As part of the 17th-century appetite for discovery and learning, attention was turned to the blank spaces on the maps of the world, and the opportunities they offered for increased knowledge, as well as increased riches. The New World colonies caught the attention of Daniel Coxe well before he invested in West New Jersey.
After a few years spent mixing with the virtuosi in London and playing with volatile salts in his laboratory, Daniel Coxe bethought himself to get a wife. He married Rebecca Coldham, the daughter of John Coldham, Esq. of Tooting Graveney, London. I’m not kidding; Tooting Graveney, actually has its own page in Wikipedia. It is considered a suburb of London, on the south side of the Thames, and was probably quite rural in the 1670s. John Coldham was an Alderman of London and warden of the Grocers Company, from which I conclude that he was a successful merchant with political connections, an ideal father-in-law for an ambitious man.
Just read a fascinating article by Walter Russell Mead on “A Lifetime Reading List.” It inspired me to reflect on why we read books and why some of us love history. Mead points out that:
“World history is so complex and multifaceted that a great danger is that young readers will give up on making any kind of sense out of it. Dozens of civilizations, scores of powers, religions and cultures rising and falling everywhere you look, uncountable throngs of significant schools of art, more battles and wars than you can shake a stick at: getting things in chronological order is the best and perhaps the only way to help young people find their footing in the torrent.”
And not only young people.
You can read the full article here.
A treatise published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions by Georgii Wedelii on Volatile Salts in 1673 was followed by a notice from the editor, which read:
“So much of this Author; whose way not being here made out and declared, we hope, a Learned and very known Member of the R. Society, Doctor Daniel Coxe, will shortly supply the world with that defect, he being certainly and experimentally master of a sure and easy way of extracting the volatile Salt out of all sorts of Plants.”
That is how Dr. Daniel Coxe was described in 1670 by Christopher Merrett in a pamphlet on the “Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries.”
It appears I have gotten my chronology wrong. The last post on Dr. Daniel Coxe concerned his early medical career, which began in 1669, when he was licensed at Cambridge to practice medicine. It had been my impression that Coxe was a medical man first, and a scientist second. But I now realize that his scientific experiments pre-dated his medical profession.
All right. Here’s the problem with history research. The more you learn, the more questions you have. If you’re not a curious person, it’s no problem. But if you are, then you are headed down unknown highways and even roads less traveled. I have always skimmed over the statement that Daniel Coxe was a physician to Charles II and Queen Anne. But, as it turns out, that is a road worth taking.
While reading an article about the ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680 by Mark Knights, I came across a reference to Daniel Coxe. He was a signer of the ‘Monster’ Petition, which meant he objected to the decision by Charles II to dissolve Parliament just before it was set to pass the Exclusion Act, which would have barred James Duke of York from becoming king, or anyone else belonging to the Catholic religion. This seems like a risky thing to do for someone who was “on the make,” as most historians describe Dr. Coxe.
Grace wondered about the distinction between East-West v. North-South New Jersey. This all goes back to the state’s geography and the way it was settled.
