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Mechanical experiments as moral exercise in the education of George III

FLORENCE GRANT

The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 48 / Issue 02 / June 2015, pp 195 - 212 DOI: 10.1017/S0007087414000582, Published online: 01 August 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007087414000582

How to cite this article: FLORENCE GRANT (2015). Mechanical experiments as moral exercise in the education of George III. The British Journal for the History of Science, 48, pp 195-212 doi:10.1017/ S0007087414000582

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Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BJH, IP address: 130.132.173.207 on 07 Jul 2015 BJHS 48(2): 195–212, June 2015. © British Society for the History of Science 2014 doi:10.1017/S0007087414000582 First published online 1 August 2014

Mechanical experiments as moral exercise in the education of George III

FLORENCE GRANT*

Abstract. In 1761, George III commissioned a large group of philosophical instruments from the instrument-maker George Adams. The purchase sprang from a complex plan of moral education devised for Prince George in the late 1750s by the third Earl of Bute. Bute’s plan applied the philosophy of Frances Hutcheson, who placed ‘the culture of the heart’ at the foundation of moral education. To complement this affective development, Bute also acted on seventeenth-century arguments for the value of experimental philosophy and geometry as exercises that habituated the student to recognizing truth, and to pursuing it through long and difficult chains of reasoning. The instruments required for such exercise thus became tools for manipulating moral subjectivity. By the there was a variety of established modes in which the Newtonian philosophy might be used to argue for the legitimacy of Hanoverian rule. The education of George III represents a less recognized iteration of this relationship, concerned not with public apologetics, but rather with the transformation of an ‘indolent’ youth into a virtuous monarch.

In 1761–1762, under the guidance of his friend and mentor John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute, the young George III acquired an extensive collection of philosophical instruments from the workshop of George Adams of Fleet Street.1 The Earl of Bute largely defined the scope of George III’s education, and a related programme of patronage and acquisition, in the late 1750s and early .2 The purchase from Adams reflects the optimism of the two men’s shared political vision during those years, and the confidence

* Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, PO Box 208280, New Haven, CT 06510, USA. Email: [email protected]. A version of this article was presented at the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century seminar at the Institute for Historical Research. My thanks go to Ludmilla Jordanova, Jane Wess, Jim Bennett, Stephen Clucas, Niall O’Flaherty, Anna Maerker, Janet Nelson, Tim Hitchcock and Penelope Corfield, who have all commented on various stages of this work. I am also grateful to Allison Derrett of the Royal Archives and Barbara McLean of the Mount Stuart Collections Department for their assistance. Material from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle is reproduced here by permission of Her Majesty the Queen. 1 This collection will be familiar to BJHS readers through Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. Wess, Public & Private Science: The King George III Collection, Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Science Museum, 1993. 2 In recent articles, John Bullion has discredited long-standing, negative interpretations of the two men’s friendship. For a review of literature on their relationship see John L. Bullion, ‘The prince’s mentor: a new perspective on the friendship between George III and Lord Bute during the 1750s’, Albion (1989) 21, pp. 34–55, 34–40. Since John Brooke’s King George III, St Albans: Panther Press, 1974, biographers seem to agree that Prince George was a fairly ‘normal’ youth. For a reassessment of Bute’s political and cultural attainments see Karl W. Schweizer (ed.), Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988. For his support of the arts see Francis Russell, John, 3rd Earl of Bute, London: Merrion Press, 2004. 196 Florence Grant they shared in the moral and social utility of the practice of Newtonian natural philosophy. Bute and Prince George both aspired to a future reign in which George III, as a monarch guided by virtue and duty, would effect moral reformation on a national scale. The programme of education they undertook for this purpose partly comprised intense historical study of the British systems of government and taxation, as well as those of its neighbours, allies and enemies in Europe. It also involved studies and exercises directly concerned with shaping the moral faculties of the young prince. To this end, Bute combined the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, which identified the benevolent passions as the source of human morality, with the conviction that ‘geometrical’ or ‘mathematical’ habits of mind were necessary for carrying through moral action in political life. The way to acquire these habits of mind was through practice with instruments. The papers relating to George III’s education contain hundreds of sheets of exercises in geometry and perspective drawing, all performed with dedicated instruments, from a simple compass and straightedge to the more complex architectonic sector.3 The philosophical instruments, paid for by Bute on the king’s behalf in 1762–1763, were directly associated with this kind of geometrical, instrumental exercise, and can therefore be seen as contributing to the wider moral and political project.4 As the prince’s mentor, Bute drew on his own education at the University of Leiden, as well as his role as a leading patron of the Scottish Enlightenment. His views on education were shaped by these experiences, and he applied them within his own family, as well as in the royal household. He intended machine experiments, like geometrical constructions, to function in this context as exercises in sustaining attention, in following long chains of reasoning, and ultimately in recognizing truth. These exercises were not purely intellectual; they were also manual, and positively required instruments – from air-pumps and complex machines to simple drawing- boards and dividers. In the context of Bute’s combined approach to moral development, the performance of experiments did not aim at the sociable and ostensive forms of self-transformation implied by ‘polite science’.5 Rather, it contributed to a far more austere undertaking, framed by the imperatives of duty, and intensified by the prince’s social singularity and the isolated conditions of his upbringing.6 In terms of personnel, George III’s education was punctuated by a of upheavals and political conflicts. The Earl of Bute and the mathematician George Lewis Scott, who acted as the prince’s sub-preceptor between 1750 and 1756, were arguably the two most

3 Royal Archives (RA) GEO/ADD/32/1769–1963. 4 Bute paid for the instruments on the king’s behalf, using a dedicated account at Campbell and Coutt’s bank. See Russell, op. cit. (2), p. 59. 5 For the uses of natural philosophy and its instruments in the formation of polite identities see Alice Walters, ‘Conversation pieces: science and politeness in eighteenth-century ’, History of Science (1997) 35, pp. 121–145. 6 For his mother’s desire to keep George isolated from the children of the nobility, on account of their vices and bad education, see Bullion, op. cit. (2), p. 36. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 197 important figures in a parade of men who instructed him in the 1740s and 1750s.7 John L. Bullion has characterized the intense friendship between Bute and Prince George in the late 1750s as a mentor–protégé relationship, in which the older man served simultaneously as ‘teacher’, ‘counsel and support’, ‘guide’, and ‘exemplar’ to the younger.8 For a few years, they worked towards an ideal of national, moral reformation under George’s kingship, in which Bute, as First Lord of the Treasury, would encourage public virtue through selective patronage.9 George’s own letters to Bute reflect the emotional tenor of this relationship, with rebukes from Bute eliciting remorse and self-accusation from the prince, who professed himself ‘extrem’ly hurt’, ‘deeply afflicted’ by his mentor’s criticisms of his conduct.10 He made repeated, impassioned promises to throw off ‘indolence ...this my greatest enemy’: ‘my duty to my Creator, to my country, to my friend, and to myself all combine in spurring me on in the strongest manner to throw off that incomprehensible indolence, inattention and heedlessness that reign within me’.11 These pleas combined distressed self-criticism with the consciousness on the prince’s part that the improvement of his own character and conduct comprised part of the duties arising from his rank. Bute, too, saw his position as one of grave responsibility, and his response was inflected by the moral philosophy and the cultural experiences of the Scottish Enlightenment. His own background provided models for a ‘philosophical’ approach to education and for the exercise of patronage. Both were central to the commission for George III’s philosophical machines. Following the example of his uncle Archibald Campbell, third Duke of Argyll, Bute had travelled to the Netherlands to attend the University of Leiden, where he enrolled to study law in 1732.12 Between 1650 and 1750, great numbers of young Scottish men travelled to the Dutch universities to study both law and medicine, and Bute’s experience followed a pattern of education that served as a direct model for the new schools of law that were established in the universities of and in the eighteenth century.13 The legal education he received at Leiden would have been ‘polite, gentlemanly, scholarly, the education of a legal virtuoso’; the Dutch ‘elegant’ school of law approached its subject philosophically, rooting it in history, philology and rhetoric, with students branching out into mathematics, logic and the natural sciences.14 Prince George’s studies of national

7 For a summary of appointments and dismissals see the ‘Introduction’ to James Waldegrave, The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave (ed. J.C.D. Clarke), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, especially the table on p. 57. For Bute’s friendship with Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his later involvement with Prince George, see Russell, op. cit. (2), pp. 18–22; and James Lee McKelvey, George III and Lord Bute, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973, pp. 33–45. 8 Bullion, op. cit. (2), p. 40. 9 Bullion, op. cit. (2), p. 40. 10 Romney Sedgwick (ed.), Letters from George III to Lord Bute, London: Macmillan, 1939, p. 13. 11 Sedgwick, op. cit. (10), pp. 3, 14. 12 Russell, op. cit. (2), pp. 3–5. 13 John W. Cairns, ‘Importing our lawyers from Holland: Netherlands influences on Scots law and lawyers in the eighteenth century’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996, pp. 136–153, 139. 14 Cairns, op. cit. (13), p. 138. 198 Florence Grant finance in the late 1750s were directed by Bute in a way that perhaps reflects this Dutch ‘elegant’ approach – as historical studies, encompassing the history of revenues and taxation in England since the Norman Conquest.15 Using networks of patronage and influence established by the Duke of Argyll, Bute also participated actively in the shaping of the Scottish universities by the ‘moderate literati’ in the middle decades of the century.16 In the early 1760s, he engineered university appointments for the jurist John Millar, the minister , the critic and rhetorician Hugh Blair, the philosopher Adam Ferguson, and the surgeon and natural philosopher James Russell.17 As he became increasingly involved with the Prince of Wales, Bute turned to philosophers for advice about education. In 1754, he consulted at length with the natural philosopher and inventor Stephen Hales about appropriate schools for his eldest son, and a few years later he engaged Adam Ferguson as a tutor.18 Bute’s preoccupation with the emotional bases of virtue clearly reflected the concerns of Ferguson and other Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century.19 In 1757 he wrote to his friend John Home concerning his own children,

it is not Greek and Latin that I am anxious about, ’tis the formation of the heart – the instilling into the tender ductile plant, noble generous sentiments, real religion, moral virtue, enthusiasm for our country, its laws and liberties; in short, ideas fit for the situations my children, especially my eldest boy, will, in all probability, be in.20

Several ‘plans’ of education; hundreds of sheets of exercises in Latin, geometry and perspective drawing; and essays on history, government, national finance, , the arts and the moral sentiments, all written by or relating to George III, survive in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.21 The underlying purposes of the education they

15 For the history of taxation from the Norman Conquest to the Glorious Revolution see RA GEO/ADD32/ 1087-1098 and GEO/ADD32/1099-1115. For revenue and taxes since the Glorious Revolution see RA GEO/ ADD32/1149-1193, GEO/ADD32/1194-1219, GEO/ADD32/1233-1420, GEO/ADD32/1421-1449. For taxes granted by Parliament between 1701 and 1756 see RA GEO/ADD32/1531-1647. For Crown revenues see RA GEO/ADD32/1648-1691; and for the Sinking Fund see RA GEO/ADD32/1692-1696. Prince George and Bute saw reducing the national debt as part of their larger project for moral reform. John L. Bullion, ‘“To know this is the true essential business of a king”: the Prince of Wales and the study of public finance, 1755–1760’, Albion (1986) 18, pp. 429–454. 16 For the ‘moderate literati’ see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985; and Nicholas Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’,inRoy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 19–40, 19–20. 17 Roger L. Emerson, ‘Lord Bute and the Scottish universities, 1760–1792’, in Schweizer, op. cit. (2), pp. 147–179, 150–151, 152–159. 18 Mount Stuart Archives, BU/98/1/27-30, 32. I am grateful to Barbara McLean, archivist in the Mount Stuart Collections Department, for this information. Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, online edn, October 2009, at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9315, accessed 17 May 2011. 19 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000, vol. 2, pp. 154–159. 20 Henry Mackenzie, ‘Account of the life of Mr John Home, Esq.’,inThe Works of John Home, Esq. (ed. Henry Mackenzie), Edinburgh: A. Constable & Co., 1822, p. 146, quoted in Russell, op. cit. (2), p. 41. 21 RA GEO/ADD32. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 199 comprised were moral ones, for this was education in the classical sense, of bringing up a youth to virtue. ‘Some short notes concerning the education of a prince’ have been attributed to Bute, and a close reading of their contents confirms the attribution.22 This document reveals the seriousness and sense of occasion with which Bute viewed his own responsibilities:

Nothing can be of greater importance to any society of Men, than the Characters of those who govern, or who are to govern in it. These Characters will depend almost intirely upon their Education, like those of the rest of Mankind. The rest of Mankind are good or bad, better or worse, according to the Education they have had, and the habits they have contracted in their Youth.23

