1 See https://royalsociety.org, accessed 6 June 2018.

2 For the 2012 charter see https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/about-us/history/2012-Supplemental-Charter.pdf?la=en-GB, accessed 06 June 2018. For its early charters and their translations see The Record of the Royal Society of London, London: Royal Society, 1940, pp. 220 ff.

3 The fundamental significance of being a physical assembly in London, and the durability of that identity, are discussed in Fyfe, Aileen and Moxham, Noah, ‘Making public ahead of print: meetings and publications at the Royal Society, 1752–1892’, Notes and Records: A History of Science Journal (2016) 70, pp. 361–380CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Birch, Thomas, History of the Royal Society of London for the Promoting of Natural Knowledge, 4 vols., London: Andrew Millar, 1756–1757, vol. 1, p. 3Google Scholar. The use of ‘college’ is transcribed from the society's founding journal-book, and is thus the language of the founders rather than an eighteenth-century gloss.

5 See Hunter, Michael, The Royal Society and Its Fellows 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution, 2nd edn, Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1994; first published 1982Google Scholar. Of 551 fellows elected up to 30 November 1700, Hunter classes over 350 as at most slightly active, with the overwhelming majority of those ‘barely active’ or ‘inactive’.

6 See Hunter, Michael, Science and Society in Restoration England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 22–23Google Scholar; McKie, Douglas, ‘The origins and foundation of the Royal Society of London’, in Hartley, Harold (ed.), The Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders, London: The Royal Society, 1960, pp. 1–38, 25–26Google Scholar.

7 RS JBO/1 p. 2, 12 December 1660. The society deliberately drew attention to the social distinction of its membership through printed lists and in Henry Oldenburg's review of Sprat's History, which Hunter interprets as ‘an argument for the respectability and innocuousness of the Society's enterprise’. See Hunter, Michael, ‘Latitudinarianism and the “ideology” of the early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) reconsidered’, in Hunter, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1989, pp. 45–71, 49Google Scholar.

8 Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 2–3.

9 Hunter, op. cit. (6), p. 49; and for an extended treatment of this theme, the same author's Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1995, pp. 120–134Google Scholar.

10 RS DM/5/49–52 (Royal Society).

11 Croone's draft, headed ‘Literarium Patentiu[m] Exemplum’, nevertheless implies the society's perpetual continuation: ‘and we will and moreover ordain that in all future time [this free corporation] be called and named the Royal Society’ (‘volumusq[ue] praeterea ac Iubemus, ut in omne tempus futurum Societatis Regalis dicatur ac Nominetur’). However, the 1662 and 1663 texts lay far greater emphasis on the notion of perpetual establishment than does either of the drafts.

12 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 4.

13 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, pp. 45, 50.

14 Ent draft charter, DM/5/52 (‘quae ad Dei Sospitatoris Nostri gloriam, ad communem humani generis utilitatem, subditorumque Nostrorum honorem atque emolumentum spectant’). For the sake of consistency and the avoidance of confusion I have used Ent's text throughout.

15 Ent draft charter, DM/5/52 (‘propterea, quod viri, iis studiis operantes, festinato nimium principia theoriasque suas tradiderint, priusquam nemsoe [nempe], sufficienti Experimentorum historiae ve Naturalis peculio, scientiae huius fundamenta locupletassent’).

16 On Bacon's deployment of the link between political and epistemic empire, see in particular Keller, Vera, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 135–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, London: T[homas] R[oycroft] for John Martyn and James Allestry, 1667, pp. 35–36Google Scholar. See also the disclaimer that the Royal Society insisted Robert Hooke include in Micrographia absolving them of responsibility for his speculative and theoretical flights in the book; Robert Boyle's statement in the ‘Proemial essay’ to Certain Physiological Essays (see The Works of Robert Boyle (ed. Hunter, Michael and Davis, Edward B.), 14 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2000, vol. 2, pp. 12–13)Google Scholar, in which he took the Baconian wish not to be ‘prepossessed by any theory or principles’ to the extent of not reading Bacon. On Boyle's Baconianism see Hunter, Michael, ‘Robert Boyle and the early Royal Society’, in Hunter, Boyle Studies: Aspects of the Life and Thought of Robert Boyle, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, pp. 54–80Google Scholar; and Sargent, Rose-Mary, The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, esp. pp. 23–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Wood, Paul B., ‘Methodology and apologetics: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society’, BJHS (1980) 13, pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism and the “ideology” of the early Royal Society’, op. cit. (7).

