The Stuart dynasty ended with the death of Queen Anne in the summer of 1714, and Newton made renewed interest with the court of the first Hanoverian monarch. He was promoted to Master of the Mint on Boxing Day 1699, and in 1703 he was made President of the Royal Society, being knighted for his services to the state two years later.Īs he lived on into his sixties and seventies, the world around him changed.

With his appointment at the Mint, and the fame he garnered as a result of his work in the exact sciences, he shed the identity of a retired Cambridge don, and became an eminent metropolitan public figure. He would never have enjoyed the senior political and administrative positions he was awarded in the early eighteenth century and indeed, would never have written the Principia or Opticks. If he had published his ideas in the late seventeenth century, he would have had to leave the university, and would almost certainly have retired to what he would have seen as the freedom of his manor in Lincolnshire. His polished writings on theology were not the musings of a dilettante but were the products of a committed, brilliant and courageous analyst.

He came to believe that it was a form of idolatry to give to any other being the worship that was properly due to God, and that Jesus was divine but was not God.

He concluded that the orthodox notion of the Trinity was a fiction that was invented in the early fourth century and subsequently promoted by servants of the devil. At some point in the 1670s Newton came to the view that a simple and authentic form of Christianity had been perverted by corrupters in the centuries following the life of Jesus Christ, producing the brand of religion that was now accepted as orthodox by the Roman Catholic Church and to some extent, by the Church of England. This programme of study was predominant and unrelenting, being occasionally interrupted by his work in alchemy, mathematics and natural philosophy. Īt some point early in his career at Trinity College, Newton undertook an extraordinary programme of creative theological research, whose expansiveness, originality and radicalism was matched by only a handful of contemporaries. In 1669 Barrow would pave the way for Newton to follow him as Lucasian professor, on the grounds that he himself had a more serious calling as a divine. At the same time, Newton came to know Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor and later master of the college. Although the barest facts of their relationship are known, Newton was close to Babington in his early years at the college and the latter almost certainly acted as a patron during this period. In 1661, her best friend’s brother, Humphrey Babington, recently reinstituted as a fellow at Trinity, was made rector of Boothby Pagnell, which was just over six miles away. His mother spent the vast majority of her time at Smith’s rectory between 16, producing the three half-siblings who would be Newton’s closest relatives after she died in 1679. William Aiscough, his maternal uncle and a Trinity College graduate, was rector of Burton Coggles, a village 5 miles east of Newton’s home, Woolsthorpe Manor. His own father died a few months before he was born, and when he was three his mother married Barnabas Smith, the ageing rector of the neighbouring village of North Witham. Nevertheless, although he had close contact with puritan groups, the senior and most influential male figures in his life were ordained members of the Church of England. His local church of Colsterworth had a puritan minister intruded by the parliamentarian authorities in the late 1640s, and in the second half of the 1650s he lodged with William Clarke, one of the most powerful parliamentarian figures in Grantham. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was born soon after the English civil wars had begun, and in the first two decades of his life he was exposed to deeply conflicting religious traditions.

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