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was prominently reprinted in 1673 in his Horologium Oscillatorium, and was followed within the year by the announcement from Paris of the balance-spring watch. Huygens’s impressive sequence of horological innovations – pendulum clock (1658), longitude pendulum timekeeper (1665) and balance-spring regulator (1674) – entitled him to precedence over others working close to him, and assured his lasting reputation as the pre-eminent figure in the field. By this time, however, both Moray and Oldenburg were of the opinion that Huygens was overstating his personal claims for priority. When the Horologium Oscillatorium appeared, strong protests were lodged by the most senior members of the Royal Society. The President, Lord Brouncker, John Wallis and Sir Christopher Wren all wrote to Huygens, reminding him – with chapter and verse – of the contributions made to his unfolding horological theory and practice by English virtuosi. They reminded him that Hooke’s circular pendulum had been demonstrated and discussed at several meetings, that Bruce’s modifications to the marine timekeepers had been crucial to their success, that Brouncker and Huygens had together debated the tautochronism of the cycloidal pendulum at length, that Wren had rectified the cycloid ahead of Huygens. All of these contributions were inadequately acknowledged in Huygens’s work, or (in the case of Hooke) not at all.90

On 27 June 1673, Oldenburg himself urged Huygens to be more generous in his acknowledgements, and urged a more collaborative approach in the interest of scientific progress: ‘If candour reigned everywhere, what friendships might we be able to establish amongst the learned, and what advantages might the public derive?’91

What is most extraordinary about the vexed (and still unresolved) issue of who was really entitled to claim priority, first for allegedly accurate pendulum clocks carried at sea, and subsequently for the spring-regulated pocket watch, is how little the Anglo–Dutch wars apparently impinged on intellectual exchange between the participant scientists and technicians. It is as if the ferocious naval battles, marauding gangs invading colonial settlements, and predatory incursions into each other’s national territories had little or no impact on the lives of those engaged in professional life in either country. How else could it have been proposed that Dutch clocks be given to an English naval commander to test while on a confrontational expedition to the west coast of Africa whose stated aim was to seize Dutch goods and assets?

Equally, the unanimous chorus of Fellows of the Royal Society chastising Christiaan Huygens in 1673 for having, in his claiming of priority for longitude clocks, been ungenerous in his ackowledgements of English (or at least Scottish) efforts in the same field surely needs to be taken with a pinch of salt: ‘what friendships might we be able to establish amongst the learned, and what advantages might the public derive?’

The Horologium Oscillatorium, in which Christiaan Huygens made his full and final claims to priority in pendulum clocks and timekeepers designed to determine longitude, was published in France and ostentatiously dedicated to the French King, Louis XIV. At the time of publication, France was at war with the United Provinces, and England was temporarily allied with the French. If Huygens’s position in Paris was tenuous, his relations with the English were doubly so. Unable to cope with the emotional pressures, in 1676 Christiaan Huygens succumbed to some sort of nervous illness, of a kind which had caused his collapse some years earlier (on that occasion he had been granted a year’s sick leave by the French authorities). This time his brother-in-law, sister Susanna’s husband Philips Doublet, was sent to Paris to cheer him up, to no avail. Instead he brought Christiaan back to The Hague in July. ‘The life that I lead there [in Paris] disagrees with me,’ Christiaan wrote to his brother Constantijn junior, who was in the field with Prince William on military manoeuvres against the French. ‘I left as