Take Nobody's Word

In 1662, the Royal Society of London adopted a motto that promised a revolution: Nullius in verba—or, on the word of no one. It was a bold renunciation of authority in favor of evidence, yet behind this polished veneer of the Enlightenment lay a messier reality marked by class-coded science and imperial gatekeeping. Even as Society president Sir Isaac Newton modeled dispassionate inquiry, the institution came to operate as a passionate apparatus for elite privilege and British expansion. Fellowship in the Society opened channels into an international fraternity of gentlemen-scientists and into the inner sanctums of British imperial power. As crisis ripened between Britain and its North American colonies, America’s first celebrity leaned on this scientific brotherhood to achieve political reform, while another American patriot rejected it as collusion with the imperial fist. 

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Transcript

Sm 3:5 Take Nobody’s Word

Intro … This month, we peel back the powdered wigs of the Royal Society to expose the entanglements of science, the British Empire, and two Americans divided over whether to court power or confront it.

In the mid-17th century, informal gatherings of Oxford- and London-based intellectuals–called the Invisible College–crystallized into an institution chartered in 1662 as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. For the first quarter of the 18th century, the Royal Society was steered by a man who defined the era, a seminal figure of the Scientific Revolution and European Enlightenment, Isaac Newton. Knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, Sir Isaac helped the Society transition away from flirtation with reports of monsters and marvels (like two-headed calves) into a learned institution focused on experimental science. The Society’s motto, Nullius in verba, translated to mean Take nobody’s word for it, was a renunciation of the weight of authority in scientific inquiry and a commitment to knowledge derived from direct observation and demonstration. 

By the mid-18th century, the Royal Society was a global arbiter of intellectual legitimacy. And yet the society was not a value-free space for scientific inquiry–it was a space where a borderless Republic of learned men overlapped with ruling hierarchies of the British empire and its expansionist aims. Under the influence of the Hardwicke Circle—a Whig-aligned social and intellectual alliance that dominated the Society’s leadership in the 1750s and 60s and with tendrils of influence also in the Society of Antiquaries and the British museum—scientific projects were harnessed to imperial power. 

The so‑called Longitude Problem: the challenge of figuring out a ship’s east-west position at sea, is one of the clearest examples of the entanglement of science with imperial power. I n 1714 Parliament established the Longitude prize, up to £20,000 pounds sterling to anyone who could find a practical way to determine longitude at sea. Fellows of the Royal Society sat on the Board of Longitude, acting as a supreme court for proposed solutions to the problem. But that court was far from impartial. Under the guidance of Society fellow and Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, the Board resisted artisan John Harrison’s marine chronometer, a decisive practical solution to the Longitude problem, which ultimately gave Britain a technology that meant faster, safer trade for merchant shipping and a strategic edge to the Royal Navy. This wasn’t a mere technical dispute about the efficacy of Maskelyne’s preferred lunar distance method versus Harrison’s marine clocks; it was also reflective of a class war between the metropolitan academic establishment and a self-taught artisan. Harrison wouldn't receive full recognition until 1773, and only after Parliament intervened to end decades of institutional stalling. The Harrison-Maskelyne affair illustrates how imperial priorities, social standing, and institutional authority shaped scientific outcomes. In short, scientific innovation was both supported and limited by the learned institutions so deeply entangled with imperial policy. 

Though self-taught, American Benjamin Franklin adopted the Newtonian experimental method: observation, hypothesis, and rigorous replication. Franklin’s documentation of electrical experiments he conducted during the 1740s and 50s earned him the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1753, which rewarded science that clarified fundamental phenomena and suggested immediate applications. John Harrison had received the Copley in 1749 for his practical advances on solving the Longitude problem. But unlike Harrison, who was never made a Fellow, Franklin was elected Fellow on May 29, 1756, entering the society at the high tide of the Hardwicke circle and its staunch Whiggism, and just prior to the imperial crisis that fired a Revolution in Britain’s North American colonies. Franklin understood that Fellowship in the Society offered access not just to a global scientific community but to the upper registers of British political hierarchies. And he used that access strategically. 

Franklin actively sought to expand the American footprint in London’s most exclusive rooms by scouting American talent abroad. Between 1759 and 1774 Franklin joined in recommending at least 37 people for election as fellows in the Royal Society. In the case of the Virginian Arthur Lee of Stratford, Franklin was the lead nominator and Lee’s nomination papers survive in Franklin’s own hand. The Virginian had graduated from Eton and completed a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, where he was awarded the first annual gold medal for promoting the study of botany by His Majesty’s Botanist, Dr. John Hope. Arthur’s university thesis, which detailed his experimental trials of the anti-malarial Cinchona bark (commonly known as quinine), was read aloud before the Society on May 1, 1766 and subsequently published in the Society’s official journal, Philosophical Transactions (vol. 56). Lee was elected Fellow that same year. Franklin signed the required bond and paid the Admission fee for Arthur in December 1767. Three years later Lee would find himself deputizing Franklin as colony agent (a kind of glorified lobbyist) for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in London, and from 1776 to 1778 the two men served together on the diplomatic commission seeking a commercial and political alliance with France in the thick of the Revolution.   

Franklin and Lee could not have been more differently made. 36 years Lee’s senior, Franklin was the son of a soap and candlemaker, a self-taught polymath who conquered London by his undeniable practical genius; Lee was the lavishly schooled youngest son of an elite Virginia family, a “restless genius” (according to Franklin) who infiltrated London as an informant and propagandist at the height of the imperial crisis. Franklin traded on his scientific reputation to gain access to the British establishment, recognizing that a shared bottle of madeira at the Crown and Anchor Tavern under the guise of a ‘simple American’ (a persona he cultivated), and later with other ‘Honest Whigs’ at St. Paul’s or the London Coffee-house, was a deft tool of intelligence gathering and coalition building. Lee, who was tutored in metropolitan politics by political provocateur and confrontationalist John Wilkes and his allies, took a decidedly more adversarial approach to political change, and generally swapped the easy collegiality of gentleman scientists for the rude arena of London politics. 

Franklin the genial reformer and Lee the combative radical joined the Society when it was still shaped by the politics of the Hardwicke Circle, which, though it was in decline after 1766, aligned to a Whig establishment that valued parliamentary authority, legal order, and social stability. Those values made them more sympathetic to colonial Loyalists as the imperial crisis ripened. Franklin’s campaign of scientific ‘soft power’ hit a wall on January 29, 1774.

On that day, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn verbally abused Franklin before the Privy Council in the Palace of Whitehall. Wedderburn cast Franklin as a doublefaced traitor whose writings and influence had helped stir up colonial unrest. The Cockpit at Whitehall was where the borderless 'Republic of Letters' stumbled. For an hour, the British establishment didn't see a Fellow of the Royal Society or a Copley Medalist; they saw a 'provincial' who had overstepped his bounds in leaking damaging private correspondence that exposed colonial administrators in an embarrassing discussion about curtailing American rights. As Franklin silently endured Wedderburn’s abuse in the Cockpit, Arthur Lee, who stood witness that day, must surely have felt vindicated in his confrontational approach. 

Even as Franklin let his silence do the talking, Arthur Lee launched a furious counter-offensive in the papers. Pulsating with high octane outrage, Arthur wrote: “To see a Minister of the Crown, the servant of the public, and the representative of the King, behaving with the petulance of a schoolboy and the malignancy of a demon; to hear him venting his own private resentment and the low spleen of his masters against a man whose character is as much above his reach as his virtues are above his imitation—this was a spectacle for gods and men! … To what a state of degradation is the British Government reduced, when its highest officers are permitted to turn the seat of justice into a theatre for the display of their own passions! When a man of Dr. Franklin’s years, of his acknowledged abilities, and of his long services to this country as well as his own, is to be treated with a scurrilous abuse that would disgrace a porter in a cellar” (Public Advertiser, February 12, 1774). Franklin’s ‘soft power’ approach had collapsed in London, but it would be vindicated in France, where he donned a fur cap, and expertly performed his ‘simple American’ or frontier sage routine to the delight of a French society that had no patience with strident radicals like Lee.

