discovered) he seems to have been detained in custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Perhaps he was safer so. His offending tracts were duly burnt; his regicide comrades were duly hanged, drawn and quartered; and in December Milton was at large. Staunch friends he had had; Andrew Marvell was perhaps bravest and most indefatigable of them all; but it must have required more powerful influence than Marvell’s and Davenant’s to save John Milton. Had Lady Ranelagh done him one more service greater than all before? Had she enlisted the interest of her powerful brother Broghill, and of such Privy Councillors as she knew best—men like Sandwich and Manchester, and Annesley and Morrice, and the old Lord Goring, poor Lettice’s father-in-law, and the young Charles Howard, who had married “Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and was going to be first Earl of Carlisle? Had Lady Ranelagh’s silken strings reached the little private Junto about the King himself—Hyde, and Ormonde, and Southampton? One remembers that Mr. Boyle had been “treated with great civility and respect by the King, as well as by the Earl of Southampton, Lord High Treasurer, and the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of England.” And it is good to think that the Boyle family—perhaps Boyle himself, whose memories went back to the Milton of Comus and Eton, the Milton of the Epitaphium Damonis and the Villa Diodati in Geneva, may have had a hand in saving Milton, the blind Republican,—to write Paradise Lost. But if to any of them, it was certainly to Lady Ranelagh that Milton owed his life and freedom. There is no record of any further visits from Lady Ranelagh to Milton after that date, but it is difficult to believe her friendship for Milton ended with the Restoration. The garden-house in Petty France was to be no more his home: his blind steps turned eastward, to Holborn again, and Jewin Street, and then to Artillery Walk, near Bunhill Fields, where he was to resume and finish his great poem, and where he was to end his days. It is difficult to believe that Lady Ranelagh never again knocked at the blind man’s door; and it must be taken for granted that one day in late August or early September 1667 a presentation-copy of Paradise Lost arrived at the house in Pall Mall.

* * * * *

On a November afternoon—Nov. 28, 1660—the usual little audience of philosophers had assembled to listen to one of Dr. Christopher Wren’s astronomy lectures at Gresham College, in Basinghall Street. Wren, who had been astronomy professor there since 1657, lectured on Wednesday afternoons during Term-time from two to three—and it was a custom for the little company to stay on after the lecture, adjourning to another room for “mutuall converse.” The political disasters of the last year or two had somewhat interrupted the advancement of learning; the soldiers had, in fact, for a time, been quartered in Gresham College. But by the end of November 1660 things were settling down again, and the lectures were going on as usual. At this particular lecture the virtuosi present were Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr. Petty, Mr. Ball, Mr. Rooke, Mr. Wren, and Mr. Hill; and their “mutuall converse” turned on the formation of a scientific society, on a broader basis than had been hitherto attempted—a society “for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall-Experimentall Learning,” to consist of weekly meetings, which were to be held every Wednesday from that date onwards.

This, it must be remembered, was no outcome of the Restoration. It was fifteen years since the Invisibles had begun their meetings, “precluding matters of theology and state affairs,” sometimes at Gresham College, oftener in Dr. Goddard’s house in Wood Street, or at the Bull’s Head Tavern in Cheapside. Robert Boyle at that time had been a boy of eighteen, just back from Geneva, and introduced into the little Hartlib-Durie-Comenius circle to find that the Parliament men were already interested in a scheme of “Verulamian education.” In November 1660 the Invisibles were fifteen years wiser than they had been in 1645. And what a fifteen years it had been! Had there ever been such a fifteen years in English History? Some of them, after the visitation of Oxford, had migrated there, taking posts vacated by Royalists, and forming the Oxford branch of the Invisible Society; and now again these same men, removed at the Restoration from their posts in Oxford University, were turning back to London. It was the old Invisible College of 1645 that was to merge itself in the Royal Society.

So, on that November afternoon 1660, in Gresham College, a new Society was formed. It was arranged that its “original members” were to be those present, with some others then and there proposed as eligible, thirty-nine names being suggested and written down. Among them were John Evelyn, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Seth Ward, Dr. Willis, Dr. Bathurst, Sir Kenelm Digby, Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Mr. William Croone, Mr. Richard Jones, and Henry Oldenburg. Robert Boyle’s influence was already making itself felt. Most of these men were Oxford colleagues, personal friends, and old Invisibles. The last three must have been his special nominations, and two of them were his own kinsmen. Dick Jones, his hopeful nephew, had just returned with Henry Oldenburg from their foreign tour. William Croone, who was nominated in absentia for the post of Registrar of the Society, was presumably a son of the old Earl of Cork’s “Cozen Croone”, the vintner of the King’s Head in Cheapside; because the “Croonian Lecture Fund,” long afterwards bequeathed to the Royal Society by Mr. Croone’s widow, was derived from “one fifth of the clear rent of the King’s Head Tavern in or near old Fish Street, London, at the corner of Lambeth Hill.” This makes William Croone a cousin of Robert Boyle’s; and he was a creditable relative, this heir of old Cozen Croone the vintner, for he was afterwards Doctor of Physic and Gresham Professor of Rhetoric; and the Royal Society owes its Croonian Lecture Fund to his and his widow’s generosity, and to the takings at the old King’s Head in Cheapside.

Other original members—they were afterwards “Fellows”—were added at later meetings. And what a list it was! There was Aubrey of the “Lives,” and Ashmole, of museum celebrity, and Dryden and Waller the poets, and old Haak the originator of the Invisible College, and Robert Hooke, whose services at Oxford Boyle amiably dispensed with so that he might be Curator, and Peter Pett the Naval Commissioner, and Thomas Sprat, the Society’s enthusiastic first biographer, and Governor Winthrop from Connecticut, and Isaac Barrow the scholarly divine, and John Graunt, the “tradesman” who drew up the Bills of Mortality. Peers there were in plenty,—the Duke of Buckingham and the Earls of Devonshire, Northampton, and Sandwich, among them; and Bishops—present and future. Doctors of Physic, of course, and Lawyers of the Temple; Churchmen, Statesmen, Army-men, Navy-men, and City-men. “It is to be noted,” says Sprat, “that they have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life. This they were obliged to do, or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own declarations. For they openly profess not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind.”

Sir Robert Moray, a Scotsman and a favourite at Whitehall, had quickly “brought in word from the Court” that the King approved of the aims of the Society. Moray, who had a laboratory of his own at Whitehall, acted for a time as interim-President, and was certainly the life and soul of the infant Society; and on May 3, 1661—not many days after his coronation, Charles II was shown, through his own great telescope, Saturn’s rings and Jupiter and his satellites. His Majesty became really interested, and began to discourse astronomy as he sat at supper in Whitehall. And a few weeks later—Sir Robert Moray still acting as go-between—the King granted the Society’s petition for a Royal Charter, and was “pleased to offer himselfe to be entered one of the Society.” On July 15, 1662, the Charter of Incorporation passed what Evelyn calls the “Broade Seale.” Lord Brouncker was elected first President and Henry Oldenburg Secretary. The King presented the Society with its mace, on which were emblematically embossed the Crown and Royal Arms, the rose, harp, thistle, and fleur de lys. In April 1663, however, a second and improved Charter passed the Great Seal. The King in this declared himself Founder and Patron; Arms were granted to the Society, and a motto from Horace was chosen—Nullius in Verba. And the Royal Society kept its first anniversary on November 30, 1663, St. Andrew’s Day having been selected partly as nearest to November 28, the day of its first meeting, but also in compliment, it is believed, to Sir Robert Moray, the popular Scotsman who from the very beginning had been one of its most energetic members.

Strange times! It has been rightly said that the foundation of the Royal Society was one of the few creditable events of the Restoration. Exactly a month before the Charter of Incorporation passed the Great Seal, Sir Henry Vane had been beheaded on Tower Hill, “the trumpets brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard”; and little more than a month later came the dreaded St. Bartholomew’s Day, which turned nearly two thousand rectors and vicars—one-fifth of the English clergy—out of their parishes. The doings of “Our Society”, meantime, read like a little oasis in a desert of intolerance. The old Earl of Cork, who had sent his sons to fight the “rebelleows” Presbyterian Scots, and spent the last days of his own life in fighting the rebellious Irish Papists, would have rubbed his eyes if he could have seen his Robyn walking in procession, side by side with the Roman Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby, each wearing a St. Andrew’s Cross pinned into his hat!

“It being St. Andrew’s Day, who was our patron,” says Evelyn complacently, “each fellow wore a St. Andrew’s Crosse of ribbon on the crowne of his hatt. After the election we din’d together, his Majesty sending us venison.”

Some difference of opinion, however, there seems to have been among the philosophers about the choice of their patron saint. Pepys did not care much who the saint was, but he grumbled at having to pay two shillings for the badge. Aubrey once confided to Sir William Petty that he would have preferred St. George, or, failing him, St. Isidore—“a philosopher canonised.”

“No,” said the irrepressible Petty, “I had rather have had it been St. Thomas’s Day, for he would not believe till he had seen and putt his finger into the holes, according to the motto, Nullius in Verba.”