The programme of education devised by Bute for Prince George in the 1750s was also a programme of acquisition, and one that continued after George’s coronation in 1760. Over his lifetime, Bute built up a collection of machines and instruments that rivalled, and may have provided a direct precedent for, that of his pupil.24 Purchases of instruments for George III, starting in the late 1750s, included two-, three-, four-, six-, and eight-foot achromatic telescopes, and ‘a 10 foot achromatic object Glass with a Tube for the Day & three Different magnifiers for the Planets with Stands and Boxes’ from John Dollond.25 In 1757, ‘a Magazine case of Silver drawing Instruments’, along with drawing boards and a stand, pens, pencils, rulers and two instruments specifically for perspective drawing –‘Mr Kirby’s Instrum[en]t with Rack work’ and ‘Another Instrum[en]t with a frame for Demonstrating the Rules in perspective’–were supplied by George Adams.26 These items by Adams would have equipped the prince not just to learn geometry and perspective drawing, which was taught to him by the draughtsman

22 ‘Some short notes concerning the education of a prince’, RA GEO/ADD32/1731. A note on the last sheet suggests that the handwriting is Bute’s. The author was not a clergyman (f. 15), which disqualifies all George III’s preceptors between 1744 and 1756. The plan is for the education of a prince in his mid-teens (f. 4), but its idealism and emphasis on academic study show that it was not the work of Lord Waldegrave, Prince George’s governor between 1752 and 1756 (for Waldegrave’s approach see Waldegrave, op. cit. (7), pp. 63–64). These circumstances make Bute the most likely candidate, but most compelling is the fact that Bute and Prince George acted fully upon the programme of historical study detailed in ‘Some short notes’ (ff. 6–10) in the years after 1755. See Brooke, op. cit. (2), pp. 107–108, and the great number of essays on the history and present state of English law, government and finance, and the histories of a dozen other European states, in RA GEO/ADD32. It would be bizarre to suggest that Bute, himself so interested in education, would have delegated responsibility for drawing up such a plan. 23 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), f. 1. 24 When Bute’s own collection was sold after his death in 1792, it included ‘A mahogany folding table, and a very curious collection of instruments, models, machines, &c. &c. ...all made from and according to the Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, of W. J. Gravesande ... which contains figures and explanations of all these articles’. All this sounds strikingly similar to George III’s mechanical apparatus. See G.L’E. Turner, ‘The auction sales of the Earl of Bute’s instruments, 1793’, Annals of Science (1967) 23, pp. 213–242, 239. The collection of Bute’s uncle, the third Duke of Argyll, is also of interest. See Roger L. Emerson, ‘The scientific interests of Archibald Campbell, 1st Earl of Ilay and 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761)’, Annals of Science (2002) 59, pp. 21–56. 25 Dollond & Son to the Earl of Bute, 21 October 1760, Bodleian Library Special Collections (BLSC) MSS North A.4, f. 310. 26 George Adams to the Prince of Wales, 14 January 1757, BLSC MSS North A.4, f. 58. 200 Florence Grant , but to study the principles of architecture, which he learned, partly through the practice of drawing, from the architect William Chambers.27 Bills from the late 1750s show multiple purchases of books at auctions as well as from booksellers such as . Bute acquired works on British and European history, geography and maps, antique ruins, architecture, mechanics, experimental philosophy and gardening.28 The artist and antiquary Richard Dalton, who was appointed librarian to the Prince of Wales in 1755, travelled to the Continent in 1758–1759 and 1762–1763 to acquire drawings and paintings for the prince’s collection and to negotiate the new king’s purchase of Consul Joseph Smith’s famous collection of art and antiquities.29 The cabinetmakers and upholders John Cobb and William Vile provided mahogany bookcases, drawing presses, tables, medal cases and desks as well as clothes presses, jewel cabinets, birdcages and candle stands at St James’s Palace and Buckingham House between 1757 and 1763.30 The overall pace of acquisition rose in the early 1760s, with the refurbishment of Buckingham House, and then fell off after Bute’s departure from government in 1764, confirming his influence on the king’s desire to collect on a grand scale.31 In the late 1750s and early 1760s, then, the instrument- maker George Adams was part of a network of elite tradesmen and professionals, assembled principally by the Earl of Bute. Some, such as Chambers and Kirby, were involved in teaching George III; others, such as Dalton, Adams, Cobb and Vile, in equipping him to be a ‘great and good Prince’.32 On 28 August 1762, the historian sent one of a regular series of letters to his friend and employer Philip Yorke.33 Among other news and gossip, Birch reported that

His Majesty is at present, & has been for some time, employ’d in a Course of Experimental Philosophy ... Champion, a famous Writing Master, has been taken out of his business of teaching, & pension’d for transcribing in a fair hand the Discourses drawn up for the royal use upon the several Branches of Philosophy ... This I was told by a Friend of Mr Champion, whose Employment was call’d by that Friend, writing out the King’s Exercises.34

27 For Chambers, Kirby and the role of drawing in George III’s architectural education, see David Watkin, The Architect King: George III and the Culture of the Enlightenment, London: Royal Collections Publications, 2004, Chapter 2. 28 For history books see BLSC MSS North A.4 at ff. 67, 94, 126, 222; for geography, f. 95; for antiquity, f. 82; for architecture, ff. 67, 86, 93; for mechanics, f. 92; for experimental philosophy, ff. 82, 93; for gardening, f. 123. 29 Russell, op. cit. (2), pp. 35–36. 30 John Cobb and William Vile to the Prince of Wales, 25 June 1757, BLSC MSS North A.4, f. 80; bills from Vile & Cobb for 1761–1763 are in the Lord Chancellor’s Bill Books, National Archives LC 9/306, bill no 306; LC 9/307, bill no 56; LC 9/308, bill nos 8, 22; LC 9/309, bill nos 35, 54. 31 Russell, op. cit. (2), p. 59. 32 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), f. 11. 33 For an account of this correspondence from 1741 to 1765 see A.E. Gunther, An Introduction to the Life of the Rev. Thomas Birch, Halesworth: Halesworth Press, 1984, pp. 35–39. 34 Thomas Birch to Philip Yorke, 28 August 1762, British Library (BL) Add MS 35399, f. 339, original emphasis. See also Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), p. 18. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 201 When Birch wrote, with apparent amusement, of ‘writing out the King’s Exercises’, he touched on an important distinction between two eighteenth-century modes of experiment: the making of experiments as a public performance, on the one hand, and the making of experiments as a participatory exercise, on the other. George Lewis Scott and the Earl of Bute both emphasized the lasting value of such exercises to form good habits of mind. In a letter written in 1752 to the prince’s sub-governor, Andrew Stone, Scott remarked that although George and his younger brother Edward were becoming familiar with the various ‘States of Europe’, they required mathematical instruction in order to progress much further:

They should indeed have a knowledge of the globe, and of the mathematical part of Geography; but as this can never be rightly understood, without some previous knowledge of Geometry, I think it would be far better to delay giving their RH’s any instructions in the scientifical part of Geography till they are duly prepared for it. Distinct, adequate and connected notions are by all means to be pursued, and the contrary to be avoided. For certainly, the intellectual habits acquired by well directed studies, are of more importance, especially to a Prince, than the speculative truths taught in the Sciences. These may be forgot, and yet the habits acquired by a proper study of them may remain, and be of great and constant Use during life.35

