Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (26 page)

At this point a band of overzealous Kent fishermen spoiled the plot. They arrested James at Faversham and dispatched him back
to London — to William’s embarrassed fury. The Dutch prince promptly returned his father-in-law to Kent, with an escort briefed
to look the other way when
they got the King to Rochester. At the second attempt, James made good his escape.

Six weeks later, on 13 February 1689, William and Mary accepted the English crown as joint sovereigns in return for their
agreement to the passing by Parliament of a‘Bill of Rights’ — a mutually convenient deal that has gone down in history as’the
Glorious Revolution.’ This is generally taken to mean that 1688/9 marked the inauguration of England’s constitutional monarchy
— the moment when Parliament finally codified the control over the Crown that it had won in the Civil War, but had failed
to secure in the reigns of Charles II and James II.

In fact, the Bill of Rights of 1689 said very little about the rights of individuals, and it would be more than a century
before England’s monarchy could truly be called‘constitutional’. In the horse-trading with Parliament that followed James
II’s effective abdication, the hard-headed William coolly defended his royal prerogatives, retaining his right to select his
own ministers and to control the length of parliamentary sessions. Revolution? The year 1688/9 witnessed nothing so grass-roots
or drastic in England — though from William’s point of view his invasion had certainly enjoyed a glorious outcome.

I
SAAC NEWTON WAS BORN IN THE LINCOLN
shire village of Woolsthorpe in 1642, the year that England’s Civil War began. A small and sickly baby, he had an unhappy
childhood, discarded by his widowed mother at the age of three when she remarried a rich clergyman who had no time for Isaac.
But a kindly uncle helped him to school in the nearby market town of Grantham, and in 1661 the nineteen-year-old won admission
to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Newton was not an outstanding student.But in 1665 the plague came to Cambridge, the students were sent home, and it was back
in Woolsthorpe that he experienced the revelation
he loved to recount in later life. Sitting in the shade of an apple tree one day, he watched an apple drop to the ground.’Why
should this apple always invariably fall to the earth in a perpendicular line?’ he remembered thinking.‘Why should it not
fall upwards, sideways, or obliquely?’

Newton did not publish his ideas about the law of gravity for another twenty years, and some have suggested that his subsequent
description of his famous Eureka moment was nothing more than an exercise in myth-making. But Isaac had come up with another
big idea during his plague-enforced gap year at Woolsthorpe, and it is not surprising that falling apples should take a back
seat while he explored this equally intriguing — and literally dazzling — phenomenon: the structure of light.‘In the beginning
of the year 1666… he later wrote,‘I procured me a triangular glass prism, to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours…
Having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window shuts [shutters] to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s
light, I placed my prism at his entrance that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall.’

The prevailing theory at this time was that a prism produced colours by staining, or dyeing, the light that passed through
it. But in his study at Woolsthorpe, where we can see today exactly where the twenty-five-year-old boffin played with the
colours of the rainbow, Newton set up a second prism. If each prism coloured the light, the hues should have deepened as they
passed through the second refraction. In fact, they returned to being bright and clear — Newton had put white light’s component
colours back together again.

This was the discovery that made his name. In 1672 he
was invited to publish his findings by the Royal Society of London for Improving Knowledge. This fellowship of inquiring minds
had started life in Oxford and London during the Civil War when, lacking a fixed base, they called themselves the‘Invisible
College’. Science was one of Charles II’s more constructive interests, and in 1662 he had chartered the’Invisible College’
as the Royal Society, bestowing his patronage on the meeting and mingling of some extraordinary minds: Robert Boyle was working
on the definition of chemical elements, together with the density, pressure and behaviour of gases; Robert Hooke was publicising
the hidden world revealed by the microscope; Edmund Halley was investigating the movement of heavenly bodies like comets;
and Christopher Wren, surveying the almost limitless architectural opportunities offered by fire-devastated London, was formulating
a fresh vision of the structures required by city living.

Immediately elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work on‘opticks’, Isaac Newton did not, in fact, get on very well
with this illustrious fraternity. His troubled childhood had left him a solitary character, untrusting and morose. But it
was a gathering of three more sociable Fellows that prompted the publication of his greatest work. Sitting in one of London’s
newly fashionable coffee houses one day in 1684, Halley, Wren and Hooke fell to discussing how to describe the movements of
the planets, and shortly afterwards Halley visited Newton to put the question to him. Newton replied without hesitation: the
planets moved in an ellipse. He had worked it out years earlier, he said, and when Halley asked to see his calculations, Newton
promised to write them out for him.

The result was his
Principia Mathematica,
often described as the most important book in the history of science. In it Newton set out his three laws of motion, the second
of these explaining the power of gravity and how it determined the motion of the planets and their moons, the movement of
the tides and the apparently eccentric behaviour of comets. Halley used Newton’s calculations to predict the course of the
comet that would make him famous — Halley’s Comet, which passed over England in 1682 and which he linked to reports of previous
comet sightings in 1456,1531 and 1607.

Having prompted Newton to write the
Principia,
it was Halley who extracted the manuscript from him, paid with his own money for its printing, and acted as its chief publicist,
preparing reader-friendly summaries of Newton’s often severely complicated ideas. Newton himself expressed his thoughts so
dourly that students often avoided his lectures at Cambridge, and he spent his time‘lecturing to the walls’.

