Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
your letter and I perceive you letter from mee with your cloth but none to you your sisters present thai love to you with my motherly lov you and prayers to god for you I your loving mother
Hannah12
It would appear from this that Hannah loved her son as any mother would, and, rather than their separation being something she agreed to readily for financial gain or convenience, it is far more likely that Isaac’s fate was decided by others within the Newton family. Smith may not have been enthusiastic about the idea of having another man’s son in his house; he may have seen Isaac as a threat to his nascent relationship with Hannah; the boy might even have been perceived as a disruptive influence: but this does not mean that Smith insisted that Isaac remain at the manor. It is quite possible that the suggestion came from the Newtons: by keeping the three-year-old at the family home, they could maintain control of the estate, keeping it out of Smith’s hands.
Perhaps Newton never learned the real reason why he was left at the manor; he certainly never mentioned it later in life. But, after the various arguments had been mulled over, his mother accepted Smith’s offer under the negotiated conditions and on 27 January 1646 her list of surnames increased by one, to Ayscough-Newton-Smith.
Unfortunately for Newton the boy, but conceivably of the utmost importance to the advancement of human knowledge, any hopes that Hannah might have had for a short marriage followed by great wealth were disappointed. Barnabas Smith lived for almost another eight years, dying at the age of seventy-one in 1653 after fathering three children: Mary (Marie), born in 1647; Benjamin, born in 1651; and Hannah, born in 1652. Although circumstances would later result in these half-siblings doing little to damage the value of Isaac’s inheritance, the enforced separation from his mother at such an impressionable age has long been recognised as one of the key factors in shaping Newton’s character.
Isaac had been raised solely by his mother, and there is little doubt that until her departure they were almost inseparable; his dependency upon her would have been far greater than if both his parents had survived. Furthermore, it was not death which effectively deprived Newton of his mother: she was taken by another man and continued to live close by. To rub salt into Isaac’s emotional wounds, he never knew when or if his mother would turn up. Sometimes she would reappear for an hour or for an afternoon, but always she would go again – and always to the other man, the hated Barnabas Smith. We know from clues left in his notebooks and personal papers that Newton loathed his stepfather and, to a lesser extent, grew to resent his mother.
Of Newton’s earliest writings only a few fragments remain, but these provide some revealing insights into the psychology of the boy. Four notebooks survive from his days in Lincolnshire and his first year at Trinity College, Cambridge. Of these, the most interesting are a notebook kept at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and a schoolboy exercise book in the possession of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, which has become known as the Morgan Notebook.
Newton began writing in the Fitzwilliam Notebook sometime during the early summer of 1662, when he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. At first he treated the book as a form of confessional, purging himself by writing out his felonies against the Lord. In shorthand, he drew up two lists: of sins committed ‘Before Whitsunday 1662’ and of those ‘Since Whitsunday 1662’. The first list, stretching back to his childhood, contains forty-five transgressions; the other, more recent, set contains nine ‘sins’. Most startling of this earlier batch are numbers 13 and 14: ‘Threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them’ and ‘Wishing death and hoping it to some’.13 What is so surprising about these entries is not so much the violence of Isaac’s feelings as a child – that could be expected – but the fact that he remembered his anger so clearly and felt compelled to confess it so many years later, long after the principal object of his hatred was dead and buried.
Perhaps even more fascinating is the window into Newton’s psychology offered by the schoolboy exercise book, the Morgan Notebook. This contains collections of scribblings, ideas jotted down from books Isaac read, lists and other notes probably dating from about the age of ten to his early teenage years. Most pertinent to his mental state is an alphabetical list of word associations based upon a contemporary book, Father Francis Gregory’s Nomenclatura. Newton placed these associations under different headings. Under the heading ‘Of Kindred and Titles’, we have F: ‘Father’ (out of Gregory) followed by ‘Fornicator’ and ‘Flatterer’ (both from Newton). Under B we have ‘Brother’ (Gregory) followed by ‘Bastard’, ‘Blasphemer’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Bedlam’, ‘Beggar’ and finally ‘Benjamite’ (all from Newton – whose half-brother, it should be remembered, was named Benjamin).* W begins innocently with Gregory’s ‘Wife’ and ‘Wedlock’, but is completed by Newton’s ‘Whore’.14
Although he was later attentive and caring towards his mother, and nursed her during her final illness in 1679, the psychological scars of her remarriage clearly dug deep and almost certainly affected Newton’s future relationships with women. Although unquantifiable, the effect of such trauma moulds different individuals in different ways according to their particular circumstances, and in Newton’s case we may match the damage to the personality which emerged from the wreckage.
During the eight years in which Hannah lived in North Witham, Isaac remained in the care of his grandparents, James and Margery Ayscough, who had taken up residence at the manor. As Newton never mentioned his grandparents later in life, it would appear there was little love lost between them. The Ayscoughs probably did their best, but they could never have replaced Hannah. From a state where he could do no wrong, bonded intimately with his gentle mother, he was inexplicably deserted and thrust into the care of two elderly people. The three-year-old Isaac’s instinctive reaction to being left in this situation would be to feel overwhelming guilt, to imagine he had somehow done something terribly wrong. Interestingly, the Morgan Notebook includes O: ‘Orphan’ (Gregory) followed by ‘Offender’ (Newton). When, eight years later, Hannah returned to stay, the eleven-year-old pre-pubescent was again disturbed emotionally. Was his mother’s sudden return a reward? Had he then been right all along to feel guilty over some unknown and unknowable deed? Had he now served his punishment?
Upon Hannah’s return, his parents moved back to their home village of Market Overton, a few miles distant, and Hannah perhaps assumed that her and Isaac’s lives could pick up where they had left off in 1646. But it was not to be. They were certainly wealthier and more secure, but the rift between mother and son was now too wide ever to heal properly. Not only was the fact of her desertion irreversible, but she was returning to the manor with three young children in tow.
Apart from the word associations of the Morgan Notebook, little evidence remains of Isaac’s feelings towards his half-siblings, but we can understand the resentment he must have harboured for this threesome whose father he despised and with whom he could only associate betrayal and desertion. In his school Latin exercise book (one of the four documents surviving from his youth) we have his comment, ‘I have my brother to entreat’,15 in which a number of biographers have detected a hint of sarcasm – at least, now his mother had returned, he had a brother to talk to – but nothing else on the subject survives.
Although by all accounts Newton was a quiet child, he also possessed a malicious streak, as is evidenced by his private outbursts against Smith recorded in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. Hannah may well have been relieved when a year after her return he was old enough to attend King’s School in Grantham, seven miles away – a distance much too great to travel each day.
Established sometime during the 1520s, by the time Newton arrived King’s School had for some 130 years provided a solid grounding in what were then considered to be the basics of education: Latin, Greek and Bible studies. In 1654 the headmaster was Henry Stokes, a graduate of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and a man who later exerted a profound influence upon the course of Newton’s early academic career.