Between the decay of the Hardwicke Circle and the rise of Sir Joseph Banks in 1778, the Royal Society was led briefly by a President unwilling to bend science to royal politics: Sir John Pringle. A confidante of Franklin, Sir John was embroiled in a controversy that turned a technical dispute into a loyalty test. During the war, George III—urged on by Benjamin Wilson and other critics of Franklin—replaced Franklin’s pointed lightning rods with blunt conductors on his royal palaces and the government gunpowder magazines at Purfleet. And he pressured the Society to endorse the change from pointy rebel rods to blunt loyalist conductors. Ironically, modern physics suggests that Franklin’s pointed rods weren’t always the better choice. Even so, while the Society convened committees to stall and avoid taking sides, Sir John declined to reverse the Society’s prior findings in favor of pointed rods. Sir John reportedly reminded the King that the laws of nature were not his to command, and absorbed the brunt of the King’s displeasure, a major factor in his 1778 resignation. This cleared the way for George III’s particular friend and advisor, Sir Joseph Banks, and signaled the end of tolerance in the Society for American sympathizers.  

Sir Joseph Banks was elected a fellow in the same year as another Etonian and botanist, Dr. Arthur Lee, and beginning in 1778 Banks dominated the Royal Society for the next four decades. Banks' close control of the Society and his political alliances and intimacy with George III ensured that the Society was a devoutly loyal and industrious arm of the British empire. Under Banks, the Society became more outward‑looking, investing heavily in voyages of collection and exploration. Banks believed that botanical and geological mastery of new lands was the path to the political and economic mastery of the empire. A case in point, Banks orchestrated the transplanting of breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean to provide a cheap food source for enslaved people on British plantations. The paradox of the Enlightenment was nowhere more visible than in the Royal Society, where science helped to illuminate the world even as it helped an empire to tighten its grip. 

Only a year after Banks took control, when the outcome of the war for independence was still unknown, Franklin invoked the higher loyalty of scientific brotherhood. He issued a circular letter to all American ship captains, instructing them to grant safe passage through the war zones to British Captain James Cook—another Copley medalist and Society fellow whose work, Franklin argued, marked him as a “Friend to Mankind” and placed him above the quarrels of nations. The Royal Society later sent Franklin a commemorative gold medal for this act, even though he was, by then, officially an enemy of the Crown.

By contrast, Arthur Lee received a collections letter after the war from Banks himself. Lee was in New York, serving on the Board of Treasury under a new national government, when he received a letter from Sir Joseph requesting payment of 11 years back dues in the amount of 28 pounds 12 shillings. In December 1787, Arthur returned this reply (now in the Stratford archives) to Sir Joseph: “Sir … I should not have failed discharging annually my contribution, as a domestic member, during those years, had I conceived myself competent to sustain that character. But I thought & still think, that the declaration of independence & the revolution consequent upon it, extinguished in me the character of a British subject, with all its benefits & burthens. It appeared to me that without being a subject, I could not continue a domestic member of your illustrious Society. For that reason, & not from wanting a full sense of the honor of that character, I considered and consider myself, as no longer a fellow of the Royal Society … Your most obedient, humble servant, Arthur Lee.” The Society accepted Arthur Lee’s resignation as a fellow in January of 1788, but Banks wasn’t inclined to waive the back dues. Arthur had a point: there was a contradiction between being a patriot of a free and independent United States, an avowed rebel, and being a “domestic” dues-paying member of a British institution. Sir Joseph also had a point: dues were owed for all the years that one held the lifetime status of fellow and a new political allegiance didn’t automatically or retroactively change one’s status. 

Arthur Lee claimed to be a citizen of a new world, but Sir Joseph Banks treated him as a delinquent member of the old one. In the end, the dispute was less about money than it was about the messy, bureaucratic separation between a mother country and its wayward daughter. There were thousands of such relationships now befogged by the new political status of Britain and the United States, and the technicalities of how these old debts were discharged, ignored, and otherwise overcome is a story for another day.  

Outro

Today, the Royal Society is an “independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity.” 

For an alternate view of Banks, see this collection of essays. 

Cover art: Coat of Arms of the Royal Society available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_arms_of_the_Royal_Society.svg

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay

Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"

AI voices courtesy of easy-peasy.ai or Play.ht (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2025