Out of the Flames Page 26

  When Small went to the catalog, he came across a listing that surprised him. He had no recollection of it and thought it must be a misprint, so he went to the shelves to check. There was no mistake—the University of Edinburgh library did indeed own a genuine 1553 copy of Christianismi Restitutio.

  Small removed the book from the shelves. It had a nineteenthcentury leather binding, polished calf or brown morocco, with a single gold fillet round the border. On the cover, tooled in gold, was “Donata Bibl. Edinb. a domino D. Georgio Douglasio filio illustriss. ducis de Queenberrie A.D. 1695.” Inside, the book had been damaged in a curious way. The first gathering of sixteen pages had been torn out. In their place, someone had substituted carefully copied handwritten pages.

  Small of course, knew the Douglas family well. The current patriarch was John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, who had given the world both the rules of gentlemanly pugilism and his son, Lord Alfred—“Bosie”—who was soon to initiate the love affair that would bring down Oscar Wilde. Aware of the value of his discovery, Small conducted an intense search of library records but could find no indication whatever of how Lord George Douglas had come to own the book two centuries before.

  One thing that was clear was that Lord George could not have donated the book in 1695 because he had died in 1693. In 1695, the Szent-Iványi copy was hidden away in Cluj, and the Colladon copy was sitting anonymously in the library of Karl von Hessen-Kassel, so this would have been the only known copy of Christianismi Restitutio in the world. Only years of searching by the most seasoned bibliophile could have unearthed such a find. But at the time of his death, Lord George Douglas had been only twenty-five years old.

  LORD GEORGE DOUGLAS “WAS born in 1668, the youngest of three sons of the third earl and first duke of Queensberry. His father, William, had lived through the Great Rebellion and as an adolescent seen Cromwell's forces conquer Scotland. The Douglas family, like most of the Scottish nobles, had fought on the side of the Royalists and was forced by the new government to pay a heavy fine. The family fortunes seriously impaired, William was obliged as a young nobleman to forgo certain privileges and entertainments befitting his position. He never got the chance to study abroad, for example, which was all the fashion in those days.

  The family recovered with the restoration of Charles II. William, now in his twenties, was rewarded for his loyalty and rose steadily until he had attained the titles of lord high treasurer of Scotland, constable and governor of Edinburgh Castle and, finally, duke of Queensberry, one of the lords of the privy council of both Scotland and England. By the time Lord George was born, William's industry had recouped all of the wealth lost under Cromwell. Still like a child of the Depression, the first duke of Queensberry never forgot the economy and deprivation of his youth—William was a bit of a penny pincher.

  As third son, Lord George could not hope to succeed to his father's titles—those would go to his older brother James—but he was still sent to Glasgow University, the best in Scotland, for training in Latin, Greek, the classics, mathematics, and science. His father was adamant that part of his education be spent studying abroad—no Douglas was going to be denied that particular privilege again—and so in March 1686, at the age of eighteen, the baby-faced, sickly Lord George left for an extended tour of the Continent. William did not feel that his son was sufficiently mature to undertake this adventure alone, so he hired Alexander Cunningham, a brilliant lawyer, classical scholar, and chess master to serve as his son's tutor and companion. William had decided that Lord George should study law while he was away, that being the area of study most valuable to a life spent in public service.

  Just at the time that Lord George and his tutor left, William was kilt deep in politics and intrigue. Charles II had died in 1685 and had been succeeded by his brother James. James was already flirting with the idea of reinstating Roman Catholicism as the state religion, much to the fear and consternation of Protestant families like the Douglases. Sure enough, in June 1686, at the instigation of the ambitious earl of Perth, who had recently converted to Roman Catholicism in order to curry favor with James, William was stripped of all of his titles and prohibited from leaving Edinburgh.

  Stripped, too, of the income associated with his positions and having recently undertaken large improvements of the family castle—which necessitated equally large expenditures of capital—William, basically under house arrest, squirmed at the bills that his youngest son, now skipping blithely through Europe, was stacking up.

