My involvement in the matter which this Cola tries to hide began near two years before he arrived on these shores, when I traveled to London to attend a meeting of like-minded natural philosophers at Gresham College. This organization, which later became our Royal Society, is not now what it was, despite the presence of luminaries like Mr. Newton. Then it was a ferment of knowledge, and only someone who attended could know what a buzz of excitement and endeavor attended those early meetings. That spirit has gone now, and I fear it will never return. Who now can match that band—Wren, Hooke, Boyle, Ward, Wilkins, Petty, Goddard and so many more names which will live forever? Now its members are like a bunch of ants, forever collecting thek tawdry rocks and bugs, always accumulating, never thinking, and turning away from God. No wonder they come to be despised.
But then all was joyful optimism; the king was back on his throne, the country was peaceful once more, and the whole world of experimental philosophy was there to be explored. We felt, I think, like Cabot’s crew when they first caught sight of the New World, and the excitement of anticipation was intoxicating. The meeting itself was very fine, as befitted the occasion; the king himself attended, and graciously presented a mace to signify his royal condescension in supporting our endeavors, and many of his most powerful ministers came too—some of whom were subsequently elected to our ranks when the Royal Society was officially formed, although, it must be said, they contributed little but luster.
Afterward, once His Majesty had made a pretty speech and we were all given the opportunity of bowing personally to him, and Mr. Hooke had demonstrated one of his more ingenious (and showy) machines to entrap the royal imagination, I was approached by a man of middling stature, with quick, dark eyes and a supercilious manner. He wore an oblong black patch over the bridge of his nose, which covered (so they say) a sword wound received when he was fighting for the late king. Personally I am not so sure; no one ever saw this famed injury, and that patch drew attention to his loyalty more than it covered a wound. Then he was known as Henry Bennet, although the world later knew him as the Earl of Arlington and he had just returned from the embassy of Madrid (though this was not yet common knowledge). I had heard vague reports that he was charging himself with maintaining the stability of the kingdom, and I was swiftly to receive full confirmation that this was, indeed, the case. In brief, he asked me to attend on him the following morning at his house on the Strand, as he wished to make my acquaintance.
The next day, accordingly, I presented myself, half expecting to be hurled into the midst of a formal levee, surrounded by petitioners and claimants all wanting the attention of a man close to the court. There were indeed a few people there, but not many and they were ignored. I concluded from this that Mr. Bennet’s star had not yet risen too far or, for reasons of his own, he was keeping his connections, and even his presence in London, fairly quiet.
I cannot say that he was pleasant; indeed, he had a formality of manner which verged on the grotesque, so keen was he to observe all the niceties of protocol, and maintain rankings in a clear form. It came, I believe, from spending too long in Spain, which is notoriously prone to such excesses. He took the trouble to explain to me that he had provided a chair with a padded seat, as befitted my dignity as a doctor of the university; others, it seemed, had to make do with a hard seat or remain standing, depending on their station. It would have been unwise of me to hint that I considered such punctiliousness absurd—I did not know what he wanted and the government was about to send a visitation to the university to eject members inserted by the Commonwealth. As I had been so inserted, Mr. Bennet was not a man to annoy. I wanted to keep my position.
“How do you consider the state of His Majesty’s kingdom?” he said abruptly, not being a man to waste too much time putting his guests at ease or winning their confidence. It is a trick often played by men in power, I find.
I replied that all His Majesty’s subjects were naturally delighted at his safe return to his rightful throne. Bennet snorted.
“So how do you account for the fact that we have just had to hang another half dozen fanatics for plotting against the government?”
“ ‘This is an evil generation,’ “ I said. (Luke 11:29.)
He tossed a sheaf of papers over to me. “What do you think of those?”
I looked at them carefully, then sniffed dismissively.”Letters in cipher,” ï said.
“Can you read them?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“Could you read them? Tease out their meanings?”
“Unless there is some particular difficulty, yes. I have had some considerable experience in such matters.”
“I know that. For Mr. Thurloe, was it not?”
“I provided no information which might have injured the king’s party, even though it was in my power to do it considerable harm.”
“Are you now prepared to do it any good?”
“Of course. I am His Majesty’s loyal servant. I trust you remember that I took great risks with my fortune in protesting against the murder of the late king.”
“You satisfied your conscience in the matter, but not to the point of leaving office, or turning down preferment when it was offered, I recall,” he replied coldly, and in a manner which gave me little optimism about winning his favor. “No matter. You will be pleased at the opportunity of demonstrating how great your loyalties are. Bring me those letters deciphered tomorrow morning.”
And so I was dismissed, not knowing whether to bless my luck or curse my misfortune. I went back to the inn where I habitually stayed in London—this was before I acquired my house in Bow Street on the death of my wife’s father—and settled down to work. It took all day, and most of the night, to get the letters done. The art of decipherment is a complicated one, and was getting more so. Frequently it is simply a matter of figuring out how one letter or group of letters was replaced by another—you work out by substitution that (for example) “a” stands for “the,” 4 stands for king, d=l, f=d, h=on, g=i, v=s, c=n; and it is simple enough to decide that a4gvgcdhfh means that the king is in London. You will note that while the method (much favored by the Royalists in the war, as they were, I’m afraid to say, rather straightforward souls) of substituting one letter for another is simple, the method of making a letter occasionally substitute for a letter, and occasionally for a syllable or a word, is more difficult. Nonetheless, it still presents few problems. What is more difficult is when the value attached to the letters constantly changes—a method first proposed in England by Lord Bacon but, I understand, in fact invented by a Florentine over a hundred years ago and now claimed by the French, an insolent nation which cannot abide that anything should not come from their land. They steal that which is not theirs; I suffered myself when a wretched little clerk called Fermat dared to say my work on indivisibles was his own.
I will try to explain. The essence of this method is that both sender and recipient must have the same text. The message begins with a group of numbers which reads (say) 124, 5—meaning that the key begins on page 124, word five, of this text. Let us suppose that this page begins—“So Hatach went forth to Mordecai unto the street of the city, which was before the king’s gate.” (Esther 4:6, a puzzling text on which I have given an elucidatory sermon, shortly to be published.) The fifth word, “to,” is your starting point, and you substitute “t” for “a,” thus getting an alphabet: