The relations between fellows of the Royal Society and French men of science when France and Britain were at war

Abstract

Abstract In the days when only soldiers and sailors fought, it was accepted practice that men of learning and men of science should continue to communicate with each other, whatever the state, of peace or war, that might at the time prevail between the nations to which they belonged. When Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, was arrested and sent to the Tower in 1667 ‘for dangerous designes and practises’, it was supposed by Pepys that the reason was 'for writing news to a virtuoso in France, with whom he constantly corresponds in philosophical matters’ ; in which case Oldenburg would have been a singularly unfortunate man. Dr McKie has shown in these pages that the probable reason for Oldenburg’s detention was that he had criticised the conduct of the war on the part of the King, and there is nothing to suggest that governments paid any more attention to the correspondence exchanged between men of science in times of war than to that of anybody else. Indeed, the men of science of Great Britain and of France remained constantly on good terms and in correspondence, whether their nations were at war, or not. For instance, there is a letter from Tournefort to Hans Sloane written during the war of the League of Augsburg in which the war is treated as an irrelevant nuisance. Sloane had just returned from his voyage to Jamaica.

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