Many thanks to the amazing Grace Barrett of Tours by Grace for leading us through Westminster Abbey!

I’m sure many people have a favorite monument/memorial at Westminster Abbey. There are so many that made my own jaw drop. But I think you’d be hard pressed to not find yourself in a bit of awe when gazing up at the monument to British mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author Sir Isaac Newton.

If you asked the average person on the street, they might say “Oh, he’s the guy who discovered gravity.”

However, there was clearly much more to the man than that. His work Principia Mathematica (1687) laid the framework for the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

More Than Gravity

Born on Christmas Day in 1642 in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton’s father (a farmer) was also named Isaac Newton. He died three months before his son entered the world. His mother, Hannah Ayscough, remarried when little Isaac was three and she went to live with her new husband, the Rev. Barnabas Smith. Isaac was left in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe). Despite his mother’s wish that he become a farmer, Isaac was destined for a different path in life.

Newton attended the King’s School in Grantham before enrolling at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661. While there, he became interested in the work of René Descartes. When the Great Plague closed Cambridge in 1665, Newton went home and began working out his theories on calculus, light, and color. His farm was the setting for the supposed falling apple that inspired his work on gravity.

I read that while the part where he was actually hit on the head by it isn’t true, the part about watching an apple falling from a tree inspired his thoughts on gravity was based in real events.

In 1666, Newton experimented with light, and found that different colors had different refractions. He began lecturing on this topic in 1670.

Newton published his most famous book, Principia Mathematics, in 1687, while he was a mathematics professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the Principia, Newton explained three basic laws that govern the way objects move. Newton also discovered diffraction, which led him to enter the field of physics.

He also established a new field in mathematics known as calculus, although the German Gottfried Leibniz was working on these ideas at the same time. His work has greatly contributed in the areas of science and mathematics making him one of the most influential scientists in human history and one of the greatest mathematician of all time.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672, Newton served as its president from 1705 to 1727. He became Master of the Mint in 1699 and was knighted in April 1705.

A lifelong bachelor, Newton died at Kensington on March 20, 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey on March 28. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber and his coffin was followed to its grave by most of the Fellows of the Royal Society. The Lord Chancellor, the Dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh and the Earls of Pembroke, Sussex, and Macclesfield were pall bearers. He was the first scientist to be so honored at the Abbey.

Newton’s Monument

Newton’s monument stands in the nave against the choir screen, to the north of the entrance to the choir. In the photo below, which Chris took, Newton’s monument is to the left. The one on the right is for James Stanhope (who died in 1721), a politician, soldier, and diplomat. I was so fixated on Newton’s monument that I didn’t even take any picture of poor Stanhope’s equally stunning one.

Both monuments were executed by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770) to the designs of the architect William Kent (1685-1748). Newton’s was unveiled in 1731 while Stanhope’s was erected in 1733.

Poet Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph for Newton but this was not allowed to be put on the monument in the Abbey. “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light”.

I think Westminster Abbey’s web page can describe what’s going on in terms of symbols better than I can:

The monument is of white and grey marble. Its base bears a Latin inscription and supports a sarcophagus with large scroll feet and a relief panel. The relief depicts boys using instruments related to Newton’s mathematical and optical work. One has a telescope, one is looking through a prism and another is balancing the Sun and planets on a steel yard. Others depict Newton’s activities as Master of the Mint (producing coin of the realm) – the figures carry pots of coins and an ingot (bar) of metal is being put into a furnace.

Above the sarcophagus is a reclining figure of Newton, in classical costume, his right elbow resting on several books representing his great works. They are labelled (on the fore-edges) ‘Divinity’, ‘Chronology’, ‘Opticks’ [1704] and ‘Philo. Prin. Math’ [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1686-7)]. With his left hand he points to a scroll with a mathematical design shown on it (the ‘converging series’), held by two standing winged boys.

The painting on this scroll had been erased or cleaned off in the early 19th century and was re-painted in 1977 from details in Newton’s manuscripts. The background is a pyramid on which is a celestial globe with the signs of the Zodiac, of the constellations, and with the path of the comet of 1680. On top of the globe sits a figure of Urania (the muse of Astronomy) leaning upon a book. On either end of the base is his coat of arms, two shinbones in saltire, within a decorative cartouche.

In Newton’s later years, his niece Catherine Barton Conduitt and her husband, John, lived with him. It was John Conduitt who commissioned the Newton monument. He drew a sketch of what he had in mind and gave it to Kent to design.The monument originally stood out against the flat front of the choir screen, but was enclosed within the present decorative arch when Edward Blore re-modeled the screen in 1834.

I haven’t read (or seen the movie) Dan Brown’s best-selling book “The DaVinci Code” but apparently Newton’s monument plays an important role in the plot and the word “apple” turns out to be part of it.

Newton also has a stone in the floor nearby as well. This Latin inscription can be translated as: “Here lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton.”

Stephen Hawking

Fast forward to recent times and an equally ground-breaking scientist was interred at Westminster Abbey. While he doesn’t have a huge monument like Newton, his ashes are interred near him.

Professor Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) attended school in St. Albans and continued on to Oxford, and later Cambridge. While in his 20s, he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease. He first married Jane Wilde in 1965 with who he had three children, and the couple later divorced. He later married Elaine Mason in 1995 and they divorced in 2007.

Hawking became a research fellow at Cambridge and started his work on black holes. He was elected to the Royal Society when he was 32, and in 1979 became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post also held by Newton. His best known work is “A Brief History of Time”. He died on March 14, 2018 at age 76.

The Caithness slate stone was designed and made by John Maine and the letter cutter was Gillian Forbes.

The Westminster Abbey web page describes it thus:

The stone depicts a series of rings, surrounding a darker central ellipse. The 10 characters of Hawking’s equation express his idea that black holes in the universe are not entirely black but emit a glow, that would become known as Hawking radiation. In this equation the T stands for temperature; the h for Planck’s constant which is used to understand parts of quantum mechanics; c stands for the speed of light; 8Pi helps us to grasp its spherical nature; G is Newton’s constant to understand gravity; M stands for the mass of the black hole and k stand for Boltzmann’s constant, which is the energy of gas particles.

Charles Darwin

I’ll finish up with a world-famous naturalist, geologist, and biologist, Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Simply put, many think of him as the person who first truly wrote about evolution. Darwin is buried in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey, near Newton and Hawking.

Born in Shrewsbury, England on Feb. 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was the son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood (of English china fame).

Darwin studied with his brother Erasmus at Edinburgh University in Scotland but was not keen on the idea of following in his father’s footsteps as a doctor. At Cambridge, he became interested in natural history and sailed on the ship HMS Beagle in 1831 to South America and the Galapagos islands.

In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and they went to live at Downe, a small village in Kent. “On the Origin of Species” was published in 1859 and he continued working although his health was often poor.

Darwin died on April 19, 1882. His body lay overnight in the Abbey, in the small chapel of St. Faith, and on the morning of April 26, his coffin was escorted into the Abbey. Pallbearers included Sir Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace, James Russell Lowell (U.S. ambassador), and William Spottiswoode (president of the Royal Society).

The burial service was held in the Lantern. Chief mourners then followed the coffin into the north aisle of the Nave where Darwin was buried next to the eminent scientist Sir John Herschel.

His simple gravestone is made of pale Carrara marble.

You can look forward to Poet’s Corner next time in Part VII.