The Extraordinary William Emerson (NZ308102)

One of the North-East’s greatest eccentrics, William Emerson, was born in Hurworth-on-Tees in 1701. He was also a brilliant mathematician, and can perhaps rightly be called a savant – a genius in his chosen field, yet a social misfit extraordinaire. His writings reached far and wide, including into the substantial mind and intellect of the great Thomas Jefferson.

He followed his schoolmaster father, Dudley, into the sphere of mathematics. As a young student, though, his offensive manner caused him to be sent to Newcastle and York during the course of his studies. In 1730 he returned to Hurworth to take over the running of his late father’s school, but his social shortcomings led to the institution’s closure in 1733. He resolved instead to live off his inherited estate near Eastgate, Weardale.

In 1735 he managed to get himself married to Elizabeth Johnson, the daughter of the Hurworth rector. However, his father-in-law, disapproving of his unkempt and uncouth new relative, refused to pay the £500 dowry, so Emerson piled all his wife’s clothes into a barrow and wheeled it round to the parsonage, saying he refused “to be beholden to such a fellow for a single rag”. In time, though, Emerson would make all those who thought him a wastrel eat their words.

Though he never really broke any new ground in his work, it was the interpretation and application of existing theories which would prove to be his greatest strength. His first work, The Doctrine of Fluxions [i.e. calculus], wasn’t published until he was into his 40s, but it became an instant bestseller. And, thereafter, as the man himself modestly pointed out, “I stepped forth, like a giant in all his might.”

And so he did. More than a dozen more critically acclaimed mathematical treatises followed on subjects such as trigonometry, astronomy, mechanics, navigation, algebra, optics, motion, music and more – all of them known for their error-free nature. The Principles of Mechanics (1754) really made his name, and was used by students into the Victorian era. Practical experimentation lay at the centre of his mathematical world, as he set his students to work splashing about in the Tees for his work on navigation, for example. He was, of course, consulted widely, yet when the Royal Society wished to make him a Fellow he refused, saying: “When a man becomes eminent, he has to pay quarterly for it. This is the way ingenuity is rewarded in England. Damn them and their FRS too.”

This outspokenness marked Emerson’s character all his life. He was often vulgar, ungrateful, bad-tempered, and had an infamously scruffy dress code. He would only tie the top and bottom buttons of his waistcoat, and wear his shirt back-to-front to keep himself warm. Then there were his bulging shin-covers, worn to stop his legs burning in front of the fire – to say nothing of his ill-fitting wigs! He walked everywhere, drank to excess and would stand fishing in the Tees for hours in the hope that the water would wash out his gout.

This mad genius died in 1782, aged 81, and was buried in Hurworth churchyard. And so finally, in the words of his epitaph, death, “as it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me.”

Thomas Jefferson’s Hero? (NU209025)

 

John Rushworth, that is. Who? I hear you ask. Well, the third President of the United States and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was something of a fan of this now largely forgotten native of Acklington Park, a settlement a few miles to the south-west of Warkworth in Northumberland.

Rushworth was born in 1612 to a very well-to-do family with Yorkshire roots. The somewhat remote site of his birth did nothing to hinder his progress in life, however, progressing to Oxford University, from where he graduated in 1640. He became a student barrister, and thence clerk-assistant to the House of Commons, having made the acquaintance of King Charles I – and even married the sister of the future Speaker of the House. When all hell broke loose a year or so later, Rushworth became a supporter of Oliver Cromwell, with whom he had much in common, both politically and religiously. When the English Civil War commenced, he became Secretary to General Fairfax as well as Secretary to the Council of War.

John Rushworth effectively became the first ever official chronicler of a major war, being present at many of the big battles which ensued during 1642-51. He was also involved with negotiations with the king, as well as events surrounding his trial and execution (though he was not a signatory to the death warrant). Oliver Cromwell appointed Rushworth his personal Secretary during his ‘reign’, and was given much in the way of new responsibilities and roles thenceforth, much of them related to law reform.

John Milton, John Bunyan and Samuel Pepys were all close friends of his, and he became MP for Berwick on several occasions over the ensuing decades. In 1659, a year after Cromwell’s death, he published his famous Historical Collections (aka The Rushworth Papers), effectively a chronicle of the Civil War years (if a somewhat biased one), in which he espoused his methods and his reasoning. As Richard Cromwell’s power ebbed away during 1659-60, Rushworth, as Secretary to the Council of State, became, briefly, a very influential figure.

Despite the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, Rushworth managed to maintain positions of power, and was even made a Knight of the Order of the Bath in 1661. But it wasn’t to last. King Charles II never could quite forgive and forget, and Rushworth was eventually tried and imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison in 1684. He died in 1690, isolated from his family (he married and had four daughters) in a damp room in Rule's Court, Southwark, depressed, under-nourished, and suffering from senile dementia, aged 78: “where, being reduced to his second childship, for his memory was quite decayed by taking too much brandy to keep up his spirits, he quietly gave up the ghost in his lodging in a certain alley there, called Rule’s Court, on 12 May 1690”.

When, in 1890, King’s Bench Prison was demolished, ‘Rushworth School’ was built on the site and the thoroughfare was renamed ‘Rushworth Street’. His writings, however, found greatest favour in the US where they served as a source of inspiration for Thomas Jefferson. Rushworth's Historical Collections occupied pride of place in the great man’s library and he often quoted from them. Rushworth’s views of Charles I as a monarch who had “declared war on his own people” were later echoed in words by Thomas Jefferson and others when writing about the reign of George III and his actions during the War of Independence.