The Dispensation and the Hidden Heresy

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642 by the Old Style calendar then in use in England, at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, a position whose terms of appointment required the holder to be an ordained Church of England priest, as was standard for Cambridge fellows of the period. Newton had by then privately arrived, through his own close study of scripture and early Church history, at a conviction that the doctrine of the Trinity was not an original Christian teaching but a corruption introduced after the biblical period, a position close to ancient Arianism and sharply at odds with orthodox Anglican doctrine he could not safely make public.

Rather than undergo ordination and risk exposing views that could have ended his career, Newton, almost certainly with the support of his patron Isaac Barrow, successfully petitioned for a royal dispensation; Charles II granted it in 1675, exempting the Lucasian professorship specifically from the ordination requirement. The dispensation let Newton keep both his position and his heterodox theology entirely private for the rest of his life, and the full extent of his anti-trinitarian writing, running to hundreds of manuscript pages, remained unpublished and largely unknown until long after his death on 20 March 1727.