  The tour had begun in Utrecht, which boasted one of the best law schools in the world. Unfortunately, Lord George and his tutor arrived in April, well into the school term, too late for a novice to pick up the material easily. Indeed, the two young men seemed to take the whole legal studies aspect of the trip as a vague guideline rather than a strict objective—Cunningham suggested going to Brussels after Utrecht, even though there was no university in Brussels. However, Lord George and Cunningham felt that this deficiency was more than made up for by the gaiety of Brussels, the cheapness of its lodgings, and the ability to get in some decent dancing and fencing without a series of school lectures getting in the way.

  But Cunningham's real passion, one that he communicated thoroughly to his charge, was his love of books. Everywhere they went, Utrecht, Heidelberg (William nixed the Brussels idea), Strasbourg, Basel, Milan, Florence—they haunted the bookstores. They did more than haunt, they bought, and bought prodigiously. They worked with secondhand dealers and bid at auctions. Somewhere along the line, probably at one of the cheaper shops, since there is no surviving invoice, they picked up an oddity—a book missing its title page, index, and first fourteen pages of text. It might not have even been bound. Whether Cunningham knew it for what it was or was simply attracted by the book's age and condition, no one knows. But soon, along with the other eight hundred books the pair bought, it was packed up and on its way to Scotland.

  This profligate spending on old books was an ongoing source of conflict between father and son. No matter how often Lord George and Cunningham pointed out to William that they were in no way extravagant, that they always got good value, that, in fact, by acquiring all of these books they were actually saving him money (the books being much cheaper in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy than in Scotland), William still put up a fuss. “The Duke of course jibbed at the expense involved, but was met with a number of spirited replies from Lord George, who, while remaining outwardly deferential toward his father, was showing definite signs of that independence of mind so characteristic of the Queensberry Douglases,” W A. Kelly, a biographer, noted.

  Such was William's tightfistedness that for a short time Cunningham flirted with a new plan for achieving financial security. While at Heidelberg, the two young men were introduced to two women—one a Welsh widow, the other an English teenager—both rumored to be in possession of large dowries. Cunningham at first suggested that Lord George marry the English girl—she was sixteen—but, finding her father to be not as wealthy as originally thought, he switched his advocacy to the Welsh widow, who, although twenty-nine, was confirmed to be very well off. Lord George, for reasons of his own, did not take to the idea, and the scheme was dropped.

  By the time the pair landed in Italy, all pretense of a legal education was dropped. William wrote, urging that Lord George return to Germany and enroll in a university or, at the very least, study at the University of Padua. Cunningham wrote back, assuring his employer that the private course of study that he, Cunningham, was currently providing was eminently preferable to anything a university had to offer. The two continued on their way.

  In Milan they visited the famed Ambrosian Library, and in Florence they were given a private tour of the grand duke's library, where they met Gottfried Leibniz, who was on a private tour of his own. They saw the sights in Rome and met all the best people.

  In 1689, while Lord George and his tutor were taking in the sights in Italy at his expense, William's position took a
decided turn for the better. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, his eldest son, James, had the foresight to be in the vanguard of William of Orange's bloodless coup, the first Scottish nobleman to desert to the Prince of Orange, “and from thence acquired the epithet (among honest men) of Proto-rebel.” The new king acknowledged James's support by appointing him colonel of the Scottish horse guards, and with that stroke the earl of Perth was vanquished.

  By 1692, when Lord George and Cunningham finally straggled home by way of Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden (“moving in circles which few grand tourists of a later age were able to enter for all their financial resources,” Kelly observed), William and James Douglas were in sufficient favor at court to get Lord George invited into the Royal Society—as a seasoned traveler, no doubt—and presented to the king. By January 1693, Cunningham was able to report to William that the king had offered Lord George the ambassadorship to either Sweden, Denmark, or Brandenburg—the choice was his. William ev-idently wanted a say in this, or at least to see his son before he left the country again, because Cunningham and Lord George had to travel back to Edinburgh before giving their answer. It was January and quite cold; Lord George took ill, never recovered, and died about six months later.

