John Aubrey: My Own Life (24 page)

. . .

Anno 1666

I am at Seend. I came here for the revel and to wait on Joan Sumner, hoping for marriage: our alliance will bring me the money I need to rescue my finances and her family will be glad of a connection to mine. Meanwhile, I have discovered chalybeate waters in her brother’s well: heavily impregnated with iron ore, and potentially of great medicinal value (more so, I suspect, even than the waters at Bath, which is only about ten miles away).

I discovered the waters
²⁶
when I was taking the air this afternoon, around 3 p.m. It had been raining all morning, until about 12 or 1 o’clock, so the sand had been washed away from the ore. By 3 p.m. the sun was out and I was surprised to see so many spangles in the light reflected by the clean ore. I examined some of the stones and went to talk to the smith in the town (George Newton), an ingenious man and clock-maker, who tells me he has melted some of this ore in his forge.

I sent my servant
²⁷
Robert Wiseman to Devizes for some powder of galles and when I infused a little in the ore-rich water, it immediately became as black as ink – so black that I could write visible letters with it. I have also tried evaporating it and it yields a sediment that is umber-like.

I have instructed my servant, ingenious Robert Wiseman, to try water from all the wells in the village with powder of galles.

. . .

Joan told me the story today of a poor pregnant woman who drowned herself in the River Avon. The body was brought into the church at Sutton Benger, where Joan saw it and noticed it seemed to be producing a cold sweat. She wiped the sweat away several times and pressed to have the body cut open to find out if the child was still alive inside.

. . .

Joan has given me a recipe to stop dogs barking which, she tells me, thieves used to use. It involves mixing boar’s fat and cumin seeds in a horn.

. . .

March

I am at Easton Pierse. I have finished transcribing Mr Pell’s
Idea of Mathematics
and will send it to Mr Boyle, who has been waiting for it. I have been so long perplexed with the unpleasant affairs of this earthen world that I have not been able to give as much time as I would like to the life of the mind. Mr Boyle has been expecting discoveries and fine things from me, but for now he will be sorely disappointed.

In about a month
²⁸
, I hope to send him observations of my mysterious Turkey, or turquoise, ring, along with some other rustic observations I have been collecting. My collections are various. I do not disdain to learn from ignorant old women.

. . .

Meetings of the Royal Society at Gresham College had ceased until recently on account of the plague sweeping over London, but they have been resumed.

. . .

April

I have taken out a licence at Salisbury for my marriage to Joan.

. . .

Mr Faithorne is drawing my portrait in graphite and chalk. I cannot say if it makes me look younger than my forty years, but my clothes at least are elegant.

. . .

My good friend and fellow antiquary Mr Elias Ashmole has at last finished cataloguing the Bodleian Library’s collection of Roman coins – a very laborious task, which he began in 1658 at the request of the Bodleian librarian Mr Thomas Barlowe.

. . .

I have shown
²⁹
my mysterious ring to Mr Boyle and told him how I have observed over many months that the cloudy spots in the stone move very slowly from one side to the other. He asked if he could borrow the ring so he can observe it himself. I readily assented. A young man in his employment will make careful drawings of the spots in the ring every two or three weeks. Afterwards it will be possible to compare the drawings and indisputably observe the motion of the spots. Mr Boyle says he has heard that a turquoise stone may lose its lustre upon the sickness or death of the person that wears it. He is reluctant to admit strange things as truth, but not forward in rejecting them as possibilities.

I promised Mr Boyle that I would make careful observations of another stone, an agate, which belongs to a friend of mine. The agate has a cloudy spot in it that seems to move from one side to another. Mr Boyle is collecting observations of this kind.

. . .

All my business and affairs are suddenly running kim kam! There are treacheries and enmities in abundance against me. Joan Sumner is now claiming that she never agreed to marry me. She complains that I have claimed to be richer than I am and accuses me of concealing the fact that there is a mortgage on my house at Easton Pierse. My mother and I had hoped to borrow 100 li. from her, but that will not be possible now, and who knows what worse will befall. Joan says she will pursue me through the courts. She imagines I have conspired to defraud her of her dowry. But I was willing to settle my beloved Easton Pierse on her and any sons we might have brought into the world. She was to bring 2,000 li. as her portion to the marriage. Our settlement was sealed and I sincerely expected our marriage to be solemnised soon after.

. . .

May

General Monck, now General at Sea, has set sail against the Dutch.

. . .

September

Fire has blazed in London for four days: the part of the city inside the old Roman wall is charred and ruined. Fortunately, the Great Conflagration did not reach Westminster or the King’s palace in Whitehall, but thousands of people have lost their homes. They roam the streets like beggars.

. . .

October

Mr Hobbes is disturbed
³⁰
because he has learnt that some of the bishops have moved in Parliament to have him burnt as a heretic. He tells me he has burnt some of his papers.

The Parliamentary Committee
³¹
is considering a ‘Bill against Atheism Prophaneness and Swearing’. It has been empowered to consider books that tend against the ‘Essence or Attributes of God’, and in particular Mr Hobbes’s
Leviathan
.

. . .

November

Following the Great Conflagration
³²
, the City of London must be rebuilt. Mr Hooke has been chosen as one of the two surveyors of the City. The other is the glass painter Mr John Oliver. Since the Guild Hall is in ruins from the fire, the city’s officials and clerks have moved to Gresham College. This means the Royal Society can no longer meet at Gresham College every Wednesday. We will meet instead at Arundel House in the Strand, the home of Lord Henry Howard.

. . .

