John Aubrey: My Own Life (13 page)

. . .

27 May

On this day Parliament passed an Ordinance enabling the Committee for the University of Oxford to send for convicted malignants and to destroy superstitious relics.

. . .

June

My good friend William Radford has been removed from his Fellowship at Trinity by the Parliamentarian Visitors.

. . .

John Wilkins, whose father was an Oxford goldsmith, has been made Warden of Wadham College by the Parliamentarian Visitors.

. . .

The south front
³¹
of Wilton House has burnt down while the rooms were being aired. Philip, Earl of Pembroke, will rebuild it, from designs by Mr John Webb, who is married to Inigo Jones’s niece. Mr Inigo Jones is now too old to come himself to Wilton.

. . .

At Morecomb-bottome
³²
, in the parish of Broad Chalke, on the north side of the river, it has been observed time out of mind that when the water breaks out there, it foretells a dear year of corn. It has happened again this year.

. . .

The walls of the church
³³
at Broad Chalke, and of the buttery at the farm there, shoot out nitre and a beautiful red, it is lighter than scarlet, an oriental horseflesh colour.

. . .

The River Thames
³⁴
runs through Wiltshire on its journey to Oxford. The source of the river is in Gloucestershire, near Cubberley, where there are several springs. Through Wiltshire it visits Cricklade, a market town, and gives its name to Isey, a nearby village, where its overflowings make a most glorious verdure in the spring season.

. . .

Clay abounds in Wiltshire
³⁵
and particularly about Malmesbury, Kington St Michael, Allington, Easton Pierse, Draycot Cerne, Yatton Keynell, Minty and Bradon Forest. At Minty, and at a place called Woburn, in the parish of Hankerton, there is the very good absorbent clay called fuller’s earth. Last week I took up a handful of the fuller’s earth at Minty Common, at the place called the Gogges: it was as black as black polished marble; but, having carried it in my pocket five or six days, I find it has become grey.

I believe the name
³⁶
Malmesbury comes from Malme, which signifies mud or clay. Some say it comes from the name of the first religious man who settled here – Maidulf – hence Maidulphi Urbs, that is Maidulph’s City, but such an etymology seems forced to me. This is a place of mud.

. . .

December

Since Christmas Eve, my father has been dangerously ill. My mother is more anxious than ever. In these empty days it is a relief to get out of the house to hunt with friends who live close by: Lord Charles Seymour and Colonel John Penruddock, who was at Blandford School six or seven years before me. Two of John’s younger brothers have been killed fighting for the King, and his father, Sir John Penruddock, like mine, is ill.

. . .

We set off with the hounds
³⁷
this morning from the Grey Wethers, which are stones as hard as or harder than marble that lie scattered across the Downs around Marlborough. In some places these stones are sown so thick that travellers in the twilight at a distance take them for flocks of sheep (wethers): hence their name. We headed north through countryside I do not know and it seemed to me we were passing through the place where the Giants fought with great stones against the Gods as described by Hesiod. Then, to my astonishment, we came upon megaliths in a village called Avebury to rival the ones I have known since childhood at Stonehenge. I had not previously heard of these Avebury stones, so when the sight of them burst upon me I reined back my horse and dismounted in wonder. The rest of the hunt passed on, but I stayed marvelling at the bank and ditch and strange stone circles. I tried to picture how they must have looked in olden times. I think Druids erected the circles, and they were complete long ago. I was lost to the present, until suddenly I heard the hounds again and hastened off to overtake them. We rode on to Kennett where there was a good dinner. I will return to draw those stones. It seems to me that Avebury excels Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church.

. . .

Anno 1649

Epiphany

On this day, at last
³⁸
, I met Francis Potter. He is the brother of Hannibal, who was our president at Trinity until the Parliamentarian Visitors ejected him recently, and the author of
An Interpretation of the Number 666
. Francis is like a monk, quite long-faced, with clear pale skin and grey eyes. He was at Trinity when I first went to Oxford, together with his brother, but we never met. Since then, he has succeeded his father as parson of Kilmington in Somerset. Like me, he was much given to drawing and painting when a boy, and of a very tender constitution in his younger years. He says that when he was beginning to be sick, he would breathe strongly to emit the noxious vapours.

Mr Potter says that the idea of moving blood from one body to another came to him ten years ago from reading Ovid. He is haunted by the barbarous Medea, mixing her witch’s brew: roots, juices, flowers, seeds, stones, the screech owl’s flesh and its ill-boding wings. He sees her, hair all unbound and blown about as she dances round, throwing more ingredients into the gruesome mix: the head of an old crow, the scaly skins of small snakes. Medea slit her lover’s father’s throat. She drained the blood of old Aeson and replaced it with her youth-giving medicine. Aeson’s hair turned black again, colour came to his cheeks, his flesh plumped up behind his skin and his wrinkles disappeared.

Mr Potter says he will try moving blood between chickens. He is brooding on the quills or tubes that might allow the transfer from one bird to another to take place. He intends to make a little bag, perhaps from the craw of a pullet, to catch the blood when it comes down the tube, and hold it there until it can be transfused into another bird. He is wondering how it might be possible to fix the quill to the bag so it will not let the blood seep out and spoil the experiment. I have promised to help him.

