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You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Roos Anna Marie 2021EditorialNotes Rec.75281–284http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0017SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Anna Marie Roos Anna Marie Roos [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Anna Marie Roos Anna Marie Roos [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:14 April 2021https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0017Life and death in the archive: The Royal Society, Martin Folkes (1690–1754), and Coram's voices through timeHistorical research is enriched by digital tools as the availability of manuscripts, ephemera, and printed materials online allow scholars to make connections that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago. The digital preservation of fragile manuscripts is another benefit. Although I have missed the tactile pleasure of working with an early modern document during lockdown, the accessibility of primary sources online has been truly astonishing.One of the best results of the digital turn in history of science is public access and crowdsourcing. The Royal Society, for instance, through its Google Arts and Culture Slideshows and its Science in the Making Platform can not only showcase its archival materials, but also make them available for the public to transcribe, which, in turn, increases their accessibility for scholarly research.1 The Coram Foundation has also partnered with Zoouniverse to make its early foundation records available to the public in its Voices Through Time: The Story of Care project.2 And it was through this latter project that I discovered a connection between the Royal Society and Coram, a connection established via Martin Folkes.Martin Folkes (1690–1754) FRS was a protégé of Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician and astronomer, and friend of Voltaire. His unique distinction was his simultaneous presidencies of both the Royal Society of London and the Society of Antiquaries, being president of the former from 1741 to 1753 and of the latter from 1750 until his death in 1754. His interest and promotion of antiquarianism in the Royal Society caused later historians to consider him an intellectual lightweight, as ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘science’, on the one hand, and the historical thrust of the antiquary, on the other hand, have traditionally been seen as different pursuits. Recent research has shown, however, that both disciplines were in a warm embrace. The early Royal Society was involved in projects that integrated natural history and antiquarianism, particularly before the establishment of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717. Antiquarianism was ‘cognate with natural history at the very least in the sense that the type of activity involved (field work, collection, display, classification) was of a similar character’.3Furthermore, as I noted in an earlier article and in my recently published biography of Folkes:What would being president of a society dedicated to the material past have to do with leading a society dedicated to natural philosophy? In the eighteenth century the ability to observe nature was thought to make natural philosophers well suited to understand the empirical details of ancient artefacts and how they were created. Naturalists, experimentalists, chymists and physicians of the early modern British world were also archivists and antiquaries, and their work in the latter sphere was central to prosecuting their work in the former.4Folkes was thus just representative of the intellectual interests of his time.As a member of London's elite, Folkes was also an early governor of Coram's Foundling Hospital. The governors met regularly and recorded all their admission decisions in meeting minutes and in Books of Regulation. They arranged for registers or billet books to record the admission of each child, any tokens it brought in, its placement at nurse, the inspector supervising the nurse in her home parish, any illness, death or survival of the child to apprenticeship.5 Building on the work of historian Gillian Wagner, I noted Folkes's role at Coram in my biography, having realized that an entry record for a foundling in the Billet Book at London Metropolitan Archives was in Folkes's handwriting: the baby named after Folkes's friend John, 2nd Duke of Montagu FRS.6 In the eighteenth century, it was common for a Coram foundling to be given the name of a benefactor or a member of the elite; some children were named after Coram himself.At the time I visited the Archive, Coram's General Register of Admissions from 1741 was in a pretty fragile state, and, understandably, access was restricted to researchers. However, with the Voices Through Time project I could now virtually turn its pages and I found something rather remarkable.7 Not only was Folkes's hand throughout the top of the 1741 register book—which I expected—but many of the orphaned children were named after members of his family or his environs. One baby was named after his mother Dorothy Hovell, and another little girl was called Etheldreda Hovell after his aunt who was married to