At a meeting of the Royal Society, Mr Oldenburg, Lord Henry Howard and others reported on their visits to the ruins of St Paul’s to see the preserved body of Bishop Braybrook, the Bishop of London, who died in 1404. The Bishop’s body, like many others, has been disturbed by the Great Conflagration: when the roof of St Paul’s fell in, the lead coffins below fell through the floor and broke open. Workmen clearing the rubble have put the bodies in the Convocation House and are charging people twopence a person to view them. I will go myself.

. . .

I saw Bishop Braybrook’s body
³³
. It was like a preserved fish: uncorrupted except for the ears and pudenda, or genitals. It was dry and stiff and would stand on end. It was never embalmed. His belly and stomach were untouched, except for a hole on one side made by the falling debris. I could put my hand in the hole and could see his dried lungs.

I could not find Sir Philip Sidney’s body. It was buried somewhere without regard and his coffin sold for rubbish.

. . .

I spoke to some
³⁴
of the labourers clearing the rubbish in St Faith’s Church, which was ruined by the collapse of St Paul’s. They tell me that when they took up the leaden coffin of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whose sumptuous monument was among those tumbled into the church, the stink was so great that they took a week to scour themselves of it.

. . .

A little before
³⁵
the Great Conflagration, somebody made a hole in the lead coffin of Dean Colet, which lay above the ground beneath his statue. I remember my friend Mr Wylde and Ralph Greatrex, the mathematical instrument maker, decided to probe the Dean’s body through the hole with a piece of iron curtain rod that happened to be near by. They found the body lay in liquor, like boiled brawn. The liquor was clear and insipid: they both tasted it. Mr Wylde said it had something of the taste of iron, but that might have been on account of the iron rod. This was a strange and rare way of conserving a corpse. Perhaps it was a pickle, as for beef. There was no ill smell.

. . .

At a meeting of the Royal Society I volunteered to recommend the observation of tides to the Deputy Governor of Chepstow in Monmouthshire. The Society’s secretary will procure the printed papers with the relevant enquiries and tables. Sir Robert Moray then proposed that directions for seamen and enquiries about tides be separately printed, and the instruments mentioned in the printed papers be made available, at the Society’s expense. He hopes to obtain an order from the Duke of York to Trinity House, which has care of maintaining lighthouses and other aids to navigation in British waters, to ensure that the captain of every ship takes with him on his voyages a copy of this book, and makes observations accordingly and notes them down in a journal. Upon return, a copy of the captain’s journal should be given to Trinity House and to the Royal Society. The Fellows approved these proposals.

Mr Hoskyns then suggested that it would be a good idea to include in the printed book an instruction to the captain to fetch up different sorts of earth from the bottom of the sea. Mr Hooke is considering the design of an instrument that would be easy to use for this purpose.

Lord Henry Howard
³⁶
intends to bring before the Royal Society his account of the management of agriculture in Surrey and Berkshire.

. . .

14 November

I have been chosen
³⁷
by ballot (along with four other Fellows) to serve on the committee that examines and audits the Royal Society’s accounts. The others are Dr Christopher Merret, Mr William Harrington, Dr Walter Pope and Mr John King. We meet next Wednesday at Dr Pope’s lodgings before the next meeting of the Society.

. . .

Blood has been moved
³⁸
between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a spaniel. The bulldog bled to death as its blood was transferred into the spaniel, which emitted as much of its own blood as was needed to make room for that of the bulldog.

No one takes any notice now of the fact that Mr Potter first thought of moving blood between animals. He and I tried it on chickens sixteen years ago: if only we had succeeded.

. . .

The band of my turquoise ring
³⁹
has broken. I fear that if I have the stone set again, the heat will destroy its peculiarity. I have told Mr Boyle I am unwilling to have it meddled with.

. . .

21 November

Today at the Royal Society I was given the printed enquiries (from nos. 17 and 18 of the
Philosophical Transactions
) on the observations of tides, which I will now take to the Deputy Governor of Chepstow.

In the Great Conflagration, all the unsold copies of the
Philosophical Transactions
were burnt in St Faith’s Church, near St Paul’s, where they were being stored. The booksellers in St Paul’s Churchyard lost their stock of books too. After the fire, volume no. 17 of the
Philosophical Transactions
was printed free of charge, and no. 18 was printed in Duck Lane.

At the meeting today
⁴⁰
, I was also given a grain of wheat, taken from a batch produced in Surrey, said to shoot up like a rush, not a hollow straw. I am one of five Fellows involved in this plant trial. We will all plant our grains of wheat and compare our results.

. . .

30 November

At the Royal Society’s
⁴¹
anniversary election meeting, we presented our report as examiners of the Society’s accounts.

My lord Brouncker
⁴²
, Mr Wylde, Dr Charleton and I rode in a coach together on our way to the meeting at Gresham College. At the corner of Holborn Bridge, we saw a cellar of coals that had been opened by the labourers (who are digging the rubbish and new foundations of the city). The coals were burning and had been burning ever since the Great Conflagration.

. . .

Anno 1667

January

Lady Denham died
⁴³
on the 6th of this month; it is rumoured that she was murdered by means of poison in her cup of chocolate. After her marriage to Sir John two years ago, the Duke of York fell deeply in love with her, which occasioned a distemper of madness in Sir John. This madness first appeared when he went from London to see the famous freestone quarries at Portland in Dorset, but when he got within a mile of his destination, turned back to London again and he did not see them. He went to Hounslow and demanded rents of lands he had sold years ago. He went to the King and told him he was the Holy Ghost. There are others at court who might have poisoned Lady Denham’s drinking chocolate. Some think the Duchess of York did it out of jealousy, but others think it was the Countess of Rochester. Lady Denham had no children.