The British Journal for the History of Science Mechanical Experiments As Moral Exercise in the Education of George
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The British Journal for the History of Science http://journals.cambridge.org/BJH Additional services for The British Journal for the History of Science: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here 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 Request Permissions : Click here 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 London 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 1730s 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 1760s.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 series 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 England’, 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