19 Ent draft charter, RS DM/5/52 (‘Concedemus libenter huic Soceitati Literas Nostras Patentes, quibus cautum sit, ut rerum ab illis inventarum emolumentem, in Collegij duntaxat commodum cedat; neque earum usus-fructus ad alium quemlibet, ipsis nolentibus, pertingat. Quinetia[m], cuicunque ob operas inventionesve mechanicas, literas patentes sub Magno Angliae Sigillo obtinuerint; tenebentur, Machinarum suarum Specimen idoneum Societati huic offerre, apud eam tut asservandum’).

20 See Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), p. 18.

21 Prohibitions against dividing the benefits of patents among five people or more were introduced in 1721 following the speculation crisis of the South Sea Bubble. See Macleod, Christine, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Robert Moray to Alexander Bruce, 5 and 17 November 1663, in Stevenson, David (ed.), Letters of Sir Robert Moray to the Earl of Kincardine, 1657–73, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 234–237Google Scholar; Maddinson, R.E.W., ‘Abraham Hill F.R.S. (1635–1722)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1960) 15, pp. 173–182, 175Google Scholar.

23 Discussed in Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 88–90.

24 Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 98–101.

25 BL Add MSS 4441 ff. 101–102.

26 Macleod, op. cit. (21), pp. 21–39, 41–44, 186–188; Stewart, Larry, ‘Science, instruments and guilds in early-modern Britain’, Early Science and Medicine (2005) 10, pp. 392–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Iliffe, Rob, ‘In the warehouse: print, property and priority in the early Royal Society’, History of Science (1992) 30, pp. 29–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for Robert Hooke's struggles to secure patents (with the assistance of senior figures in the Royal Society) on horological inventions.

28 The possibility of splitting the reward for inventions between the fellows and the society was raised again in (probably) the 1670s: R.S. Cl.P./20/50 f. 86. For discussion see Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 213, 243–244; and Macleod, op. cit. (21), p. 187. For a more general assessment of the impact of the Royal Society and the city's regulated trades on scientific entrepreneurship see Stewart, Larry, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Patronage in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar

29 For a discussion of these issues see Biagioli, Mario, ‘From ciphers to confidentiality: secrecy, openness and priority in science’, BJHS (2012) 45, pp. 213–233, esp. 215–217, 222–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 For the third instance see British Library Sloane MS 4026 f. 240, draft council minute, of uncertain date but assignable to Queen Anne's reign by a reference to ‘her present Majesty’; RS CMO/2, 29 January 1712/1713; RS JBO/11, 22 January 1712/1713.

31 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 116.

32 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, pp. 391, 397.

33 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 252, 3 June 1663.

34 RS DM/5/52 (‘Deinque Beneficia, immunitates, libertates, & privilegia quaecunque alia Societiti cuipiam aut Collegio in utralibet Academia, sive Oxoniensi, sive Cantabrigiensi, antehac concessa (excepto privilegio, gradus Academicas in ulla facultate conferendi.) Sodalitio huic concedimus’).

35 Rumour that the society intended to award degrees, and the universities’ opposition to this, is recorded in Anthony à Wood's notes to his diary for December 1660. This does not establish the date of the rumour, since the notes were added after the fact, but the care with which the draft charters specify the exemption of this power strongly indicates that it was intended to placate Oxford and Cambridge and to forestall active opposition to the charter. Wood, Anthony à, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself, 5 vols., Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1891, vol. 1, p. 354Google Scholar.