Scott, himself a mathematician, was convinced that the order of instruction often carried more weight in princely education than did its content – and, like Bute, that geometry and its instruments could provide the basis of ‘proper study’. In the context of George III’s education, mathematics and experimental philosophy were viewed like the ‘scientifical part’ of geography, as exercises designed to habituate the mind to dealing with truth, and to following long chains of connected ideas. Both were considered necessary guides for virtuous action in the complex situations of political life. George III’s vast collection of philosophical instruments was integrated into a ‘mathematical’ system of knowledge, similar to that recommended by Scott, through its direct association with one particular printed book: Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments: or, an Introduction to Sir ’s Philosophy by the Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher Willem ’sGravesande.36 The physical apparatus included machines for performing experiments in mechanics and pneumatics, constructed from mahogany, brass, glass, steel, ivory, leather, silk thread and clay. Two objects dominate the rest of the collection by virtue of their size, but also because they provide the physical stage for most of the other apparatus: a large air-pump and a mahogany table, referred to by Adams as the ‘great Table’. Together with a detachable pillar, the ‘great Table’ supported an ensemble of modular attachments: the apparatus for ‘explaining the principles of mechanics’.37

35 George Lewis Scott to Andrew Stone, 20 November 1752, BL MS Add 32730, ff. 308r–309. 36 Willem ’sGravesande, Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirmed by Experiments: or, an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (tr. John Theophilus Desaguliers), 2 vols., London: W. Innys et al., 1747. This English edition was published after the deaths of both author and translator. ’sGravesande’s final Latin edition of 1742 was completed by his friend Jean Nicolas Sebastien Allamand, and Desaguliers’s translation was brought to press by his son, also J.T. Desaguliers. J.N.S. Allamand, ‘Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Mr ’sGravesande’,inOeuvres philosophiques et mathematiques de Mr G. J. ’sGravesande, Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1774, pp. xxviii, 281. 37 Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), pp. 291–372. 202 Florence Grant Adams also provided the air-pump with a range of glass ‘receivers’ and other accessories for performing experiments. These included animal bladders, mercury barometers and gauges, truncated brass cones, Magdeburg hemispheres, a heavy brass vessel for condensing air, a spring-driven bell, an arrangement of vessels for isolating different kinds of air, apparatus for electrical and chemical experiments in vacuo, and a pneumatic gun.38 The mechanical apparatus, assembled by Adams from designs published in a number of different printed sources, and comprising hundreds of separate experiments, is united by a modular system that allows its components to be assembled, reassembled and combined on the basic, central structure of the table and pillar. It included experiments for illustrating the properties of extension and solidity; plates of glass, artificial magnets and vessels of mercury for illustrating attraction and repulsion; a variety of multi-use parts such as pulleys, cross-bars, balances and supporting arms; devices for showing the centre of gravity and the properties of the simple machines; other machines for illustrating Newton’s laws of motion and the motion of pendulums; machines for central forces and collisions between elastic and inelastic bodies; and others for experiments measuring elasticity. The sheer scale of the collection is reflected in its 177 separate entries in the Science Museum’s 1993 catalogue, Public & Private Science: 114 for the ‘great Table’ and its related mechanical apparatus, and sixty-three for the air-pump and apparatus for pneumatics experiments.39 During the early 1760s these machines were displayed in Buckingham House along with part of the king’s growing library. When the French mathematician Jerome Lalande visited in 1763, he recorded having seen the air-pump among ‘many cabinets in two large rooms full of instruments, machines and books’.40 After being moved from Buckingham House to the Royal Observatory at Richmond, and thence to King’s College London, the instruments were permanently loaned to the Science Museum in London in 1926, where a selection from the collection is on display in the ‘Science in the 18th century’ gallery.41 George III’s instruments and experiments were directly linked with ’sGravesande’s Mathematical Elements and a group of over a dozen other books, through detailed citations in illustrated manuscripts. The ‘Discourses’ mentioned by Thomas Birch in his letter to Philip Yorke can be identified with these manuscripts, compiled by George Adams: ‘A description of the pneumatic apparatus made for His Majesty King George the Third ... 1761’ and ‘A description of an apparatus for explaining the principles of mechanicks made for his Majesty King George the Third ... 1762’.42 Each is

38 Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), pp. 247–290. 39 Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), pp. 247–290, 291–372. A collection of comparable size was sold by Benjamin Martin to Harvard University in 1765; see John R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument- Maker, and Country Showman, Leiden: Noordhoff International, 1976, pp. 128–148. 40 The original reads, ‘plusieurs armoires en deux grandes pièces pleines d’instrumens, de machines et de livres’. Joseph Jérôme Le Français de Lalande, Journal d’un voyage en Angleterre: 1763 (ed. Hélène Monod- Cassidy), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980, p. 72. 41 John R. Millburn, Adams of Fleet Street: Instrument Makers to King George III, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, p. 98. 42 Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), pp. 18, 243–246. Versions of these manuscripts are held in the Science Museum Library at Swindon, and bound, fair copies are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 203 a compendium of experiments, drawn from books and periodicals, and full of citations allowing the machine experiments to be interpreted in light of selected passages in Mathematical Elements and other publications. In the twenty years before his death in 1742, ’sGravesande had built up a vast collection of instruments for use in his lectures, in which experiments ‘illustrated’ the abstract and difficult principles of nature.43 His book presented its readers with a system of natural philosophy, progressing from the properties of bodies and motion; through the simple and compound machines; and culminating with the motions of the comets, the planets and their moons. For the Earl of Bute and George III, the rigour of ’sGravesande’s philosophical system made the same book an ideal source of exercises in tracing out long sequences of connected ideas – an activity that was central to Bute’s plan for moral development. Jessica Riskin has rightly emphasized the importance of visual exposition and entertainment in eighteenth-century courses of experimental philosophy. But ’sGravesande’s Mathematical Elements cannot accurately be called ‘ without geometry’.44 ’sGravesande was the most rigorously geometrical of his peers. Both he and his translator Desaguliers had stressed that in their lectures, experiments acted as ‘a Medium’ to illustrate ‘a Series of philosophical Propositions in mathematical Order’.45 Thus ’sGravesande’s book, and the manuscripts and machines provided by George Adams for George III, provided a ‘system’ of experiments ideal for what Bute had called ‘the investigating truth through long trains of Ideas, and the deducing true consequences from ... propositions well laid and precisely defined’.46 This rigour not only is apparent in terms of the organization of ’sGravesande’s course, which progresses from simple definitions through more and more complex propositions, each building on the last in imitation of Euclid’s Elements.47 It also is reflected in his comprehensive provision of geometrical demonstrations or quantitative calculations relating to individual experiments. Although Desaguliers had trumpeted the ‘mathematical’ order of his own two-volume A Course of Experimental Philosophy, it was, in practice, rather haphazardly assembled. ’sGravesande’s chapter on the air-pump, for example, provides mathematical glosses for each experiment, and attempts to impose order on their sequence, in part by excluding some of the usual ‘repertoire’ of experiments in pneumatics.48 In contrast, Desaguliers composed the corresponding chapter of his own