William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury. Another child was given the moniker of Martin Hillington; Folkes owned the stately Hillington Hall in Norfolk, a neat juxtaposition of his name and his estate. Other children were named after Sarah and Charles Richmond, Folkes's dearest friend Charles Lennox, the 2nd Duke of Richmond and his beloved wife Sarah, whom Lennox affectionately nicknamed ‘Taw’; Lennox, like Folkes, was also a governor of the Foundling Hospital. The foundling William Rishton was called after Folkes's son-in-law who married his daughter Dorothy, and there was even a little boy named Martin Folkes in the register. Sadly, most of these children, including ‘Martin Folkes’ died young, the result of infectious disease and the effect of poverty that the Foundling Hospital could not remedy.Martin Folkes's eldest and only son, also named Martin, had died the previous year, killed in a riding accident at the Caen Military Academy in Normandy at the age of twenty. The Caen Academy had a good reputation for its training in geography, ballistics, and mathematics, as well as its riding school. In 1738, Charles-Louis Secondat de Montesquieu, also a Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote to Folkes that his own son Jean-Baptiste had made ‘some progress’ in natural philosophy, and hoped to see Folkes when he visited, adding ‘I think I can tell you that because when you talk to your friend, you talk to yourself.8 Meeting minutes show that Folkes's son, though not yet a Fellow of the Royal Society, had also been a silent attendee at meetings as part of his education, gathering with other Fellows at the Mitre Tavern afterwards to learn to debate and to drink.When Folkes's son died, Charles Lennox was apparently the first to hear, as he had diplomatic contacts in France. Folkes was clearly stunned, Lennox subsequently writing concerned letters to Folkes's brother William about his friend's emotional state: ‘Let me beg of you to write if it is butt two lines to let me know how he does’, continuing that he loved and valued Folkes ‘equal to any man living’.9 Lennox continued in a subsequent letter, ‘I can't butt still be in very great pain for him. I don't like the account he gives me of his starts, and talking of the thing as if it had been a dream. I thinke those are bad symptoms. I hope in God you will be able to govern him and keep him low. For I can not help being in pain for his senses which strong as they are may not be proof against such a terrible shock’.10I do not believe that, when he was Coram governor, Folkes named a foundling after himself. Rather, I think it was in memoriam to his own son. Many this past year have lost loved ones to the pandemic, and the immediacy of those losses resonated again when seeing that page from the Register Book, glowing on the screen.Rest in Peace, Martin Folkes.Rest in Peace, the Lost Foundlings.Rest in Peace, those lost to COVID-19.Footnotes1 Royal Society, Science in the Making, https://makingscience.royalsociety.org/s/rs/page/welcome (accessed 13 March 2021). Google Arts and Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com (accessed 13 March 2021).2 Coram Foundation, Voices Through Time: The Story of Care, https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/jojo38/voices-through-time-the-story-of-care/about/research (accessed 13 March 2021).3 David Miller, ‘“Into the valley of darkness”: reflections on the Royal Society in the eighteenth century’, Hist. Sci.27, 160 (1989).4 Anna Marie Roos, ‘Afterword: dismiss the antiquary at your peril’, J. Eighteenth-Cent. Stud.43, 525–532 (2020); Anna Marie Roos, Martin Folkes (1690–1754): Newtonian, antiquary, connoisseur (Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 3.5 London Metropolitan Archives, ‘The Foundling Hospital Records’, https://coramstory.org.uk/explore/content/blog/voices-through-time-the-story-of-care/ (accessed 2 April 2021).6 See Gillian Wagner, Thomas Coram, Gent (1668–1751) (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2004); Roos, Martin Folkes, op. cit., pp. 311–312.7 The 1741 register may be accessed at: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/jojo38/voices-through-time-the-story-of-care/collections/hadlow/general-register-1741 (accessed 13 March 2021).8 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède de Montesquieu to Folkes, 19 August 1738, in Correspondance de Montesquieu, published by François Gébelin with M. André Morize (Imprimeries Gounouilhou, Bordeaux, 1914), vol. 1, pp. 332–333.9 MS/MC/50-2-115, Letter from Charles Lennox to William Folkes, 3 August 1740, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich.10 MS/MC/50-2-116, Letter from Charles Lennox to William Folkes, 8 August 1740, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich.© 2021 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. Previous ArticleNext Article FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 September 2021Volume 75Issue 3 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0017Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online14/04/2021Published in print20/09/2021 License:© 2021 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. Citations and impact Subjectshistory of science archivesbiographical history