Michael White - Isaac Newton - The Last Sorcerer

The winter of that year was bleak both for the Newtons and for the country as a whole – England had slid into a savage civil war. By the time Hannah and Isaac were married, King Charles I had left London, never to return as England’s acknowledged sovereign, and had headed north. His queen, Henrietta Maria, adored by her doting husband but loathed by many of his subjects, had been sent to Europe for her own safety. During the summer and autumn of 1642, what had begun as petty skirmishes and political and religious wrangling developed into full-scale civil war, with the royalists camped first at York and then at Oxford. The battle of Edgehill, one of the most famous of the war, had been fought at the end of October and had gone the royalists’ way; the country was gripped by battle fever. Within the space of a few years, England had been transformed from a nation at peace, existing beyond the turmoil of the Thirty Years War which had ravaged mainland Europe since 1618, into a nation in which brother had taken up arms against brother and lifelong friendships had been shattered by the taking of sides in the dispute – for the King or for Parliament.

Most biographers of Newton, from Stukeley to recent times, have assumed that the Newtons had royalist leanings. They have based this opinion upon the family’s class and social aspirations, reasoning that, as upwardly mobile lower gentry, they would favour the status quo and disapprove of attacks upon the traditional monarchical system. This may have been so, but the sides in the Civil War were not defined clearly along class lines. There were many noblemen who fought on the side of Parliament, and many of the lower orders supported the King. Furthermore, the many complex reasons for the dispute included not only political preoccupations but religious issues, which for some would have been more important. For many historians, the Civil War had its foundations in the decisions of Henry VIII and his immediate descendants and was as much to do with the ideological clash between Rome and the Church of England as with the position and powers of Parliament. The Newton family would not have shared Charles’s sympathy towards Catholicism, and indeed in later life Isaac was positively anti-Catholic.

The political views of the Newtons during the Civil War were not recorded. The fact that Hannah’s brother, William Ayscough, maintained his position as rector in the nearby village of Burton Coggles during and after the war neither confirms nor refutes the Ayscoughs’ Cavalier sympathies: it merely shows that he, like many others, including perhaps the Newtons, bent with the wind.

For all the turmoil the Civil War wrought on the people of England, at the time Hannah Newton was far more concerned with immediate problems caused by a domestic tragedy a few days before the battle of Edgehill: her husband, Isaac, had died leaving her heavily pregnant. What caused his death is unclear. He had just turned thirty-six and appears to have been ill for some time beforehand. We know this because of the introduction to his will, which reads, ‘In the name of God amen the first day of October (anno Dom 1642) I Isaac Newton of Woolsthorpe in the parish of Colsterworth in the county of Lincoln yeoman sick of body but of good and perfect memory …’ 5

Very little is known of Isaac senior. Misinterpretations have been made of his character based largely on the research of the eighteenth-century writer Thomas Maude, who claimed that Hannah’s husband was a wastrel. 6Maude had actually confused him with a relative, another John Newton, and it seems from the contents of the will that Isaac had actually managed well his newly acquired estate and had taken seriously his responsibilities before marrying Hannah. He was illiterate, but seventeenth-century farmers had little real need for learning, and he left the estate pretty much as he inherited it; Hannah and her child were well provided for.

During those miserable days between the death of her husband and the birth of their child, we can only assume that Hannah did her best to maintain the farm and to prepare herself for the coming event. She went into labour late on Christmas Eve and almost certainly gave birth in the room in which the child was conceived – the bedroom to the left of the top of the stairs. Hannah’s mother, Margery, travelled from the nearby village of Market Overton to supervise the birth, and two women from Woolsthorpe were paid a few pennies to help. Sometime soon after 2 a.m. on Christmas morning a son – Isaac – was born.

By Newton’s own account, offered late in life, he was born premature. This may have been true, but he was fond of mythologising his childhood and, for complex reasons, he encouraged the idea that there had been something miraculous about his birth. Also, Newton quite naturally did everything he could to pre-empt any rumours that he may have been born illegitimate. The records do not give an exact date for the marriage of Isaac and Hannah, but an unkind analysis, ignoring the declared prematurity, would conclude that Newton was conceived out of wedlock. Most revealing is the fact that when, at the time of his knighthood in 1705, Newton was asked to draft a genealogy for the College of Heralds, he pushed back the date of his parents’ marriage to 1639 (the year in which his grandfather acquired the manor house). 7This could have been a genuine mistake, but Newton’s deep-rooted need for secrecy, impeccable social credentials and high-caste moral attitudes (along with the convenience of the changed date) mean that the real reason may not be so accidental.

According to John Conduitt, husband of Newton’s half-niece Catherine Barton and a collector of personal anecdotes about his famous relative, Isaac was a tiny baby who, so the legend goes, was small enough to fit into a quart pot. ‘Sir I. N. told me’, Conduitt recalled, ‘that he had been told that when he was born he was so little they could put him into a quart pot & so weakly that he was forced to have a bolster all around his neck to keep it on his shoulders.’ It is an appealing story, and one supported by others that Newton passed on to Conduitt. In an elaboration of the story, the two women attending Hannah at the time of Newton’s birth were sent to the home of one Lady Pakenham to obtain medicines. Apparently, Newton was so frail that on their way back to the manor the two women ‘sat down on a stile sure the child would be dead before they could get back’. 8

Such tales have become part of the legend of Newton’s life, supported by the testimony of many of the villagers whom Stukeley interviewed during the late 1720s for his biography of Newton. Unlike many interpretations of Newton’s later exploits, they are at least plausible. But it is typical of the adulatory style of Newton’s early biographers that so much is made of the miraculous nature of his early survival. A description of Newton’s infancy from Sir David Brewster, writing in 1855, serves to illustrate:

Providence, however, disappointed their fears, and that frail tenement which seemed scarcely able to imprison its immortal mind, was destined to enjoy a vigorous maturity, and to survive even the average term of human existence. 9

Newton would have strongly approved of such a description, which adds still more weight to the self-image he so much treasured.

Of the first three years of Newton’s life almost nothing is recorded. We know from a tiny scrap of parchment unearthed by Stukeley that the baby Isaac was baptised on 1 January 1643. It is easy to conjure up a romantic image of Hannah on New Year’s Day trudging through the snow with her feeble baby wrapped in swaddling-clothes on their way to the local church for the christening ceremony, but it is almost certain that the village vicar would have visited the manor to conduct the service.