The Royal Society, Pepys and the New Science
A Lecture at Gresham College, November 1660
On the evening of Wednesday 28 November 1660, twelve men stayed behind after a lecture by the young astronomer Christopher Wren at Gresham College in the City of London. They agreed to form a club for promoting ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. The group built on years of informal meetings — some at Wadham College Oxford under John Wilkins in the 1650s — but the November 1660 meeting is now treated as the founding of the Royal Society.
The Royal Charter, 1662
Charles II granted the new body its first Royal Charter on 15 July 1662, with a second, more detailed charter the next year. The full title was ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. The king became its patron, presenting fellows with a silver mace that they still carry today. Crucially, royal patronage was honour, not money. Fellows paid their own subscriptions of one shilling a week, and from 1672 each new member paid a forty-shilling admission fee. The Crown gave no Treasury funding. This is why the modern misconception that the Society was a government department is wrong: it was a private subscription club with the king’s blessing.
The Royal Society was chartered by Charles II in July 1662. Its full title was ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’. It was a private subscription society funded by its fellows’ weekly dues, not by the Treasury — royal patronage was prestige, not money.
Wilkins, Boyle, Hooke, Wren
The early Society’s leadership reads like a roll-call of the new science. John Wilkins, the Warden of Wadham College Oxford, ran the original experimental club there in the 1650s. Robert Boyle, the wealthy Irish son of the Earl of Cork, used his Oxford laboratory to work on what we now call Boyle’s Law of gases (published 1662). His paid assistant Robert Hooke became the Society’s first Curator of Experiments in 1662, demonstrating new effects at every weekly meeting; his ‘Micrographia’ (1665) showed the world the first detailed microscope drawings of insects, cork cells and snowflakes. Christopher Wren, the astronomer who triggered the founding meeting, became Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1669 and shifted the centre of his work towards architecture without leaving the Society. Natural philosophy was the period’s name for what we would now call physical science.
Each Wednesday afternoon Hooke would prepare an experiment, often involving Boyle’s air pump, magnetic effects, blood transfusion or telescope observation. Fellows took turns to read papers, often in Latin, and to repeat each other’s experiments — the principle that scientific claims must be reproduced before being accepted is one of the Society’s lasting contributions to method. From 1665 the secretary Henry Oldenburg edited ‘Philosophical Transactions’, the first English-language scientific journal still published today. The motto ‘Nullius in verba’ (‘Take nobody’s word for it’) summed up the experimental ideal.
Pepys, the Society and Newton’s Principia
Samuel Pepys was elected a fellow on 15 February 1665. Reformer of the Navy by day, he kept his diary at night and gave the Society advice on naval matters. He was elected President in December 1684, two months before the death of Charles II, and he held the chair until 1686. In that capacity he gave the formal imprimatur — a licence to print — to Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ (full Latin title: ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’), published 5 July 1687. The book set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation that defined modern physics for the next two and a half centuries. Pepys’s name appears on the title page as President of the Society.
Wren beyond St Paul’s
Wren’s scientific career flowed into his architectural one. In 1675 Charles II commissioned him to build the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, with John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. Its purpose was practical: accurate star charts to help English ships find longitude at sea. Wren also designed the Royal Hospital at Chelsea (1682) for old soldiers, the Trinity College Library at Cambridge (1676), and the new buildings at Kensington Palace and Hampton Court for William and Mary after the reign. Architecture and the new science met in Wren personally — he understood the geometry of his domes because he understood astronomy.
The early Society was as quarrelsome as it was inventive. Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton clashed bitterly in 1672 over the nature of light and again in the 1680s over priority on the inverse-square law of gravitation. Hooke believed Newton had drawn on his own earlier ideas about gravity without credit; No authenticated portrait of Hooke survives, and a much-repeated story blames Newton for its loss; Hooke’s biographer Allan Chapman treats that story as a myth. Disputes over priority were typical of seventeenth-century natural philosophy — the Society’s journal ‘Philosophical Transactions’ was partly designed to settle them by recording who published what first.
Royal Patronage of the Arts
Patronage of science was part of a wider royal cultural policy. Charles II refounded the Royal Library, founded the Royal Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in 1673 to train navigators, supported musicians like Henry Purcell at the Chapel Royal, and made Sir Peter Lely court painter in 1661; Lely’s ‘Windsor Beauties’ series, commissioned by James’s wife Anne Hyde, painted the women of the court. The pattern was the same as in science: the Crown gave prestige, names and a few salaries; the City of London and private patrons paid most of the bills.
Robert Hooke was the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments and demonstrated weekly experiments at Gresham College. Samuel Pepys, elected fellow in 1665 and President from 1684, gave the imprimatur to Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia’ in 1687.