THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND ITS HOMES*

Abstract

THE interest of the Crown in the Royal Society, and perhaps a recognition of a duty to provide accommodation for it, were signified by King Charles II's grant of Chelsea College and its estates, as set forth in our third Charter of 1669. The property proved, alas, for various reasons, to be much more a burden than an asset, and Christopher Wren, in 1682, with the Council's approval and recorded gratitude, sold it back to the King for £1,300. Mean while, an opportunity for the Society to acquire a house of its own, built to the designs of Hooke and Wren, on a piece of land granted by Henry Howard from the grounds of Arundel House, had not become effective. The Society, therefore, remained for fifty years from its foundation a tenant of rooms in Gresham College, until in 1710, when Isaac Newton was president, it acquired the house in Crane Court, off Fleet Street, which was its home for another sixty-eight years. In 1778, thanks to the personal interest in our affairs of King George III, the friend of our great president of those days, Sir Joseph Banks, the Society was granted quarters in Somerset House. Therewith the obligation of the State to provide us with housing was for the first time definitely accepted, “in generous recognition by the Sovereign of the services which science had rendered to the state”, as Banks stated in his address of 1780. The records show that the accommodation in Somerset House was regarded from the first as inadequate, even though our requirements had been reduced by the transfer of our “Repository of Rarities” to the British Museum. The rooms, on the other hand, can be seen from prints of the period to have had a pleasant dignity, and the Society remained in them for nearly eighty years.