Today in History—January 13: The King, the Gold, the Kingdom in Revolt

“That none from henceforth shall use to multiply gold or silver, nor use the craft of multiplication; and if any the same do…that he incur the pain of felony in this case.”

On this day in 1404 King Henry IV of England outlawed alchemy. The Act Against Multipliers made it a felony to practice transmutation—the act of changing base metals like lead into gold.

In modern terms: 622 years ago a king banned chemistry to keep anyone from getting richer than he was.

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Alchemy was an ancient system built on the belief that all matter consisted of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. We know now that it’s a lot more complicated than that, but at the time it was believed that if you combined these elements in the correct—and as yet unknown—order, you could make anything. Even gold.

In Henry’s defense, he had reason to be jumpy. He seized the crown from his cousin, Richard II, five years before, after Richard (unsuccessfully) tried to exile him. The years that followed were a blur of uprisings, border challenges, and foreign pressure. From Wales to York and from the Scots to the French, rebellions popped up so often that the map of England began to look like a game of whack-a-mole.

Now, Henry feared that someone might be able to make gold and devalue the treasury. Or worse, bankroll one of his challengers. That, at least, was something he thought he could control.

In the end, it wasn’t gold that felled Henry—it was his health. He was stricken with, well, something, in 1405. Historians are still debating the diagnosis, suggesting everything from stroke to psoriasis to syphilis. The king missed so many sessions of Parliament in 1406—it couldn’t proceed without him, since it was called to finance his military expenditures—that it became referred to as the Long Parliament.

Alchemy never achieved its mystic promise, but it didn’t disappear with the ban. Instead, it evolved: Isaac Newton believed in it. Robert Boyle—the founder of chemistry—practiced it too. Alchemy boiled down to studying how things interact with other things. What began as mythical transmutation slowly became systematic experimentation.

The act was repealed in 1688. No one ever turned lead into gold. But they did invent modern science.

Famous Birthdays

1381: St. Colette—Roman Catholic abbess

1827: Ethel Lynn Beers—American poet

1616: Antoinette Bourignon—French mystic

1970: Shonda Rhimes—American TV writer and producer