43 For the function of the experiments in relation to abstract ideas see ’sGravesande, op. cit. (36), vol. 1, p. viii. For ’sGravesande’s collection of instruments see Allamand, op. cit. (36), pp. xxviii–xxxi; and Peter de Clercq, The Leiden Cabinet of Physics, Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 1997. 44 Jessica Riskin, ‘Amusing physics’, in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, pp. 43–64, 47. 45 John Theophilus Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 2 vols., London: W. Innys, 1745, vol. 1, p. ix. 46 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), ff. 5–6. 47 The definitions of body, extension, solidity and vacuity, attraction, repulsion and motion in ’sGravesande, op. cit. (36), vol. 1, pp. 82–108, are the foundation of his system of philosophy, just as the definitions of point, line and superficies are those of the Euclidean system of geometry. Compare Edmund Scarburgh, The English Euclid: Being the First Six Elements of Geometry, Translated out of the Greek, Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1705, pp. 1–9. 48 ’sGravesande, op. cit. (36), vol. 2, pp. 19–38. 204 Florence Grant book by ‘pasting in’ verbatim a pamphlet published twenty-seven years earlier by the instrument-maker William Vream, in which the maximum number of experiments received minimal verbal description.49 The philosophical instruments of George III are impressive and ingenious artefacts, but the decision to tie them so closely to the Mathematical Elements, through design as well as manuscript citations, framed them for mathematical exercise, no less than display. Eighteenth-century ideas concerning the use of mathematical practice to shape subjectivity followed broadly Lockean views on the formative power of repeated practice and habituation.50 These ideas linked mind, body and objects in two crucial ways. First, had modelled his view of the power of mathematics to make men into ‘reasonable creatures’ on a series of comparisons with bodily exercise and practice.51 It was the same process by which dancing made men into dancing-masters, or playing music made them into musicians or, for that matter, turning on a lathe made them into turners.52 Second, the mathematical sciences, especially geometry and experimental philosophy, were compound activities, with manual and intellectual components inextricably connected. Matthew Jones has shown that both René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz designed instruments for the practice of mathematics as a spiritual exercise.53 Joshua Kirby, tutor in perspective drawing to Prince George, also recognized the interconnection of manual exercise and subjectivity. According to Kirby, making perspective drawings caused a beneficial and lasting change in the mind of the draughtsman: through regular practice, the student would be ‘taught to SEE’ with ‘exactness’ and ‘judgment’.54 Ann Bermingham has proposed that the gentlemanly practices of drawing in seventeenth-century England were ‘a disciplining of the hand by the mind’.55 But Kirby’s remarks reveal that the inverse was also true: geometrical exercise disciplined the mind through the hand. Perhaps the most concrete elements in this web of connections between the corporeal and the intellectual – and certainly its most durable artefacts – were mathematical and philosophical instruments. George III’s papers demonstrate that to study even elementary geometry was not simply to memorize definitions and axioms, or to reason through problems. It was also to construct diagrams with a compass and straightedge: ‘To bisect a given line’ or ‘On a given line to desc[ribe] a reg[u]lar Hexagon’.56

49 William Vream, A Description of the Air-Pump, London: for the author, 1717; Desaguliers, op. cit. (45), vol. 2, pp. 19–38. See also Morton and Wess, op. cit. (1), p. 245. 50 See John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, London: A. Ward et al., 1745, pp. 65–66. 51 John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding (ed. Paul Schuurman, PhD thesis, Keele University, 2000), p. 156. 52 Locke, op. cit. (51). 53 Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 28–29, 189, 235. 54 Joshua Kirby, Dr. Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy, London: for the Author, 1765, p. vi. 55 Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 45. 56 George III, ‘Elementary problems & theorems in geometry, part 1’, RA GEO/ADD32/1825-1829. There are similar exercises on sheets GEO/ADD32/1885-1898 and in ‘Problems of practical geometry useful in Fortification’, GEO/ADD32/1919-1921. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 205 George III’s philosophical machines provided the material basis for the exercises recommended by Scott, Bute and others, for the gradual and painstaking cultivation of a person with a fixed attention, able to follow long chains of reasoning, and therefore familiar with truth – that is, a prince capable of moral action. Sometime after 1765, George III sketched a ‘Plan of education’ in which ‘modern philosophy’ was given a similar role to that of geometry in the ‘Short notes’, indicating that he, too, considered ‘the cognitive grasp perfected through philosophy and mathematics as a resource for the sorts of cognitive grasp necessary for living well’–and for fulfilling his duties as a monarch:57

The study of the principles of Governments require a vigour and depth of mind, quiet [?] habit of reflection and of commanding one’s thoughts, to bring the mind into that order the study of Phylosophy is highly necessary ... he should examine the most celebrated Modern Phylosophers, Bacon, Boyle, Newton, Locke’s Human Understanding.58

Bute’s plan of moral education did not depend solely on giving George III a mathematical mind. Rather, these exercises had a carefully delimited role within a larger scheme that drew heavily on the work of Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at the from 1729 until his death in 1746. Like Hutcheson, Bute ‘regarded the culture of the heart as the main end of all moral instruction’.59 But he also believed that while a benevolent heart was the true motor of moral action, the passions alone were an inadequate guide in the complex situations of political life. For that, mathematical exercises were key. In ‘Some short notes concerning the education of a prince’, Bute considered this relationship between the passions and the understanding in detail, positioning the emotional and geometrical components of this composite approach to moral development:

Another degree or kind of knowledge which every Scholar should acquire ... is that of the conduct of the understanding: the investigating truth through long trains of Ideas, and the deducing true consequences from ... propositions well laid and precisely defined on every subject. Nothing can be more necessary in Action as well as in Speculation; the discovery of those sources from which all our moral obligations flow, and the pursuit of these obligations in all the parts to which they extend, will be taught neither by Grotius, nor Puffendorf, nor Cumberland nor Clarke nor Wollaston nor Burlamaqui nor any of the books of Logick which are in use, half so well and so distinctly as we may teach ourselves if we acquire the habit of employing our reason in a right method. and to acquire this habit nothing can contribute so effectually as an application to the first elements of Geometry. He who is absorbed in Mathematicks may become useless to Society, but He who is not able to reason like a Mathematician will never be very useful in it. He who has Ideas floating on the surface of his mind, and who is not accustomed to analyze them, to reduce them into a right order, to combine and to compare them rightly, may go showishly enough through the ordinary affairs

