Isaac Newton
The Last Sorcerer
Michael White

To Bill Hamilton: for getting the ball rolling

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 Desertion

Chapter 2 The Changing View of Matter and Energy

Chapter 3 Academia

Chapter 4 Astronomy and Mathematics Before Newton

Chapter 5 A Toe in the Water

Chapter 6 The Search for the Philosophers’Stone

Chapter 7 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Chapter 8 Feuds

Chapter 9 To the Principia

Chapter 10 Breakdown

Chapter 11 Metamorphosis

Chapter 12 Old Men’s Battles

Chapter 13 A Question of Priority

Chapter 14 Joining the Ancients

References

Index

Also by Michael White

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction
Truth Revealed

This strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind – Copernicus and Faustus in one.

MAYNARD KEYNES¹

According to a list of the most influential people in history, The 100, Isaac Newton ranks number 2 – after Muhammad and ahead of Jesus Christ.² This position is justified by his unparalleled contributions to science – principles that have moulded the modern world. Yet Newton was not the man that history has claimed him to be. More than any other scientist in history, Newton’s image has been protected by his disciples and by generations of biographers who have produced inaccurate and sometimes totally false accounts of his life. Not until the 1930s did the real Isaac Newton begin to emerge from the mists of history into the light of critical analysis. Amazingly, it has taken since then to shrug off the final deceits of those who wished to perpetuate the myth that Newton was in some way omnipotent, beyond the baser mundanities of human existence; that he was the pure, distilled essence of scientific inquiry – genius unsullied.

The hagiographic accounts began within a year of Newton’s death. William Stukeley, who is today better remembered as a scholar of Druidism and ancient mythology, was Newton’s first biographer. His Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written during the 1720s, is a devotional account of his hero’s life, based uniquely upon first-hand experience.³ Stukeley knew Newton well during the final decade of his life, and because of this the Memoirs is an important book. But, like many of Newton’s later biographers, Stukeley was blinkered by adoration: he saw Newton as a demigod, almost immortal and utterly without fault.

Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, published in 1855, is a worthy successor to Stukeley and contributes much to our understanding of Newton, but again it is tarnished by the author’s lack of objectivity. Brewster, like others, ignored evidence that did not fit his image of Newton; he decided to paint a one-sided view that merely reinforced the image that Newton himself tried to establish for posterity, without questioning the many contradictions in the scientist’s long and complex life.

There is no question of the greatness of Newton’s work, nor of his intellect. But, just as his most famous work, the Principia Mathematica, is a highly sophisticated and complex description of the mechanistic workings of the universe based upon simple, easily understood truths, so too was his personality far more twisted and convoluted than orthodox historians of science would have us believe.

Newton was above all a secretive man, a man coiled in upon himself, detached from the world, and for long periods of his life he was secluded from the everyday current of affairs. For much of his working life he studied and experimented alone in his college rooms and in his laboratory nearby. In many respects, he was nonconformist from an early age, shunning the simple rural life of his family, living in self-imposed isolation at university, refusing to take holy orders. He subscribed to Arianism – the doctrine of an heretical sect which denied the principle of the Holy Trinity – when public awareness of such beliefs would have wrecked his career. And, most importantly of all, he was an alchemist.

By the time biographers came to consider his life, Newton was dead and the need to hide his religious leanings had gone. But what stuck in the craw of those early biographers was a body of material found in Newton’s vast library and within his huge collection of papers and notebooks that made it very clear that the most respected scientist in history, the model for the scientific method, had spent more of his life intensely involved with alchemy than he had delving into the clear blue waters of pure science. It also confirmed what a few of Newton’s close friends had known during his lifetime: that he had expended a vast amount of his time studying the chronology of the Bible, examining prophecy, investigating natural magic, and, most of all, attempting to unravel the hermetic secrets – the prisca sapientia.

Newton’s early biographers found it impossible to reconcile these opposites and were forced to gloss over any ignominious or disturbing findings they unearthed, putting them down to aberrations, eccentricities: ‘the obvious production of a fool and a knave’ was how David Brewster described Newton’s vast collection of alchemical writings.⁴

The real life story of Isaac Newton, the neurotic, the obsessive, driven mystic, began to emerge only in 1936, when a collection of Newton’s papers, considered to be of ‘no scientific value’ when offered to Cambridge University some fifty years earlier, was purchased at Sotheby’s by the distinguished economist and Newton scholar John Maynard Keynes. (He bequeathed it to King’s College, Cambridge, when he died ten years later.)

After studying the contents of Newton’s secret papers – those documents, manuscripts and notebooks ignored by the hagiographers – in 1942 Keynes delivered a lecture to the Royal Society Club in which he portrayed an altogether different and highly controversial image of history’s most renowned and exalted scientist:

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.⁵

Keynes was obviously enthralled by what he had discovered, and, fortunately for us, he lived in an age that could accept such findings. What he found raised two linked questions about Newton. First, if the creator of modern mechanical theory had spent the majority of his time involved with alchemical experiments, what else might be hidden about him? Second, did Newton’s work in alchemy influence his purely scientific work?

The first of these problems was relatively easy to answer. Newton was known to have been a difficult man, a man who had been damaged emotionally by childhood trauma, a supreme egotist who had been involved in well-publicised battles with a number of contemporaries. But, before Keynes’s revelation, biographers had barely alluded to these facts. Until 1936, most Newton biographers were content to rely upon the opinions of William Stukeley. Only gradually did others begin to question the old authorities and to dig a little deeper.

What has been unearthed does not always paint a pretty picture. The reality of human character rarely does. However, the newly revealed Newton, the broader-canvas Newton, is a human Newton – a man whom we should be proud to accept for his peculiarities and failings as we are for his unique skills and talents. As Sir Christopher Wren, his contemporary, put it, ‘Neither need we fear to diminish a miracle by explaining it.’⁶

What has been gradually revealed is the image of a genius who sought knowledge in everything he came across, a man who was driven to investigate all facets of life he encountered, everything that puzzled him. Such voraciousness drove him to self-inflicted injury, nervous breakdown, to a state in which he almost lost his mind, and possibly even to occult practices and the black arts. But the work that emerged from these explorations changed the world.