Today we see Isaac Newton as a pioneering scientist and the father of physics. In fact, the terms‘scientist’ and‘physics’
did not exist in his lifetime. Newton devoted long years of research to the ancient mysteries of alchemy and how base metals
could be turned into gold. The modern scientists and historians involved in the‘Newton Project’, a venture that will put all
his ten million or so words on to the World Wide Web, report that more than a million of those words are devoted to alchemy,
and another four million to lurid biblical prophecy — and particularly to the book of Revelation: the Whore of Babylon, the
nature of the two-horned and ten-horned beasts and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Yet between the lines of this ancient-sounding discourse
lurks a radical and forward-thinking vision. Newton
eagerly
awaits the moment when‘the Word of God makes war with ye Beasts & Kings of ye earth’ to create a new heaven, new earth & new
Jerusalem’, This man, born with the Civil War and producing his master work in the years when the absolutist Stuart monarchy
finally collapsed, is rightly identified with modernity. He prepared the brief by which Cambridge University would defend
its independence against King James II, and in 1689 he was elected to the Parliament that put William and Mary on the throne.

More important, his explanation of how the universe operated by logical mechanical laws was to cause a profound alteration
in human thought. The work of Newton, Halley, Hooke and their contemporaries upended the very basis of philosophy and human
inquiry, making once divine areas the province of their own earthly research. All things were possible. Reason, logic and
deduction would replace blind faith. Old ideas were questioned. New ideas were explored. No longer did God reside in the heavens;
he existed in your mind if you could find him there — a transformation in thinking that truly was a glorious revolution.

The excellent general histories of Britain by Norman Davies, Simon Schama, Roy Strong, Michael Wood and others were set out
in the bibliography to the previous volume of
Great Tales.
For the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they are joined by:

Brigden, Susan,
New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603
(London, Penguin Books), 2000.

Guy, John,
Tudor England
(Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1988.

Haigh, Christopher,
English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors
(Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1993.

Kishlansky, Mark,
A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714
(London, Penguin Books), 1996.

Saul, Nigel (ed.),
The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England
(Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1997.

For a wide range of original documents, some in facsimile and all usually in translation, visit the following:

www.bl.com

www.fordharmedu/halsall

www.history.ac.uk/iht/resources/index.html

www.library.rdg.ac.uk/home.html

eebo.chadwyck.com/home

This last excellent website, Early English Books Online, is set up for institutions — your local library can apply for a free
trial — but not individuals. You can find a backdoors way in, however, if you go to the interface supplied by the University
of Michigan on
www.hti.umich.edu/e/eebodemo/.

FURTHER READING AND PLACES TO VISIT

1387: Geoffrey Chaucer and the Mother Tongue

You can visit Chaucer’s grave in Westminster Abbey, the memorial that inspired Poets’ Corner. To read the very earliest editions
of
The Canterbury Tales
as printed by William Caxton in the 1470S and 1480S, visit the British Library website,
www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage.html
— and for a wonderfully bawdy modern English version, read the classic translation by Nevill Coghill.

Coghill, Nevill,
The Canterbury Tales
(Harmondsworth, Penguin Books), 1951.

1399: The Deposing of King Richard II

Nigel Saul has written the definitive biography. Christopher Given Wilson has pulled together the contemporary sources.

Given Wilson, Christopher (ed.),
Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397-1400: The Reign of Richard II
(Manchester, Manchester University Press), 1993.

Saul, Nigel,
Richard II
(London, Yale University Press), 1997.

1399:‘Turn Again, Dick Whittington!’

For an evocative flavour of Whittington’s London, visit the medieval gallery at the Museum of London, or its website:
www.museumoflondon.org.uk.

1399: Henry IV and His Extra-virgin Oil

A recent academic conference has assembled the latest research and thinking on this enigmatic king.

Dodd, Gwilym, and Biggs, Douglas,
Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399-1406
(York, Medieval Press), 2003.

1415;
We Happy Few
—
the Battle ofAzincourt

The two English films of
Henry V
by the Shakespearian giants of their respective generations are regularly rerun on television. Laurence Olivier’s sun-filled
idyll was shot in neutral Ireland during World War II, with the Irish army playing the bowmen of England. Kenneth Branagh’s
1989 version presents, surely in deliberate contrast, a dark, brooding and rain-drenched interpretation.

1429: Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans

Marina Warner has written the definitive interpretation; George Bernard Shaw, the classic play. For transcriptions of Joan’s
trial, visit:
archive.joan-of-arc.org.

Warner, Marina,
Joan of Arc, the Image of Female Heroism
(London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 1981.

1440: A‘Prompter for Little Ones’

Nicholas Orme’s playful and original book is the inspiration for this chapter. The metal toys uncovered by Tony Pilson and
the Mud Larks are exhibited in the medieval galleries at the Museum of London:
www.museumof london.org.uk.

Orme, Nicholas,
Medieval Children
(London, Yale University Press), 2001.

1422-61,1470-1: House of Lancaster: the Two Reigns of Henry VI

David Starkey’s rereading of the‘Royal Book’ of court etiquette has cast a new light on the supposed shabbiness of Henry VI.
The Paston Letters, England’s earliest set of family correspondence, provides a human picture of how the wars disturbed —
and did not disturb — ordinary life. To get the flavour of one conflict, visit
www.bloreheath.org
, which walks you round the
site of the 1459 battle. Eagle Media’s DVD (emdv354) has preserved the History Channel’s excellent series‘The Wars of the
Roses’.