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The Jewel House

Yale University Press

Chapter One

Standing on the south bank of the River Thames in 1600 and looking from Southwark to the ancient walled City of London, the viewer would have been struck by four features of her skyline: the monumental, crenellated stone fortress of the Tower of London to the east; the round, half-timbered "O" of the Globe Theater to the south; the truncated spire of St. Paul's cathedral in the west, rising up from the rectangular bulk of the enormous medieval church, still charred from a stroke of lightning that had blown off the top; and the sun glinting off the golden grasshopper that hovered over the smooth stone façade and arched colonnades of Gresham's new Royal Exchange to the north (see Figure 1). These four buildings marked London's distinct skyline and symbolized the political, cultural, religious, and economic power of the metropolis. Elizabethan London was truly the capital of early modern England, the vital, cosmopolitan center of the country's life. Anyone who has struggled to understand the Elizabethan City as a cultural, social,economic, political, or spatial entity will find comfort in the fact that contemporary residents, too, found it both exhilarating and bewildering. "She is grown so great, I am almost afraid to meddle with her," wrote Donald Lupton in 1632, continuing, "she is certainly a great world, there are so many worlds in her."

While London's skyline would have struck any visitor, the real vibrancy of the City-the energy symbolized by the Tower of London, the Globe, St. Paul's, and the Royal Exchange-rested in her people. On her dark, congested streets Londoners lived and worked, argued and worshiped, struggled and thrived. London grew from a small urban center of some 50,000 in 1550 to the second-largest city in Europe by 1600, with more than 200,000 residents. "This city of London is not only brimful of curiosities, but so popular also that one simply cannot walk along the streets for the crowd," wrote Swiss visitor Thomas Platter in 1599. Elizabethan Londoners were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, living cheek by jowl with immigrants from France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The City's residents included Africans, Ottoman Turks, and Jewish conversos. Her foreign population was both a great asset and a great source of anxiety. The immigrants brought new trades like pinmaking and glassmaking, as well as new ideas for waterworks and other engineering projects, but they also increased the stress on already overburdened job and housing markets. Life on the City's streets, below the church spires and under the walkways of the Exchange, was both creative and competitive-the ideal environment for cultural and intellectual change.

Among the bustling crowds were hundreds of men and women who studied and exploited nature. Though they lacked a single building like the Globe Theater to draw the eye of a passing stranger, at street level they made up a recognizable and important feature of London life. These naturalists, medical practitioners, mathematicians, teachers, inventors, and alchemists not only actively studied the natural world; they were also interested in how that study could benefit human lives. During the age of Elizabeth, London nurtured the development of an empirical culture-the culture of the Scientific Revolution. While members of the royal court occupied themselves with threats foreign and domestic, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge still debated the authority of ancient texts, the residents of London were busy constructing ingenious mechanical devices, testing new medicines, and studying the secrets of nature. There would have been no Scientific Revolution in England without the intellectual vitality present in Elizabethan London, for she provided later scientists with its foundations: the skilled labor, tools, techniques, and empirical insights that were necessary to shift the study of nature out of the library and into the laboratory.

To understand how London helped bring about such a change, it is helpful to return to her streets. St. Paul's cathedral, built in the Middle Ages to signify London's devotion to God, had stood for centuries as the most important landmark in the square-mile center of what was known simply as "the City" (Figure 2). Elizabeth I had launched numerous schemes, including a public lottery, in an effort to rebuild the damaged church. Despite its diminished height, St. Paul's remained the City's ecclesiastical center in 1600. Outside, preachers in open-air pulpits urged throngs of Londoners to repent and mend their ways, raising their voices to be heard over the booksellers and printers who had made the churchyard precincts their home for the past century. Where once it had been the religious hub of the City, by Elizabeth's reign the cathedral had become the intellectual epicenter of the realm, the source not only of religious debate but also of news sheets, broadsides, and thousands of printed books that spread the ideas of the Renaissance to eager readers. Buyers haunted the stalls outside St. Paul's purchasing used copies of Francis Bacon's Essays and first imprints of John Marston's latest play, or picking through bins of cheap old almanacs and star charts for hair-raising illustrations of local wonders like a two-headed calf, and to scoff at once-frightening prognostications made humorous by hindsight. And students of nature flocked there to buy vernacular books on medicine and surgery, imported foreign botanical works, and the mathematical instruments that were often sold along with handbooks that helped explain their use.

There was a high degree of literacy within London, helped along by a system of grammar schools that taught basic skills to City children. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were advantageous in London's competitive markets and in the global trade networks to which they were linked. Sir Thomas Gresham's major gift to the City, the Royal Exchange, was built as a lasting monument to London's position in these markets, and it quickly became the center of economic life in the City. Modeled after Antwerp's famous Bourse, the Royal Exchange housed shops full of expensive luxury items, offices where elite members of the Barber-Surgeons' Company plied their trade, covered walkways where spices, drugs, and cloth were bought and sold, and a grand open courtyard where gossips met and would-be lovers formed romantic liaisons. As the Exchange's popularity grew, market stalls opened up outside the gates, including shops that sold mathematical instruments and hastily erected platforms where itinerant medical practitioners peddled their potions and lotions. One Elizabethan proclaimed that it often seemed as if all of London could be found in the Exchange-lords and ladies, tradesmen and their wives, servants, apprentices, and thieves. Within the Royal Exchange and in the streets surrounding the building you could have heard every language from Arabic to Swedish being spoken by the merchants and foreign immigrants who formed an integral part of London life.