The other major question provoked by the Keynes papers – whether or not there was cross-fertilisation between Newton’s alchemical studies and his scientific researches – was a much more difficult problem to address and remains a question that is far from being resolved completely.

Not least of the problems facing any serious research into what Newton was doing is the fact that he left behind over a million words on the subject of alchemy. Beyond that has lain the problem of deciphering such a mass of material written largely in code, in Latin and in Newton’s tiny handwriting. The task has occupied scholars for sixty years and is ongoing. The late American scholar Betty Jo Dobbs produced a vast body of work providing a detailed analysis of Newton’s alchemical experiments gathered together in two academic works, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (1975) and The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (1991). Others have begun to analyse Newton’s vast collection of writings on biblical prophecy and his ideas on a range of subjects from astrology to numerology.⁷ But for the lay reader there remains the added difficulty of understanding the mental processes behind seventeenth-century alchemy. It is not easy to empathise with a mentality that is, on so many levels, quite alien to the late-twentieth-century mind.

In the following pages I will discuss both sides of the argument, for and against alchemical influence upon Newton’s scientific work. But, based upon the evidence available, my conclusion is unequivocal: the influence of Newton’s researches in alchemy was the key to his world-changing discoveries in science. His alchemical work and his science were inextricably linked.

Newton himself said, ‘A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.’⁸ The no man’s land between imagining and understanding is, at times, the natural home of the biographer; but by demythologising truths that have long been veiled in secrecy this no man’s land becomes narrower. Newton the towering intellect, the pioneer and father of modern science, can now stand alongside Newton the mystic, the emotionally desiccated obsessive and the self-proclaimed, but deluded, discoverer of the philosophers’ stone – divested but undiminished.

Chapter 1 Desertion

Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hide in Night.God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.

ALEXANDER POPE¹

In the days before the English Civil War, Woolsthorpe was a peaceful Lincolnshire village, and even when, for a time, the world seemed turned upside down by internecine struggle the village survived the traumas almost unscathed. A few hundred yards beyond the village, up on the Great North Road (today the A1), the soldiers of the King and those of Parliament clanked their way towards cannon blast and bloody death during the bleak winter of 1642–3; but few men from the village became embroiled in the fighting, and the nearest battles were several miles away.

Woolsthorpe (or Wulsthorpe as it was once known) is an ancient settlement, nestled in a hollow on the west side of the river Witham, about seven miles from the nearest sizeable town, Grantham. Newton’s first biographer, William Stukeley, described the village as having a good prospect eastwards, with a view of the Roman road and the Hermen-Street going over the fields to the east of Colsterworth: ‘There can be no finer country than this,’ he declared.²

During the seventeenth century, Woolsthorpe was little more than a collection of small farms and humble country dwellings clustered around the manor house. The area offered poor opportunities as arable land and would sustain only a two-field rotation, which meant that fields were left fallow half the time, so the locals eked out a frugal existence largely from sheep farming.

The Newtons, of which there were many scattered around the Grantham region, had for several generations before Isaac’s birth been viewed as being one cut above the local populace, existing on the social cusp between yeomen and lower gentry.* This was all thanks to Isaac’s great-great-grandfather, one John Newton, of the nearby village of Westby, who, according to community records and evidence pieced together from wills and tax demands, managed miraculously to ascend the social order from peasant to yeoman during his lifetime.⁴ In fact John Newton of Westby did so well that he was able to leave substantial inheritances and dowries for his children – including, for his son Richard, sixty acres of some of the best land of the area, situated in the village of Woolsthorpe, bought shortly before the old man’s death in 1562.

John Newton’s descendants were neither so aspiring nor so successful. Although the impetus he had provided placed them in good stead, none of them until Isaac made much of an impression in any area of life or improved their social standing to the same degree. The Newton men married relatively well between John and Isaac Newton senior (Isaac’s father) – a period of perhaps a century. Although this nudged them slowly upward through the grades of yeoman, none of them was educated formally and it is a startling fact that Isaac Newton senior (like many of his class) could not sign his own name. Yet his son became President of the Royal Society and Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps because of this confused social position of his family and ancestors, class and standing always meant a great deal to Newton.

Isaac’s great-grandfather, Richard Newton, bequeathed the sixty acres in Woolsthorpe to his son Robert, who was born around 1570, and it was he who purchased the manor house standing nearby. According to local records, the property had changed hands by sale four times in the preceding century and was in a dilapidated state when it was acquired by the Newtons. Basic repairs were carried out within a few years, and it became the family home for this, perhaps the most prosperous, branch of the local Newton family.*

It was with the next generation that the Newtons gained a further modicum of social elevation and a smattering of academic credibility, when Isaac senior, Robert’s son, married into the Ayscough family – respected local lower gentry who sent their sons to Oxford and Cambridge universities and whose family members found their way into parsonages and lectureships. When the illiterate but propertied Isaac Newton senior married Hannah Ayscough, whose family had fallen upon hard times and were in danger of sliding down the social scale, it was a match of convenience as much as an auspicious melting of genes and environment: a cocktail to change the world. Thanks to his aspiring forebear John Newton, Isaac had money – in December 1639 Robert Newton had settled the entire Woolsthorpe estate on him. Hannah had breeding. Both families were therefore satisfied, and in April 1642 the couple were married. Hannah took the name Ayscough-Newton.