Mr Potter does many experiments. He showed me bees’ thighs under a microscope. He gave me a copper quadrant and a silver one, and showed me that the best way of making an arch is with a parabola and chain. This he demonstrated by taking the girdle from his cassock and holding it against a wall. He has a pretty square garden with the finest box-hedges I have ever seen. They are planted on a mount at the centre of the garden, and cut to look like fortifications, with high pillars of box standing out, looking very stately both summer and winter. It troubles me that a man of Mr Potter’s gifts should lie mouldering away in a place like Kilmington, where he has no one to discuss his ideas with. He is like an old carrying pail growing moss in an orchard. Mr Hobbes has often said to me that such isolation is a great setback, even to the deepest-thinking of men.

. . .

These are the peaks
³⁹
in Wiltshire: Clay-hill, near Warminster; the Castle-hill at Mere, and Knoll-hill, near Kilmington, which is half in Wiltshire, and half in Somersetshire; all of them seem to have been raised (like great blisters) by earthquakes. Mr Potter takes great delight in Knoll-hill. We climbed it together today. It gives an admirable prospect every way; and from the summit you can see the Fosse Way between Cirencester and Gloucester, which is forty miles away. And you can see the Isle of Wight, Salisbury steeple, the Severn Sea, etc. It would make an admirable station for someone intending to draft a geographical description of Wiltshire or Somerset.

. . .

Mr Potter tells me stories
⁴⁰
of his great Trinity friend Sir Henry Blount, who travelled to the Levant. Sir Henry was pretty wild when young and especially addicted to common wenches. He appears in Henry Nevill’s satirical pamphlet,
The Parliament of Ladies
(1647), responsible for spreading the dangerous doctrine that it is far cheaper and safer to lie with common wenches than with ladies of quality. He is gentleman pensioner to the King and was with him at the Battle of Edgehill, and afterwards in Oxford. When he returned to London, he walked into Westminster Hall with his sword by his side. The Parliamentarians all stared at him; they knew he was a Cavalier who had fought with the King. He was called before the House of Commons, where he insisted he was only doing his duty, so they acquitted him.

. . .

January

The trial of the King has ended and his fate is decided. The court has decreed: ‘That the King, for the crimes contained in the charge, should be carried back to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of execution, where his head should be severed from his body.’ My kinsman Sir John Danvers has been serving on the committee that tried the King and will now be one of those that signs the death warrant.

Mr Emanuel Decretz
⁴¹
, Serjeant Painter to the King, tells me that the bed of state erected in Westminster Abbey for the King’s father’s funeral was designed by Inigo Jones from plaster of Paris and white calico: it was very handsome and cheap, showing as well as if the caryatids which bore up the canopy had been cut from white marble. The present King must expect a lesser funeral.

. . .

30 January

On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid. The executioner was masked, so no one could tell his name.

On the scaffold, the King declared: ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ It is said that James Harrington and Thomas Herbert were with him on the platform and that before he died, the King gave them watches. And it is said that while he was a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle, and on the eve of his execution, the King recited Pamela’s Prayer from Sir Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia
: ‘Look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance unto me.’

I read these lines in the library at Wilton. I walked on the terrace there, when I was a boy, hoping to see the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney or his sister Mary. The world since then is changed utterly. His Majesty loved Wilton above all places; now he is dispatched to a place outside of time. We who remain behind must weather the disturbance of the world. The King is dead.

PART IV

Learning

Anno 1649, Broad Chalke

January

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY,
it was held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning, and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers. Even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye and it was once held a sin to scrutinise the ways of nature.

In our present times
¹
I know many who are concerned with the advancement of learning. At Oxford there is a new club for the pursuit of experimental philosophy estabished by Mr John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College. My honoured friend Mr John Lydall has promised he will write to me about their experiments and discoveries. In this way I hope to follow their progress even though I am not in Oxford.

. . .

Since the Parliamentarian Visitation
²
of Oxford, and the replacement of many Fellows, the mathematician John Wallis has been made Savilian Professor of Geometry. It was he who deciphered the King’s letters after they were seized at the Battle of Naseby. Soon afterwards they were printed as a book,
The King’s Cabinet Opened
.

. . .

At Hullavington
³
there has been a strange wind, which not only flattened the corn and grass as though a huge roller had been drawn over them, but also flattened the quickset hedges in two or three fields. It was a hurricane.

. . .

Old good-wife
⁴
Dew of Broad Chalke has died, aged 103. She told me she was, I think, sixteen years old when King Edward VI was in this county, and that he lost his courtiers, or rather, his courtiers lost him, out hunting, and found him again in Falston Lane.

. . .

7 February

I attended the baptism
⁵
of my godson, John Sloper. His father is vicar of Broad Chalke.

. . .

17 March

On this day Parliament abolished kingship.

It is rumoured
⁶
that Parliament intends to purge Oxford again. No favours will be granted to those who refuse to recognise Parliament’s authority. They will be removed from their positions in the University.