This is why Robert Hooke enjoyed the sustained friendship of such a wide variety of Londoners: the Mercers’ clerk John Godfrey, the needlewoman Nell Young, the linguists Theodore Haak and Francis Lodwick, the sea captain Robert Knox, the ‘operator’ Henry Hunt, the clergymen John Wilkins; and Seth Ward, the watchmaker Thomas Tompion, the antiquarian John Aubrey, the schoolmaster Dr Richard Busby, the landowner Sir Robert Southwell, and the scientists Robert Boyle, Edmond Halley, Thomas Henshaw and Christopher Wren.