57 Jones, op. cit. (53), p. 9. 58 RA GEO/ADD32/1732. This plan was extracted from a printed eulogy of Louis, dauphin of France (1729–1765), which actually recommended the Port-Royal Logic, Locke, Descartes and Malebranche. M. Thomas, Eloge de Louis, Dauphin de France, : A. Regnard, 1766, p. 10. 59 William Leechman, ‘The preface’, in Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (ed. William Leechman), 2 vols., Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1755, vol. 1, pp. xxx–xxxi. 206 Florence Grant of life: but He who is to act as well as judge in the most extraordinary and the most arduous, must be taught, if I may say so, not only what to think, but how to think: the conduct of his understanding must be so directed that no Sophisms may impose upon Him, and that He may be able to discern the truth that is latent under every disguise.60

The argument developed here, and put into action in the education of George III, was that the conduct of the understanding was a moral matter, and the geometrical mind was best equipped to discover the sources and practical consequences of moral obligation. Concern with moral development was no novelty in the history of princely education. Nevertheless, texts associated with the education of Tudor and Stuart princes did not afford the mathematical sciences any special efficacy in this regard. Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth I, warned that excessive mathematical study made men ‘unfit to live with others ... unapt to serve in the world’.61 James I and VI advised his eldest son that the useful study of mathematics, for a prince, extended only to military arts such as ballistics and fortification.62 At the latter end of the seventeenth century, John Bettam, tutor to James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, dismissed contemporary debates in astronomy as ‘vain curiosity’.63 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the stance taken by Bute and Scott represented just one of many competing attitudes concerning the moral effects of mathematical exercise. A variety of views was expressed by authors, some writing in the seventeenth century, but all available to readers such as Bute and George III in the 1750s and 1760s. Philosophers on the Continent, such as Descartes and Leibniz, had argued that the practices of geometry produced virtuous qualities of mind.64 In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the French Cartesian Bernard Fontenelle thought, perhaps along more Lockean lines, that frequent exercise in the mathematical sciences ‘wou’d make Truth so familiar, that we might on other Occasions know it at first sight, and almost by Instinct’.65 The Dissenting minister and tutor Isaac Watts considered the mathematical sciences ‘happily useful’ for the cultivation of attention, and a ‘steady fixation of thought’ to be in itself a moral faculty.66 Indeed, his view of the matter was very similar to that expressed in ‘Some short notes concerning

60 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), ff. 5–6. 61 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong but specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in ientlemen and noble mens houses ..., London: John Daye, 1570, p. 5. For Ascham as Elizabeth I’s tutor see Rosemary O’Day, ‘Ascham, Roger (1514/15–1568)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/732, accessed 4 January 2014. 62 James I and VI , Basilikon doron. Or His Maiesties instructions to his dearest sonne, Henrie the prince, London: Richard Field for John Norton, 1603, p. 94. 63 John Bettam, A Brief Treatise of Education, with A Particular Respect to the Children of Great Personages. For the Use of His Royal Highness, The Prince, Paris: P. Lauren, 1693, p. 5. For Bettam as James Stuart’s tutor see Peter Gordon, Royal Education: Past, Present and Future, London: Frank Cass, 1999, pp. 92–93. 64 Jones, op. cit. (53). 65 Bernard Fontenelle, ‘A translation of part of Monsieur Fontenelle’s preface to the Memoirs of the Royal Academy at Paris, in the year 1699’,inMiscellanea Curiosa, 3 vols., London: R. Smith, 1708, vol. 1, sig. A4v. 66 Isaac Watts, ‘The improvement of the mind’, in Watts, The Works of the Late Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D.D., (ed. D. Jennings and P. Dodderidge), 6 vols., London: T. and T. Longman et al., 1753, vol. 5, pp. 185–358, 261. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 207 the education of a prince’. ‘The evidence of truth does not always appear immediately, nor strike the soul at first sight’, wrote Watts, and without the ability to direct and maintain our attention, ‘we judge falsly of many things’.67 Defences of mathematics on moral and spiritual grounds came from an ideologically diverse group of authors, including Descartes, Leibniz, Fontenelle, Watts and the Jacobite mystic Andrew Michael Ramsay.68 The question continued under debate for much of the century, in pedagogy, moral philosophy and reflection on human relationships more broadly speaking. In England, a group of High Church Tories, including , the anti-Newtonian natural philosopher and theologian John Hutchinson, and his supporter George Horne, denied any connection between moral subjectivity and the mathematical sciences.69 Others, such as the physician and one-time friend of Newton, George Cheyne, warned that absorption in advanced mathematics could breed sinful pride and contempt for one’s fellow creatures.70 This discussion, about the effects that mathematical practice could have in shaping moral subjectivity, was joined by some of the parties to concurrent debates over the epistemological, political and theological validity of Newtonian experimental philosophy.71 But those arguing for and against the idea that such exercise could help prepare the mind for moral action defy neat separation into ‘Newtonian’ and ‘anti-Newtonian’ camps. In the education of George III, then, geometrical exercises were intended to play a vital but carefully delimited role in shaping the prince’s moral character. His long, undated ‘Essay on duty’ made the position more explicit, with direct reference to the alternative views of specific moral philosophers. Adopting the notion of the ‘moral sense’ proposed by Francis Hutcheson, the prince primarily condemned Thomas Hobbes for having ‘drawn a very odious picture of us’ by rooting human morality in self-interest.72 But neither did he follow Samuel Clarke in arguing that moral relationships were analogous with proportional relationships in mathematics; after considering this