36 Cowley, Abraham, A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, London: J.M. for Henry Herringman, 1661CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evelyn to Robert Boyle, 3 September 1659, in Hunter, Michael, Clericuzio, Antonio and Principe, Lawrence M. (eds.), The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 6 vols., London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001, vol. 1, pp. 365–369 (and 497–498Google Scholar for the differences from the copy retained in Evelyn's letter-book).

37 Ent draft charter, DM/5/52 (‘volumus praeterea & ordinamus, ut ex praedicto Numero, Septemdecem-viri hi, scilicet … una cum Praeside, Thesaurario, Regestario, Secretario, sive septem, pluresve eorum’). It is not clear from this language whether the council is to consist of seventeen including the named officers or seventeen plus them. The ambiguity, if such it was, was clarified by the 1662 text, which stipulates the number of the council at twenty-one including the president. Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 89.

38 Ent draft charter, DM/5/52 (‘Et si qui Nobiles, Collegij hujus Socij, tempore conventus hujus Concilis adfuerint, ijsdem conceditur, & assidere, & suffragia ferre’).

39 See Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 4.

40 I am defining ‘aristocratic’ as ‘of the rank of baron or above’, in conformity with the early proposal to waive the requirement of election for anyone of that standing found in Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 5.

41 A watered-down declaration of loyalty and fidelity to the monarchy and to Charles II in particular was included in the list of fitting qualifications for members in the 1662 charter text, but not stringently applied, since fellows with strong ties to the protectorate regime were involved with the society from the outset. Translation of first charter (1662), The Record of the Royal Society, op. cit. (2), p. 228.

42 Translation of third charter (1669), The Record of the Royal Society, op. cit. (2), p. 284. They were included at the requirement of the Lord Privy Seal, at that time Sir John Robartes, also a fellow of the society (albeit inactive). Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 2, p. 352, 1 March 1668/1669.

43 Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, London: Allen Lane, 2005, pp. 43–66Google Scholar; Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 62–95Google Scholar.

44 The strategy of drafting in royalist leadership when the corporation's privileges were under threat was adopted by several of London's livery companies threatened with the revocation of their charters at the height of the exclusion crisis – including the Clothworkers, who imported two government officials as an explicit demonstration of loyalty. They were Joseph Williamson and Samuel Pepys – past and present presidents of the Royal Society as well as Secretary of State (1674–1679) and Secretary of the Admiralty (1674–1679, 1684–1689). See Knights, Mark, ‘A city revolution: the remodelling of the London livery companies in the 1680s’, English Historical Review (1997) 112, pp. 1141–1178, 1149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Sprat, op. cit. (17), pp. 53–57; Wallis, John, A Defence of the Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions, London: T.S. for Thomas Moore, 1678, pp. 7–9Google Scholar.

46 Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The origins of the Royal Society reconsidered’, in Pelling, Margaret and Mandelbrote, Scott (eds.), The Practice of Reform in Health, Science, and Medicine: Essays in Honour of Charles Webster, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 167–184, 168–171, 173–174Google Scholar. For an argument in favour of Wallis's narrative see Rampelt, Jason, ‘The last word: John Wallis on the origins of the Royal Society’, History of Science (2008) 46, pp. 177–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, pp. 352–353; Robinson, H.W. and Adams, W. (eds.), The Diary of Robert Hooke 1672–1680, London: Taylor & Francis, 1935, pp. 315, 318–322Google Scholar; Scott, J.F. and Sir Hartley, Harold, ‘William, Viscount Brouncker, P.R.S. (1620–1684)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1960) 15, pp. 147–157Google Scholar; Feingold, op. cit. (46), pp. 178–179.

