John Aubrey: My Own Life (3 page)

Dr Robert Plot (1640–96), first curator of the Ashmolean Museum, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford (1683), author of
Natural History of Oxfordshire
(1677) and
Staffordshire
(1686), Historiographer Royal (1688). Fellow of the Royal Society (1677).

Mr Francis Potter (1594–1678), author of
An Interpretation of the Number
666 (1642), rector of Kilmington (1628–78), Fellow of the Royal Society (1663), instrument maker, experimentalist.

Mr William Radford (1623–73), friend of Aubrey’s from Trinity College, Oxford.

Mr John Ray (1627–1705), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1649–62), naturalist. Presbyterian views caused him to retire to Black Notley, Essex. Fellow of the Royal Society (1667).

James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85), Charles II’s illegitimate son by Lucy Walters. Captain General (1670), deprived of office (1679), banished (1684) for plotting against his father, landed at Lyme Regis to invade England (1685), defeated at Sedgemoor and beheaded.

Mr John Selden (1584–1654), jurist, antiquary, orientalist, active in Parliament’s attempts to curb royal authority; retired from public affairs after the execution of Charles I.

Mr Ralph Sheldon (1623–84), of Weston in Warwickshire, Royalist, antiquary. Compiled a ‘Catalogue of the nobility of England since the Norman Conquest’, had a fine library at Weston, which Anthony Wood catalogued, and a cabinet of curiosities. Roman Catholic.

Sir Charles Snell (
c
.1617–51), of Kington St Michael, Aubrey’s neighbour.

Mr Fabian Stedman (1640–1713), leading figure in campanology and bell-ringing who introduced the idea of change ringing.

Mr Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), antiquary, born at Market Lavenham in Wiltshire, Anthony Wood’s literary executor.

Mr Israel Tonge (1621–80), Church of England clergyman and informer in the Popish Plot together with Titus Oates. Schoolmaster whose experimental methods impressed Aubrey.

Nicholas Tufton, 3rd Earl of Thanet (1631–79), Royalist, imprisoned 1655 and 1656–8 on suspicion of plotting against the Commonwealth.

Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), painter and etcher, born in Antwerp, made three extended visits to England.

Sir John Vaughan, 3rd Earl of Carbery (1639–1713), politician and colonial governor. Knighted at Charles II’s coronation (1661) and became MP for the borough of Carmarthen in the same year. Became his father’s heir upon his elder brother’s death (1667) and claimed the courtesy title Lord Vaughan. Appointed Governor of Jamaica (1674); intended to run Jamaica’s government with the English Parliament as a model. Fellow of the Royal Society (1685) and President (1686).

Mr Edmund Waller (1606–87), poet, member of the Long Parliament, exiled (1644). Knew Hobbes in France and planned to translate
De Cive
into English. MP for Hastings after the Restoration. Fellow of the Royal Society (1663).

Sir William Waller (
c
.1598–1668), Parliamentarian army officer, occupied Malmesbury during the Civil War and razed the church at Westport.

Dr John Wallis (1616–1703), mathematician, cryptographer, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford (1649), participant in experimental philosophy group leading to the foundation of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Society (1663).

Mr Seth Ward (1617–89), astronomer, Bishop of Exeter and Salisbury, Fellow Commoner at Wadham College, Oxford (1650), friend of John Wilkins. Interested in the search for a Universal Language. Fellow of the Royal Society (1663).

Mr Christopher Wase (
c
.1625–90), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, ejected for Royalist sympathies. Tutor to William Herbert, later 6th Earl of Pembroke, to whom he dedicated his translation of
Cygneticon
(1654). Headmaster of Dedham and Tonbridge schools, appointed Superior Bedell of Civil Law at Oxford (1671). Author of
Considerations Concerning the Free Schools, as Settled in England
(1678).

Mr John Wilkins (1614–72), promoter of experimental philosophy in England, established groups in Oxford and London from which the Royal Society developed. Warden of Wadham College (1648–59). Fellow of the Royal Society (1663).

Dr Thomas Willis (1621–75), physician, chemist, natural philosopher, member of the Experimental Philosophy Club in Oxford (1650), which operated a chemical laboratory in Wadham College, sponsored by the college’s president, John Wilkins. Collaborated with Robert Boyle. Fellow of the Royal Society (1663).

Mr Anthony Wood (1632–95), antiquary and historian of Oxford University, author of
Historia Et Antiquitates Univ. Oxon.
(1674) and
Athenae Oxonienses
(1691–2); Aubrey collected biographical notes for him. Expelled from the university for printing a libel on the Earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde).

Mr Edward (Ned) Wood (d.1655), Aubrey’s friend at Trinity College, Oxford, elder brother of Anthony Wood.

Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), scientist, architect, mathematician, designer of St Paul’s and other churches and buildings after the Great Fire. Fellow of the Royal Society (1663) and President (1680–2).

Mr Edmund Wylde (1616–96), sat in Long Parliament and supported Parliamentary cause. Fellow of the Royal Society (1663). Aubrey’s patron.

