Antiques

Magazine Antiques, June, 1996 by Wendell Garrett

James Thomson, "Rule Britannia," 1740

When Elizabeth I died childless on March 24, 1603, the wily, vacillating, and pedantic James VI of Scotland was the preferred candidate to succeed her. When he was proclaimed James I of England, his triumphal entry into London and coronation encompassed every magnificence. The cultural picture was bright. Shakespeare was only forty, Ben Jonson about thirty, and Christopher Marlowe had died only a decade earlier. The King James Bible, considered one of the singular glories of English letters, was published in 1611. The Banqueting House in Whitehall, designed by Inigo Jones with a ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens, was completed in 1622 and was the first purely Renaissance building in London - a fitting monument to the new age. While the Banqueting House was under construction, William Harvey was at work on his treatise that explained the circulation of the blood. William Gilbert's De magnete...confirmed the Copernican hypothesis of the earth's rotation and founded the study of electrical science. John Donne, the dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, was writing the verses that made him the most notable poet of the metaphysical school, and the didactic Francis Bacon was at work on his radical system of philosophy. And in September 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers set sail on the Mayflower to establish a colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 was greeted by "shouting and joy expressed by all...past imagination," as Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary. Two of the greatest literary works of the seventeenth century date from after the restoration: John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678). In London, Charles II reopened the theaters and himself founded two theater companies in Covent Garden. He laid the foundation stone of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. He refurbished the Queens Chapel opposite Saint James's Palace for his Portuguese queen, Catherine of Braganza. He built a new palace at Greenwich, which is now the Royal Naval College, and he employed the architect Hugh May to rebuild the state apartments in Windsor Castle.

The king's interest in scientific matters induced him to establish the office of astronomer royal, and it was no accident that the association that united leading scientists and philosophers became the Royal Society. The court drew artists and professional men of all kinds, and the kings entourage included physicians and surgeons, a librarian, a poet laureate, chaplins, painters, and musicians. Such extensive patronage did not go uncensored. When the great plague of 1664-1665 claimed thousands, followed in 1666 by the fire that destroyed the City of London, there were those who claimed these calamities were God's punishment of a people steeped in sin and preoccupied with "blasphemous questionings."

To Englishmen of the next century it was not monarchs but the philosopher John Locke and the physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton who dominated the last years of the seventeenth century. For Locke, government was based on a contract by men to form an ordered society. They entrust the execution of government to one or more persons who, if they violate the terms of the trust, may forfeit their right to govern. Society is then entitled to take the necessary steps to ensure that government and the preservation of property shall go on. By this theory, revolution is the ultimate safeguard of law. Newton seemed to his contemporaries to have established once and for all the main principles of mathematics, physics, astronomy, and optics. The work of these two titans of the seventeenth century became the leitmotivs of the eighteenth on both sides of the Atlantic.