1 - Approaches and Contexts

Summary

In April 1686 the Royal Society received the first part of one the most significant works in the history of science: Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). This manuscript was not delivered by Newton himself, but by Dr Nathanael Vincent, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge and Rector of Blo Norton in Norfolk, and also one of the least famous early Fellows of the Royal Society. Vincent is an obscure figure, in part, because throughout his career he was eclipsed by figures whose contributions to British history were much more significant, and whose names consequently feature more prominently in studies of Restoration England. Vincent was no Robert Hooke or Christopher Wren. He presented information about a ‘petrified skull in Sidney College’; he discussed the ‘head of an urn’; and he donated to the Society's repository ‘talcum aureum; belliculus; a stæchas flower … and the horns of a cervus volans’. He also contributed to debates on Denis Papin's method of raising water, and he noted ‘some unobserved properties of the Phosphorous’ – mainly that you could write with it in a warm room. Vincent also wrote about a mysterious invention, ‘which after many advances, I have (I think) brought very near its utmost perfection’. Fellows of the Royal Society were told that Vincent ‘offered to discover’ the invention, ‘if he could have subscriptions for it as for a book’. They responded that ‘the Society could not proceed in this way, till they knew the matter’. Vincent never told them what the invention was, the Society never did proceed in that way, and Vincent resigned his fellowship in 1687. Vincent's poor fortune also coloured his final years. In 1719 a group of undergraduates abused him at his own door, then prior to his death in May 1722 Vincent was tricked by a distant relative out of his not inconsiderable fortune of £1,500.

Why, then, begin a book about Restoration court culture with Newton's courier, an obscure churchman who used phosphorous as a pencil and who invented something and then told nobody about it? Because Vincent was also Chaplain in Ordinary to Charles II.