John Aubrey: My Own Life (17 page)

. . .

14 December

Today I attended Mr Selden’s funeral. He was magnificently buried in the Temple Church. All the Parliament men, the benchers and great officers, were invited to attend. All the judges were in mourning and an abundance of persons of quality.

Mr Hobbes told me that when Mr Selden was close to death, the minister, Mr Richard Johnson, Master of the Temple, attempted to see him. Mr Hobbes happened to be there and said, ‘What, will you that have wrote like a man, now die like a woman?’ So the minister was not let in.

My sadler, who has known the family a long time, tells me that in his lifetime Mr Selden got more by his prick than his practice (since he married the widow of the Earl of Kent and failed to distinguish himself at the Bar). He was wont to say: ‘I’ll keep myself warm and moist as long as I live; for I shall be cold and dry when I am dead.’

In his funeral oration today, Mr Richard Johnson quoted the saying: ‘When a learned man dies, there dies a great deal of learning with him . . . If learning could have kept a man alive, our brother would not have died.’

Mr Selden meant
⁶²
to leave his books to the University of Oxford, but has not done so because recently he was disobliged by their refusal to lend him a manuscript. I do not know what will happen to the books now.

. . .

Anno 1655

January

Mr Hobbes’s
De Corpore
⁶³
is being printed. In it he argues that there are two parts of philosophy, natural and civil, concerned with two kinds of bodies, very different from one another.

. . .

22 January

On this day Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, dissolved the Parliament.

. . .

February

Meredith Lloyd, chemist, lawyer and antiquary, is living near me at the girdler’s shop under the King’s Head Tavern in Fleet Street. He has collected much information about Celtic languages and Welsh monuments.

. . .

I visited Mr Hartlib and told him that I am trying to write the life of Lord Bacon.

. . .

I have been to visit Mr John Hales at Eton. He was ejected from his Fellowship at Eton College five years ago, after refusing to swear the oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth. Since my Trinity friends went to see him in 1647, he has had to sell his library to maintain himself. He has kept only a few books for his private use, to wind up his last days withal.

Mr Hales is a pretty little man
⁶⁴
, sanguine, of cheerful countenance, very gentle and courteous. He received me with much humanity. He was wearing a violet-coloured cloth gown with buttons and loops and reading Thomas à Kempis. He is living now with a widow, Mrs Powney (I wish I had her Christian name), in her handsome dark old-fashioned house in Eton opposite the churchyard, next to the Christopher Inn. In the hall, after the old fashion, above the wainscot, there is painted cloth with godly sentences out of the Psalms, according to the pious customs of old times.

Mrs Powney was much against the sale of Mr Hales’s books (which the bookseller Cornelius Bee bought for less than a third of their value) because she knew the library was his life and joy. She is a very good woman and a grateful spirit. Mr Hales helped set her and her husband up in the world when they were first married, so now she is helping him. She is primitively good and deserves to be remembered.

. . .

Slough, near Eton
⁶⁵
, is a very dirty place, and such a dirty place we call a slough, which is a Welsh word.

. . .

14 April

My honoured kinsman Sir John Danvers died at Chelsea today, aged seventy. He will be buried at Dauntsey.

. . .

I have learnt that my friend from student days, Ned Wood, has died of consumption. He was only twenty-eight.

. . .

Mr Inigo Jones’s theories on the origins of Stonehenge have been posthumously published by his assistant Mr John Webb, but the monument has been framed to fit Mr Jones’s hypothesis that it was a Roman temple. I do not think the evidence of the stones supports his argument.

I find it strange
⁶⁶
that Mr Camden in his
Britannia
does not notice that the stones at Stonehenge are Grey Wethers and come from a pit no more than fourteen miles away, where there are thousands of such stones to be drawn out of the earth. Some stones, not big enough for use at Stonehenge or Avebury, still lie on the brink of the pit.

I know Avebury well now because my honoured friend Sir James Long of Draycot spends a week or two every autumn hawking there, and sometimes I have had the happiness to accompany him.

The downs surrounding Avebury
⁶⁷
are romantic country: the prospects noble and vast. They are well stocked with flocks of sheep; the turf is rich and fragrant with thyme and basil; and the nut-brown shepherdesses are worthy of attention too. We have had good sport there. Yet the flight of the falcon was a mere parenthesis to Sir James’s witty discourse: the muses accompany him, along with his hawks and spaniels.

Ever since I came upon
⁶⁸
Avebury for the first time, in the empty days after Christmas 1648, when I was out hunting with Colonel John Penruddock, I have longed to understand better what those stones meant in their own time.

. . .

I asked Dr Harvey
⁶⁹
how flints are generated. He told me that the black of the flint is a natural vitrification of chalk, and added that flint is an excellent medicine for gallstones and the green sickness. In the stone-brash country of north Wiltshire, flints are very rare and only little ones can be found.

Dr Harvey’s brother
⁷⁰
Eliab has bought Cockaine House, and this is where the doctor now lives and contemplates. He tells me he delights to be in the dark, where he can think best. Once he had a house at Combe in Surrey, with good air and prospects, where he had caves made in the earth, in which he delighted to meditate in summer.

