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Meeting at Gresham College in a small room, a small cabinet of curiosities, over-full but well kept. Hoskins President, Henshaw Vice-President, Halley Secretary. Van Leeuwenhoek’s letter was read. Newton and Fatio were there too.58

In the period of uncertainty leading up to the Dutch invasion and William’s claiming the English throne, Isaac Newton had already begun to emerge from his sheltered position as a solitary scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1687, when James II’s interference with the university roused even those as aloof as Newton from their political indifference, he found himself nominated to act for the university in what turned out to be a critical piece of resistance to James II’s policy of installing Catholic cronies in key administrative positions. Newton was one of nine prominent members of Cambridge University who in April 1687 – at the very moment when Edmond Halley was seeing the Principia through the press – confronted the notorious ‘Hanging Judge’ Lord Jeffreys, and refused to allow James II to appoint his personal nominees, without qualification or oath, to senior academic positions.59

So at the beginning of 1689, Isaac Newton was already one of the most prominent, Protestant-supporting members of the university community, with impeccable credentials to serve the incoming regime. On 15 January he was elected one of the three university representatives to the national Convention appointed to settle the legitimacy of William and Mary’s claim to the English throne.60

Two weeks after his arrival in London, having returned to Hampton Court, Christiaan Huygens had an audience with King William and dined with his Dutch favourite, William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, the most powerful man at court. It had been suggested beforehand that, as an esteemed virtuoso particularly well-connected with the Dutch royal household, Christiaan might put a word in with William III on Isaac Newton’s behalf, putting the mathematician’s name forward for a senior academic promotion. Two days later, on 10 July, Christiaan, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Newton met at seven in the morning in London, ‘with the purpose of recommending Newton to the King for the vacant Mastership of a Cambridge College’.61 On 28 July, Christiaan attended a fashionable concert at which he was introduced to the Duke of Somerset, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and Newton’s preferment was once more discussed.62

So Christiaan Huygens was directly involved in the political game of snakes and ladders, in which Newton – hitherto a small player, politically – moved centre-stage, while formerly powerful intellectuals like Wren and Boyle were nudged to the margins.

The Cambridge college whose headship Newton had ambitions to fill was King’s, and John Hampden, the court lobbyist on Newton’s behalf who approached Huygens, was a leading Parliamentary player. Huygens’s approach evidently had the desired effect. Shortly thereafter, William wrote to the Fellows of King’s College, informing them of his desire that they appoint Newton as their new Provost. The new foreign King was, however, roundly rebuffed by the Fellows, who selected another candidate. This was probably just as well for Newton’s future career as a public figure, since imposed royal appointments were deeply unpopular.63

Even though this personal intervention of Huygens’s to advance Newton’s career did not succeed, the scientific relationship between the two men was thereby significantly strengthened. In August, before he left for home, Huygens received two papers from Newton on motion through a resisting medium. At some point during the visit they also had lengthy discussions of optics and colour.64 Huygens told the German mathematician Leibniz that Newton had communicated ‘some very beautiful experiments’ to him – probably his experiments with thin films similar to the ones Huygens himself had performed twenty years earlier, and to those Hooke had recorded in his Micrographia