The winter of that year was bleak both for the Newtons and for the country as a whole – England had slid into a savage civil war. By the time Hannah and Isaac were married, King Charles I had left London, never to return as England’s acknowledged sovereign, and had headed north. His queen, Henrietta Maria, adored by her doting husband but loathed by many of his subjects, had been sent to Europe for her own safety. During the summer and autumn of 1642, what had begun as petty skirmishes and political and religious wrangling developed into full-scale civil war, with the royalists camped first at York and then at Oxford. The battle of Edgehill, one of the most famous of the war, had been fought at the end of October and had gone the royalists’ way; the country was gripped by battle fever. Within the space of a few years, England had been transformed from a nation at peace, existing beyond the turmoil of the Thirty Years War which had ravaged mainland Europe since 1618, into a nation in which brother had taken up arms against brother and lifelong friendships had been shattered by the taking of sides in the dispute – for the King or for Parliament.

Most biographers of Newton, from Stukeley to recent times, have assumed that the Newtons had royalist leanings. They have based this opinion upon the family’s class and social aspirations, reasoning that, as upwardly mobile lower gentry, they would favour the status quo and disapprove of attacks upon the traditional monarchical system. This may have been so, but the sides in the Civil War were not defined clearly along class lines. There were many noblemen who fought on the side of Parliament, and many of the lower orders supported the King. Furthermore, the many complex reasons for the dispute included not only political preoccupations but religious issues, which for some would have been more important. For many historians, the Civil War had its foundations in the decisions of Henry VIII and his immediate descendants and was as much to do with the ideological clash between Rome and the Church of England as with the position and powers of Parliament. The Newton family would not have shared Charles’s sympathy towards Catholicism, and indeed in later life Isaac was positively anti-Catholic.

The political views of the Newtons during the Civil War were not recorded. The fact that Hannah’s brother, William Ayscough, maintained his position as rector in the nearby village of Burton Coggles during and after the war neither confirms nor refutes the Ayscoughs’ Cavalier sympathies: it merely shows that he, like many others, including perhaps the Newtons, bent with the wind.

For all the turmoil the Civil War wrought on the people of England, at the time Hannah Newton was far more concerned with immediate problems caused by a domestic tragedy a few days before the battle of Edgehill: her husband, Isaac, had died leaving her heavily pregnant. What caused his death is unclear. He had just turned thirty-six and appears to have been ill for some time beforehand. We know this because of the introduction to his will, which reads, ‘In the name of God amen the first day of October (anno Dom 1642) I Isaac Newton of Woolsthorpe in the parish of Colsterworth in the county of Lincoln yeoman sick of body but of good and perfect memory …’⁵

Very little is known of Isaac senior. Misinterpretations have been made of his character based largely on the research of the eighteenth-century writer Thomas Maude, who claimed that Hannah’s husband was a wastrel.⁶ Maude had actually confused him with a relative, another John Newton, and it seems from the contents of the will that Isaac had actually managed well his newly acquired estate and had taken seriously his responsibilities before marrying Hannah. He was illiterate, but seventeenth-century farmers had little real need for learning, and he left the estate pretty much as he inherited it; Hannah and her child were well provided for.

During those miserable days between the death of her husband and the birth of their child, we can only assume that Hannah did her best to maintain the farm and to prepare herself for the coming event. She went into labour late on Christmas Eve and almost certainly gave birth in the room in which the child was conceived – the bedroom to the left of the top of the stairs. Hannah’s mother, Margery, travelled from the nearby village of Market Overton to supervise the birth, and two women from Woolsthorpe were paid a few pennies to help. Sometime soon after 2 a.m. on Christmas morning a son – Isaac – was born.

By Newton’s own account, offered late in life, he was born premature. This may have been true, but he was fond of mythologising his childhood and, for complex reasons, he encouraged the idea that there had been something miraculous about his birth. Also, Newton quite naturally did everything he could to pre-empt any rumours that he may have been born illegitimate. The records do not give an exact date for the marriage of Isaac and Hannah, but an unkind analysis, ignoring the declared prematurity, would conclude that Newton was conceived out of wedlock. Most revealing is the fact that when, at the time of his knighthood in 1705, Newton was asked to draft a genealogy for the College of Heralds, he pushed back the date of his parents’ marriage to 1639 (the year in which his grandfather acquired the manor house).⁷ This could have been a genuine mistake, but Newton’s deep-rooted need for secrecy, impeccable social credentials and high-caste moral attitudes (along with the convenience of the changed date) mean that the real reason may not be so accidental.

According to John Conduitt, husband of Newton’s half-niece Catherine Barton and a collector of personal anecdotes about his famous relative, Isaac was a tiny baby who, so the legend goes, was small enough to fit into a quart pot. ‘Sir I. N. told me’, Conduitt recalled, ‘that he had been told that when he was born he was so little they could put him into a quart pot & so weakly that he was forced to have a bolster all around his neck to keep it on his shoulders.’ It is an appealing story, and one supported by others that Newton passed on to Conduitt. In an elaboration of the story, the two women attending Hannah at the time of Newton’s birth were sent to the home of one Lady Pakenham to obtain medicines. Apparently, Newton was so frail that on their way back to the manor the two women ‘sat down on a stile sure the child would be dead before they could get back’.⁸

Such tales have become part of the legend of Newton’s life, supported by the testimony of many of the villagers whom Stukeley interviewed during the late 1720s for his biography of Newton. Unlike many interpretations of Newton’s later exploits, they are at least plausible. But it is typical of the adulatory style of Newton’s early biographers that so much is made of the miraculous nature of his early survival. A description of Newton’s infancy from Sir David Brewster, writing in 1855, serves to illustrate:

Providence, however, disappointed their fears, and that frail tenement which seemed scarcely able to imprison its immortal mind, was destined to enjoy a vigorous maturity, and to survive even the average term of human existence.⁹

Newton would have strongly approved of such a description, which adds still more weight to the self-image he so much treasured.

