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court of Charles II, while Moray had settled in Maastricht, where he was part of a substantial English garrison assisting the Dutch Orangists to protect the southern Protestant Dutch border.10 The two were staunch Royalists whose families had been closely involved in the fortunes of the Stuarts. Now, cut off from familiar social circles, and with no likelihood (or so it seemed) that they would ever be able to return to Britain, both were occupying their spare time in recreational scientific activities – Moray had a chemistry laboratory complete with a number of stills, and both men were interested in pharmaceuticals and medical remedies.11

They were also interested in precision timekeepers. In April 1658, Moray wrote to Bruce (who was at this point in Bremen, where his family had salt and coal business interests):

I haue a second=watch can measure pulses, but no art can make a watch measure 2 minutes equally, unless yong Zulicom [Christiaan Huygens] at The Hague have found it out, who they say makes clocks that fail not a minute in 6 moneths. But this you will beleave as litle as I do, for I can demonstrate that it must go wrong to keep foot with the sun.12

A week later, Moray was able to tell Bruce (who had moved on to Hamburg) that he had now seen and handled one of the new pendulum clocks:

I have yet to tell you that I have this day seen an exceeding pretty invention of a new way of watch, which indeed I take to be the very exactest that ever was thought upon. The Rhyngrave shew it me. It is long since I heard of it, but did not expect what now I see. The inventor undertakes it shall not vary one minute in 6 moneths, and verily I think he is not much too bold. He is a young gentleman of 22, second son to Zulicon [Sir Constantijn Huygens], the Prince of Orange’s secretary, a rare mathematician, excellent in all the parts of it. I need not describe it to you till we meet, and then I believe I may get you a sight of it.13

Moray’s brief examination of the clock had whetted his horological appetite. The local Commander had shown it to him because it had a defect, and Moray could see what that was:

I find the greatest matter I have at hand to do it with, is that clock I told you of in my last. It is one of the prettiest tricks you ever saw. It stayed no longer here than just to let me see it, as if God had sent it hither of purpose. It was a good part of the time in my hands. It hath a defect and the Rhyngrave sent it to me to considder of, for all that buy them oblige themselves not to put them into workemen’s hands. I needed not look upon it long to know all was in it. I needed no more for that than the very first glance I had of it. The rest is but matter of adjusting of numbers for the wheels and pinions.

However, he had thought it best to advise that the clock be returned to its maker, Solomon Coster. But if Bruce were prepared to put up the money, he went on, the two of them together could easily construct an improved version of Huygens’s clock:

If I thought you had a mind to bestow 40 dollars or some less on one of them I would think to have it ready for you against you come. Never any other design made wanrests14 go so equally … If I make any, I will make it beat another time than this doeth, for it beats at the rate of 80 strokes of the wanrest or thereby to a minute, and I will make it beat just 60 which will be the seconds, and will put an index to shew them. But there is no end of tricks of this kind. When you come to the shop you may perhaps find there will and weal.15

Moray had clearly not at this point met Christiaan Huygens in person, but he was aware of his reputation. Since Christiaan’s father, the diplomat and lifelong servant of the Princes of Orange Sir Constantijn Huygens, boasted about his son – his ‘Archimedes’, as he called him in letters to the eminent French thinkers Mersenne and Descartes – on every possible occasion, and Moray and he moved in the same circles, this is not surprising.16 It is likely that Bruce already knew the Huygens family too, as they were supporters of