Collected Essays (27 page)

Miss Lane is careful to give only such details of the Plot and the trials as come directly within the scope of her subject. She does not concern herself, for example, in any detail with the unsolved murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a wise austerity perhaps in a book so long and necessarily so unrelieved in its horror. Her judgement of Charles II is admirably balanced and her condemnation brief and pointed. Of Oates’s final trial she writes: ‘King James left Oates to the Law, which was precisely what King Charles had done in the case of Oates’s victims; but whereas Charles knew those victims to be innocent, James was convinced that Oates was guilty.’ We prefer this final sentence on the King to the sentimental championship of Mr Arthur Bryant: ‘Alone, vilified, driven on every side, Charles remained calm and patient, etc.’ The King, it is true, was fighting for the survival of the House of Stuart, but those innocent men, cut down from the gallows while still alive to be drawn and quartered, may well have wondered whether the price the King paid was not too vicarious. ‘Let the blood lie on them that condemned them,’ Charles is reported to have said, ‘for God knows I sign with tears in my eyes’, but even if an appeal is made to God, responsibility cannot be so easily shifted and tears are more becoming after a crime than at the moment of commission. Perhaps this was the chief horror in the career of Oates, the corruption he exercised through fear. If he had had one redeeming quality, physical or mental, if he had charmed as some dictators have done with
bonhomie
or inspired confidence with false oratory, the corruption would have seemed less extreme, but fear was his only weapon, and Charles II joins the poor ex-schoolmaster William Smith as one of those on whose cowardice Oates found he could rely.

1949

ANTHONY À WOOD

W
HEN
Anthony à Wood, the Oxford antiquarian, died in 1695 and left his books, manuscripts and pamphlets to the Ashmolean Museum, a colleague wrote: ‘This benefaction will not perhaps be so much valued by the University as it ought to be because it comes from Anthony Wood.’ He was the best-hated man in the University; he was malicious, he was dangerous because he had a power over words; he noted everything. They burnt his great book,
Athenae Oxoniensis
, and he recorded the event in his diary with a venomous certainty of posterity’s judgement. In five volumes, published forty years ago by Dr Andrew Clark, the Oxford of his day stands pricked in acid.

There is Mr Smith, of University College, whose lecture in the Theatre was attended by two thousand people. ‘Mr Smith was very baudy among the women: he had a grand auditory, while some lecturers had none – so you may see what governs the world’; he hears certain ‘bachelors’ and masters (he never fails to give names) ‘uttering fluently romantick nonsense, unintelligible gibberish, flourishing lyes and nonsense’; he dines with his brother Kit – ‘cold meat, cold entertainment, cold reception, cold clownish woman’: he writes of poor John Aubrey, and Aubrey’s most passionate defenders cannot deny the truth in the caricature: ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than erased’; the Court comes and goes again: ‘rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, carelesse’. Mr Peter Allan, of Christ Church, ‘with his pupill Lord Shandoes and Mr Jeanson (who the Sunday before preached at St Giles) with Sir Willoughby D’ews’ are eternalized in his diary in the act of entering a bawdy house in Mew Inn Lane. The great Doctor Fell does not escape the pen which notes also ‘a calf with a face like a man’ exhibited at the ‘Golden Lion’, the rotting bones on a gibbet on Shotover, a brass here, a natural phenomenon there.

The Oxford scholars tried to turn the tables. ‘They pretended he had a bastard at Headington, they made him angry by accusing him of keeping drunken company; in the days of the Popish Plot they spread the rumour that he was a papist: ‘a man that is studious and reserved is popishly affected’; but not one of them left a record to supersede his. William Prideaux’s letters to John Ellis confirm Wood’s picture of seventeenth-century Oxford; there is nothing quainter in Wood than Prideaux’s description of Doctor Fell making a surprise visit to the Clarendon Press and finding it secretly employed in printing an edition of Aretine for ‘the gentlemen of All Souls’; of Bodley’s Librarian nearly beaten to death by his wife, ‘an old whore’; of the Vice-Chancellor’s undergraduates ‘bubbeing’ at the ‘Split Crow’ with his approval.

