All hail the new Carolean Age

The Restoration of Charles II heralded an outstanding era of scientific discovery and a flowering of the Arts for which Britain has, rightly, continued to be famous. Here we suggest who, in the reign of Charles III, is continuing such work today

- Kate Green, John Goodall and Carla Passino

A FEW years after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Isaac Newton legendarily watched an apple falling from a tree and reasoned that a gravitational force was preventing it falling any other way than straight down. At about the same time, his fellow polymath Robert Hooke, discoverer of the law of elasticity, among many other things, found the Rings of Saturn, designed an early microscope and uttered the word 'cell'.

British genius and innovation is nothing new. Some 3½ centuries on from Newton and Hooke, scientists have patented a prosthetic leg that is driven by the body's nervous system and a drug that can slow Alzheimer's; only in April this year, an astronomy team at Cambridge University detected chemicals associated with life on a faraway planet unromantically called K2-18b.

The era of the Restoration saw a burgeoning of the Arts and Sciences joyously freed from Puritan suppression and presided over by an intellectual, tastemaker king who appreciated them, just as our own Charles III does, with his promotion of contemporary composers, musicians, architects and artists, plus his foresight in farming, horticulture and heritage crafts. Beauty and craftsmanship were allowed to flourish in the earlier Carolean age, including in the sculptures of Grinling Gibbons. Many institutions, such as the Royal Society and Royal Observatory, founded in the time of Charles II, endure.

Citizens of the Restoration would be astonished to see vaccines that prevent diseases such as typhoid, (bad) poetry 'written' by AI, remote-controlled satellites looking at planets and the iPad-drawn paintings of David Hockney—or would they? They knew they were living in an age of discovery and talent, as should we.

The composer