• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

[Dutch] I shall be going home shortly, because the winter is coming on. I regret that I did not come here three months earlier, then I would have made a little progress with the language. [French] And I would have had the contentment of spending [more] time with the Count of Kincardine and my daughter, and this agreeable peace and civility. [Dutch] It is very beautiful and fruitful here. The Lord of Kincardine’s house lies on a high hill and the park is delightfully close by. My daughter is extremely sad that I am leaving.27

To make herself feel more at home, Veronica laid out the garden at Culross in the Dutch style, and planted it with imported Dutch tulips.

The Royal Society was established in London on 28 November 1660 by a group of scientific enthusiasts that also included John Wilkins, Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren.28 Sir Robert Moray and Alexander Bruce were founder members. The records show them to have been extremely active, usually together, in the Society’s early meetings.29 Precision timekeepers were on the agenda of these from the outset, particularly Huygens’s new pendulum clocks. The pendulum improved the accuracy of mechanical clocks dramatically: from a variance of fifteen to thirty minutes a day, to less than a minute.30 Its potential for naval and military use looked extremely promising.

Throughout the 1660s, the records of the Royal Society document a steady sequence of experiments involving pendulums and other isochronous oscillators in timekeeping.31 Moray was not the only enthusiast, but his prominent position (he chaired the meetings) meant that his encouragement of improvements to Huygens’s published designs was important.

Christiaan Huygens paid his first visit to London in April 1661, as part of the official United Provinces delegation attending Charles II’s coronation. His existing Anglo–Dutch social connections helped him to develop cordial social relations with those with similar scientific and technological interests to his own in London. Almost the first courtesy call he paid was on Bruce’s Dutch wife Veronica, to fulfil a commission from a Dutch mutual friend he had spent time with in Paris.32 The next day Bruce took Huygens to a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College, at which Moray was presiding, following which Dr Goddard (a prominent member) took Huygens to his Gresham rooms and showed him three handsome pendulum clocks.33

Thereafter Huygens spent much of his time in the company of Bruce and Moray, both of whom, we should remember, spoke fluent French and good Dutch and had many Dutch social connections, and other Fellows of the Royal Society.34 He did not even bother to attend the coronation of Charles II, preferring to observe a lunar eclipse with members of the Society. Bruce showed Huygens pendulum clocks of his own design, in which the Dutchman took a particular interest.35 John Evelyn tells us in his diary that he and Huygens visited the clockmaker Ahasuerus Fromanteel on 3 May, ‘to see some pendules’.36

By the time Huygens returned to The Hague in late May, a deep and lasting friendship had been established between himself and Moray, his relationship with Bruce had been consolidated, and he was also well integrated with other leading members of the Royal Society. Thereafter he took a close personal interest in advancing the cause of pendulum clocks in Britain, both scientifically and commercially. Shortly after his return to The Hague, Huygens asks Moray in a letter how the long-pendulum clock, ordered from Huygens’s clockmaker and paid for by Bruce, was performing (Moray confessed in a separate letter to Bruce a month later that he had still not had time to have it properly set up by a clockmaker);37 Huygens also helped procure clocks for Lord Brouncker, the President of the Royal Society.38 In June 1661 Henry Oldenburg paid a courtesy visit to Huygens at The Hague, on his way back to England from unspecified business in Bremen and elsewhere in the Netherlands (Oldenburg had received his university education