John Wilkins - Early Life

Early Life

Wilkins was likely born at Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire. His father was a goldsmith, and died when he was young; his mother remarried, and Walter Pope was half-brother to Wilkins. His maternal grandfather was a Puritan vicar, John Dod. He was educated at Magdalen Hall (which later became Hertford College), Oxford, being tutored by John Tombes and graduating BA in 1631 and MA in 1634. He studied astronomy with John Bainbridge.

After ordination, Wilkins became vicar of his home town of Fawsley in 1637, but he soon resigned. He became chaplain successively to Lord Saye and Sele and George Berkeley, 8th Baron Berkeley. In 1644 he became chaplain to Prince Charles Louis, nephew of King Charles I, who was in England; from 1648 Charles Louis was able to take up his position as Elector of the Palatinate on the Rhine, as a consequence of the Peace of Westphalia. Wilkins may have accompanied him on his return to Heidelberg.

Wilkins was one of the group of savants interested in experimental philosophy who gathered round Charles Scarburgh, the royalist physician who arrived in London in summer 1646 after the fall of Oxford to the parliamentarian forces. These included George Ent, Samuel Foster, Francis Glisson, Jonathan Goddard, Christopher Merrett, and John Wallis. Others of Scarburgh's circle were William Harvey and Seth Ward. This London group was described much later by Wallis, who mentions also Theodore Haak, anchoring it also to the Palatine exiles; while there are clear connections to the Wilkins Oxford 'club', it is no longer considered that these were founders of what later became the Royal Society.