48 For the classic discussion of the roles of these milieus in pre-Restoration science see Webster, Charles, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660, London: Duckworth, 1970, pp. 54–55Google Scholar. Webster was part of a wider effort to locate the intellectual origins of natural-philosophical endeavour in the political and religious ferment of London during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. See Hill, Christopher, ‘The intellectual origins of the Royal Society: London or Oxford’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society (1968) 23, pp. 144–156Google Scholar; and Hall, A.R. and Hall, M.B., ‘The intellectual origins of the Royal Society: London and Oxford’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society (1968) 23, pp. 157–168Google Scholar. For an account of the Harveian associations of the group Wallis described see Frank, Robert G., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, esp. pp. 23–25Google Scholar. For the proposition that the distinctive robustness of ‘Oxford science’ as a category arises from the association of men schooled in mathematical and chemical natural philosophy with anatomists and physiologists responding to Harveian challenges and influences see passim, but in particular Chapter 3, pp. 43–45.

49 Wren, Christopher, ‘Preamble to a draft Charter of the Royal Society’, in Wren, Christopher Jr, Parentalia; Or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, London: for T. Osborn and R. Dodsley, 1750, pp. 196–197Google Scholar.

50 Hunter, op. cit. (6), pp. 145–147; Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The mathematical sciences and the new philosophy’, in Tyacke, Nicholas (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 360–448, 391–392, 397Google Scholar.

51 Sprat, op. cit. (17), pp. 53–54

52 Sprat, op. cit. (17), p. 76.

53 Sprat, op. cit. (17), pp. 86–87. Sprat's critique of the Dutch failure to realize the promise of their mercantile strength and philosophical liberality made a notable exception for The Hague, a particular focal point for English exiles during the Interregnum. See Jardine, Lisa, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, London: Harper Perennial, 2008, pp. 81–82, 175Google Scholar.

54 On the depth and intricacy of the connection between Dutch medicine, botany and commercial culture see Cook, Harold, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more recently, but in a similar vein, Margocsy, Daniel, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 For a discussion of this project, and of Anglo-Dutch political and cultural relations in the mid-seventeenth century, see Pincus, Steven, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1688, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 15–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Helmers, Helmer J., The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014Google Scholar.

56 Sprat, op. cit. (17), p. 67; Stogdill, Nathaniel, ‘“Out of books and out of themselves”: invigorating impartiality in early modern England’, in Traninger, Anita and Murphy, Katherine (eds.), The Emergence of Impartiality: Towards a Prehistory of Objectivity, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 189–222Google Scholar; and the classic study of gentlemanly disinterest and impartiality in the construction of knowledge, Shapin's, Steven A Social History of Truth: Science and Civility in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Sprat, op. cit. (17), pp. 391–392, 396.

58 Ochs, Kathleen H., ‘The Royal Society of London's history of trades programme: an early episode in applied science’, Notes and Records (1985) 39, pp. 129–158Google Scholar.

59 Sprat, op. cit. (17), pp. 260–306. See Houghton, Walter E., ‘The history of trades: its relation to seventeenth-century thought, as seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1941) 2, pp. 33–60, 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 As suggested by Hunter, op. cit. (6), p. 49. A careful examination of the minutes demonstrates that it was only from August 1661 that letters sent to the society and to individual fellows began to be read in meetings, initially mainly through Sir Robert Moray and Sir Kenelme Digby; and only from the summer of 1662, through Oldenburg in particular, that they became a significant part of the society's day-to-day activity.

61 See Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 279–336; Jardine, Lisa, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, London: HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 235–240Google Scholar.

62 Though Hooke's Gresham and Cutlerian lectures were not always well attended they were by definition open to the public. Hooke seems to have made a point of recording poor attendances; see, for example, Robinson and Adams, op. cit. (47), pp. 289, 294, 297–298; also Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), p. 333.

63 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 3, p. 100, 6 November 1673.

64 Biagioli, Mario, ‘From book censorship to academic peer review’, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures (2002) 12, pp. 11–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 See Peacey, Jason, ‘“Printers to the university” 1584–1658’, in Gadd, Ian (ed.), The History of Oxford University Press, vol. 1: Beginnings to 1780, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 51–77, 74–77Google Scholar. It is possible that the society modelled its licensing privilege on Oxford's, which leaves open the possibility that it too might have set up as a printer in its own right.

