Vegelin’s father came from a Swiss Protestant family which had moved to the Rhineland town of Neustadt, in the Palatinate; he served under Gustavus Adolphus, and was rewarded with the estate of Claerbergen in Friesland. (The family name was originally Vögelin; Vegelin used ‘Vegelin’, ‘Vegilin’ or – to indicate the hard ‘g’ – ‘Veguelin’.) Nothing is known of Vegelin’s education or early adulthood until the late 1630s, when he spent some time in Paris, making the acquaintance of the inventor and musical theorist Jean Le Maire. In 1639 Vegelin spent several months in England, where (thanks to his Palatinate connections) he got to know Samuel Hartlib, Theodore Haak and other members of the Hartlib circle. He went back to the Netherlands in August 1639, but by November he was in Paris again: during the following year he was in frequent contact with Marin Mersenne, and served as an intermediary between him and Haak in London. Indeed, it was thanks to Vegelin that Mersenne had his first direct contact with any of the core members of Hartlib’s circle. At the same time, Vegelin appears to have pursued his own special interests in two fields: applied mathematics (perspective, sun-dials, navigation), and music.

At some time before mid-September 1641 Vegelin left Paris; he travelled to The Hague, where Constantijn Huygens persuaded Willem Frederik of Nassau, the Stadhouder of Friesland, to take him on as a secretary. This employment began in November 1641, and Vegelin would spend the rest of his life working as secretary and ‘hoofmeester’ (court chamberlain) for the Stadhouder and his family, based mainly at the Nassaus’ court in Leeuwarden. In 1643 he married a rich widow; their descendants would become one of the leading land-owning families of Friesland.

Vegelin’s intellectual interests are known almost entirely from his correspondence. In the 1640s he exchanged letters with Mersenne and Constantijn Huygens (in which he complained that Friesland was an intellectual backwater); in 1655 he was in touch with Mathias Pasor, the linguist, theologian and mathematician at Groningen University; and in 1667-8 he corresponded with the learned lady of Utrecht, Anna Maria van Schurman. His fullest surviving correspondence was with Kircher’s assistant Gaspar Schott: there are twenty letters from Schott to Vegelin between 1661 and 1664. Schott was then preparing his Technica curiosa; in it, he included many flattering references to Vegelin, calling him a ‘patron of letters and of writers’. He mentioned a letter in which Vegelin had discussed Pascal’s multiplying machine and the origins of arithmetical notation, and he recorded that Vegelin had sent him all Boyle’s English works. Through Vegelin, Schott had sent a letter to Boyle; but he received nothing in response except a polite acknowledgement. (Cornelis de Waard deduced from this that Vegelin was himself in direct contact with Boyle; however, the evidence suggests that his contact was via his old friend in London, Theodore Haak.) No doubt it was thanks to Schott that Vegelin was put in touch with Kircher and was encouraged to direct his son, Ernst Frederik, to visit Kircher in Rome in 1671. Vegelin kept up his interests in optics and astronomy, corresponding with Christiaan Huygens in 1683-90; he died, aged 79, in 1693.

Bibliography

C. de Waard, ‘Philips Ernst Vegelin’, in Nieuw nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, 10 vols. (Leiden, 1911-37), vol. 7, cols. 1224-5

S. J. Fockema Andreae, Huis- en familiearchiven van Eysinga – Vegelin van Claerbergen, Monumenta Frisica, Fryske Archyfrige no. 6 (Leeuwarden, 1965) [catalogue of MSS; contains a brief account of the family]

N. Malcolm, ‘Six Unknown Letters from Mersenne to Vegelin’, The Seventeenth Century (forthcoming: 2001) [includes biographical information]

G. Schott, Technica curiosa (Würzburg, 1664) (esp. pp. 87-8, 180-1, 540-1, 862, 870)

Letters from or to Vegelin are printed in the published correspondence of Mersenne, Constantijn Huygens and Christiaan Huygens. Unpublished letters to Vegelin (by Schott, Pasor, van Schurman and others) are in the Rijksarchief in de Provincie Friesland, Leeuwarden, van Eysinga – van Claerbergen papers, MS 67.