Gunpowder and Geometry Read online

  On 29 January a sly motion to print the names of Copley Medal winners in the Transactions was passed after another lengthy debate: but without a crucial amendment that would have required a list of past winners also to be printed. Hutton and Maskelyne were past winners; that was the point, and advertising their names and achievements at this moment would have embarrassed Banks and his Council, though it would probably have done nothing worse.

  On 12 February Francis Maseres, another mathematician Fellow, brought in a motion to revoke Council’s December decision about where the foreign secretary should live, and to ask Hutton to take up the post again. It made for another long, noisy meeting, at which Hutton’s written defence was read out once more. Banks was sincerely moved by the situation, but he was confident of success: ‘I felt at that moment like a Bull going to be baited’, he wrote in a private note, but like a game bull who likes the fight as well as the dogs and ‘has more than an equal chance of Success’. Once more he packed the room with supporters, who eventually defeated the motion by 85 to 47.

  Finally on 26 February the Society debated two motions whose point was to restrict presidential influence in elections. Yet again a meeting was wasted in shouting; yet again the room was packed with Banks’s supporters, making the outcome a foregone conclusion when the vote at last came, around eleven at night.

  In the course of four rowdy meetings several members of the anti-Banks party had disgraced themselves quite thoroughly. Horsley repeatedly lost his temper and apparently made something of a spectacle of himself:

  The manner which he assumed … will not easily be forgotten. The impression will long remain … of the power of voice, and the energy of words, with which his denunciations were delivered. The high tone he adopted went beyond the usual custom of public debates.

  He had openly threatened secession at the 8 January meeting, and Maskelyne replied to say that ‘where the Learning is there will the Real Royal Society be’. The split in the Royal Society was also to some degree a split by subject matter, natural history being on the whole somewhat more open to the gentleman dilettante than were mathematics or astronomy by this period. Thus the anti-Banks party was composed largely, though by no means exclusively, of astronomers and mathematicians. And Banks understood Horsley and Maskelyne to be referring specifically to the mathematicians. His private response was that ‘howsoever respectable mathematicks as a science may be it by no means can pretend to monopolise the praise due to Learning[;] it is indeed little more than a tool with which other sciences are hewd into form’.

  Margaret Ord also took up the pen in private, creating in imagination a scene she can only have heard about at second hand. We otherwise have little of her authentic voice, and her flavoursome verses deserve quoting in full:

  Tis Horsley’s voice loud strikes the ear,

  And forceful strikes the guilty chair;

  Agast Sir Joseph stares:

  And, husht, around the listning throng,

  Nor breathe, nor stir, nor move the tongue,

  While painful truths he hears.

  Each member feels the generous spirit;

  Indignant glows for Hutton’s merit;

  In virtue’s praise all join:

  The gods themselves espouse the cause,

  And Pringle’s ghost with warm applause

  Approves the sounds divine.

  Go on Horsley! in Newton’s plan;

  Fair truth directs thee, generous man!

  To save celestial science.

  Good men and true the steady hand,

  Who join their heart and join their hand,

  To hurl Sir Jo defiance.

  Expulsion! no. As Michael’s train

  Drove Satan from the heavenly plain,

  To groan in chains of woe:

  So Horsley’s bays, loud fame shall tell,

  Drove the mock president to h–ll,

  To claim a chair below.

  Above, however, Banks remained in the president’s chair, and Horsley’s party – for it was his rather than Hutton’s – stood in a hugely frustrating situation. It is clear from the numbers voting at the various meetings that they would have been a majority at any ordinary meeting of the Society. But the new statute about notice of motions meant that they would now always face a house packed with Banks’s supporters, and lose any motion they brought in. All was over, though there was a little shouting still to do.

  Paul Henry Maty was an unfortunate casualty. He had bravely taken Hutton’s part; he had done more than anyone to give Banks the lie direct, contradicting him flatly about his behaviour around certain elections. He had also belatedly admitted that the spark to the whole row was his fault; he had taken away and lost the letter from Geneva that Hutton had been accused of neglecting. His position as secretary was now impossible. There was a bizarre incident on 25 March when he presented to the Society a pamphlet he had written, full of loud criticism of the president, and demanded that Banks move thanks for it. When Banks declined, Maty refused to go on with the meeting. Pressed to do so, he resigned as secretary and walked out.

  In another – and mercifully final – doomed sortie, Charles Hutton then offered himself as a candidate for the secretaryship, calling in the promise made to him six years before that the next vacancy would be his. It is hard to see what he can have hoped to achieve. At the vote, Hutton attracted much the same number of votes as he had in December – thirty-nine – and Banks once again got his way; 139 of his supporters voted in his friend Charles Blagden as the new secretary.

  Action within the forum of the Society no longer seemed to serve much purpose, and both sides turned to a wider audience. The anti-Banks party collected their letters to the newspapers in pamphlet form in April 1784, and issued another pamphlet based on this material around the same time. As well as Maty’s Authentic Narrative they produced three more pamphlets over the summer. They provided material to the popular poet Peter Pindar, who quite spectacularly attacked Banks in 1788 with Peter’s Prophecy; or, The President and the Poet. Hutton himself wrote an anti-Banks pamphlet, but was wise enough to stop short of publication, some said after it had even been printed. The Banks party replied with three pamphlets towards the end of the year. These were strident, partisan: their purpose was to publicise the row and they succeeded admirably. Together with newspaper reports they were sent literally all over the world by Fellows of the Royal Society and their friends. Reports on what was now being called the ‘Dissensions’ appeared in French and German, and Banks received commiserations from as far afield as India. He was still receiving correspondence from foreign friends about the matter two years later. From his point of view, the visibility of all this material may have been just as damaging as the original row.

  He tried hard to play the matter down, telling anyone who would listen that it was a ‘trifling affair’, a mere spat. And under his guidance, Council decided to award the Copley Medal for 1784 to Edward Waring, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, for a paper on the strikingly abstruse subject of ‘the Summation of Series, Whose General Term is a Determinate Function of Z the Distance from the First Term of the Series’. Thus, Banks felt, the Society demonstrated its esteem for mathematics and mathematicians and refuted the charges brought by Horsley and others that it had become a ‘train of feeble amateurs’ who viewed the higher reaches of science with uncomprehending hostility. He said much of this in the speech at the end of November when the medal was conferred. Waring must have wondered whether his merits and those of his paper had played any part at all in the award, and in fact he stayed away, sending a friend to receive the medal on his behalf. As an attempt to have the last word in the Dissensions, Banks’s stratagem didn’t quite work, since his speech was followed by cries of ‘Rigmarol!’ from the floor, and a proposal to publish it was voted down. It was just a year since Hutton’s original dismissal.

  Hutton had been caught up in quite a drama. The row had been publicised worldwide, it had brought to a halt one of the mos
t prestigious learned societies in the world and had come close to unseating its president. Much of what took place had, perhaps, been about the private resentments of Paul Henry Maty and the personal ambitions of Samuel Horsley; many had opposed Banks for reasons unrelated to Charles Hutton, and some had supported Hutton for reasons that had little enough to do with Joseph Banks. But when tempers cooled and things began to go back to normal at the Royal Society, one thing was quite clear: Hutton’s day in the sun there was irretrievably over.

  7

  Reconstruction

  Walk out of the Academy, leaving behind its bricks and the high windows reminiscent of a schoolroom. Turn right, away from the river. Not to the house in the Warren, but away out of the military riverside site altogether. Leave its noise and its smells behind, and follow the road up the hill. A brisk ten-minute walk, no great climb, towards Shooter’s Hill. You quickly gain a view back over the river; there’s a faint echo of the climb up away from the river in Newcastle to reach the pit villages: but this walk leads south, into the sun, not north.