Anthony Wood is not concerned only with local history. The Oxford of the Great Western Railway is more remote from political life than the Oxford which could just be reached in a day by a fast coach from London. It was the birth-place of several of Charles’s bastards, the scene of the most dramatic Parliamentary dissolution of his reign; and James II, too, presented himself as closely as Doctor Fell to Wood’s careful, malicious eyes: ‘Afterwards the King, with a scarlet coat on, his blew ribbon and Georg, and a star on his left papp, with an old French course hat on edged with a little seem of lace (all not worth a groat as some of the people shouted).’ But a certain distance from London had its advantages, and during the terror of the Popish Plot Wood’s study of character and familiarity with slander kept him from running with the crowd. In 1679 he confided to his diary – he would not have been rash enough to have told it abroad – a story of Oates and Bedlow which ended with the words, ‘So the King’s worthy evidence sneaked away.’

1932

JOHN EVELYN

I
F
it were necessary to play at the Shakespeare-Bacon game with the seventeenth century, and having lost the sources of all its lyrics arbitrarily to choose the authors from those men whose careers are still remembered,
The Garden
might easily be assigned to John Evelyn, the author of
Sylva
, rather than to Marvell, the rough satirist, the bishop baiter, the M.P. for Hull. For Evelyn lived very much the life to which Marvell’s poetry is an escape.

well described his life at Sayes Court; and Lord Ponsonby,
*4
with his unerring eye for the interesting detail, speaks of Evelyn’s long list in
Kalendarium Hortense
of apples unknown today, of peaches and nectarines. But a wider gulf than ambition separated the two men. Evelyn, the scholar of gardens, a man so modest that, while he had the entry to the King’s presence and walked Whitehall familiarly with Charles, he petitioned for no office more important than the care of the trees in the Royal forests (and that he was not granted), differed from the poet above all in this: the garden was not his escape from life (an escape which very faintly tinges Marvell’s poetry with sentimentality), but life itself.

Marvell wrote, but to the owner of Sayes Court his garden meant a great deal more, or a great deal less, than quiet and innocence. It meant study (he was the translator of
The French Gardener
in his youth, of
The Complete Gardener
in his age). It meant labour:

The hithermost Grove I planted about 1656; the other beyond it, 1660; the lower Grove 1662; the holly hedge even with the Mount hedge below 1670. I planted every hedge and tree not only in the gardens, groves, &c., but about all the fields and house since 1653, except those large, old and hollow elms in the stable court and next the sewer, for it was before, all one pasture field to the very garden of the house, which was but small.

It meant the arid grief of work wasted when Admiral Benbow, to whom Evelyn had let Sayes Court, relet it to Peter the Great, who spoilt the bowling green, demolished fruit trees, and had himself driven daily in a wheelbarrow through the great holly hedge that Evelyn loved. It seems to have been the image by which he could visualize immortality: at his birthplace, at Wotton, to which he returned to live in his old age, he began to labour again: ‘I am planting an evergreen grove here to an old house ready to drop.’ It was certainly his most enduring passion. ‘The late elegant and accomplished Sir W. Temple, tho’ he laid not his whole body in this garden, deposited the better part of it (the heart) there; and if my executors will gratify me in what I have desired, I wish my corpse may be interred as I have bespoke them.’ But this man of few wants seldom had them gratified, and he was buried within the church. Lord Ponsonby speaks of ‘the darkness, the locked door, and the iron railings’.

Evelyn had not Pepys’s power of transmitting himself to posterity. He is himself the least character in his own diary; and his knowledge of other men was no more penetrating than his knowledge of himself. He worked hard on a multiplicity of committees, but these were to him as much an escape from real life as the garden was to Marvell. One imagines him selfless, innocent, taken advantage of. He had no instinctive knowlege of psychology; he believed implicitly in the high moral worth of Lady Sunderland, because she kept her garden in good order; he was puzzled by her husband’s inconsistencies, rather than distressed by his treacheries. Though he was not deceived in the goodness of Margaret Godolphin, his life of her shows no perception of character. She is Virtue as the Court is Sin, she is Alabaster as it is Clay.