Of the first three years of Newton’s life almost nothing is recorded. We know from a tiny scrap of parchment unearthed by Stukeley that the baby Isaac was baptised on 1 January 1643. It is easy to conjure up a romantic image of Hannah on New Year’s Day trudging through the snow with her feeble baby wrapped in swaddling-clothes on their way to the local church for the christening ceremony, but it is almost certain that the village vicar would have visited the manor to conduct the service.

After this there is a three-year period of blankness. As the Civil War raged the length and breadth of the country, Hannah and her son continued to live at the manor house. Their employees tilled the land and carried out the annual lambing, the shearing, the milking and the feeding, while Hannah dealt with the many bureaucratic aspects of the business and supervised sales of animals and the maintenance of farm stocks. It would also have been natural for Hannah’s parents to play a significant role in helping their widowed daughter. Hannah and her son were not rich, but they were comfortably off. At the time of Isaac senior’s death, the deeds of the manor house and the surrounding lands, along with goods and chattels valued at £459.12s. 4d., 234 sheep, 46 head of cattle and several barns full of oats, barley and malt were all bequeathed to Hannah. To put this into perspective, the average farmer of the region owned a flock of between 35 and 40 sheep, and the will of a typical yeoman contained goods worth little more than £100. During the 1640s, a workman could expect to earn in the region of one shilling and sixpence a week.

By the winter of 1645 King Charles was holed up in Oxford, effectively under siege by Cromwell’s army. In June of that disastrous year for the royalists, his troops suffered their worst military defeat at the battle of Naseby. England was still far from regicide, but the forces that, four years later, would lead to this singular event were already coalescing. Lincolnshire continued to pass through the upheaval relatively unscathed, making Woolsthorpe a haven of solitude and anonymity for advancing or retreating armies. Throughout the Civil War, troops were away from their garrisons for months at a time and relied upon the hospitality of town and country folk alike; stories of villages and towns refusing to accommodate troops of either side are rare. Isaac would have seen soldiers of both sides passing through the village, and there may have been occasions when troops stayed in the houses beyond the fields of his little sanctuary, or even at the manor itself. If Hannah accommodated royalists or Roundheads, no record has been passed on to us, and Newton never mentioned such a thing, but it would not have been surprising.

The worst of the fighting was over by the summer of 1646, but for Isaac a far more significant event had transformed his life. At the beginning of the year, soon after his third birthday, his mother had decided to remarry.

Barnabas Smith was the rector of North Witham, a hamlet just over a mile from Woolsthorpe. Little is known about him, but what is known does not paint a pretty picture. He was successful academically but seems to have displayed only a passing interest in learning. The son of a wealthy landowner, he attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1601. He collected books, but by all accounts did not often read them; he made a half-hearted effort to start a notebook in which he intended collecting his thoughts on a variety of theological subjects, but gave up after a few pages. Both the books and the notebook did eventually find serious use, however, as they were passed on to Isaac as part of his inheritance upon Smith’s death. The books – some 250 of them – may have led Newton into serious collecting himself and could well have introduced him to a number of the theological subjects which later preoccupied him to and beyond the point of obsession. Nor was the notebook wasted: the mostly blank pages ended up covered in Isaac’s earliest scribblings on the subject of gravitation and the formulation of the calculus. With a barely disguised dig at his stepfather, Newton never referred to Smith’s hand-me-down as a notebook, but, doubtless knowing its history, called it the ‘Waste Book’.

Smith was sixty-three years old when the widowed Hannah Newton first caught his eye. Hannah was around thirty. (There are no surviving official records giving her exact date of birth.) By then he had been rector at North Witham for over thirty-five years, the rectorship having been bought for him by his father in 1610 as the source of a convenient annuity. According to a visiting bishop who had come to check up on the new rector twelve months after his arrival in North Witham, Smith was a non-resident and, presumably on good behaviour, but ‘inhospitable’.

For Smith the rectorship was little more than a dalliance. By the time of his proposal to Hannah in 1645 he commanded an independent income of over £500 per annum – a considerable sum in the seventeenth century, to which his clergyman’s stipend would have added little. Perhaps he had no need to be ‘hospitable’. During his rectorship, he certainly appears to have sailed calmly through the upheavals in Church doctrine created by the Civil War. Between the start of the first Civil War and the end of the second, many Anglican clergymen chose banishment from their living over conformity to the constantly changing tide of theological fashion. Smith, however, went with the flow.

Smith’s first wife had died only six months earlier, in June 1645, and it may have been for this reason that his initial approach to Hannah was businesslike even for the time. Instead of attempting to woo or even talk to her face to face, he paid a servant a day’s wages to deliver a letter of proposal.

Whatever Smith’s reasons for making such a decidedly unromantic proposal, Hannah did not at first reply. Instead, she consulted with her brother, William – who, as incumbent in a nearby village, must have known Smith – and a family conclave was convened to weigh up the pros and cons of the match.

The terms and conditions of the proposed arrangement were negotiated as a business transaction, and the eventual agreement seems equitable, but little thought appears to have been spared for the pawn in this game – Hannah’s three-year-old son. The deal was that Hannah and Smith would marry and she would naturally move to North Witham, but Isaac would stay at the Newton home. In return, some land to the value of £50 was to be signed over for him to inherit at the age of twenty-one, and the house in Woolsthorpe was to be refurbished completely.

What is so surprising is not so much that Smith did not want Hannah’s son to live with them but that Hannah should go along with these terms. Even accepting that nothing was known of psychology in the seventeenth century, that a mother would willingly trade her son for a new life strikes the twentieth-century observer as totally heartless.

