The establishment of Newtonian natural philosophy as the foundation of undergraduate studies at Cambridge had owed much to the conviction of Newton's early clerical disciples that his system of natural philosophy was an invaluable ally to the cause of Christian apologetics. Cambridge, then, had been particularly important in fostering the ‘holy alliance’ between Anglicanism and Newtonianism which had been one of the characteristics of the Hanoverian Church and which had helped to diminish the accusation of clerical obscurantism which was so marked a feature of the French Enlightenment. As Cannon writes: ‘how different the English Enlightenment was from the French. Sheltered under Newton's great name, science and religion had developed a firm alliance in England symbolized by that very British person, the scientific parson of the Anglican Church’ (S. F. Cannon, 1978: 2).

Yet once Newtonian natural philosophy became securely established in the university's curriculum these apologetical motives were increasingly forgotten. As so often with institutions, a new impulse is gradually translated into established routines which only faintly bear the imprint of the intentions of the reformers. In Cambridge's case the Newtonian heritage was, by the late eighteenth century, increasingly narrowed to those aspects which could be most conveniently combined with the university's pedagogical processes which were increasingly shaped by the Senate House examination (after 1824 known as the mathematical tripos).