was—and, in a case such as this, with fires breaking out in several places at once, and at so great a distance from each other, then the whole conflagration seemed like the result of some great and malevolently supernatural design. For one all too brief and brilliant moment my sky was quite lit up, as if by fireworks. The next, I lay overwhelmed and everything was consumed. My church maimed irreparably; my soul boiled away to nothing; my heart burned to a cold black cinder. In short, my life reduced to ashes.
Of course, after the fire comes the rebuilding. Sir Christopher Wren’s many great designs. St. Paul’s. Yes, it’s true, I had my own projects. The fact that I am a retired colonel might leave one to suppose that something arose from the ashes of my former life. But the rebuilding was difficult. And not entirely successful. Indeed, I sometimes think it would have been better if, like King Priam slain by Neoptolemus in the burning ruins of Troy, I too had died after we parted.
Doctor Clarke did not have the patience to be told as much. Doubtless he was still inclined to believe Doctor Newton was someone who gave sight to the blind. But any soldier will tell you that sometimes you can see too much. Even the most courageous man can become quite untrussed at the sight of the enemy. Could King Leonidas with his one thousand Spartans have held the pass at Thermopylae for two whole days if his men had seen the whole host of the Persian army before them? No, there are occasions when it is better to be blind.
Clarke had said that Newton had given us the golden thread by which we may find our way through God’s labyrinth. Well, that is how I first perceived his work, myself. Only the creator of the labyrinth institutes it otherwise, there being no end to the labyrinth, for it is infinite, at which junction one lights upon the awful discovery that neither is there a creator. But I do not like a labyrinth so well as a chasm or an abyss into which Newton, by virtue of his system of the world and falling bodies and mathematics and chronology, lowers us upon a rope, which is a more precarious situation wherein gravity may do its invisible work.
Invisible work. Newton knew all about that. His theory of gravity, of course. His interest in alchemy, for example. And ciphers, too. When I told Doctor Clarke how Newton had believed that a man who might decipher an earthly code might similarly fathom the heavenly one, I could have told Clarke such a story of codes and ciphers and secrets as would have made his wig smoke. But no. Doctor Clarke would not have had the patience to hear such a story as mine, for it is a difficult tale and besides, I am a soldier, without much skill in talk. Moreover, I lack the practice in its recounting since it has not been told before this day. Newton himself swore me to secrecy about this dark matter, as he himself called it. Yet now that the great man is dead I can see no reason not to tell someone. But who? And how would I have begun? I fear I am too cool to have mastered the unaffected eloquence and noble, simple style of history that would hold anyone’s attention for very long. It is the Englishman’s malady. We are too plain in our speaking to make a good tale in the telling. I must confess there is much about my own history that I have forgotten. It is difficult for me to remember all of this. More than thirty years have passed and there are many aspects to this story that seem to elude my grasp. But perhaps it is me who is lacking, for I do not find myself very interesting; and certainly not in comparison with Newton. How could I ever have thought to understand one such as he? I was not a man of letters. I could better describe a battle than a history such as this one. Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. I fought in all those battles. There has been little poetry in my life. No fine words. Just guns and swords, bullets and bawds.
But perhaps I might rehearse the matter in my own head. For one day I should like this story to be known. And if I should happen to be bored, I shall simply order myself to desist and I shall take no offence. I had little thought that in recalling this story I might need to write it down. And yet how else might I improve upon the telling of it, except by writing it?
Michael Maier,
THE SUN SHALL BE NO MORE THY LIGHT BY DAY; NEITHER FOR BRIGHTNESS SHALL THE MOON GIVE LIGHT UNTO THEE! BUT THE LORD SHALL BE UNTO THEE AN EVERLASTING LIGHT, AND THY GOD THY GLORY. (ISAIAH 60:19)
n Thursday, November the fifth, 1696, most people went to church. But I went to fight a duel.