  Out of respect for his son, William bequeathed all of Lord George's books to the Advocates Library at Edinburgh, later the Edinburgh University Library. Cunningham compiled the catalog. Two years later, William followed his son to the grave, and James took over the family, becoming the second duke of Queensberry.

  After William's death, Alexander Cunningham donated in Lord George's name a book bought on their tour that he'd omitted from the catalog, his now-rebound copy of Christianismi Restitutio, the one John Small rediscovered two hundred years later.

  “WHAT CUNNINGHAM AND the Douglas family could not have known, but Small did, was that the sixteen missing pages were a vital piece of bibliographic evidence. It meant that not only was this volume a third copy of one of the rarest and most valuable books in the world, but that it was Calvin's own, the one he had used to denounce Servetus to the French Inquisition. The sixteen missing pages were those that had been sent to Arneys through Trie. The manuscript pages—there are eighteen—are not an exact copy of the missing printed pages, because Calvin, wanting a complete book and having already removed the first gathering, instructed his secretary to use instead the first section of the 1546 manuscript of Christianismi Restitutio sent to him by Servetus, the closest facsimile available.

  So Calvin, after ordering every copy of Christianismi Restitutio hunted down and destroyed, after threatening anyone who harbored a copy with the same fate as that of its author, could not bring himself to destroy his own.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WHEN CHRISTOPH VON MURR misdirected his catheter, it epitomized the sort of experimentation that went on in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (although not always with such disastrous results). It was a period in which the monumental leaps of pure theory by men like Newton, Boyle, and Locke were sounded, digested, and finally applied. Science buzzed with the excitement of research. Watt gave the world the steam engine, Franklin electricity, and Linnaeus the classification of the natural world.

  Once again, the progress of science spilled over into other, messier arenas of human affairs. Tinkering with vials and tubes and machinery led to tinkering with economics and politics; tinkering with economics and politics led to the American War for Independence and, later, the cataclysm of the French Revolution. As, by degrees, the laws of the natural world were discovered, people attempted to apply what they had learned to the laws of human interaction. Many once again struggled with the concept of the true nature of God.

  The antitrinitarian movement that had begun in the little Italian church in Geneva had now spread to England, where Unitarians were an entrenched, grudgingly accepted minority. Although not allowed to hold public office or attend Oxford or Cambridge, Unitarians and other Dissenters, as they were called, created their own schools that were every bit the intellectual match of their more established counterparts. These schools, which encouraged free inquiry in religion, also encouraged the same approach to science, history, politics, and other academic disciplines. The result was a disproportionate number of Dissenters who became leading scientific minds of the time. One man in particular embodied this quest to reconcile science and the spirit: the great English chemist Joseph Priestley.

  Priestley was born on March 13, 1733, in West Riding, Yorkshire, in the English Midlands, a major center for the manufacture of cloth. His mother died when he was six. His father could not care for Joseph adequately and sent him off to live with his aunt, Sarah Keighley, who adopted him when he was nine.

  The Keighleys, like the Priestleys, were Calvinists, but, according to Priestley himself in his autobiography, unlike his parents, his aunt made her home “a resort for all the dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood without distinction, and those who were the most obnoxious on account of their heresy were almost as welcome to her, if she thought them honest and good men (which she was not unwilling to do) as any others.” At Mrs. Keighley's dinner table, Priestley, who had mastered Greek, Latin, and Hebrew in addition to French, Italian, and Dutch by the time he was sixteen, was exposed to the sort of political and theological questioning definitely outside the experience of the average English family. When it became time for him to go to school, he was sent to the foremost Dissenting academy in England.