During our late wars, after the arrest of the King, Dr Harvey’s rooms were plundered and he lost many of his papers and unpublished manuscripts, which he had worked on for years, trying to understand the generation of insects. He says this loss is the greatest crucifixion he has experienced in his life. It seems nothing can be done to recover those papers.

Dr Harvey tells me
⁷¹
that after his book on the circulation of the blood,
De Motu Cordis
, came out in 1628, his medical practice declined mightily, since the vulgar thought him crack-brained and all the physicians were against him and envied him. Many wrote against him, but after about twenty or thirty years his doctrine was received in all the universities of the world. In his book
De Corpore
, Mr Hobbes says that Dr Harvey is perhaps the only man ‘that ever lived to see his own doctrine established in his lifetime’.

I have seen Dr Harvey
⁷²
ride on horseback to visit his patients, his man following on foot.

. . .

16 May

On this day Colonel Penruddock was beheaded at Exeter for leading an uprising against the Protectorate, which started out in Salisbury and headed west through Blandford and Yeovil proclaiming Prince Charles king. The Parliament’s new-modelled army defeated Colonel Penruddock and his followers at South Molton in Devon. He was tried before Serjeant Glynne and condemned to death.

. . .

June

I had a fall
⁷³
at Epsom, and have broken one of my ribs. I fear it might cause an impostumation. I went there to evaporate water from the Epsom Spring, intending to analyse its mineral content.

The mineral waters at Epsom, Bath, Tonbridge and other places are of great importance for medical cures. If it were possible to discover more waters of this kind, that would be a great benefit to others and a financial benefit to myself.

. . .

I have evaporated water
⁷⁴
from Holy-well, in the parish of Chippenham. I found two sorts of sediment, perhaps by reason of the oblique hanging of the kettle: one a deep soot colour, the other the colour of cullom earth. The colour did not change when I infused powder of galles. I will try it with syrup of violets.

. . .

Hancock’s well
⁷⁵
at Luckington is so extremely cold that in summer one cannot endure one’s hand in it. It does much good to the eyes. It cures the itch, etc. By precipitation it yields a white sediment, inclining to yellow, like a kind of fine flour. I believe the water is much impregnated with nitre. In the lane that leads from there to Sapperton, the earth is very nitrous.

. . .

November

I have received
⁷⁶
Dr Harvey’s bill for my purge to prevent an impostumation. This bill, and the recipe he sent me back in April 1653, is in his own handwriting, so I will preserve them both.

. . .

December

My friend Lord Nicholas Tufton
⁷⁷
has been imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of plotting against Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector.

. . .

I visited Sherborne House
⁷⁸
, Mrs Sadler’s great house in Salisbury Close. The pitched causeway in the court was so neglected in the late troubles that it became overgrown and lost below weeds. Recently they intended to pave it, but discovered the old pavement when they dug down deep enough.

Mrs Sadler’s niece Katherine Ryves lives with her in the great house. She would be a most eligible wife.

. . .

Anno 1656

January

As I requested, my honoured friend Mr Lydall has bought twelve apple and four pear trees for me from the Oxford gardener Ralph Austen, at 12d a piece. Now they must be brought to Easton Pierse and planted. Mr Austen has provided a list of the names of the trees and some directions on how they should be ordered. The courier told Mr Lydall he would not take them until next week, when he promises to get something in which they can be transported without harm.

Mr Lydall tells me
⁷⁹
that Mr Hobbes’s
Elements of Philosophy
has been printed, and he will send me a copy.

. . .

I have been visiting
⁸⁰
my great friend Sir James Long, of Draycot Cerne, and his wife Dorothy – a most elegant beauty and wit – daughter to Sir Edmund Leech. Her ladyship has in her possession some copies of unpublished poems by Edmund Waller. She lent the originals to the Duchess of Beaufort before their friendship was broken. Mr Waller has no copies. Among these unpublished poems is one ‘On the Lady Isabella Cutting Trees in Paper’:

Fair hand! That can on virgin paper write,

Yet from the stain of ink preserve it white;

Whose travel o’er that silver field does show

Like track of leverets in morning snow.

Love’s image thus in purest minds is wrought,

Without a spot or blemish to the thought.

Strange that your fingers should the pencil foil,

Without the help of colours or of oil!

For though a painter boughs and leaves can make,

’Tis you alone can make them bend and shake;

Whose breath salutes your new-created grove,

Like southern winds and makes it gently move.

Orpheus could make the forest dance, but you

Can make the motion and the forest too.

I remember hearing Lady Isabella playing the lute in Trinity College gardens when I was a student. How beautiful she was!

Here at Draycot
⁸¹
is a great deal of vitriol ore. Petrified periwinkles and also belemnites are frequently found in the ground. The water in the wells is vitriolate, and with powder of galles it turns a purple colour. It is not good for tucking or fulling mills because it tinges the cloth a little yellowish.

I have taken careful note of the coats of arms in the windows at Draycot House. The Longs were anciently Lords Lieutenant of Braden Forest and one was Chief Justice in Eire.

. . .

I have recommended Dr Willis’s treatise
De Fermentatione
(printed this year) to Mr Hartlib, most highly. I went to see him at his house where he is confined now by kidney stones. His eyesight is failing too.

. . .

I have acquired a copy of Laurus’s
Antiquae Urbis (Romae) Splendor
(1612), and inserted my bookplate into it.