Gunpowder and Geometry Read online

  But mathematics never lent itself to that kind of performance. If a paper was dense with algebra, if it needed its geometrical diagrams in order to be understood, or if – worse yet – it was actually about mathematics rather than its practical uses, there were real difficulties. Even the most skilful reader could scarcely make such things readily comprehensible, and not all Fellows were remotely interested in any case. Some Fellows persisted in sending mathematical papers to the Royal Society, but it was increasingly felt that by doing so they were causing a problem, breaking the rules of a world that was still to some degree about ‘polite’ discussion of accessible topics.

  And Banks made no secret of his personal dislike for the subject. In public he used what a follower of Hutton’s called ‘waspish and petulant expressions’ whenever mathematical papers were read; in private he reckoned mathematics a mere tool, and one whose injudicious use obscured matters. Of a book about electricity he complained that the author had ‘done little but apply Conic Sections infinite series & Fluxions to explain the laws of Electricity which I look upon in the same light as driving it like a Fox into an Earth from whence our electricians will never be able to dig it’.

  If all that were not enough to damn Hutton, he was also, of course, strongly connected with Banks’s predecessor Sir John Pringle. Naturally Banks wanted to consolidate his own power at the Royal Society by replacing Pringle’s men with his own wherever it was decent to do so. Banks’s own were most usually aristocrats (Banks himself became a baronet in 1781) and gentry, and had fashionable interests such as natural history, horticulture, agriculture, antiquarianism. He was a skilled manager of those constituencies, and he could little afford places on the Council of the Royal Society for someone who was a member of none of them.

  Furthermore, Pringle’s circle had become politically suspect. During the 1770s Pringle had vocally supported Benjamin Franklin, then in England, in a dispute about the best shape for lightning conductors; it had become a public issue when the Board of Ordnance asked the Royal Society’s advice on the subject, needing to protect its gunpowder stores from lightning damage. Pringle and Franklin were opposed by a number of influential Fellows of the Royal Society, who thought their advice wrong and dangerous. For political reasons, Franklin had ceased to be an acceptable figure in Britain by the end of the decade, and it was rumoured Pringle’s resignation as president had been called for by the King as a result. Hutton was unavoidably tarred with this brush; many of his own friends were radicals, nonconformists or both, and to make his whiff of radicalism worse he certainly had some personal sympathy for the cause of American liberty.

  So things were against Hutton from the start, and although the detailed balance between these factors is now lost to us, it’s certain that by the end of two years on Council Banks had had enough of him. It became clear, indeed, that he felt Hutton should never have been elected to fellowship. At the end of 1780 Hutton’s name was omitted from the house slate for the new Council. Nearly half the twenty-one or so members of Council were new each year, so his two-year stint was not exceptionally short. But it was a clear signal that he no longer enjoyed the kind of favour that had brought him into the Society, its dining club and its Council during the 1770s.

  Banks expressed his irritation in some ways that seem rather puerile. During 1781 the Royal Society put together a printed list of its members. It decided that members’ titles would be included, but in August the Council intervened specifically to rule that Hutton should not be styled ‘professor’ in the list. No other Fellow was singled out for comparable attention. Hutton spotted the clumsy slight when the list was printed and – perhaps unwisely – fought it, producing his warrant from Woolwich and obtaining an undertaking to style him ‘professor’ in future lists.

  Banks’s next move was to interfere with the terms of the foreign secretaryship. Early in 1782 he represented to Council that foreign correspondence was not being dealt with adequately, and stated or implied that this was Hutton’s fault. After deliberation Council agreed to alter the written instructions for the foreign secretary, striking out the matter of translations and insisting that he should now handle only the foreign correspondence proper, such as it was. Hutton and his friends reckoned this was a demotion, another deliberate slight and perhaps one aimed at provoking him to resign. He had enjoyed the translation work, he was sorry to be deprived of it and reckoned it a waste of money to contract it out as was being proposed. And he had little enthusiasm for answering the Society’s (very few) foreign letters. He hesitated, demanding a written copy of his new instructions and stalling for some months before agreeing to continue in his post.

  There were admittedly two sides to this. As others saw it, the change was more like a promotion. It took Hutton away from laborious and unglamorous translation work and gave him direct contact with a wide range of distinguished foreigners. Completing and sending pre-printed forms of thanks for books received need not be the whole story. There were occasions when a few well-turned phrases in Latin or French from Hutton himself might be appropriate: might even be necessary, if offence was to be avoided. Such excursions in international politesse could have done Hutton himself a great deal of good.

  So it’s possible this was meant not as a slight but as an olive branch: a chance in Banks’s eyes for Hutton to redeem himself, and potentially a valuable gift to an ambitious young networker.

  Hutton refused to see it that way. He was up to the task: polite he could do, even obsequious, and if his written French wasn’t the most accurate he was reasonably au fait with the set phrases of epistolary politeness. Help could easily have been found had he felt he needed it. But instead, he complied stolidly, minimally with his new written instructions, sending the routine forms of thanks and occasionally conferring with the other secretaries about specific items. He used no initiative and penned no personal notes. More complex letters were rare: the records of the Royal Society show that in the 1780s it received perhaps three or four foreign letters a year. Hutton worked on some of them, translating extracts and writing a couple of replies; others were taken away and dealt with by the main secretaries or sometimes by other Fellows who happened to know the correspondents. His performance as foreign secretary attracted no further comment at Council for a year and a half.

  He and Banks meanwhile continued in something of a stand-off. Although he was beginning to find his visits to the city tiresome, Hutton continued to attend every second meeting of the Society – keeping his rooms in Clement’s Inn in order to do so – and he regularly checked the Society’s letters book for anything he needed to deal with. But he and Banks never spoke to each other at the meetings, and Hutton never went to Banks’s home in Soho Square: neither to the ‘breakfasts’ hosted there every Thursday nor to wait on him privately. Banks, for his part, made no overtures either.

  Hutton was not the only one who found Joseph Banks a problematic figure at this time. The president was developing a habit of interfering in the election of new Fellows to the Society; on several occasions he declared himself opposed to particular candidates, and he sometimes pressured individuals to blackball candidates of whom he disapproved. His reasons were ultimately to do with the different constituencies that were the bases of his own power, and the various networks of which he rightly or wrongly disapproved. In his world there was room in the Royal Society for both the patrons and the working men of science, but there was none for mathematicians, schoolmasters or commercial authors, bringing with them as they did the taint of interested motives and, often, of radical politics.

  Early in 1781, for instance, Banks blocked the election of Henry Clarke, a Manchester mathematics teacher who had the support of both Maskelyne and Hutton. Others he blocked were likewise provincial schoolmasters, country doctors and the like. Some felt Banks was abusing his power, and it began to be said – in a memorable but unfair simplification of his complex set of agendas – that Banks wished ‘to make great Men Fellows, instead of wise Men’. Maty, as secr
etary, was particularly troubled and seems to have come in for more than his share of bullying by Banks over this matter of elections.

  There were other kinds of conduct from the president that some found overbearing. As well as in elections, he was throwing his weight about in the selection of papers for reading at meetings and printing in the Transactions; he got involved in a silly dispute about the reorganisation of the Society’s books, over the head of the official librarian, and wasted money – as some thought – on fine new furniture for important visitors and on the framing of pictures. Little things, but they added up to a strong sense among some of the most active members of the Royal Society that Banks was the wrong man for a difficult job.

  Ultimately this tangle was not so much the fault of Banks as a consequence of the structure of the Royal Society. It was – by history and by convention – not a learned academy on the European model, but a gentlemen’s club. Most of its members were gentlemen with a passive interest in natural philosophy – or at least a vague feeling of goodwill towards it – and most attended few meetings. A minority were actively engaged; and their needs, wishes and views were very different. In a sense, then, he was the president of two different societies, with different memberships and different agendas. The Society being in constant need of both money and social prestige, Banks can hardly be blamed for sometimes favouring rank over intellectual worth, for not always doing what the more active members would have preferred. Yet as president he was also obliged to preside over the weekly meetings, at which the active members preponderated. It was a situation that required a more delicate hand than Banks possessed.

  The catastrophe came towards the end of 1783, when the American war was ending and, in Britain, one of the great political upheavals of the century was taking place. Charles Hutton’s supporter Sir John Pringle had died the previous year. After years of unconcealed dislike, Banks at last moved decisively against Hutton.

  In November, Banks once again told Council there was a problem with Hutton’s work as foreign secretary. He didn’t say quite what it was, relying – he hoped – on Council’s willingness to dismiss Hutton at his word. But Hutton had one friend who was still a member of Council. Nevil Maskelyne protested – as did Paul Henry Maty – and the proposed measure was softened. Instead of sacking him outright, Council ruled that the foreign secretary should be required to reside in London. Since Hutton’s position at Woolwich required him to live outside the city, the effect was much the same.

  Days later he duly presented his resignation. Not to Council, though, but to a full meeting of the Royal Society.

  Understanding, Sir, that the circumstance of my residence, for a great part of my time, at the distance of nine miles from town, has occasioned, or has been imagined to have occasioned, some difficulty or inconveniences, I therefore beg leave to return thanks for all favours, and to give notice that I wish to resign that office.

  It was news to some Fellows that there was such a role as foreign secretary, and news to most that Charles Hutton had been under-performing in it. There was no immediate comment, but Hutton’s bearing seems to have struck the room favourably and there was perhaps already a hint of battle in the air.

  St Andrew’s Day came round, and by old custom the Society voted for its new Council the following day. The house slate was voted in without demur, and Maskelyne was not on it. Excuses could be found – Banks wished him to spend more time on a book he was supposed to be working on – but it took little imagination to think he was being punished for his attempt to support Hutton at Council.

  At the next meeting Banks’s opponents acted. Edward Poore, an otherwise obscure Fellow of the Society, moved thanks to Hutton for his work as foreign secretary. Seconded by Maty, he carried his motion, though the president and his friends were against it. The incident rattled Banks – as it should have – and the new Council met in a hasty session to reconfirm the decision about where foreign secretaries should live. Banks let slip a little more information about what Hutton was supposed to have done wrong. Certain letters, he said, had been found unanswered, and a protest received from one foreigner who had been sent the mere printed form of thanks.

  Hutton now supplied Council with a written defence of his conduct, in which he said he had followed all the written and verbal instructions he had received and pointed out that neither the president nor anyone else had ever drawn his attention to specific letters needing to be answered. It did him no good at Council, but at the next meeting of the Society the mathematician Samuel Horsley successfully moved that it be read out, and the consequence was another motion – passed by a clear majority – that Hutton had ‘fully justified himself’. The meeting made no demand that he be reinstated, but the Society had administered an unmistakable slap to its president, and that in front of an unusually large number of guests (fifty-eight), perhaps drawn by the rumour of war. The mood was uncomfortable, Banks’s situation excruciating. Had someone proposed a no-confidence motion on the spot, there was every chance Banks could have been unseated as president.

  But there was no such decisive action. Instead Horsley took the floor again. Archdeacon of St Albans as well as editor of the works of Newton, he was a celebrated pulpit orator but showed at the Royal Society an unfortunate tendency to lose control of his manner. On this occasion he kept his accusations against Banks vague. He mentioned presidential interference in elections and in the selection of papers for reading at meetings. He claimed that enough presidential wrongdoing had occurred to keep the Society in discussion all winter. And with that alarming thought, the Royal Society closed for Christmas.

  Already the row – since row there was clearly to be – had largely ceased to be about Charles Hutton and the Society’s foreign correspondence, and had come to be about other matters, notably Banks’s general fitness to continue as president. Most who knew Hutton, indeed, thought him amiable and able, and very few knew or cared about the Society’s meagre correspondence with nations with which Britain had until very recently been at war.

  The Christmas break saw furious activity. Banks’s friends assembled an impressive party of supporters. Banks himself was confident of riding out the storm Horsley had raised; but he overcame an initial distaste for canvassing and held a private meeting of about fifty sympathetic Fellows on New Year’s Day. There, further information about Hutton’s alleged neglect of specific letters was released; an extract from the letter of complaint, from the Geneva-based naturalist Charles Bonnet, was read out. Many of those present undertook to support two motions Banks’s friends would propose at the next full meeting of the Society. To ensure a good turnout from the kind of patrons who were generally absent from the weekly meetings, Banks sent an engraved card to every Fellow requesting attendance since ‘it is probable that Questions will be agitated on which the opinion of the society at large ought to be taken’.

  Hutton’s friends did less. They began a series of letters to two of the London newspapers setting out their side of the story, but the publicity would do them little good in the long run. They had little success in recruiting support from those who didn’t normally attend the Society’s meetings.

  The first of those meetings in 1784 was chaotic. It lasted well over three hours, and saw the rowdiest scenes the Royal Society has ever known. The Society’s old meeting room at Somerset House is one of those panelled places that echoes loudly even to footsteps. A good shout raises quite a din, and if several shouted at once the result would be appalling.

  The house was visibly packed with Banks’s supporters, and no scientific business was done at all; no papers were read. Instead, the Fellows debated a carefully worded motion in support of their president. There were lengthy speeches on both sides. Horsley in particular tried to urge the Fellows to hear the case against Banks before they voted their approval of him. He even tried to name and discuss the candidates Banks had blocked from election. Despite what a later writer called ‘a style of eloquence scarcely to be surpassed’ he was shouted down
, Banks’s friends ‘riotously clattering with their sticks’. Banks ‘took not the least pains to procure silence, and restore order to the debate’. Well-informed observers reckoned Horsley’s devotion to the good of the Society was sincere, but his offensive manner may well have done his cause more harm than good. Rumour also said his party aimed not just at ousting Banks but at putting some specific individual in the chair: some said Horsley himself, others Lord Mahon (author, as it happens, of the book on electricity of which Banks disapproved). The hint that personal ambition was involved helped the rebels’ cause not a bit.

  When it was finally put to the ballot around eleven o’clock, the approval of Banks was carried by a large majority (119 to 42). In a sense all this proved was that Banks had brought in a hundred or so of his supporters for the occasion (and that Horsley hadn’t). In a normal meeting the group who had voted against Banks would have been a majority.

  Right at the end of the meeting a second motion was carried without contest, Horsley’s party presumably feeling that there was nothing to be gained from further shouting in front of an obviously packed house. This was a measure to require two meetings’ notice of any motions for discussion in the future. It sounds like a detail, but it was probably Banks’s shrewdest move in the whole affair; it would give him two weeks to summon his supporters to any future meeting when his presidency would be threatened.

  What followed was rather like aftermath, since the anti-Banks party could now only hope that Banks’s supporters would tire of turning up to meetings for the purpose of voting with him. They didn’t.