They represented a conservative wing in the larger discussion, and in different ways they informed approaches to the idea of a learned society as an active educational and regulatory body.
[7] This conception already had a generation of history behind it: in the reign of Henry VIII Nicholas Bacon (with Robert Carey and Thomas Denton) had reported on a project to create a new inn of court, conceived along the lines of a humanist academy.
Arthur Agard (or Agarde), the Society’s most respected member, was hesitant: Although I must confess that in this proposition I have more travelled than in any of the former, for that it concerneth me more to understand the right thereof, especially in that sundry have resorted to me thereabouts to know whether I have in my custody any records that avouch the same in certainty; yet so it fareth with me, that in perusing as well those abbreviations I have noted out of Domesday and other records …, as also those notes I have quoted out of ancient registers and books which have fallen into my hands within these xxx.
Those involved included: Robert Bruce Cotton and others petitioned Elizabeth I to establish a national library and academy, having in mind an institution for antiquarian study.
[35] The suppression of the Society of Antiquaries having left a hiatus in intellectual life, at least as far as antiquarian interests were concerned, Edmund Bolton brought forward a plan for a royal academy (his "academ roial").
Salomon's House, the proposal or model from Francis Bacon's New Atlantis for an institution of natural philosophy, dates also from this period at the end of the reign of James I.
[41] The foundation in 1635 of the Académie française coincided closely with Francis Kynaston's setting up of an actual educational institution, his Musaeum Minervae, in his own home in Covent Garden.
He was himself the regent, and his friends Edward May, Michael Mason, Thomas Hunt, Nicholas Fiske, John Spiedal (Spidall), and Walter Salter were professors in various areas.
[43] The full course was to occupy seven years; no gentleman was ‘to exercise himself at once about more than two particular sciences, arts, or qualities, whereof one shall be intellectual, the other corporall.’ The regent taught the following subjects: heraldry, a practical knowledge of deeds and the principles and processes of common law, antiquities, coins, husbandry.
[44] The academy idea was still in the air in the years before the First English Civil War, and Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel brought forward a proposal during the Short Parliament.
Abraham Cowley in 1661 conspicuously and in detail advocated a "philosophical college" near central London, that would function as an innovating educational institution, in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy.
[51] A group actually met in Gray's Inn in 1665 to plan an academy, as was recalled later by Evelyn: Cowley and Sprat were involved, with George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Matthew Clifford, Cyril Wyche, John Dryden, and others.
[53] Giovanni Torriano, in his The Italian Reviv'd, equated some English clubs of the Restoration period with groups who in France or Italy would be called "academies".
In the form of a call for a "national dictionary" to regulate the English language, on the French model, this conception had much support from Augustan men of letters: Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison (The Spectator 135 in 1711) and Alexander Pope.
[60] The whole idea later met stern opposition, however, from the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, invoking "English liberty" against the prescription involved: he predicted disobedience of an academy supposed to set usage.
[63] During his 1780 diplomatic mission to Amsterdam, statesman, and later President of the United States, John Adams advocated for an official English Academy as part of the federal government in a letter to the Second Continental Congress.
[64] The proposal was later rejected by the Continental Congress due to concerns of individual liberty, and marked one of the earliest instances of the government’s consideration of linguistic diversity.