·¬ÇÑÉçÇø

·¬ÇÑÉçÇø’s Charter Book has been much in demand recently. On 23 June it took the short journey down the Mall to Buckingham Palace so His Majesty King Charles III could sign in as our Royal Patron, then on 10 July our new Fellows 2026 picked up a fountain pen and added their signatures at our annual Admission Day. No inky blots this year, I’m pleased to say!

Library staff are used to leafing through the Charter Book to point out famous signatures, with page numbers such as 9 (Isaac Newton), 65 (Charles Darwin) and 105 (our first women Fellows, Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson) now firmly lodged in our brains. For my money, the fifth page of the book is the real ‘must-see’ – with pages 1-4 reserved for kings, princes, diplomats and peers of the realm, this was the earliest page on which the ‘everyday’ members of the Royal Society were required to add their names:

There must have bit of jostling in the queue in early January 1665, when the newly-bound book was presented to the Fellowship. Robert Hooke, the Society’s curator of experiments, just managed to squeeze himself on at the extreme bottom left, and the discipline of writing in neat columns, evident in most of the later pages of the book, appears to have gone out of the window as FOMO kicked in.

Notably, the signatures of ten of the twelve Founder Fellows of the Royal Society – those present at the inaugural meeting at Gresham College on 28 November 1660 – can be found on page 5. If you fancy a tricky challenge (and several of them signed their names in shortened form, which doesn’t help), see if you can locate them in the picture above; if you’re struggling, higher magnification is available in the on our Turning the Pages platform. In alphabetical order of surname, you’re looking for , , , , , , , , and . To avoid any confusion, you can safely ignore both the other Balle (, William’s brother) and the other Wren (‘M’ for , Christopher’s cousin), neither of whom was present on 28 November 1660.

An eleventh Founder Fellow, , may have been less sharp-elbowed in the queue to sign the book – his signature is found in the first column of (the much less crowded!) page 6:

That’s eleven of the twelve accounted for, then – but what happened to the ‘twelfth man’? Well, sadly, Founder Fellow (1622-1662) didn’t live long enough to inscribe his name in the Charter Book. The summer of 1662 must have been a lot colder than our current conveyor belt of heatwaves, as Rooke – who suffered generally from poor health – picked up a chill on a walk from his patron’s home in Highgate to his Gresham College lodgings in the City of London. He died from the ensuing fever on 27 June 1662, aged just 40.

Rooke did, however, play a key role in the inauguration and pre-Charter years of the Royal Society. Part of the Wadham College circle including John Wilkins and Robert Boyle in early 1650s Oxford, Rooke moved to London to become in 1652. He took a sideways step to the post in 1657, handing the Astronomy chair to a younger man, Christopher Wren. Apparently Geometry came with a better apartment than Astronomy, and it was in Rooke’s rooms that the first Royal Society meeting took place, following Wren’s Gresham lecture.

Meetings continued in term-time in Rooke’s chambers, moving to William Ball’s room in the Temple during College holidays. Rooke played an active part in these gatherings in 1661 and the first half of 1662: he was commissioned to prepare the Society’s '', a significant set of instructions for British mariners setting sail for the East and West Indies, .

Rooke combined his astronomical and geometrical expertise in the two principal papers he presented to the Society, one ‘’ and a second giving ‘’. He considered that accurate measurement of both these phenomena might lead to improvements in longitude calculation for his ‘Sea-men bound for farre voyages’. While both methods attracted due consideration in the 1660s, they were overtaken by . Rooke, although highly respected by his Royal Society colleagues, was therefore rather lost to posterity following his early death. There are no extant portraits, and so little is known of his early life that a full biography has never been written.

We do, however, have one memento placing Lawrence Rooke squarely within his peer group in the early Royal Society. The Charter Book is not the earliest collection of signatures recorded in our archives: in the , signing-in pages (above) have been inserted at the beginning, dated 5 December 1660 and bearing an early version of the obligations of Society members. There are 115 names on the list, presumably added over an extended period from 5 December onwards, and featuring other names who never made it into the Charter Book, including the poet .

Rooke is one of the first names on this Journal Book signature sheet, in column one on the left-hand page, in close proximity to his Oxford tutor John Wilkins and to Christopher Wren’s cousin Matthew. I’ll end, then, with a close-up of the signature of our ‘twelfth man’, lost to the Charter Book but very much part of the Royal Society’s early days: