A ‘College’ for the Royal Society: The abortive plan of 1667 — 1668

THE Royal Society did not possess premises of its own until 1710. For most of the first 50 years after its foundation in 1660, the Society met at Gresham College, the educational institution in the City of London founded in the late Elizabethan period by Sir Thomas Gresham. By the Restoration the college had little vitality but plenty of space, and the Royal Society worked out a mutually advantageous relationship with its professors: the Society held its meetings and housed its facilities at Gresham, while the college gained some reflected prestige and any interested professors were allowed free membership of the Society. The only gap in the Society’s sojourn at Gresham in these years occurred in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666, in which the Royal Exchange was destroyed. Gresham College was then commandeered for more urgent civic functions, and the Society, though not actually obliged to leave, felt it best to transfer its operations elsewhere. From the summer of 1667 the Society was instead given hospitality by Henry Howard, brother of the then Duke of Norfolk, at Arundel House in the Strand, the London house of the Howard family, returning to Gresham again only in 1673 (1).