67 Watts, op. cit. (66), pp. 185–358, 261. 68 See Andrew Michael Ramsay, Plan of Education for a Young Prince, London: J. Wilford, 1732, pp. ii–iii. 69 See John Hutchinson, ‘An abstract from “The religion of Satan, or Anti-Christ, delineated”’,inAn Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson (ed. George Horne), Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1753, pp. 231–244; Samuel Johnson, ‘John Milton’,inThe Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols., Dublin: Wm. Wilson, 1780–1781, vol. 1, p. 174; and George Horne, Memoirs of the Life, Studies, and Writings of the Right Reverend George Horne, D.D. (ed. William Jones), London: G.G. and J. Robinson et al., 1795, p. 304. For Hutchinson and Horne see G.N. Cantor, ‘Revelation and the cyclical cosmos of John Hutchinson’, in Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds.), Images of the Earth, Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1997, pp. 17–35; C.B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, natural philosophy and religious controversy in eighteenth-century Britain’, History of Science (1980) 18, pp. 1–24; and C.D.A. Leighton, ‘Hutchinsonianism: a counter-Enlightenment reform movement’, Journal of Religious History (1999) 23, pp. 168–84. 70 George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life, London: George Strahan, 1724, pp. iv–vi. 71 For these debates see the essays in James E. Force and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. 72 George III, ‘Essay on duty’, RA GEO/ADD32/1964-2007, at 1984; see also Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, London: W. Innys et al., 1756, pp. 209–210. For English moral philosophers’ ongoing argument with Hobbes see Rivers, op. cit. (19), Chapters 2–3. For Hobbes’s battle with the early fellows of the Royal Society over the forms of knowledge that could properly be called natural philosophy see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, especially Chapters 3–4. 208 Florence Grant position he rejected it. In his Boyle lectures, delivered in 1704, Clarke had argued that ‘the Original Obligation of all ... is the eternal Reason of Things’.73 According to this eternal reason,

every rational Creature ought ...to do all the Good it can to all its Fellow-creatures. To which end, universal Love and Benevolence is as plainly the most direct, certain, and effectual means; as in Mathematicks the flowing of a Point, is, to produce a Line; or in Arithmetick, the Addition of Numbers, to produce a Summ; or in Physicks, certain kinds of Motions, to preserve certain Bodies, which other kinds of Motions tend to corrupt.74

In his response to Clarke, Prince George explicitly refuted this geometrical model, writing that some philosophers

talk much of ye Abstract natures & Reasons of things, eternal differences & from these suppose Moral obligation to arise. They call a conform[ity] to truth, virtue, & ye opposite Vice ...[but] What is Truth but ye conformity of propositions to ye nature & reality of things? & has not vice its nature & consequences as well as Virtue?75

Returning to ‘Some short notes concerning the education of a prince’, we can clearly distinguish its attitude towards geometry from that of Clarke. Geometry prepared the mind for ‘the discovery of those sources from which all our moral obligations flow, and the pursuit of these obligations in all the parts to which they extend’.76 But it was not, in itself, the source or model of those obligations. Instead, Bute’s concern for the ‘culture of the heart’ stemmed from his Hutchesonian view of moral obligation, which derived from the benevolent passions and affections, and from an internal, naturally operating, ‘moral sense’.77 Here the mental faculty shaped by geometry was conceived as an instrument of the benevolent passions, ensuring their efficacy in practice. In the complex form of pedagogy adopted by the Earl of Bute in the late 1750s, each type of study aimed at forming a specific part of the prince’s moral subjectivity. Sensitivity to the passions and affections, and the ability to conceptualize their operation, were complemented by exercises in the mathematical sciences. The latter were intended to habituate the mind to pursuing and identifying the truth ‘latent under every disguise’–and thus to enable the prince to act as well as to feel virtuously.78 With direct concern for cultivating this ‘moral sense’, Bute drew on other branches of learning, such as history and moral philosophy. He attempted both to sensitize the young prince to his own passions and affections and, on a more general level, to illustrate the importance of their proper management for the happiness and virtue of individuals and societies. In one of his earliest letters explicitly regarding Prince George’s education, the earl used a historical ‘abstract’ to show the prince how far his own moral character and education

73 Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, London: John and Paul Knapton, 1738, p. 190. 74 Clarke, op. cit. (73), p. 206. 75 George III, ‘Essay on duty’, RA GEO/ADD32/1964-2007, at 1988–1990. For the source of this argument see Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), pp. 215, 250–251. 76 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), f. 5. 77 For a useful summary of Hutcheson’s position see Rivers, op. cit. (19), pp. 206–207. 78 ‘Some short notes’, op. cit. (22), f. 6. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 209 were implicated in the survival of the British Empire. In the great empires of the past (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome), ‘effeminacy and corruption’ led to eventual decline and defeat.79 This was a natural result of the accumulation of wealth and trade, and the consequent softening of manners in these ruling nations. Another reason for the ruin of ancient empires, however, was the depravity of their princes, and this Bute painted in the highest terms of condemnation, as resulting directly from bad education. ‘From their tender years’, wrote Bute, ‘they were surrounded by the basest flatterers, men who paid a servile court to their passions, cultivated with the utmost care every vicious inclination and laughed at honor, honesty, and every virtue’.80 The result was personal and national misery. Bute deployed these examples as a warning to the young Prince of Wales – to fear flatterers, and above all to preserve the warmth of his filial affection and regard for his mother:

no wonder if Kingdoms fell under such Princes, with such ministers; unhappy people, but more unhappy Kings, they could never feel the joy arising from a good or compassionate action, they knew neither; ignorant of the social passions they would never hear the warm the honest voice of friendship, the tender affection and calls of nature, nor the more endearing sounds of love, but here the scene’s too black, let me draw the curtain, let me adore that Providence that has placed us in an age where these enormities are (in Europe at least) unknown.81

Bute used history to make the prince aware of his own attachments and desires, as well as their social and political consequences. He also used contemporary moral philosophy to equip him with a conceptual model of virtue, the passions and affections. Prince George’s ‘Essay on duty’ is a reworking of Hutcheson’s An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728), arguing in favour of the moral sense against philosophers, such as Clarke, who based the principles of virtue in reason; and, more importantly, against those, such as Hobbes, who understood human beings as fundamentally motivated by self-interest. Following Hutcheson closely, the prince’s ‘Essay on duty’ argued that human beings are endowed by God with a moral sense which naturally, and previously to ‘instruction, art, or Volition’, perceives virtue and vice.82 He also proposed that noble, generous or benevolent actions are motivated by ‘Publick Affections’ (according to Hutcheson, ‘Love, Congratulation, Compassion, natural Affection’), rather than reason or self- love.83 The public affections operating unchecked, however, could be harmful to the individual and are moderated by ‘ye Private passions’ (‘Ambition, Covetousness, Hunger, Lust, Revenge, Anger’).84 Again, these ‘violent’ or ‘particular’ passions and

