The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince Page B

was an attempt to use it to achieve the ‘Antilian’ dream.
    The train of events that led to the foundation of the Royal Society is more complicated and more esoteric than many modern writers would have us believe. Despite the restrictions of the ongoing Civil War, it began in London in 1645 with an informal meeting of scholars who set out to explore new ideas in natural philosophy – as science was then called. In what was almost certainly no coincidence, the two prime movers were in the retinue of the exiled Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, Frederick and Elizabeth’s son. The two were Charles Louis’ secretary, Theodore Haak, and his chaplain, John Wilkins. Charles Louis had been invited to live in London by Parliament, whose cause he backed. All very odd for the son of a Stuart – especially given that he was the nephew of the king who Parliament was fighting against.
    John Wilkins – the future Bishop of Chester, inventor of the metric system and something of an oddball for a Church of England chaplain – was really the driving force behind the formation of the Royal Society. At the age of forty-two, the highly ambitious Wilkins married Cromwell’s sixty-three-year-old widowed sister, presumably a move that did nothing to prevent his inexorable rise. He also wrote a defence of Copernicanism in 1641 ( Discourse Concerning a New Planet ), and more creatively, a flight of fancy with the self-explanatory title, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638). His attempt to introduce a new universal language to be used by natural philosophers instead of Latin was terminally halted when his entire print run was lost in the Great Fire of London.
    In his hugely popular book Mathematicall Magick , published in 1648, Wilkins specifically references the Fama Fraternitatis . His book was based – as he freely acknowledged – on mathematical works by Dee and Fludd and even declared that he took the title from Cornelius Agrippa.
    It was at this juncture that the now-famous references to an ‘Invisible College’ appeared. These were in letters written in 1646 and 1647 by one of the most eminent founders of the Royal Society, the chemist Robert Boyle (1627–91) – credited with turning alchemy into chemistry – who alluded to a gathering of scholars and philosophers of which he was a part and which called itself by this mysterious name.
    Not only was the intriguing term ‘invisible’ used in the Rosicrucian manifestos, but it carried clear echoes of the mysterious, even sinister, ‘College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross’, otherwise known as the ‘Invisibles’ in Paris. Boyle’s comments were almost certainly a kind of Rosicrucian in-joke.
    Many writers have seen a connection between this enigmatic group and the founding members of the Royal Society, and hinted at the existence of an anonymous behind-the-scenes cabal. But maybe too much mystery has been read into these connections since the group Boyle refers to is relatively easy to identify. Historian Margery Purver, in Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), shows that the Invisible College was the circle centred on Hartlib.
    The references to the Invisible College appeared in lettersthat the young Boyle wrote to Hartlib and make the connection between Hartlib and the activities of the college very explicit. On 8 May 1647 he wrote: ‘You interest yourself so much in the Invisible College, and that whole society is so concerned in all the accidents of your life …’ 9 In other correspondence from around the same time, Boyle calls Hartlib the ‘midwife and nurse’ of the college. 10
    The Invisible College was Hartlib’s Antilia, or more accurately the group of learned men he hoped would become Antilia. Considering this in combination with the ‘invisible’ clue suggests that it is essentially a Rosicrucian brotherhood. However, this doesn’t mean the connection with the Royal Society is nonexistent: Hartlib hovers in the background during its