Contemporary accounts of Hannah’s character provide us with very little that is believable about her or helpful in reading her character: John Conduitt tells us, ‘She was a woman of so extraordinary an understanding and a virtue that those who … think that a soul like Sir Isaac Newton’s could be formed by anything less than the immediate operation of a Divine Creator might be apt to ascribe to her many of those extraordinary qualities with which it was endowed.’¹⁰ Giving her the benefit of the doubt, however, we can only speculate that she agreed to the arrangement reluctantly and primarily for her son’s future. Smith was old and wealthy, and Hannah doubtless thought he would not live long. Because his first marriage had been childless, upon his death she would, she might assume, inherit everything, and after the short period of separation Isaac would benefit greatly from the union. But it was hardly as if the Newtons were destitute. By the standards of the day they were doing very nicely indeed. Did she really need to agree?

We only have two pieces of evidence to demonstrate Hannah’s love for her son. First is the fact that she made him sole heir to the estate and in her will she left her body to be buried as Isaac ‘shall think fit’.¹¹ The other is a scrap of a letter written in her barely literate hand during Isaac’s undergraduate days which reads:

Isack

received your letter and I perceive you letter from mee with your cloth but none to you your sisters present thai love to you with my motherly lov you and prayers to god for you I your loving mother

Hannah¹²

It would appear from this that Hannah loved her son as any mother would, and, rather than their separation being something she agreed to readily for financial gain or convenience, it is far more likely that Isaac’s fate was decided by others within the Newton family. Smith may not have been enthusiastic about the idea of having another man’s son in his house; he may have seen Isaac as a threat to his nascent relationship with Hannah; the boy might even have been perceived as a disruptive influence: but this does not mean that Smith insisted that Isaac remain at the manor. It is quite possible that the suggestion came from the Newtons: by keeping the three-year-old at the family home, they could maintain control of the estate, keeping it out of Smith’s hands.

Perhaps Newton never learned the real reason why he was left at the manor; he certainly never mentioned it later in life. But, after the various arguments had been mulled over, his mother accepted Smith’s offer under the negotiated conditions and on 27 January 1646 her list of surnames increased by one, to Ayscough-Newton-Smith.

Unfortunately for Newton the boy, but conceivably of the utmost importance to the advancement of human knowledge, any hopes that Hannah might have had for a short marriage followed by great wealth were disappointed. Barnabas Smith lived for almost another eight years, dying at the age of seventy-one in 1653 after fathering three children: Mary (Marie), born in 1647; Benjamin, born in 1651; and Hannah, born in 1652. Although circumstances would later result in these half-siblings doing little to damage the value of Isaac’s inheritance, the enforced separation from his mother at such an impressionable age has long been recognised as one of the key factors in shaping Newton’s character.

Isaac had been raised solely by his mother, and there is little doubt that until her departure they were almost inseparable; his dependency upon her would have been far greater than if both his parents had survived. Furthermore, it was not death which effectively deprived Newton of his mother: she was taken by another man and continued to live close by. To rub salt into Isaac’s emotional wounds, he never knew when or if his mother would turn up. Sometimes she would reappear for an hour or for an afternoon, but always she would go again – and always to the other man, the hated Barnabas Smith. We know from clues left in his notebooks and personal papers that Newton loathed his stepfather and, to a lesser extent, grew to resent his mother.

Of Newton’s earliest writings only a few fragments remain, but these provide some revealing insights into the psychology of the boy. Four notebooks survive from his days in Lincolnshire and his first year at Trinity College, Cambridge. Of these, the most interesting are a notebook kept at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a schoolboy exercise book in the possession of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, which has become known as the Morgan Notebook.

Newton began writing in the Fitzwilliam Notebook sometime during the early summer of 1662, when he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. At first he treated the book as a form of confessional, purging himself by writing out his felonies against the Lord. In shorthand, he drew up two lists: of sins committed ‘Before Whitsunday 1662’ and of those ‘Since Whitsunday 1662’. The first list, stretching back to his childhood, contains forty-five transgressions; the other, more recent, set contains nine ‘sins’. Most startling of this earlier batch are numbers 13 and 14: ‘Threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them’ and ‘Wishing death and hoping it to some’.¹³ What is so surprising about these entries is not so much the violence of Isaac’s feelings as a child – that could be expected – but the fact that he remembered his anger so clearly and felt compelled to confess it so many years later, long after the principal object of his hatred was dead and buried.

Perhaps even more fascinating is the window into Newton’s psychology offered by the schoolboy exercise book, the Morgan Notebook. This contains collections of scribblings, ideas jotted down from books Isaac read, lists and other notes probably dating from about the age of ten to his early teenage years. Most pertinent to his mental state is an alphabetical list of word associations based upon a contemporary book, Father Francis Gregory’s Nomenclatura. Newton placed these associations under different headings. Under the heading ‘Of Kindred and Titles’, we have F: ‘Father’ (out of Gregory) followed by ‘Fornicator’ and ‘Flatterer’ (both from Newton). Under B we have ‘Brother’ (Gregory) followed by ‘Bastard’, ‘Blasphemer’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Bedlam’, ‘Beggar’ and finally ‘Benjamite’ (all from Newton – whose half-brother, it should be remembered, was named Benjamin).* W begins innocently with Gregory’s ‘Wife’ and ‘Wedlock’, but is completed by Newton’s ‘Whore’.¹⁴

Although he was later attentive and caring towards his mother, and nursed her during her final illness in 1679, the psychological scars of her remarriage clearly dug deep and almost certainly affected Newton’s future relationships with women. Although unquantifiable, the effect of such trauma moulds different individuals in different ways according to their particular circumstances, and in Newton’s case we may match the damage to the personality which emerged from the wreckage.

During the eight years in which Hannah lived in North Witham, Isaac remained in the care of his grandparents, James and Margery Ayscough, who had taken up residence at the manor. As Newton never mentioned his grandparents later in life, it would appear there was little love lost between them. The Ayscoughs probably did their best, but they could never have replaced Hannah. From a state where he could do no wrong, bonded intimately with his gentle mother, he was inexplicably deserted and thrust into the care of two elderly people. The three-year-old Isaac’s instinctive reaction to being left in this situation would be to feel overwhelming guilt, to imagine he had somehow done something terribly wrong. Interestingly, the Morgan Notebook includes O: ‘Orphan’ (Gregory) followed by ‘Offender’ (Newton). When, eight years later, Hannah returned to stay, the eleven-year-old pre-pubescent was again disturbed emotionally. Was his mother’s sudden return a reward? Had he then been right all along to feel guilty over some unknown and unknowable deed? Had he now served his punishment?