  Woolwich Common is to your right. Thorns, briars, furze bushes. A few scattered cottages. The local people use the common for grazing, turf and wood. The Academy uses it to test ordnance; cows fall into the holes they leave.

  Further up, onto Shooter’s Hill itself: actually a section of Watling Street, the ancient London–Dover road. The freshly built Severndroog Castle – triangular tower, hexagonal turrets – and a few little villas for military officers. Although called Ditchwater Lane, it’s a deceptively desirable location, in a wooded backdrop to the common. The Warren is hidden by the curve of the hill. And you’re home.

  Charles Hutton in middle age.

  It would be difficult to overstate what a disaster the settled, open dislike of the president of the Royal Society represented, both for Charles Hutton and for those of his friends who had stood by him. Sir Joseph Banks was no pantomime villain. He was an intellectually serious, well-read, energetic man; he controlled what some called a ‘learned empire’ that took in not just the Royal Society but the Society of Dilettanti, the Society of Antiquaries, the British Museum. He was close to the new political establishment, and to the King; in time he would become George’s minister for science in all but name. Many liked and admired him. Banks was most evidently on the scene to stay.

  Hutton was faced with the need to do some rebuilding. Neither he nor anyone else was ever actually expelled from the Royal Society – nor did anyone resign – but he could hardly make himself very visible at its meetings after what had happened, and he stopped publishing in the Philosophical Transactions, as did a few of his friends.

  A few of his friends. Horsley had claimed in January 1784 that there was a substantial body of Fellows ready to secede and form a fresh society. A core group did, indeed, form a club of their own and met on alternate Friday afternoons at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street, to dine and discuss mathematics and natural philosophy. There was a certain irony to this, because during the previous decade Banks himself had been the leader (the term employed at the time was ‘perpetual dictator’) of another ‘rebellious dining club’ that split from the Royal Society’s own dining club over a dispute about its rules and met separately for several years. But the new Friday Dining Club had a different agenda, and it aspired, at least at first, to be what Horsley had promised in January 1784, a secession of the core scientific members of the Royal Society, leaving behind at Somerset House a mere rump of dilettantes.

  That dream unravelled over the months following the close of the row. Banks’s opponents were just not sufficiently united. Some opposed him because they disliked him; some because they disliked his interference in elections; some because they disliked his treatment of Hutton. Some supported Hutton because they liked him, or felt loyalty to him as mathematicians. It hardly made for an enduring rival society, as events would prove.

  Indeed, one of those closest to Hutton and most vocal in his support never parted with the Royal Society at all. Nevil Maskelyne, as Astronomer Royal, ran an institution – the Royal Observatory at Greenwich – that was subject to regular visitation and financial control by the Council of the Royal Society, and he therefore had little choice but to remain on speaking terms with its president. He continued to publish his own papers in the Transactions and to pass on to the Society those of others. In the long run his relationship with Banks would deteriorate, but in the short term, during the 1780s, he managed to patch things up quite adequately.

  Others did similarly little to keep opposition to Banks meaningfully alive. Paul Henry Maty died within a few years, apparently in penury, having forfeited by his resignation as secretary of the Royal Society his main source of income. Horsley achieved preferment within the Church and became bishop successively of St David’s, Rochester and St Asaph, although he continued to publish on mathematical subjects. Francis Maseres, a long-standing friend of Hutton, spent much of the 1790s on a project remarkable for its size, if for nothing else. Inspired by the historical introduction to Hutton’s 1785 logarithm tables, he undertook to republish in full all the writings about the construction and use of logarithms mentioned there. The six volumes of his Scriptores Logarithmici perhaps predictably burgeoned, filled with material related only tangentially if at all to logarithms – solutions of classes of equation, proofs of theorems in algebra, flattering reprints of some of Hutton’s own work – and the series had, even on publication, something of the character of a white elephant.