66 These shares seem to have changed hands more than once; instead of being directly transferred from Allestry's heirs to Martyn they were assigned by John Dunmore to Sir Thomas Davies, and then Davies to Martyn, seemingly on the same day (24 August 1671). These ‘assignements’ were only actually entered in the register in December 1672. This was not a transfer of all Allestry's interests in Royal Society publishing – Martyn acquired only Sylva, Micrographia, and Sprat's History (this last not actually published under the society's imprimatur). A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers: From 1640–1708 A.D., London: privately printed, 1913, 3 vols., vol. 3, pp. 449, 451–452Google Scholar.

67 See Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 492–497CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the society's efforts to subordinate the company's trade practices to its own norms of genteel civility.

68 For the Oxford group's meeting, and the conviction that this could not legally constitute the Royal Society, see Robert Boyle to Henry Oldenburg, 30 September 1665, Hall, A.R. and Hall, M.B. (eds.), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 vols., Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press and Taylor and Francis, 1965–1986, vol. 2, pp. 535–537Google Scholar.

69 Moray to Oldenburg, 23 July 1665, Hall and Hall, op. cit. (68), vol. 2, pp. 446–447.

70 These were strikingly favourable; Oldenburg was paid outright for copy at the rate of three pounds per sheet. See Johns, Adrian, ‘Miscellaneous methods: authors, societies and journals in early modern England’, BJHS (2000) 33, pp. 159–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 This episode has been examined, but only cursorily, by Rivington, C.A., ‘Early printers to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1984) 39, pp. 1–27, 5Google Scholar.

72 Moray to Oldenburg, 10 October 1665, Hall and Hall, op. cit. (68), vol. 2, pp. 559–562

73 See Hunter, op. cit. (6), p. 93.

74 One of the society's more curious revenue-raising moves was an enquiry about the possibility of, in effect, charging duty on all philosophical books sold in England, a proposal made a few weeks after it had sworn Martyn and Allestry as its first printers. Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 377.

75 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 4, p. 65; Merrett, Christopher, A Short Reply to the Postscript &c of H.S., London, 1670Google Scholar.

76 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 2, p. 206.

77 See, in particular, Cook, Harold, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986Google Scholar.

78 See RS DM/5/12 for precisely this complaint. Attributed to Hooke by Michael Hunter and Paul Wood, ‘Towards Solomon's House: rival strategies for reforming the early Royal Society’, in Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 185–244, 244. See also James Jurin's complaint that ‘many Gentlemen of ye Society object against printing much of Physick or Chirurgery, as not being so properly ye business of ye Royal Society’. Jurin to John Huxham, 3 August 1727, in Rusnock, Andrea (ed.), The Correspondence of James Jurin, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, pp. 364–365Google Scholar.

79 RS DM/5/37; Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 377. The Royal Alum Works, established by Elizabeth I and renewed by James I, had been an expensive disaster for the crown. See Price, William Hyde, The English Patents of Monopoly, 3 vols., Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906–1908, vol. 1, pp. 82–101Google Scholar.

80 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 1, p. 391, for the first proposal that the society endeavour to acquire from the king the land and buildings of Chelsea College; for the society's plans for a new London building in the late 1660s see Hunter, Establishing the New Science, op. cit. (7), pp. 156–176; and on the eventual acquisition and remodelling of Crane Court, the society's home from 1710 to 1780, see Bennett, Jim, ‘Wren's last building?’, Notes & Records (1972) 27, pp. 102–118Google Scholar; and Jennifer Thomas, ‘A “philosophical storehouse”: the life and afterlife of the Royal Society's repository’, unpublished PhD dissertation, London, 2009, pp. 26–28.

81 For a recent discussion of the cultural position of projects and projectors see Yamamoto, Koji, Taming Capitalism before Its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and Projecting in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, esp. pp. 180–184CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the Royal Society's involvement in this milieu.

82 Birch, op. cit. (4), vol. 2, p. 385, 24 June 1669.