Not all of London's citizens were buying books, but an illiterate person did not lack opportunities to hear the news, make friends with foreigners, or learn of recent economic and political developments at home or abroad. A visit to the Royal Exchange, St. Paul's churchyard, or the theaters on the south bank of the Thames provided any Londoner, literate or illiterate, high or low, foreign or native born, with easy access to news and information. The area around the Globe in Southwark was particularly important as a metropolitan cultural center. New plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and their contemporaries were enacted there and stimulated debate and comment among the audience. Ben Jonson, in and out of prison repeatedly throughout the 1590s, published his satirical send-up of London characters called Every Man Out of His Humour in 1600. While the 1599 production of the play at the Globe was warmly received by courtiers traveling down the Thames from Whitehall who enjoyed figuring out which of their friends were being lampooned, the play was seen by some City residents as lacking in both plot and taste. But the area around the Globe also housed a large hospital at St. Thomas's church which was known for its surgical staff, the workshops of several large-scale instrument makers who constructed parish clocks for the City and palace clocks for the royal court, and dozens of immigrant brewers who ran strange distillation and fermentation apparatus that astonished and intrigued the locals.

In 1600 the City's residents still clung tenaciously to London's Roman foundations, the uneven stone walls that encompassed roughly a square mile of territory on the north bank of the Thames. Yet the steady influx of people forced London to push relentlessly outward, and suburban sprawl began to encompass lands that had been gardens (such as the open fields to the west that would in the next centuries be developed into the residential and shopping district Covent Garden), industrial areas (such as the artillery foundries and glasshouses to the northeast of the City walls by the Tower of London), and the lands once held by the now banished Catholic Church. London's rapid expansion underscored her strategic and political importance to the realm, and Elizabeth I took care to treat her capital and its residents with an astute combination of firmness and respect. Yet the City remained difficult to govern due to her cobbled-together nature, the contrast between rich and poor that existed on every street, and her diverse population. While the political ideal of the City was one of peace and harmony, in reality London was a conglomeration of distinct neighborhoods anchored by more than one hundred churches and scores of trade organizations. Each individual and every corporate body wanted to advance their own causes and maintain their hard-won privileges. Overcrowding, the presence of foreign immigrants, poverty, public health crises, and civic unrest made this loose conglomeration contentious and politically explosive. Monarchs, including Elizabeth I, not surprisingly preferred to remain outside the City, maintaining no official residence within London's walls. Palaces in nearby Westminster and Greenwich put the queen within easy reach of the City in case of serious internal troubles, and within easy reach of the Tower of London in case a foreign invasion was threatened. Such threats were frequent in the half-century before 1600, especially in the years leading up to and away from the great naval battle of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when rumors of impending danger spread like wildfire in the City's streets. Most foreign threats stemmed from the continuing religious antagonisms between Protestant England and her Catholic neighbors Scotland, France, and Spain. In 1600, despite England's victory against Spain, the rumor mill still suggested that there was a Jesuit hiding in every cupboard and a Spanish assassin lurking around every corner. And in fact espionage was a common feature of life in London, with French agents, Italian double-agents, and English spies frequenting the alleys and taverns to gather news and intelligence.

Within these landmark buildings, on the streets around them, behind shop-fronts, and upstairs in residences throughout the City, men and women were studying and manipulating nature. This book is about these minor vernacular figures and their small successes, trial-and-error progress, and mundane aspirations. It is about the powerful partnership that existed in London between collaboration and competition, which often led to a heated but amiable discussion of ideas about nature in English rather than a publication of them in Latin. It provides an account of a relatively brief period in London's history and of the men and women who studied the natural world and tried to find better ways to harness its power and control its processes. They pursued this course by examining their own experiences as well as by repeatedly testing and verifying the experiences of their friends and rivals, thus taking steps toward experimentation. In Elizabethan London we can see how students of nature eagerly embraced the new print culture that was available to them but preserved the vibrant manuscript culture of the medieval period in their notebooks and recipe collections. By sketching out this vital world and exploring the ways in which the City of London functioned as a center for inquiry into and debates about nature, I am contributing to an ongoing historical project to situate the work of a small handful of acknowledged scientific geniuses within the densely social communities of practice that surrounded them.

Readers who want to learn more about Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and the other geniuses of the Scientific Revolution-and it is important to do so-may find this book unsatisfying. Here the most well-known figure you will encounter is Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Though not a genius in the sense of Newton or Boyle, he was a visionary. Born and bred in the age of Elizabeth, he lived just outside London's walls for much of his adult life in the western suburbs of the City. Popularly regarded as the father of modern science for his argument that science should be an organized activity pursued for the benefit of humanity, Bacon was deeply interested in the natural world and her mysterious workings and in The New Atlantis (1627) shared his vision for how science could be more functional and productive. Given his fascination with the natural world and his commitment to putting its control into human hands, he should have found the City an exciting and intriguing place. Instead, Bacon found the City's interest in nature deeply troubling. It was too plebeian, too democratic, and too vernacular for his taste. Bacon belonged to a higher level of the social order than did most of the City residents who made medicines, planted botanical gardens, or conducted experiments. How, he wondered, could he transform London's doubtlessly energetic-but to his mind inchoate and purposeless-inquiries into nature into a tool of state that could benefit the commonwealth?

Bacon responded to this question by constructing an ideal house of science-named Salomon's House after the archetype of wisdom in the Bible, King Solomon-that contained the scientific, medical, and technical activities he found most fruitful. The final pages of The New Atlantis were dedicated to a fantastic description of Salomon's House and the studies of nature that would take place there. These included efforts to explore the earth's mineral resources, to discover the most fruitful cultivation techniques, and to peruse the heavens with mathematical instruments. The study of the human body would take place in hospitals and anatomical theaters while others struggled to develop new medical cures. In his imaginary house of science, Bacon put all of these activities within a single, hierarchical institution overseen by a single, well-educated man.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Jewel House by Deborah E. Harkness Copyright © 2007 by Deborah E. Harkness. Excerpted by permission.
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