  Joseph Priestley followed the same spiritual path as had Michael Servetus two hundred years before, tracing the roots of the Trinity to the Council of Nicaea, rejecting all corruption of the religion outside Scripture, and believing in Christ as a man who was made divine by God's word. Priestley was similar to Servetus in temperament as well. Both were outspoken, scathing to opponents, and unable to suppress either their opinions or their passion; both possessed raw genius that extended across academic disciplines. Priestley published essays on history, education, civil policy, government, and philosophy, as well as numerous treatises on religion, and while he always considered himself primarily a theologian, like Servetus he is now mostly remembered for his contributions to science.

  Priestley began his scientific career relatively late in life, at age thirty-three, after he met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1766. He asked Franklin for permission to write a history of electricity, which Franklin thought was an excellent idea. While writing the history, Priestley sought to reconcile certain inconsistencies by performing some experiments and, for the purpose, invented an “electricity machine,” really a demonstration device in which he showed that graphite conducted electricity. He finished his history the following year and as a result was elected to the Royal Society.

  From there, Priestley became an obsessive experimenter. His favorite medium was gas, an interest that developed, he said, “in consequence of living for some time in the neighborhood of a public brewery.” Hundreds and hundreds of times, he heated a substance to see what sort of gas was created.

  He succeeded in isolating oxygen, nitric oxide, hydrogen chloride, and ammonia. He was the first to put forward and then prove the the-ory that plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, and that this is due to a chemical reaction precipitated by sunlight on green leaves. “I find that you have set all the philosophers of Europe to work upon fixed air [carbon dioxide] and it is with pleasure I observe how high you stand in their opinion; for I enjoy my friend's fame as my own,” Franklin wrote him in a letter.

  Like Murr, Priestley frequently tried out his experiments on himself. He diluted his “fixed air” with water and produced… seltzer. He drank it, liked it, and the soft-drink industry was born. After he had isolated oxygen, he breathed it in through a siphon: “The feeling… was not sensibly different from common air, but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light for some time afterward. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article of luxury?” It took 250 years,
but the Oxygen Bars in California finally proved Priestley correct. Not all his experiments were as successful: he once preserved meat in nitric oxide for six months, then tried to eat it. (“He found it horrible, though his friend Magalhaens considered it not so bad,” reported his biographer, Anne Holt.)

  In 1780, he moved to Birmingham and was at once invited to become a member of the Lunar Society, whose ranks included Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood—both of Charles Darwin's grandfathers—and James Watt. The group met once a month for scientific and philosophic conversation at a member's house at the full moon (so they could see to walk home at night). Watt once wrote to Erasmus Darwin by way of invitation, “I beg that you would impress on your memory the idea that you promised to dine with sundry men of learning at my house on Monday next… For your encouragement there is a new book to cut up, and it is to be determined whether or not heat is a compound of phlogiston [an undetectable substance that many in the eighteenth century supposed existed in all combustible materials] and empyreal air, and whether a mirror can reflect the heat of the fire… If you are meek and humble, perhaps you may be told what light is made of, and also how to make it, and the theory proved by synthesis and analysis.”

  Despite what had become an enormous scientific reputation, Priestley's own genius for indiscretion often got him into serious trouble. In addition to his radical religious opinions, he was an outspoken supporter of the American Revolution at a time when it was even less popular than usual to hold that view in England. He opposed the lucrative slave trade and was an advocate for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which discriminated against anyone who did not adhere to the articles of the Church of England. He published The History of the Corruptions of Christianity, a full-blown attack on the Trinity, and followed it up with The History of the Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ. Priestley's worst indiscretion was his vocal support of the French Revolution. Detesting tyranny in any form, he viewed the fall of the monarchy as the dawn of a new, brighter day, just as the fall of the tsar, before the coming of Stalin, at first seemed to signal the end of repression in Russia to American political progressives. But even in the early days before the Terror, the French Revolution was perceived as a threat to the English monarchy and established social order, and the public overwhelmingly feared it.