Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [90]
She suggested that the liquid was inserted into the drops using the same skill as that employed to make fashionable glass earrings:
Weomen weares at there eares for pendents as great wounders, although they make not soe great report, which are glasse bobbes with narrowe neckes as these glasses have tailes, and yet is filled with severall coullers silkes and coursse black cottonwooll, which to my senses is more difficult to putt into these glasse pendants, then liquer into these glasse gunnes.44
The explanation did not satisfy Huygens, who responded a week later. He did not detect any liquid inside the drops.45 A week later again, Margaret reiterated her belief that there was some kind of combustible material inside the drops, but conceded that it might simply be compressed air.46
This exchange of letters is fascinating in itself, both for what it tells us about the involvement of women in seventeenth-century science, and for the additional light it sheds on Sir Constantijn Huygens’s varied and wide- ranging intellectual and artistic interests. It is particularly interesting to note that Prince Rupert’s drops were one of the earliest curious phenomena explored at length experimentally at the Royal Society after the return of the English exiles. On 4 March 1661 ‘glass bubbles’ were produced to a meeting of the Society: ‘The King sent by Sir Paul Neile five little glass bubbles, two with liquor in them, and the other three solid, in order to have the judgement of the society concerning them.’47 Anxious to impress the King (whose active support for the Society was being sought), the members responded immediately. More drops were produced and experimented on two days later, and a full report of the experiments performed was given to the Society at its weekly meeting on 14 August by the President, Sir Robert Moray.48 Two years later Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Society, lent Moray’s account to the French traveller Balthasar de Monconys, who made his own translation into French of the method described for making the drops.
It was the Society’s curator of experiments Robert Hooke who produced a plausible (and largely correct) explanation for the phenomenon of the glass drops, based on the compression of the glass itself, and drawing an analogy with the way the locked stones in brick arches collapse instantaneously and violently once the keystone is removed.49
Historians of science are generally agreed that it was Prince Rupert (Elizabeth of Bohemia’s son, and a prominent figure at the Restoration court) who brought the drops from mainland Europe, but are undecided as to where they originated. But a common name for the drops was ‘Holland tears’ – lacrymae Batavicae – and although the first known discussions of them come from the early scientific academies in France, it is suggested that they were brought to France from Holland in the 1650s.
The exchange of letters between Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens shows that the drops were indeed known in the Dutch Republic in the 1650s, and were also being discussed in France. But I hope that the story indicates how overdetermined the connections are between the Dutch and the English in the history of ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, and how many strands there are to the development of a plausible explanation of the causes of the drops’ spectacular properties. In particular, when we find Christiaan Huygens trying to manufacture drops with the help of local craftsmen (they were largely unsuccessful), and investigating their properties in The Hague in 1665, and corresponding about them with Adrien Auzout in Paris, we need to factor into our account his father’s enthusiasm for the same drops almost ten years earlier.
During the 1650s, the elegant, restrained neoclassical style of building cherished by Sir Constantijn Huygens in The Hague, and admired by him in the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, became the familiar backdrop to the complicated lives of exiled Englishmen and women. The Cavendishes’ appreciation of their sumptuous rented home inspired them to remodel their own estate