In the Shadow of the King

Ian Seymour

May 3, 1715, saw a total eclipse across southern Britain, running from Cornwall to the Wash and spanning Mid-Wales to the Isle of Wight. The event is primarily remembered today as its course was predicted by Edmond Halley, who published a fascinating map of its path as a Broadside (a single sheet publication) in early 1715. This has often been regarded as one of the first visual expressions of Enlightenment values: a confident statement about nature itself, based on reason applied to fact, demythologising the world.

Halley would not have disagreed, yet this was not the whole story. The caption to the map explains that “the like Eclipse having not for many ages been seen….I thought it not improper to give the Publick an account thereof, that the suddain darkness wherein the Starrs will be visible about the Sunn may give no surprize to the people, who would, if unadvertised, be apt to look on it as Ominous, and to Interpret it as portending evil to our Sovereign Lord King George and his Government, which God Preserve. Hereby they will see there is nothing in it more than Natural”. As such, the map was a political act, an assertion of loyalty and counter- propaganda. George I, crowned in the previous October, had a debatable claim to the throne. He was challenged by the Jacobites, who tended to adopt a more traditional cosmology and outlook.

The government’s argument ran that George ruled by natural legal right: Law and Parliament made him King.

The ‘Mysterious’ assertion of ‘Divine Election’ by the Jacobite candidate, James Francis Stewart, was dismissed as archaic superstition. The passage of the shadow of the solar eclipse was presented as a rational and inevitable process, clearly understood through overt scientific principles. This had obvious parallels to the pro-George position.

Costing sixpence, few of ‘the people’ probably saw Halley’s map, nor would they have needed his warning. A comic poem of the time, On the Great Eclipse of the Sun by Allan Ramsey, imagined “unlearn’d clowns” fleeing their fields “in dire confusion”, but there is no evidence that such things really happened. The only books most people saw were Bibles and almanacks, the latter unexpectedly scientifically progressive. Eclipses had no astrological significance and were simply presented as objects of wonder, their causes correctly explained. Some might question George’s claim, but Old Moore’s Almanac brooked no doubt.

Ian Seymour