Welbeck Academy

The group involved in these studies included Charles Cavendish (William's brother), Thomas Hobbes, Robert Payne and Walter Warner.

Newcastle was called "our English Maecenas" by Gerard Langbaine the Younger;[8] he was a patron after the Restoration to both John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell.

[11] By 1645 Newcastle was in Paris: his circle had contacts in Marin Mersenne and Claude Mydorge, whom Charles Cavendish had met in France at least 15 years earlier.

[12][6] In France Newcastle met and married that year Margaret Lucas who was with the exiled court of Queen Henrietta Maria.

Besides Hobbes, who joined them in Paris, the Cavendishes knew at this period René Descartes, Kenelm Digby, and Christiaan Huygens.

[18] But possibly Hobbes had met Mansfield (as he then was) by 1627, on a tour of the Peak District, according to surviving poems (his own and by Richard Andrews), as related by Noel Malcolm.

[20] A manuscript work from the Cavendish group of this period, the so-called Short Tract on First Principles, is considered by Malcolm to be by Payne though very much influenced by the issues Hobbes was addressing at the time, and his approach.