John Wilkins

Why he matters for the novel

Wilkins is the man who made the Royal Society possible. A bishop who married Cromwell’s sister, befriended Royalists, and brought everyone together to talk about science. He wrote the first English book on cryptography — retitled Cryptonomicon in Stephenson’s universe, connecting this novel to the earlier book. His attempt to create a universal philosophical language is a precursor to everything from Leibniz’s symbolic logic to Daniel’s Logic Mill to modern computing.

Who he was

John Wilkins (1614-1672), Bishop of Chester. Born in Northamptonshire, educated at Oxford. He was a natural diplomat — the kind of person who could be Cromwell’s brother-in-law and still have Royalists trust their sons to his care. He became Warden of Wadham College, Oxford during the Interregnum, where he assembled the group of natural philosophers who would become the Royal Society.

The connector

Wilkins’s great talent was holding people together across political and religious divides:

• He was a Parliamentarian who maintained friendships with Royalists
• He married Cromwell’s sister Robina (1656), making him the Lord Protector’s brother-in-law
• After the Restoration, he was briefly deprived of his positions but quickly recovered, becoming Bishop of Chester in 1668
• He was the Royal Society’s first secretary and driving organizational force

In a society riven by Civil War loyalties, Wilkins created a space where people could set aside politics and focus on experiment. That’s the Royal Society’s founding gift.

Mercury (1641)

Wilkins published Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger in 1641 — the first book on cryptography written in English. It covered codes, ciphers, and methods of secret communication. In Stephenson’s alternate universe, the book is titled Cryptonomicon, creating a direct link between this 17th-century bishop and the characters of Stephenson’s 1999 novel (where a fictional book called Cryptonomicon also plays a central role).

Stephenson’s own annotation (p. 22): “Wilkins’s treatise was called Cryptonomicon. And just to make things a little more confusing, in the real world is an Internet document called Cyphernomicon, by Tim May, which predates my work by many years!”

The universal language

Wilkins’s most ambitious project was An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). He tried to create a universal system of classification — a language in which the name of every thing would describe its nature. Every concept would be categorized, subcategorized, and assigned a symbol.

It didn’t work — natural language is too messy, too alive for a rigid taxonomy. But the attempt matters. Wilkins was trying to do for human knowledge what Linnaeus would later do for biology and what Daniel Waterhouse’s Logic Mill cards attempt for his own notes. The dream of a universal organizing system connects Wilkins to Leibniz (who corresponded with him and pursued similar ideas), to the Encyclopédie, to the Library of Congress, to the internet.

Death

Wilkins died in 1672, before the Royal Society had fully established itself. Had he lived longer, the Society’s internal politics — the Hooke-Newton feuds, the factional disputes — might have been less destructive. He was the institutional glue, and the Society never quite replaced him.