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Carving out science in Elizabethan London
The Jewel House; Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.
By Deborah E Harkness. Yale University Press £19.99
THE best viewing platform to see a contemporary Tower of Babel from the temples of Mammon is outside Tate Modern. The City of London lies across the Thames, where we are told the wealth of Britain is generated. From there comes the money – the lubricant which allows us to spend and forget the consequences.
Deborah Harkness, an American academic, looks across the river at 16th-century London bounded by St Paul’s, Gresham College, The Royal Exchange, the Tower of London, and left along the South Bank, the Globe Theatre – a very different London where the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and provocative ideas flourish.
The Jewel House is packed with detail, centring on two main 16th-century characters, both middle-aged lawyers: Hugh Plat and the magisterial Francis Bacon. Plat wrote the Jewel House of Art and Nature where a reader “could learn how to preserve food, build a bridge, smelt metal and even make toothpaste”.
Francis Bacon’s Salomon’s House, described in his New Atlantis, was a hymn to scientific development – almost a socialist utopia. Bacon, who went to Trinity College Cambridge at 12 and graduated at 15, was the trailblazer for the Royal Society – encouraged by his uncle, William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s most trusted confidant.
People collected objects – everything from fossils to shark’s teeth. They gobbled up information. This was a time of new technology as well as antiquities and novel artefacts, clocks, dials and abacus.
Antwerp – a great merchant port – and London were in constant and eager touch exchanging information, watched with green-eyed jealousy by the College of Physicians and the Barbers and Surgeons’ Company.
John Gerard of Holborn was the father of English botany, while Humfrey Baker can claim to be the parent of that perfidious science, accountancy. London was the third university (after Oxford and Cambridge) where theory and practice coexisted.
The Virgin Queen Elizabeth, aided by Cecil, began rationalising the essential new law with Letters Patent. She wrote of “learned intervention for the good of the Commonwealth”. She meant more pounds in her swelling bank account.
Cures for syphilis and the pursuit of alchemy – the elusive formula for gold – went hand in hand. Even the art of distilling came from scholarly prisoners – some looking for the elixir of life. It was a tumultuous time where the most used Latin word was “gre”, our word for it is to query or question.
The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm summed it all up: “The science of Elizabethan England was the work of merchants and craftsmen, not of dons, carved out in London not in Oxford or Cambridge” – a view Harkness endorses.
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