Apocalypticism

Drake Waterhouse expected the world to end in 1666. He was not alone.

The context

Apocalypticism — the belief that the end of the world is imminent and can be predicted from scripture — was not a fringe position in 17th-century England. It was mainstream Puritan theology. Many of the most educated people in the country, including members of Parliament and senior clergy, spent serious time calculating the date of the Second Coming from the books of Daniel and Revelation.

Why 1666

The number 666 appears in Revelation 13:18 as “the number of the beast.” The year 1666 was therefore charged with eschatological significance. When the Great Plague struck London in 1665, killing a quarter of the population, it looked like a precursor to divine judgment. When the Great Fire followed in September 1666, destroying most of the city, the case seemed overwhelming. Drake Waterhouse and others like him saw these catastrophes not as natural disasters but as prophecy fulfilled.

The world didn’t end. This created a theological crisis for the apocalypticists — one the novel explores through Drake’s character and its effects on Daniel.

Newton the apocalypticist

Newton himself spent more time on biblical chronology and prophetic interpretation than on physics. His unpublished manuscripts on prophecy run to over a million words. He calculated that the world would end no earlier than 2060 — a date based on his reading of the Book of Daniel. Newton didn’t see this as separate from his scientific work; for him, God had written two books, nature and scripture, and both could be decoded through careful analysis. The same mind that discovered gravity also produced elaborate timelines of the kingdoms described in Revelation.

Fifth Monarchists

The most extreme English apocalypticists were the Fifth Monarchists, who believed that the four great empires prophesied in the Book of Daniel (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) had passed and that Christ’s kingdom — the fifth monarchy — was about to begin. Some took up arms to hasten it. Thomas Venner led an armed uprising in London in January 1661, seizing St. Paul’s Cathedral before being suppressed. Drake Waterhouse, in the novel, moves in this world — not necessarily as an armed rebel but as someone who believes, with total conviction, that history is about to end.

The shift

The failure of 1666 to produce the Apocalypse didn’t kill apocalypticism, but it redirected it. The next generation — Daniel’s generation — channeled the same intensity of belief into natural philosophy. If God’s plan couldn’t be read from Revelation’s timeline, perhaps it could be read from the mathematics of planetary motion. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in verba (“take nobody’s word for it”), is a direct rejection of the apocalypticists’ method of interpreting ancient authority. But the energy — the conviction that the universe has a hidden structure that human reason can decode — is the same.

In the novel

Daniel grows up in a household saturated with apocalyptic expectation. His father Drake names his sons after Old Testament figures and reads the news as prophecy. Daniel’s journey from his father’s world to Newton’s is the novel’s central arc: from reading God’s plan in scripture to reading it in mathematics. The transition is never complete — traces of Drake’s apocalypticism survive in Daniel’s own conviction that the universe can be understood, that knowledge is progressive, that there is a plan.