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After Christiaan Huygens had returned to The Hague, at the end of August 1690, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier spent a month with Newton in London, followed by fifteen months in the Netherlands, mostly with Huygens.66 Over the next several years, Fatio facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two men. Huygens came to regard Fatio as his direct link through which he learned Newton’s latest thoughts on mathematics, gravity and light.

Although Christiaan Huygens retreated rapidly to his self-imposed life as an intellectual invalid at Hofwijk, his brother Constantijn continued to be a person of influence at the court of William and Mary.67 Newton, mean-while, became Master of the Royal Mint, and a formidable figure in London political circles. He was also by now an international celebrity as the author of the Principia – the man who had finally unlocked the secret of the motion of the heavens. In terms of his own continuing career, Hooke now found himself between a rock and a hard place: between the City and the Royal Society. In neither did he any longer command any kind of authority, and in neither could he find powerful protectors who had survived the change of dynasty.68

So when, on 12 June 1689, Huygens, Newton and Hooke found themselves together at a meeting of the Royal Society, Newton and Huygens were, unbeknown to Hooke, about to embark on a new, yet more intense phase of their intellectual relationship. Hooke, meanwhile, was increasingly ill at ease with the Royal Society, where all but a few of his oldest friends among the members seemed to take him less and less seriously.69

Of all Hooke’s claims to scientific breakthrough, and to have anticipated Huygens’s and Newton’s ideas, those in optics were probably the most convincing and well-documented. Both Newton and Huygens had started their work on thin coloured films in 1665–66 after having read Hooke’s suggestive discussion in Micrographia.70 Similarly, both men had pursued the wave theory of light proposed in that book, and the associated calculation of the velocity of propagation of light. In the early 1670s, when Newton first wrote to the Royal Society with his theory of colour, and first crossed swords with Hooke, who inevitably challenged him, Newton was open about having been influenced by Hooke’s work.71 By 1675, however, egged on by Oldenburg, Newton was denying Hooke’s influence and claming that any ideas the two men shared were simply ‘common thoughts’: ‘I desire Mr Hooke to shew me therefore … [that] any part of [my hypothesis] is taken out of his Micrographia.’72 Nevertheless, Hooke’s experiments in optics were an authoritative contribution to the reputation of the Royal Society, and some important intervention from him at that auspicious meeting of the Society in which Huygens and Newton participated was to be expected. None is recorded.

Following the meeting of the Royal Society on 12 June, Hooke worked through the arguments propounded in Huygens’s Treatise on Light with even more than his usual punctiliousness. We can surmise that he was discouraged and depressed by the confident authority with which Huygens and Newton had conducted themselves at the Royal Society meeting. He responded by drafting two lectures defending in detail his own ‘philosophical’ views: the first dealing with those concerning light and its properties (wave theory and thin films), the second dealing with planetary motion (orbits of the planets, and shape of the earth). Hooke’s health that year was particularly bad. According to Richard Waller, he was ‘often troubl’d with Head-achs, Giddiness and Fainting, and with a general decay all over, which hinder’d his Philosophical Studies’.73

Eight months later, on 19 and 26 February 1690, Hooke delivered his response to the Society.74 The first lecture includes a particularly poignant restatement of his own originality, which appeals to his listeners to assess his own contribution before deciding that Huygens’s competing views are correct:

This is in brief what I thought necessary to be considered before what I have