Charles Cavendish (Nottingham)

Sir Charles Cavendish (ca. 1594 – 1654) was an English aristocrat, Member of Parliament, and patron of philosophers and mathematicians.

Life

He was the younger brother of William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and was knighted by James I in 1619. He was MP for Nottingham in 1624 and 1628, and sat in the Short Parliament of 1640.^[1] He built a mansion on the site of Bolsover Castle, bought by his father (also called Sir Charles Cavendish). His work on the house, to a design by John Smythson (son of Robert Smythson), was never completed.^[2][3][4] He went into exile with his brother after the Battle of Marston Moor (1644).

His group of intellectual acquaintances has been called the “Welbeck Circle”, after the family home Welbeck Abbey; it has also been called the “Newcastle Circle” after the elder brother’s title. Because the Cavendishes were royalist émigrés of the 1640s, the centre of this circle moved to Paris, where it took on the form of a salon. It grew around Thomas Hobbes and John Pell, with Sir Kenelm Digby joining in Paris,^[5] and also included William Petty.^[6]

Cavendish knew Pell from the Welbeck period, along with the mathematicians Walter Warner and Robert Payne. He supported William Oughtred and knew John Wallis. From early travels in France, he knew Marin Mersenne and Claude Mydorge; later he met René Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and Pierre Gassendi.^[7]

Notes

1. ^ Noel Malcolm (editor), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Volume II: 1660-1679 (1994), pp. 801-806.
2. ^ http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/NRY/Slingsby/Slingsby68.html
3. ^ http://www.touristnetuk.com/ne/NYM/towns/slingsby.htm
4. ^ http://archive.thisisryedale.co.uk/2003/6/4/13057.html
5. ^ Margaret J. Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (2000), p. 97.
6. ^ http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaBook/tei/DicHist1.xml;chunk.id=dv1-22
7. ^ Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers (2000), article Cavendish, Charles, pp. 165-6.

Further reading

• Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall (2005), John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician