Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
the adulatory style of Newton’s early biographers that so much is made of the miraculous nature of his early survival. A description of Newton’s infancy from Sir David Brewster, writing in 1855, serves to illustrate:
Providence, however, disappointed their fears, and that frail tenement which seemed scarcely able to imprison its immortal mind, was destined to enjoy a vigorous maturity, and to survive even the average term of human existence.9
Newton would have strongly approved of such a description, which adds still more weight to the self-image he so much treasured.
Of the first three years of Newton’s life almost nothing is recorded. We know from a tiny scrap of parchment unearthed by Stukeley that the baby Isaac was baptised on 1 January 1643. It is easy to conjure up a romantic image of Hannah on New Year’s Day trudging through the snow with her feeble baby wrapped in swaddling-clothes on their way to the local church for the christening ceremony, but it is almost certain that the village vicar would have visited the manor to conduct the service.
After this there is a three-year period of blankness. As the Civil War raged the length and breadth of the country, Hannah and her son continued to live at the manor house. Their employees tilled the land and carried out the annual lambing, the shearing, the milking and the feeding, while Hannah dealt with the many bureaucratic aspects of the business and supervised sales of animals and the maintenance of farm stocks. It would also have been natural for Hannah’s parents to play a significant role in helping their widowed daughter. Hannah and her son were not rich, but they were comfortably off. At the time of Isaac senior’s death, the deeds of the manor house and the surrounding lands, along with goods and chattels valued at £459.12s. 4d., 234 sheep, 46 head of cattle and several barns full of oats, barley and malt were all bequeathed to Hannah. To put this into perspective, the average farmer of the region owned a flock of between 35 and 40 sheep, and the will of a typical yeoman contained goods worth little more than £100. During the 1640s, a workman could expect to earn in the region of one shilling and sixpence a week.
By the winter of 1645 King Charles was holed up in Oxford, effectively under siege by Cromwell’s army. In June of that disastrous year for the royalists, his troops suffered their worst military defeat at the battle of Naseby. England was still far from regicide, but the forces that, four years later, would lead to this singular event were already coalescing. Lincolnshire continued to pass through the upheaval relatively unscathed, making Woolsthorpe a haven of solitude and anonymity for advancing or retreating armies. Throughout the Civil War, troops were away from their garrisons for months at a time and relied upon the hospitality of town and country folk alike; stories of villages and towns refusing to accommodate troops of either side are rare. Isaac would have seen soldiers of both sides passing through the village, and there may have been occasions when troops stayed in the houses beyond the fields of his little sanctuary, or even at the manor itself. If Hannah accommodated royalists or Roundheads, no record has been passed on to us, and Newton never mentioned such a thing, but it would not have been surprising.
The worst of the fighting was over by the summer of 1646, but for Isaac a far more significant event had transformed his life. At the beginning of the year, soon after his third birthday, his mother had decided to remarry.
Barnabas Smith was the rector of North Witham, a hamlet just over a mile from Woolsthorpe. Little is known about him, but what is known does not paint a pretty picture. He was successful academically but seems to have displayed only a passing interest in learning. The son of a wealthy landowner, he attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1601. He collected books, but by all accounts did not often read them; he made a half-hearted effort to start a notebook in which he intended collecting his thoughts on a variety of theological subjects, but gave up after a few pages. Both the books and the notebook did eventually find serious use, however, as they were passed on to Isaac as part of his inheritance upon Smith’s death. The books – some 250 of them – may have led Newton into serious collecting himself and could well have introduced him to a number of the theological subjects which later preoccupied him to and beyond the point of obsession. Nor was the notebook wasted: the mostly blank pages ended up covered in Isaac’s earliest scribblings on the subject of gravitation and the formulation of the calculus. With a barely disguised dig at his stepfather, Newton never referred to Smith’s hand-me-down as a notebook, but, doubtless knowing its history, called it the ‘Waste Book’.
Smith was sixty-three years old when the widowed Hannah Newton first caught his eye. Hannah was around thirty. (There are no surviving official records giving her exact date of birth.) By then he had been rector at North Witham for over thirty-five years, the rectorship having been bought for him by his father in 1610 as the source of a convenient annuity. According to a visiting bishop who had come to check up on the new rector twelve months after his arrival in North Witham, Smith was a non-resident and, presumably on good behaviour, but ‘inhospitable’.
For Smith the rectorship was little more than a dalliance. By the time of his proposal to Hannah in 1645 he commanded an independent income of over £500 per annum – a considerable sum in the seventeenth century, to which his clergyman’s stipend would have added little. Perhaps he had no need to be ‘hospitable’. During his rectorship, he certainly appears to have sailed calmly through the upheavals in Church doctrine created by the Civil War. Between the start of the first Civil War and the end of the second, many Anglican clergymen chose banishment from their living over conformity to the constantly changing tide of theological fashion. Smith, however, went with the flow.
Smith’s first wife had died only six months earlier, in June 1645, and it may have been for this reason that his initial approach to Hannah was businesslike even for the time. Instead of attempting to woo or even talk to her face to face, he paid a servant a day’s wages to deliver a letter of proposal.
Whatever Smith’s reasons for making such a decidedly unromantic proposal, Hannah did not at first reply. Instead, she consulted with her brother, William – who, as incumbent in a nearby village, must have known Smith – and a family conclave was convened to weigh up the pros and cons of the match.
The terms and conditions of the proposed arrangement were negotiated as a business transaction, and the eventual agreement seems equitable, but little thought appears to have been spared for the pawn in this game – Hannah’s three-year-old son. The deal was that Hannah and Smith would marry and she would naturally move to North Witham, but Isaac would stay at the Newton home. In return, some land to the value of £50 was to be signed over for him to inherit at the age of twenty-one, and the house in Woolsthorpe was to be refurbished completely.
What is so surprising is not so much that Smith did not want Hannah’s son to live with them but that Hannah should go along with these terms. Even accepting that nothing was known of psychology in the seventeenth century, that a mother would willingly trade her son for a new life strikes the twentieth-century observer as totally heartless.
Contemporary accounts of Hannah’s character provide us with very little that is believable about her or helpful in reading her character: John Conduitt tells us, ‘She was a woman of so extraordinary an understanding and a virtue that those who … think that a soul like Sir Isaac Newton’s could be formed by anything less than the immediate operation of a Divine Creator might be apt to ascribe to her many of those extraordinary qualities with which it was endowed.’10 Giving her the benefit of the doubt, however, we can only speculate that she agreed to the arrangement reluctantly and primarily for her son’s future. Smith was old and wealthy, and Hannah doubtless thought he would not live long. Because his first marriage had been childless, upon his death she would, she might assume, inherit everything, and after the short period of separation Isaac would benefit greatly from the union. But it was hardly as if the Newtons were destitute. By the standards of the day they were doing very nicely indeed. Did she really need to agree?
We only have two pieces of evidence to demonstrate Hannah’s love for her son. First is the fact that she made him sole heir to the estate and in her will she left her body to be buried as Isaac ‘shall think fit’.11 The other is a scrap