Upon Hannah’s return, his parents moved back to their home village of Market Overton, a few miles distant, and Hannah perhaps assumed that her and Isaac’s lives could pick up where they had left off in 1646. But it was not to be. They were certainly wealthier and more secure, but the rift between mother and son was now too wide ever to heal properly. Not only was the fact of her desertion irreversible, but she was returning to the manor with three young children in tow.

Apart from the word associations of the Morgan Notebook, little evidence remains of Isaac’s feelings towards his half-siblings, but we can understand the resentment he must have harboured for this threesome whose father he despised and with whom he could only associate betrayal and desertion. In his school Latin exercise book (one of the four documents surviving from his youth) we have his comment, ‘I have my brother to entreat’,¹⁵ in which a number of biographers have detected a hint of sarcasm – at least, now his mother had returned, he had a brother to talk to – but nothing else on the subject survives.

Although by all accounts Newton was a quiet child, he also possessed a malicious streak, as is evidenced by his private outbursts against Smith recorded in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. Hannah may well have been relieved when a year after her return he was old enough to attend King’s School in Grantham, seven miles away – a distance much too great to travel each day.

Established sometime during the 1520s, by the time Newton arrived King’s School had for some 130 years provided a solid grounding in what were then considered to be the basics of education: Latin, Greek and Bible studies. In 1654 the headmaster was Henry Stokes, a graduate of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and a man who later exerted a profound influence upon the course of Newton’s early academic career.

If the years immediately following Hannah Newton’s departure for a new life with Smith and the confusion of her return moulded Isaac’s emotional make-up, then those between his arrival in Grantham and his leaving for Cambridge in 1661 laid the foundations of his intellectual outlook. He had two major influences in this new life. The first was the routine of a formal education; the other was his new home environment as a lodger with the family of the local apothecary, the Clarks, who had close links with Grantham School and provided accommodation for a succession of pupils in their apartment above the apothecary shop next to the George Inn on the High Street.

At first, school was of little interest to Isaac, as is shown by his lacklustre and completely unexceptional academic status. He was quick to learn but was also a natural autodidact, ignored by most of his teachers and disliked by the other boys. Pupils were expected to learn the core curriculum of classical languages and scriptural studies parrot-fashion. It all required little imagination and offered no inspiration for inquisitiveness. It is, to the modern mind, astonishing that Newton had no formal mathematical training until he entered Cambridge (and even then mathematics was not part of the standard curriculum during his first years as an undergraduate). To compensate for this dull fare, Isaac first read the books handed down to him by his stepfather and later those he found in the library of St Wulfram’s church in Grantham – a long, narrow room above the church porch. Most of these texts were dry fodder indeed: theological tracts and Puritan propaganda that Newton was encouraged to read by a Puritan divine and lecturer at the school named John Angell.

These theology books and the encouragement of Angell led Newton into a religious doctrine he maintained for the rest of his life, but they did not provide the intellectual meat he needed. Fortunately, other books came his way. The most important in leading him to scientific inquiry was The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate, which Isaac discovered when he was about thirteen. He was totally captivated by it and spent 2¹/₂d. on an exercise book into which he copied out long passages.

Bate’s book, first published in 1634, was full of detailed instructions for making wonderful machines and devices, and it was from following these that the teenage Newton was able to design and build working mechanical models for which he gained something of a reputation as a schoolboy. Some seventy years later, Stukeley was able to find a few old folk who still remembered Newton’s miraculous models – windmills that actually worked, into which the boy sometimes placed a mouse to turn the sails; kites; perfectly functioning sundials; and paper lanterns with which he found his way to school on dark winter mornings. The ancient villagers to whom Stukeley referred knew nothing of Bate’s book, which might go some way to account for such hyperbole as ‘Newton’s innate fire was soon excited. He penetrated beyond the superficial view of the thing … He obtained so exact a notion of the mechanism of it, that he made a true and perfect model of it in wood; and it was said to be as clean a piece of workmanship as the original.’¹⁶

Model-building provided a suitably insular pastime for a boy who appears to have had no friends at school. According to Stukeley’s interviewees, Newton tried to interest his schoolmates in his cerebral activities; rather than being content to watch his contemporaries indulge in what Stukeley calls ‘trifling sports’, Isaac apparently tried to ‘teach them … to play philosophically’.¹⁷

It is easy to detect here the personality of a boy crying out for attention and companionship but simply unable to communicate with others of his age. He had been an only child, and under the best of circumstances such an upbringing can cause children to have difficulty in adjusting when they first encounter others of similar age at school. Stukeley and his followers have tried to imply that the matter went deeper than this: that there was something totally otherworldly about Newton as a boy. And no doubt he was exceptional; he was certainly a talented youth, even if at this age he showed little interest in the official curriculum. Thanks to Stukeley’s first-hand accounts, we know Isaac could draw and write well. ‘Sir Isaac furnished his whole room with pictures of his own making, which probably he copied from prints, as well as from life,’ claimed one interviewee.¹⁸ Another recalled in her dotage that Newton had written a poem for her, which she could still recall from memory.¹⁹ And, although his mathematical talent had not yet emerged, his interest in mechanical devices illustrates that the skill and curiosity of the scientist, the talent for constructing experiments and testing ideas, was already awakened.