Gunpowder Day was then a cause for Protestant celebration twice over: this had been the day, in 1605, when King James I had been delivered from a Roman Catholic plot to blow up the Parliament; and, in 1688, it had also been the day when the Prince of Orange had landed at Torbay to deliver the Church of England from the oppressive hand of another Stuart, the Catholic King James II. Many Gunpowder Day sermons were preached throughout the City, and I would have done well to have listened to one of them, for a little consideration of heavenly deliverance might have helped me to channel my anger against Papist tyranny instead of the man who had impugned my honour. But my blood was up and, my head being full of fighting, I and my second walked to the World’s End Tavern in Knightsbridge where we had a slice of beef and a glass of Rhenish for breakfast, and thence to Hyde Park, to meet my opponent, Mister Shayer, who was already waiting with his own second.
Shayer was an ugly-looking fellow, whose tongue was too big for his mouth so that he lisped like a little child when he spoke, and I regarded him as I would have regarded a mad dog. I no longer remember what our dispute was about, except to say that I was a quarrelsome sort of young man and very likely there was fault on both sides.
No apologies were solicited and none proffered and straightaway all four of us threw off our coats and fell to with swords. I had some skill with the weapon, having been trained by Mister Figg in the Oxford Road, but there was little or no finesse in this fight and, in truth, I made short work of the matter, wounding Shayer in the left pap which, being close to his heart, placed the poor fellow in mortal fear of his life, and me in fear of prosecution, for duelling was against the law since 1666. Most gentlemen fighting paid but little heed to the legal consequences of their actions; however, Mister Shayer and myself were both at Gray’s Inn, acquainting ourselves with a tincture of English law, and our quarrel was quickly the cause of a scandal that obliged my leaving off a career at the Bar, permanently.
It was perhaps no great loss to the legal profession, for I had little interest in the Law; and even less aptitude, for I had only gone to the Bar to please my late father who always had a great respect for that profession. And yet what else could I have done? We were not a rich family, but not without some connections, either. My elder brother, Charles Ellis, who later became an MP, was then the under-secretary to William Lowndes, who was himself the Permanent Secretary to the First Lordof the Treasury. The Treasurer, until his recent resignation, had been Lord Godolphin. Several months later the King named as Godolphin’s replacement the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Montagu, to whom Isaac Newton owed his appointment as Warden of the Royal Mint in May 1696.
My brother told me that, until Newton’s arrival in the position, there had been few if any duties that were attached to the Wardenship; and Newton had taken the position in expectation of receiving the emolument for not much work; but that the Great Recoinage had given the office a greater importance than hitherto it had enjoyed; and that Newton was obliged to be the principal agent of the coin’s protection.
In truth it was sore in need of protecting for it had become much debased of late. The only true money of the realm was the silver coin—for there was little if ever much gold about—which constituted sixpences, shillings, half- crowns and crowns; but until the great and mechanised recoinage, mostly this was hand-struck with an ill-defined rim that lent itself to clipping or filing. Except for a parcel of coin struck after the Restoration, none of the coin in circulation was more recent than the Civil War, while a great quantity had been issued by Queen Elizabeth.
Fate took a hand to drive the coinage further out of order when, after William and Mary came to the throne, the price of gold and silver became greatly increased, so that there was much more than a shilling’s worth of silver in a shilling. Or at least there ought to have been. A new-struck shilling weighed ninety-three grains, although with the price of silver increasing all the time it need only have weighed seventy-seven grains; and even more vexing was that with the coin so worn and thin, and rubbed with age, and clipped and filed, a shilling often weighed as little as fifty grains. Because of this, people were inclined to hoard the new coin and refuse the old.
The Recoinage Act had passed through the Parliament in January 1696, although this only chafed the sore, the Parliament having been imprudent enough to damn the old money before ensuring that there existed sufficient supplies of the new. And throughout the summer—if that was what it was, the weather being so bad—money had remained in such short supply that tumults every day were feared. For without good money how were men to be
