'Emerging from the Shadows'

'The True Patriarch of English Clock-Making'

 Ahasuerus Fromanteel's 1649 'Cromwellian and Royal' Astronomical and Musical Sun-Clock.

Ahasuerus Fromanteel, (Norwich 1607-1693 London), in 1649 created his Chef d’Oeuvre  lauded by his noble contemporaries. Made for Dudley Palmer a Kentish lawyer living in Gray's Inn, to commemorate his scientist forebears Leonard and Thomas Digges -first in England to publish support for Nicholas Copernicus' circa 1530's heliocentric system- by commissioning Fromanteel's unique dynamic Solar-Zodiac clock with grand-sonnerie striking, multi-barrel music-work, quarter-chimes, and passing-minute strike. I named it ‘Sun-clock'.

Polymath William Leybourne says it was made in 1649, "I had some hand in its making". Diarist John Evelyn cited its visible aspects in the King's Closet of Rarities (1660), then its excellent aural qualities on dining at Mr Palmer's (1661), then new Equations at the Royal Society (1666). And in 1664 exchanges with Christiaan Huygens then seeking a Dutch patent for a weight-remontoir, Sir Robert Moray cited Fromanteel's priority for the 'remontoir' with springs, he recalled in the King's Chamber. Huygens conceded but said his used  small weight not 'two springs'. Royal Society minutes, bracketing the 1666 Great Fire, reported it as Mercator's Equating clock, a most fortunate survivor of the conflagration left Gresham College unscathed. Finally in 1683 John Aubrey cites Royal association passed down 'to Mr Knib, a watchmaker, who did  not understand it neither, who sold it to Mr Fromantle (that made it) for 5Li., who now asks for it 200Li.'  Palmer's clock then passed into the oblivion of time's shadows.

Probably Fromanteel’s greatest achievement, Mr Palmer's unique Sun-clock is now a major relic, lost in time's shadows till 1989, his reputation meanwhile had long been overshadowed by his great acolyte Thomas Tompion, now proved pivotal to the evolution of English pendulum horology. It reveals complex multi-functions, resolving the several hitherto unexplained losses of highly important clocks, three of those cited had 'Royal' associations. And in January 1655/6, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, in loco Regis, had sponsored Ahasuerus to Freeman of the City of London, for unknown achievement (Cromwell's letter is lost), despite the Royalist Clockmakers' Company hostility to Fromanteel and his acolytes.

Soon after Cromwell's death in September 1658, Ahasuerus advertised his 'new Regulators' tested before the Lord Protector's learned Doctors. It is a debated paradigm, was it Huygens' new crutched-verge suspended-pendulum of 1656/7, or was it Fromanteel's own verge-pivoted pendulum? This author asserts the latter, invented or evolved from his Bürgi inspired  cross-beat vertical-foliots with a spring-remontoir. 

 Keith Piggott