What eventually transformed his unhappy relationship with official learning was a seemingly trivial event. On the way to school one morning, one of the boys in his class (according to some historians, Clark’s stepson, Arthur) kicked Isaac hard in the stomach. What provoked the attack is open to conjecture, but it is significant that the bully was one place above Newton in their class ratings. Enraged, Isaac challenged the other, much larger, boy to a fight after school. According to John Conduitt, who popularised the tale:

[A]s soon as the school was over he challenged the boy to fight, & they went out together into the church yard, the schoolmaster’s son came to them whilst they were fighting & clapped one on the back & winked at the other to encourage them both. Though Sir Isaac was not so lusty as his antagonist he had so much more spirit & resolution that he beat him ‘til he declared he would fight no more, upon which the schoolmaster’s son bad him use him like a coward, & rub his nose against the wall & accordingly Sir Isaac pulled him along by the ears and thrust his face against the side of the church.²⁰

Still not content, before leaving the bully to nurse his wounds, Newton declared he would not rest until he had overtaken his combatant’s academic position. According to Conduitt, Isaac not only overtook the bully but, within a short time, rose to first place in the school.

The rooms Newton shared with the Clarks above the apothecary shop must have been crowded at this time; Mr Clark and his wife had three children from his wife’s previous marriage – Catherine, Eduard and Arthur Storer. Newton probably shared a room with one or both of the brothers, and in any event, given the size of apartments above town-centre shops of the seventeenth century, living conditions must have seemed very cramped to a boy brought up in a manor house set in acres of open space. Yet, by all accounts, Isaac was content living with the Clarks. If Arthur Storer was indeed his antagonist until the fight in the churchyard, then we can imagine the schoolboy arguments and rivalries within the Clark household when the adults were out or busy in the shop. It is easier to imagine the rows and recriminations after the fight, when Arthur and Isaac returned home, one with cuts and bruises all over his face, the other still rigid with anger.

Fortunately for Isaac, the Clarks appear to have been a very placid couple who raised their children with a distinctly far-sighted liberalism quite atypical of the time. Furthermore, Clark – proud of his position as an apothecary and, according to contemporaries, a cheerful, open man – encouraged the inquisitive Newton to watch him at work and to ask questions.

To Newton, bored with school and searching for something to stimulate his intellect, the apothecary – a repository for chemicals from which remedies and medicines of all descriptions were concocted and sold to the public – was a place full of wonders. On the shelves around the walls of the shop stood jar upon jar of strange-coloured powders and liquids – yellow sulphur, silver mercury, red lead oxide. The shop provided him with his earliest experience of the possibilities of chemistry. It also offered an opportunity to conduct his own experiments.

We know from his surviving notebooks that Newton did not simply watch Mr Clark go about his business but transcribed remedies and cures from books he discovered alongside the chemical jars. He may have even devised his own recipes. In these journals we find descriptions of how to produce paints and pigments, methods by which glass may be cut with chemicals, and ‘a bait to catch fish’. We also encounter cures for various illnesses – such as that for fistulas (here meaning surgically produced openings into the body), which involved ‘drinking twice or thrice a day a … small portion of mint and wormwood and 300 millipedes well beaten (when their heads are pulled off) in a mortar … & suspended in 4 gallons of ale in its fermentation’.²¹ Newton was evidently a hypochondriac from an early age and was fond of concocting remedies which he both used upon himself and offered to others. He listed over 200 different human ailments in the Morgan Notebook under the heading ‘Of Diseases’.

As well as receiving his earliest knowledge of primitive chemistry from Clark the apothecary, Newton acquired from him an introduction to the concept of brotherhood.* Along with all other members of his profession (which at the time existed in a anachronistic limbo: part shopkeeping, part quack medicine), Clark was a member of the Society of Apothecaries. Perhaps, upon his return from regular meetings of the society at its then premises in Water Lane in London, the affable Clark would hint at the proceedings and glamorise the rules and regulations of the organisation to the ever-inquisitive Newton. In this way he not only inspired the boy to delve into the arcane world of cures, remedies and recipes but provided him with another valued piece of knowledge: the concept that there existed brotherhoods through which individuals could communicate and circulate information.

Primitive chemistry and the charms of the apothecary’s world were not the only distractions in the Clarks’ home. Living under the same roof was Mr Clark’s stepdaughter, Catherine Storer, the only female other than his mother and later his half-niece Catherine Barton to whom Newton is known to have been emotionally attached.*

It is difficult to assess accurately how important Catherine Storer was to Newton, because we have only her account of their relationship – conveyed to Stukeley shortly before Newton’s death. By this time Newton was a world-renowned scientist and, aside from the fact that she was in her early eighties and doubtless romanticising her own past, for Catherine to exaggerate her place in the great man’s boyhood affections would have been quite natural.

They were certainly close friends. This much is demonstrated by their writing to each other during Newton’s early days in Cambridge. Further evidence comes from a conversation Stukeley recalled having with Newton shortly before the scientist’s death. Newton, he claimed, expressed a desire to return to live out his days in Woolsthorpe and showed a particular interest in acquiring a property near to where Catherine had once lived.²² However, Catherine Storer’s suggestions to Stukeley that she and Isaac were sweethearts, and that Newton had at one time seriously considered passing up his academic career in order to marry her are most probably pure fantasy. In his memoirs, Stukeley recounted Catherine Storer’s tale, saying:

Sir Isaac and she being thus brought up together, it is said that he entertained a love for her, nor does she deny it. But her portion being not considerable, and he being [a] fellow of a college, it was incompatible with his fortunes to marry, perhaps his studies too. It is certain he always had a kindness for her, visited her whenever in the country, in both her husbands’ days, and gave her forty shillings upon a time, when it was of service to her. She is a little woman, but we may with ease discern that she has been very handsome.²³

Catherine may have harboured hopes, but any spark of romantic interest that Isaac might have shown her was soon extinguished. As his academic performance improved, he was drawn to the attention of his headmaster, Henry Stokes, who saw in him a talent he could not allow to go to waste.