79 Earl of Bute to the Prince of Wales, 1756[?], BL ADD MS 36797, f. 63v. 80 Earl of Bute to the Prince of Wales, op. cit. (79), f. 64r. 81 Earl of Bute to the Prince of Wales, op. cit. (79), ff. 64r–v. 82 For the moral sense, see George III, op. cit. (72), at 1975; and Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), pp. 3–6. For its natural operation see George III, op. cit. (72), at 1980; and Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 2. For its status prior to ‘instruction, Art or Volition’ see George III, op. cit. (72), at 1981; and Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. xvii. 83 For the moral sense and public affections as the sources of virtue see George III, op. cit. (72), at 1991; and Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 218; for the public affections enumerated see Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 30. 84 For the dynamic balance between the public affections and the private passions see George III, op. cit. (72), at 2000–2001; and Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 55. 210 Florence Grant affections alone cannot provide steady, moral direction; they are ideally dominated by ‘general’ or ‘calm’ desires of the same type.85 As the prince explained, ‘a calm self love is plac’d at ye head of ye Private passions, to direct their attractions & Repulsions. ye Publick Affections are controul’d by a dispassionate Benevolence, which in ye same manner ought limit their motion’.86 As Bute pictured it, the primary benefits of geometry in moral education would come from practical exercises, training the understanding to work in tandem with the passions. Hutcheson’s system of counterbalancing passions and affections allowed the dynamics of emotional life to be figured mechanically, and in doing so Hutcheson used the intermediary image of the human body. The passions and affections ‘are by Nature balanced against each other, like the Antagonist Muscles of the Body ... jointly, they form a Machine, most accurately subservient to the Necessities, Convenience, and Happiness of a rational System’.87 The prince chose instead to compare the passions and affections directly to a machine:

ye Passions on one side may be look’d on as powers [f]orcing mankind to a certain course, with a force proportional to ye greatness of ye good aim’d at. & on ye other as weights balancing ye action of ye powers, & controuling ye violence of their impulses. By these powers & weights a ballance is fix’d in ye human breast by ye Great Creator, which makes ye Creature act pretty steady, in yt variety of Stages we must pass thro’.88

The instruments of natural philosophy played a complex role here: they simultaneously acted as the basis for moral exercise and provided a powerful analogy for Hutcheson’s system of counterbalancing passions and affections. This recurring emphasis on the efficacy of machines in moral life, present at diverse material and cognitive levels in the education of George III, raises the question whether virtue was conceived by him and Bute as mechanical, in the radical sense proposed by eighteenth-century French thinkers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie. La Mettrie, rejecting Christian metaphysics, reduced the body and the soul to a single, physical substance. His moral philosophy was mechanical in that it held individuals’ virtue or vice to be determined by the qualities of their physical constitutions; it also regarded standards of virtue and vice to be wholly conventional, constructed for the benefit of societies rather than for that of individuals in their natural state.89 In contrast, Hutcheson explicitly framed his moral sense as a faculty of the soul, and he considered the ‘public passions’, as the springs of social virtue, to be wholly natural.90 Adopting Hutcheson’s philosophy, Bute and Prince George sidestepped the question whether the corporeal training implicit in geometrical practice contributed to its psychological effects. They juxtaposed, without attempting to integrate conceptually, the Hutchesonian analogy between moral affect and mechanics, on the one hand,

85 Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 29. 86 George III, op. cit. (72), at 2001. 87 Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), p. 183. 88 George III, op. cit. (72), at 2001. 89 For this account of La Mettrie’s moral philosophy, I have relied on Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 132–134, 216–223. 90 Hutcheson, op. cit. (72), pp. 229, 55. Mechanical experiments as moral exercise 211 and mechanical practice as moral exercise, on the other. By declining to draw any explicit, physiological relation between the two, the earl and the prince also avoided the suggestion that virtue itself might be mechanical, in La Mettrie’s sense of being physiologically determined. Bute’s confidence in the moral utility of mathematical practice seems to represent a novel development in the history of princely education in Britain. Tudor and Stuart treatises on the subject, while concerned with virtue as one of the pillars of monarchical rule, considered the mathematical sciences injurious, indifferent, or useful only in the arts of war.91 Nonetheless, the moral education of George III does speak to a broader context in which the Newtonian philosophy was used to secure the legitimacy of Hanoverian rule in Britain. Historians recognize a number of distinct modes of Newtonian apologetics for the Hanoverian succession. Steven Shapin has described disputes over the nature, sources and limits of monarchical power extending from the Exclusion Crisis into the 1720s, in which Newtonian doctrines formed part of the complex alignments among political parties, High and Low Church factions, and court and country interests.92 Concerned to protect their standing at court and to quash perceived doctrinal threats to the Established Church, Newtonian Whigs made attacks on Leibniz abroad and freethinkers at home, in which natural-philosophical questions became virtually coextensive with questions over the nature of monarchical power.93 Allegorical and iconographic modes of association between Newtonianism and the Hanoverian regime are also well known. John Theophilus Desaguliers’s allegorical poem The Newtonian System of the World, the best Model of Government (1728) argued by analogy with law-governed, planetary motion for the natural legitimacy of Hanoverian rule in a system of ‘limited Monarchy’.94 An iconographic mode of argument, using portrait busts to assert national, intellectual and moral affiliation with her adopted country, was deployed with apparent success by Queen Caroline in the early 1730s. Caroline’s Hermitage at Richmond housed the busts and written works of the English philosophical and theological ‘worthies’, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Robert Boyle, William Wollaston and Samuel Clarke. As a widely publicized space for solitary retirement and contemplation, Caroline’s Hermitage announced her identification with British virtues and achievements, in large part through association with Newton.95 Caroline’s grandson, George III, was the first Hanoverian monarch born and raised in England. By the time of his succession, the last Jacobite rebellion had been suppressed; public anxiety over the foreignness of the Hanoverians, and the legitimacy of their succession, had largely subsided.96 In the context of his education, the question of

91 For the centrality of virtue in princely education see, for example, James I and VI, op. cit. (62), pp. 61–62; and Bettam, op. cit. (63), p. 9. 92 Steven Shapin, ‘Of gods and kings: natural philosophy and politics in the Leibniz–Clarke disputes’, Isis 72 (1981), pp. 187–215. 93 Shapin, op. cit. (92), pp. 202, 207–210. 94 John Theophilus Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, the best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem, Westminster: A. Campbell for J. Roberts, 1728, p. v. 95 For Caroline’s Hermitage see Judith Colton, ‘Kent’s Hermitage for Queen Caroline at Richmond’, Architectura (1974) 2, pp. 181–189. 96 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, London: Pimlico, 2003, p. 229. 212 Florence Grant legitimate rule was posed to him not as a dynastic concern, but rather as a matter of personal character. Here the Newtonian philosophy, deployed by previous generations as a ‘resource’ in political conflict, as a naturalizing allegory or as a nationalistic emblem, accrued a further role: that of providing exercises for transforming a self-confessed ‘indolent’ youth into a virtuous – and therefore morally legitimate – monarch.97 As a material basis for geometrical practice, the instruments now on display at the Science Museum in London played a tacit but crucial role in this undertaking.

97 Shapin, op. cit. (92), p. 202.