Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
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for pygmies than houses for men.2
Covering little more than half a square mile, Cambridge had a population of about 8,000 including almost 3,000 students, graduates and university staff. Students could easily find themselves at risk – their souls in jeopardy from the attentions of prostitutes and innkeepers (a danger made much of by the hypocritical masters), and their physical safety threatened by ubiquitous thieves and murderers. In a letter to his mother written in 1664, one John Strype, a young student in his first year at the university, describes graphically the social climate in the town:
We have hereabouts most intolerable robbing: never by reports so much. I have heard within two or three days of six or seven robberies hereabouts committed: whereof two or three killed. No longer than last Sabbath, a mile off, a man knocked on the head. Lately a scholar of Peter House had both his ears cut off, because he told the thieves, after he had delivered some money to them, that he would give them leave to inflict any punishment upon him, if he had a farthing more: but they searching him, found, it seems, 20s. more: so they took him at his word, and inflicted the cheater’s punishment upon him.3
Such incidents were not attributable solely to the perceived wealth of the students, nor was it simply that students were easy targets for thieves; there had been bad feeling between town and gown for centuries. Although town considerably outnumbered gown, the lives of the townsfolk were dominated by an autocratic university governing body that often behaved in corrupt and self-interested fashion. Most of the town’s tradesmen relied upon the university for their livelihoods, and many resented the draconian powers of the Vice-Chancellor. His sphere of influence was by no means restricted to university property or the student body: he was, in all but name, a feudal lord who controlled all forms of commerce and oversaw all legal and financial matters within the town. A royal charter drawn up in 1600 stipulated that Cambridge was allowed a mayor, bailiffs and burgesses and that the civic authorities could have and use their own seal. But the final clause of the charter specified that ‘Nothing in this charter shall prejudice or impede the privileges, liberties and profits of the Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University.’4
Little over a year before Newton arrived in the town, the Mayor had been humiliated by the Vice-Chancellor and made to apologise for apparently overstepping his authority. In his written recantation, he was forced to make it clear exactly who was boss:
Whereas I, Edward Chapman, Mayor of the Town of Cambridge, did upon the XXVIth day of February 1660 by error send my warrant for releasing of William Land, John Devole and James Delamot out of the Tolbooth Gaol, to which they had been committed by the then Vice-Chancellor, Dr Ferne, I therefore, in satisfaction to the University, hereby acknowledge the error and do promise not to do or to my power suffer anything hereafter to be done that may anyways infringe the liberties or privileges of this University to my knowledge. In witness whereof I have set my hand the second day of March in the year of our Lord God 1660.5
Amazingly, little changed until the late Victorian era, when both the power of the university over the town and the limitations placed upon the freedom of students were gradually eroded. In Newton’s student days – and until long after Darwin attended the university during the late 1820s – the activities of the students were monitored by the university police, the proctors. Students were forbidden to associate with tradesmen, to drink in taverns, to have dealings with prostitutes and to break an evening curfew. Although many of these rules were frequently broken by the students and their enforcement was lax, examples were made.
Outside the city walls, England had changed and was continuing to change, but little of this was reflected in the attitude of the university authorities or in the antiquated curriculum taught. The peaceful restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had brought with it a nationwide climate of renewal. Cromwell’s Protestant Commonwealth had died with him in 1658, and, although the country would remain suspicious of the Catholic leanings of the house of Stuart, Newton entered Cambridge in 1661 in a new age of religious tolerance and political stability.
This radically altered the broader character of society, and fellows of the university who had fallen victim to Puritan purges were reinstated (although not to the exclusion of former Roundhead sympathisers). Yet the university authorities maintained a hold over the town hardly changed since medieval times. Since the reign of Henry VIII, the King had the legal right to shut down any college in the realm and claim its possessions. Consequently the university remained loyal to the Crown, and as a monarchist institution it was rooted in tradition and notions of a glorious past.
To Isaac Newton – a country boy who had never visited a town larger than Grantham – Cambridge was Avalon. He left Woolsthorpe on the second or third day of June 1661 and set out along the Great North Road on the fifty-mile trip to the town that would be his home almost without a break for the next thirty-five years. En route, he broke his journey first at Sewstern, where he took his first look at a piece of land bequeathed to him in Barnabas Smith’s will (the annual income from which would pass to him after his twenty-first birthday), and then at Stilton on the approach to the Great Fens, a day’s ride from Cambridge.
According to Stukeley, on Newton’s last day under Stokes’s tutelage the proud headmaster made his prize student stand in front of the school while he delivered a speech praising the boy and, with tears in his eyes, urged Newton’s fellow pupils to follow his academic example. Apparently the other boys were as moved as their headmaster. More believable is Stukeley’s admission that the farm hands and servants at the manor were glad to see Newton leave home and ‘rejoiced at parting with him, declaring, he was fit for nothing but the “Versity”’.6
Hannah, however, had ensured that her son would not be allowed fully to escape the mundanity of ‘real life’ and the hardships he may have thought he was leaving behind.
When Newton enrolled at Trinity College, on 5 June 1661, he entered the college on the lowest rung of the social ladder, as a subsizar (becoming a sizar after he had matriculated at Trinity a month after his arrival). Subsizars and sizars were little more than servants who paid their way by emptying the bedpans and cleaning the rooms of the more privileged students. These included the elite – fellow-commoners, young men from noble families, and pensioners (usually the sons of wealthy businessmen).
The exact form that sizarship took for Newton remains unclear. Traditionally, sizars waited on other students, but there was another type who worked solely for one fellow, invariably their tutor. It has always been supposed that Newton’s sizarship was of the first type, and this may be true, but there is evidence to suggest that he was in fact sizar to Humphrey Babington, brother of Mrs Clark, the Grantham apothecary’s wife, and fellow of Trinity.
It may even have been that Newton was only able to attend the university thanks to Babington taking him on as his personal servant. Babington had himself been a Cambridge student. As a royalist sympathiser, he had been sacked from his fellowship under the Puritan purge of the Commonwealth years but was reinstated with the Restoration. After Newton’s death, Ayscough family tradition had it that ‘the pecuniary aid of some neighbouring gentleman’7 had enabled Newton to study at Cambridge.
If Newton was Babington’s sizar his duties would have been particularly easy, because his master was in college for only a few weeks a year and would have demanded little of him. What is clear is that the conflict of interests between Isaac’s mother and those who saw scholarly potential in the young man did not end when Hannah complied reluctantly with the wishes of Babington, Ayscough and Stokes. Newton’s academic fees at the university were in the region of £10 to £15 per year, and he was given an allowance of a further £10. Both of these expenses were met by Hannah. But, considering she commanded a very comfortable annual income of around £700, it is evident that she wanted deliberately to make life hard for her son at Cambridge.
Sizarship was bad enough for those who could afford nothing better, and the failure rate of sizars was naturally