No record of Newton’s academic progress survives, but it is safe to assume that by the time the boy was sixteen Stokes was already viewing him as a likely candidate for university entrance. What Hannah’s initial reaction to her son’s progress might have been is unknown, but late in 1658, as Stokes was about to suggest that her son should consider a university education, Hannah decided to remove him from King’s School.

Hannah had shown little consideration for education, and it had been at the insistence of her brother, the Cambridge-educated William Ayscough, that Isaac had attended an elementary school while living with his grandparents. Ironically, it could have been Stokes’s enthusiasm that prompted Hannah to remove Isaac from the school. She saw little need for her son to be educated; her husband had demonstrated how the farm could be managed even without the benefit of literacy.

At first Hannah had her way. For most of 1659 Isaac lived at the manor with his mother and Barnabas Smith’s children. But, in the notebook started in 1662, the list of his ‘sins’ during the period in which he lived there indicates that it was a time fraught with bitterness and family arguments.

He was, for the most part, an obedient and respectful son, but the stress of being taken away from an environment in which he was blossoming and the threat of having his life ruined again by the wishes of his mother were evidently too much. The Fitzwilliam Notebook lists his crimes as ‘Refusing to go to the close at my mother’s command’, ‘Striking many’, ‘Peevishness with my mother’, ‘With my sister’, ‘Punching my sister’ and ‘Falling out with the servants’. The signs of strain are clear.

Whether it was to show deliberately how bad he was at farm duties or through genuine inability and absent-mindedness, he did not perform his duties at all well. Stukeley tells us that:

When at home if his mother ordered him into the fields to look after the sheep, the corn, or upon any rural employment, it went on very heavily through his manage [i.e. he did not conduct the task well]. His chief delight was to sit under a tree, with a book in his hands, or to busy himself with his knife in cutting wood for models of somewhat or other that struck his fancy, or he would go to the running stream, and make little millwheels to put into the water.²⁴

His lack of interest even brought an admonition from the authorities. The records of the manor court of the nearby village of Colsterworth show that on 28 October 1659 an Isaac Newton was fined 3s. 4d. ‘for suffering his sheep to break the stubbs of 23 of loes [loose?, meaning unenclosed] furlongs’. On top of this, he was obliged to pay 1s. on each of two further counts, ‘for suffering his swine to trespass in the corn fields’ and ‘for suffering his fence belonging to his yards to be out of repair’.²⁵

Following this, Hannah decided that her son should be supervised by a servant from the household who would look after him and give the boy proper instruction. Predictably, the idea failed because Newton quickly turned the situation to his advantage, allowing the servant to do all the work while he sloped off to read or to pursue other interests.

Each Saturday, Isaac set off dutifully with the servant to Grantham to sell the farm produce and to purchase supplies for the following week. Arriving at the Saracen’s Head, the inn in Westgate, he would instruct the servant to continue with the business of the day while he went off to visit Mr Clark at his shop in the High Street.

What drew Newton there was a collection of books that Clark had acquired from his recently deceased brother, Dr Joseph Clark, the usher (assistant teacher) of King’s School. The apothecary himself was interested in the collection, but had little time to read. Perhaps Newton had offered to catalogue the books in exchange for the chance to read them; be that as it may, somehow he managed to persuade Clark to allow him to spend almost all of each Saturday in the back room behind the shop in solitary bliss studying texts on physics, anatomy, botany, philosophy and mathematics – his first real exposure to these things. From Bate’s The Mysteries of Nature and Art Newton had discovered the elements of experimentation and practical skills – lessons he would never forget but would employ both as an orthodox scholar and in his role as alchemist. But here were texts by greater writers and natural philosophers. We do not know for sure the contents of the library, but it is safe to assume a scholar such as Dr Clark would have collected the works of the great names of the past and perhaps the more controversial figures of the day, and it is likely that Newton now first discovered Francis Bacon and René Descartes, Aristotle and Plato, acquiring a fuller and more useful education than he could possibly have gained within the narrow confines of the school curriculum.

Word of Isaac’s truancy soon reached two different parties involved in the argument over his future. Hannah heard of her son’s antics through the complaints of the servant, and Henry Stokes discovered how his ex-pupil was showing admirable determination not to fall under his mother’s yoke. Stokes had tried to dissuade Hannah from taking Newton away from school but had been unsuccessful. Now, hearing how Isaac was doing everything he could to foil his mother’s efforts, Stokes decided to try again.

Initially, nothing changed. Despite the irritation caused by her son’s behaviour, Hannah would not listen to suggestions that he should pursue an academic career and desert the farm. To be fair, Hannah was herself poorly educated and could not have appreciated the world of learning that Isaac took to so naturally. To her, the only thing that mattered was the management of the estate: it was the source of their prosperity, and she could not understand what her son could possibly gain by attending university. She had already lost two husbands and was expected to maintain a farm, run a household and look after three young children. She could not bear to lose Isaac too.

But, after Stokes appealed to her a second time, she realised she could hold Isaac back no longer. (Her decision was no doubt sweetened by Stokes’s offer to remit the standard charge of forty shillings paid to the school by the parents of all boys who came from beyond the town.²⁶)

Stokes then talked to William Ayscough (who had probably influenced Hannah’s change of heart and was himself a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge), and probably to Humphrey Babington, a relative of the Clarks and a fellow at Cambridge University. Together they smoothed the way for Isaac’s admission, and by the autumn of 1660 the young man was back in Grantham preparing for Cambridge.

Helped by those around him who understood his desire to learn, Isaac now, for the first time, found himself completely content. Throughout his childhood and teenage years he had constantly been pulled in different directions. At school he clashed with the teaching tradition on the one hand and his contemporaries on the other. He eventually found his true nature not from the comfort of others or through the small accomplishments of orthodoxy, but in the discovery of a larger world beyond the confines of his upbringing. By 1660 he had passed the threshold and entered the world in which he would flourish.

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