  Hutton’s own relationship with Banks, like Maskelyne’s, underwent something of a thaw during the decade after the row. Banks visited Hutton at Woolwich during what was probably the summer of 1784, and though the purpose was ostensibly to do with the fledgling trigonometrical survey of Great Britain (later the Ordnance Survey), the wish to mend fences cannot have been far from either man’s mind. What was said on that occasion we shall never know, and the same is true of another occasion a few years later when Banks was invited to attend the examination of cadets at the Royal Military Academy. Banks and Hutton even managed to correspond briefly in 1797 – there was a query about the manufacture of gunpowder.

  That Hutton himself had other and broader loyalties, ties to more networks than just the mathematical Fellows of the Royal Society, was emphasised in his election to fellowship of no fewer than three foreign scientific societies in the later 1780s: the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Haarlem Philosophical Society in 1786, the American Philosophical Society in 1788. A colleague from the Paris observatory, Edme Jeaurat, visited around this time, staying with Hutton at Woolwich, talking mathematics and – to judge by a subsequent letter – mildly flirting with his teenage daughters Isabella and Camilla. Hutton had also, back in 1782, joined the philosophical club based at the Chapter Coffee House on Paternoster Row.

  A rather sad case on Banks’s side of the row was that of Reuben Burrow. Maskelyne’s former assistant at the Royal Observatory had received what he felt was inadequate credit for his surveying work on the chilly Scottish hill of Schiehallion, and he never forgot or forgave. Even by 1775 he had come to think of Hutton, Maskelyne and others as the enemy, resenting their prominence and the sums of money their work was bringing them from the Board of Ordnance, the Board of Longitude and the Stationers’ Company. Burrow later did a deal with London publisher Thomas Carnan, who had recently won a case at law against the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly on printing almanacs; Burrows would write and Carnan would publish a rival to The Ladies’ Diary.

  The Diary itself had been the site of some mathematicians’ spats in its time, but this was perhaps the most absurd of all. From 1780 to 1788 there appeared annually in London two publications with the title The Ladies’ Diary, each consisting substantially of mathematical puzzles and their solutions. One was edited anonymously by Charles Hutton and published by the Stationers’ Company; the other was edited by Reuben Burrow – who was named on the title page – and published by Thomas Carnan. Burrow distinguished the content of his D
iary from that of Hutton’s mainly by including some longer discursive articles on mathematical topics; he never received the flood of contributed material Hutton did, and at times he seems to have been relying on just a handful of cronies, relatives and himself to fill up the pages. But he kept it going, and he inevitably used its pages to keep his quarrel alive, attacking Hutton, Maseres, Horsley and their works. He accused Hutton of stealing his correspondence, and in private judged his Diary ‘trifling’ and claimed he ‘does not know how to make an Almanack’. In his own copies of their works he scribbled abuse, some of it obscene. The verdict of Augustus De Morgan, two generations later, was that Burrow was ‘an able mathematician but a most vulgar and scurrilous dog’.

  Eventually the rival Ladies’ Diary folded, and Burrow, after filling his personal journal with increasingly violent abuse of London-based mathematicians, took a job in India, teaching mathematics in the Corps of Engineers and later working as a surveyor to the East India Company. He died at Buxar in 1792. His story illustrated to anyone who was interested the disunity of British mathematicians; they were by no means closing ranks and pulling together, even in the face of the threat represented by Joseph Banks.

  Burrow’s story illustrated, indeed, a trope that was becoming increasingly popular in the sentimental and romantic literature of the time: that a too exclusive attention to mathematics made one argumentative, antisocial, even mad. Radical poet and artist William Blake, in an early satire from the time of the row at the Royal Society, included characters loosely based on its leading players: ‘Come said the Epicurean lets have some rum & water & hang the mathematics’. Most closely resembling Hutton was ‘Obtuse Angle’, a gentle, pedantic man with pockets full of ‘a vast number of papers’. He reckoned that ‘a man must be a fool ifaith not to understand the Mathematics’. At one point he sang a ‘mathematical song’ about someone called Sutton. He had a friend (Maskelyne?) called Steelyard the lawgiver.