For

M. F. R.

John Aubrey

My Own Life

Ruth Scurr

England’s Collector

JOHN AUBREY LOVED
England. He was born a gentleman in Wiltshire in 1626. He grew up heir to the house he first drew breath in, surrounded by rolling green fields and falcon-frequented skies. From an early age, he saw his England slipping away and committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it – in stories, books, monuments and buildings. Aubrey was wonderfully imaginative. By posterity he meant us: people of the future, who would hear his voice through his writing and be grateful for the information he bequeathed. Throughout Aubrey’s lifetime, the English were losing assuredness of their identity to a degree not to be repeated till the late twentieth century. When he was a child, Elizabethan times, which ended with the Queen’s death in 1603, were within living memory. The disruption caused by the dissolution of the monasteries, initiated by Henry VIII in 1536, could still be felt a hundred years later when Aubrey went to school and noticed schoolbooks covered in old manuscript parchment from lost religious libraries. Aubrey lived through England’s Civil War, which began while he was a student at Oxford. He was twenty-two when Charles I was executed. He saw Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, and his son Richard Cromwell’s brief succession. He experienced the Restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II, who was deposed in 1688, and the Glorious Revolution that brought William of Orange and his wife Mary (daughter of James II) to the throne. Aubrey died in 1697, ten years before England and Scotland joined their parliaments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Throughout these constitutional crises and regime changes, Aubrey looked back to Ancient Britain. He worked out that the megaliths at Stonehenge, which he had known since childhood, were neither Roman nor Danish, as his contemporaries thought. He offered as a ‘probability
¹
’ his theory that Druids erected Stonehenge. It is now known that the stone temples pre-dated the Druids by thousands of years, but in his time, Aubrey was closer to the truth than anyone else. He admired the civilising force of the Romans. He drew a direct parallel between the Roman occupiers of Britain and the English settlers of North America. He supposed that the Ancient Britons – with their iron tools, Druid priests and stone temples amidst the wolves and oak trees – were ‘two or three degrees less savage’ than the American tribes that the English adventurers and settlers of his own time encountered. The Romans, as Aubrey understood them, were great improvers: they brought into England architecture, skill in husbandry, and elm trees; they conquered most of the island, as far as Hadrian’s Wall, and established the Ancient Roman province of Britannia. He thought that after the Roman Britons left and were succeeded by the Saxons, England was engulfed in a mist of ignorance for 600 years.

Aubrey exemplifies an English sensibility to be proud of – charming, self-deprecating, moderate in all matters political and religious, learned but never ponderous. In the aftermath of
²
the Second World War, the biographer and novelist Anthony Powell, himself a great chronicler of England, found in Aubrey’s work ‘as striking a record of Englishmen and English ways as has ever been written’. Powell, who was as interested in genealogy and ancestry as Aubrey was, might have emphasised that the Aubrey family was of Welsh, not English provenance. But Aubrey himself was quintessentially English. His sensibility was English; his sense of humour was undeniably English; his identity was deeply rooted in north Wiltshire and the West Country. The historical and scientific interests
³
that enthused him as a student in Oxford and afterwards were not parochial; through his reading and correspondence he was connected to wide European and Scandinavian circles of scholarship. But ultimately Aubrey’s intellectual pursuits arose from his love of particular places and people – predominantly English places and people. Looking back
⁴
on his long life, he explained: ‘I was inclined by my genius from childhood to the love of antiquities: and my Fate dropt me in a countrey most suitable for such enquiries.’ If fate had dropped Aubrey into Greece or Italy, his enquiries into antiquities would have been more conventional. He longed to visit those countries, as many of his countrymen did on their Grand Tours. He considered emigrating to America, where his friend William Penn was prepared to grant him 600 acres in Pennsylvania, but nothing came of it. Aubrey’s mother prevailed on him not to leave England, and aside from frequent visits to Wales, a trip to Ireland and an unsuccessful sojourn in France, he never did.

Aubrey understood antiquities within the framework established by the intellectual giant of the previous generation, Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount of St Albans, who died the year Aubrey was born. Philosopher, statesman, scientist and author, Bacon set the foundations for the advancement of learning through experiment and observation. He divided human understanding into three parts: history, poetry and philosophy. History was then subdivided into religious, political and natural history; antiquities were a further subdivision defined as ‘the remnants of history’. Antiquities, according to Bacon
⁵
, are like the pieces of splintered wood that survive a shipwreck; they are what is rescued ‘when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time’. Aubrey frequently likened his own activities to rescues after shipwreck.

Aubrey collected natural and antiquarian remarks: notes on nature, scientific phenomena, architecture, inscriptions, stories and anecdotes. He also collected artefacts: books, manuscripts, paintings, old coins and other rarities. He was unusually modest for a man of his social standing, upbringing and education, though keen to assert his gentlemanly status. He did not presume to know what use posterity might make of the remnants of the past he managed to salvage. He was concerned with accuracy like a scrupulous modern-day investigative journalist, but insistent that controversial components of his work should not be cited until long after his death. His notes are full of gaps where it was not possible to remember or find a particular piece of information. The imperative word
quaere
, meaning enquire or query, recurs like a refrain through his work. He saw himself more as collector than writer: a collector of fragments of fact that would otherwise be lost because no one else would trouble themselves to write them down and pass them on to the next generation. In childhood, Aubrey collected stories from the older people he met. As a student, he started to collect books. His first recorded act of antiquarianism was to commission drawings of the ruins of Osney Abbey in Oxford. Later the ruins were razed to the ground; without Aubrey, there would be no contemporary record of what they looked like.