No man, indeed, could be less judged by his friendships, but in that strange company, which included Jeremy Taylor, as well as Lady Sunderland, I wish that Lord Ponsonby had found room for William Oughtred, the mathematician, who, according to Aubrey, came very near to discovering the philosopher’s stone, and who died with joy at the Restoration. For Evelyn, who had successfully avoided the slaughterings of civil war, came near to killing his friend, when a grotto in the gardens he had designed at Albury collapsed.

His lack of psychological penetration prevented Evelyn from being a good diarist. His merits as a writer showed themselves when he wrote as a specialist, and he was a specialist not only on gardens, but on salads, on coins, on sculpture, on Spinoza, on navigation. I confess that I have to take Lord Ponsonby’s word for the value of his great work,
Sylva.
But the same meticulous detail (‘Whenever you sow, if you prevent not the little field mouse, he will be sure to have the better share’), can be seen in
Fumifugium
with its plan for a green belt round London planted with sweet smelling flowers and herbs. His style is peppered with pedantries, but there is a kind of Baconian beauty in the accumulation of detail, and a touch all Evelyn’s own in the sudden lyrical quickening, the sudden widening of his horizon, as a memory of his early travels comes back on him.

I propose . . . That these
Palisads
be elegantly planted, diligently kept and supply’d with such
Shrubs
, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous
Flowers
, and are aptest to tinge the
Aer
upon every gentle emission at a great distance: Such as are (for instance amongst many others) the
Sweet-brier
, all the
Periclymenas
and
Woodbinds
; the Common
white
and
yellow Jessamine
, both the
Syringas
or
Pipe trees;
the
Guelder-rose
, the
Music
and all other
Roses; Genista Hispanica:
To these may be added the
Rubus odoratus, Bayes, Juniper, Lignum-vitae, Lavender:
but above all,
Rosemary
, the
Flowers
whereof are credibly reported to give their scent above thirty Leagues off at Sea, upon the coasts of Spain: and at some distance towards the meadow side,
Vines, yea, Hops.

The seventeenth century has been lucky lately in its biographers; Lord Ponsonby’s
Evelyn
has followed hard on the heels of Mr Bryant’s
Pepys;
it is not Lord Ponsonby’s fault that he cannot lay claim to finality in his study. Mr Bryant had at his disposal the complete diary, and all the papers collected by Tanner and Wheatley. But Evelyn’s diary remains to-day in great part unpublished, and Lord Ponsonby was denied access to the manuscripts at Wotton, and was even refused permission to see the house and grounds. All the more praise is due to him for a biography which certainly ranks as high as Mr Bryant’s. There is no nonsense about Lord Ponsonby’s work, no trying flowers of fancy, and the character of Evelyn emerges, the more clearly for his biographer’s restraint, in its slight conceit, its rather silly pedantry (‘You will consult,’ Evelyn wrote to Pepys, when the latter was contemplating his history of the navy, ‘Fulvius Ursinus, Goltzius, Monsieur St Amant, Otto, Dr Spon, Vaillant, Dr Patin and the most learned Spankemius’), in its essential goodness.

1934

BACKGROUND FOR HEROES

‘H
E
drank a little tea and some sherry. He wound up his watch, and said, now he had done with time and was going to eternity.’ So Burnet on Lord William Russell’s last hour. History may no longer consist of the biographies of great men, but perhaps our deepest pleasure in Miss Thomson’s analysis
*5
of the account books belonging to the Bedford household at Woburn remains in our awareness that this is the way of life of a familiar hero, the life he set a period to with the winding of his watch. William, the fifth earl, with whose domestic economy this book chiefly deals, was happy in having no history, but there is an extra-special interest in the fact that his heir, William Russell, was brought up among these surroundings, the huge house of ninety rooms, including the little artificial grotto with the gilt chairs and the Bedford arms among the shells and stalagmites; that he read in this library so ponderously stocked with the works of Baxter (not one play, not a single volume of even sacred poetry), took his impress even from the gardens designed and stocked (the details are here) by the beloved John Field, was fed and clothed out of the family bank, the great chest in Bedford House made in the Netherlands ‘painted in the characteristic Dutch fashion, squares showing prim landscapes and flowers, roses and tulips’.