9781422277638

When Isaac was fourteen years old, the Reverend Smith died and his mother returned to Woolsthorpe with the three children born from her second marriage. Newton had to leave the King’s School of Grantham and return home, because as the eldest son, he was expected to manage the farm. But he soon convinced his mother that he would never make a good farmer. Sent to graze the sheep, he was often found beneath a hedge with a book, completely unaware that the sheep had wandered away. When he went into Grantham on market day to sell farm produce and buy things for the family, he would leave the job to the trusted servant who went with him and hide himself in the garret of his old lodging to read books until the servant came back. Either his Grantham schoolmaster or a maternal uncle persuaded his mother that it would be a loss for Isaac to bury his talent by making him a farmer. So it was decided that Isaac should go back to Grantham and prepare for higher education at a college. Conflict in England The years of Isaac Newton’s childhood and early youth were stormy ones in English history. In the year Newton was born, a civil war began in England between supporters of King Charles I (known as Royalists, or Cavaliers) and those who backed the British Parliament (known as Parliamentarians, or Roundheads). Many of those who supported Parliament were members of a Protestant Christian religious group known as the Puritans. The Puritans wanted to rid the Anglican church (headed by the king) of what they considered to be sacriligious Roman Catholic practices, and to oppose Catholic influence in England from other countries such as Spain and France. The English Civil War raged from 1642 to 1646, and again from 1648 to 1651. The capture and beheading of Charles I in 1649 resulted in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland being ruled by Parliament as a commonwealth. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell was named Lord Protector of the commonwealth. However, Cromwell’s death in 1658 threw the young government into disarray. During Isaac Newton’s last month at Grantham in 1660, church bells proclaimed the restoration of the monarchy in England, and the triumphal return of the executed king’s son, Charles II, to take the throne.

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