John Aubrey: My Own Life (51 page)

. . .

Yesterday I went
²³
to see Mr John Rushworth, author of the
Historical Collections
, which gather together records of the debates and passages in the House of Commons during the years of our civil war. He was licenser of the press between 11 April 1644 and 9 March 1647. Mr Rushworth claims to have invented a new method of writing history: i.e. writing and declaring only matter of fact in chronological order, without observation or reflection. He boldly set down what was said at the trial of Charles I, and after the execution of the King became personal secretary to Oliver Cromwell.

My visit to him
²⁴
yesterday was mortifying. He has quite lost his memory with drinking brandy to keep his spirits up. He lodges with the widow Mrs Bayley in the Rules-court Alley, Southwark; she takes good care of him and wipes his nose like a child. He has forgotten his own children and entered a second childhood of his own. He does not recognise any of his four daughters. He tells me he is superannuated.

. . .

14 July

I dined with Mr Ashmole
²⁵
. We discussed Sir Richard Napier, the nephew of the astrologer. There is a story that before he died he lay at an inn where he saw a premonition of himself dead on the bed.

I have been setting
²⁶
aside legal business and my time is wholly taken up with transcribing my manuscripts. I hope I can be finished in six weeks. Then I shall go and see Mr Wood in Oxford and make myself happy in good company.

. . .

August

Thank God
²⁷
I have almost finished the tedious task of transcribing my manuscripts. Life is so uncertain. This morning I was in such anguish at the thought I might die before sending these transcriptions to Mr Wood, in which case they will all be lost. There is no trust, or hardly any, in anybody. It is so common for people to publish another person’s labour under their own name, but I know Mr Wood is too much of a gentleman to wrong me in this way.

. . .

I have collected
²⁸
together my samples of handwriting that reach from the Conquest to this present time. By a collection of several hands or fashions of characters one may know prima facie the king’s reign in which a manuscript was writ. It may also be useful for the detection of forgeries. It is now over twenty years since I had this wish, to get some graver to set forth the hands of several reigns or centuries, but only now am I preparing my work to be printed. I was led on to it by my Chronologia Architectonica.

Just as the Roman
²⁹
architecture degenerated into Gothic in like manner did the Roman character. I have heard that in the Vatican library at Rome are conserved still some copies of books written in the time of the Roman government. I shall not adventure to retrieve any so high as that here in England. The highest in antiquity that I know of in our nation is the charter granted by King Athelstan to the corporation of Malmesbury of which I hope to exhibit a copy in my book.

. . .

September

Anyone would think that there is an evil genius haunting me. I moved into pleasant lodgings at the end of last January here in London, and a week later a schoolmaster moved into the room above me. He came in around midnight or one o’clock in the morning and woke me, and rose very early hammering around for about a quarter of an hour every morning before he left for his work. The following week a man, wife and child breeding teeth moved in too. The child cried day and night and the mother’s shrill tongue and singing to the cradle were intolerable. Even so, I kept on with my transcribing. But just as I had about a week’s more work to do to finish, read over and correct, the child in the next room fell sick of the smallpox, and then the mother got it too. My friend Mistress Smyth is afraid of catching smallpox, since she has never had it, so I had to leave my lodgings and lie at inns to avoid being in contact with the disease and passing it to her. I brought my manuscript with me but am without my Pliny, Homer, etc. for quotations.

Last week I had the good luck to move to an empty house, where I am writing this, but just today I have heard there will be a new tenant moving in. I could have gone to stay with Mr Kent, but he has two children also sick with smallpox.

It is said
³⁰
that the party who is first infected in a family with smallpox has the disease most mildly. Those that are infected by that person have it more malignly by degrees, and so the more who are infected, the more pestilent the disease becomes, until at last it is a plague.

I hope I can go
³¹
to Oxford next month. I have written to Mr Wood to ask him to consider where I should lie. Perhaps I could board at Mr Kit White’s, the chemist in Holywell, or some other private place. Wherever it is, I wish the windows would be south-or east-facing. I need to retrieve my laundry: I hope Mrs Seacole hasn’t lost it. There should be a shirt, cap and cravat waiting for me in Oxford. I would much prefer not to stuff up my breeches by wearing two shirts and sweltering on the coach.

. . .

15 September

I spent the day with Mr Hooke and he told me of his controversy with Mr Newton, whom he has known ever since the latter was elected to the Royal Society in January 1672. Together we wrote a letter to Mr Wood about Mr Hooke’s ‘An Attempt to prove the motion of the Earth’, which he first read to the Royal Society in 1670, long before Mr Newton published his
Principia
in 1687.

It is clear to me that it was Mr Hooke, not Mr Newton, who made the greatest discovery in nature that ever was since the world’s creation. In 1679, Mr Hooke proposed an inverse square law to explain planetary motions. Mr Hooke is certain that he first discovered the properties of gravity and showed them to the Royal Society years before Mr Newton printed and published them as his own inventions.

I hope Mr Wood
³²
can read what Mr Hooke wrote today and do him credit for his genius. I must get from Mr Hooke a catalogue of what he has written and as many of his inventions as I can. He believes there are around a thousand of them. It is so hard to get people to do right by themselves.

. . .

I am kept busy and am likely to be involved in a Chancery suit regarding the sale of Broad Chalke and my brother’s rights. I have entrusted what remains of my estate at Broad Chalke to my brother (about 250 li. per annum) and instructed him to pay a debt of 20 li. I owe to Captain Stumpe of Malmesbury. This debt is on a bond I borrowed in 1660. There is a further debt of 80 li. also.

. . .

Michaelmas

I have decided to sell my last interest in Broad Chalke to Mr Kent, my landlord. My brother William must not hear of this since he believes I have entrusted my interest in the farm to him. I find that the only way I can put off my grief is to concentrate on putting my papers in order before I die. There are still some good old books of mine left in Broad Chalke farm, which I am hoping to be able to send to Oxford (the Venerable Bede’s works in two volumes, etc.).

. . .

October

Mr Kent and all his family have gone to Broad Chalke to take possession of it. My books are still there and I must find a way to retrieve them. My brother will not be spoken to and has absented himself. Perhaps I can go to Broad Chalke with Mr Kent at Christmas and settle matters then.

. . .

November

Mr Paschall has
³³
a manuscript on Stonehenge by an antiquary to show me that argues that it is British; and he tells me that a Roman pavement has been discovered at Bawdrip: it is a shame I did not see it when I was at Chedzoy.

. . .

Mr Hooke affirms
³⁴
that the whole of the City of London has been raised since the time of the Romans by nearly twenty feet. Since the Great Conflagration in 1666 it has been raised another two feet more or less. When the city was first built, the ground was only a little above the high-water mark, as at Southwark.

. . .

Mr Ralph Bathurst
³⁵
has been long replying to my last letter because I omitted to tell him how to reach me in London. He declines my suggestion that he write an epitaph for Sir William Petty. At the age of seventy he thinks that it would be more proper to write his own epitaph. He tells me that he has seen many good wits miscarry before reaching his present age, and he has much less reason to hope for better success.

. . .

December

Mr Paschall tells me
³⁶
of a manuscript by Philantiquarius (Peter of Langtoft), dating from the early fourteenth century, concerning the treasures of Claudius and other Roman emperors found in Somerset and tracing the advance of the invader. He also sends an account of Stonehenge as an old British triumphal temple erected to the idol Anaraih to which captives and spoils were sacrificed; and an explanation of the layout of the circles and stones.

. . .

This month
³⁷
the child in the next chamber to mine is much quieter so I am making progress transcribing a fair copy of my Monumenta Britannica and writing the Preface.

. . .

Mr Wood claims
³⁸
that everyone seems to complain these past few months that money is dead and there is no trading (because of the taxes and wars, especially the lingering war in Ireland between the abdicated King James and King William). In Oxford the University is very thin of scholars: only eighty or so matriculated last Michaelmas, and half have gone home for Christmas.

It is said
³⁹
that when King James entered Ireland from France earlier this year, one of the gentlemen who went before him bearing the mace stumbled without any rub in his way. The mace fell out of his hands and the little cross upon its crown fell off and stuck fast between two stones in the street. This is well known all over Ireland and it much troubled the King and his attendants. It was an ill omen.

. . .

Anno 1690

March

I have made a collection
⁴⁰
of all my learned and philosophical letters from 1643 to the current year. It took me three days. I will send them to Mr Wood and hope they will be safe: not put under pies as the Bishop of Sarum’s were!

. . .

I have begun
⁴¹
to draw up an apparatus for the lives of our English mathematicians. Dr Richard Blackbourne has suggested that I do this. I have made a list of all the mathematicians I intend to include. Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Allen, John Collins, William Lilly, etc. I have written about before now, so I have simply marked them as ‘done’. I will not meddle with the Lives of our own writers in mathematics before the reign of Henry VIII, but will prefix those excellent verses of Mr John Selden’s printed in Arthur Hopton’s
Concordance of Years
in 1616.

. . .

The other day
⁴²
I was at Thomas Mariett’s house and heard Dr Henry Birket tell a story about Dr Ralph Kettell at Trinity College in 1638 or 1640. Dr Birket heard Dr Kettell preaching, as he was wont to do on Trinity Sunday. He told them they should keep their bodies chaste and holy, ‘But,’ he said, ‘you fellows of the college here eat good commons and drink good double beer and breed seed, and that will get out!’ It is rumoured that next year Trinity’s chapel will be demolished and rebuilt. How the good old Doctor would have ranted and beat up his kettledrum if he had lived to see such luxury in the college as there is now.
Tempora mutantur!

. . .

April

I am afraid I will die with so much work still on the loom. I have been ill for two of the past three months with my gallstone and gout. But not seriously ill, except for two days from the stone.

Between Mr Kent and my brother all my best things – my papers and my books – are embezzled.

I will go to Oxford
⁴³
to see Mr Wood, but I shall stay only a little while: I have little money to spare: and a great deal of business to do.

. . .

Mr Fabian Philips has died. I will visit his family to see if I can gather up his literary remains and find a safe place for them. His daughter is his executrice. I hope she will set up a tablet with her father’s name and date of death in the church where he has been buried in his wife’s grave.

. . .

May

How I wish
⁴⁴
my papers were in Mr Wood’s hands, for death seems to threaten. I shall send a wagon to him with a box full of manuscripts and printed books, which the noble Earl of Pembroke gave me not long ago, and pray they arrive safely. God bless us in this in-and-out world.

. . .

I have been speaking
⁴⁵
to Captain Edmund Hamden about his poet cousin Edmund Waller, who was born in the parish of Agmundesham in Buckinghamshire at a place called Winchmore Hill. The house was sold by Edmund Waller’s father, but not long before his death in 1687, Edmund had a very great desire to buy it back again: part of the house had been rebuilt, but the room in which he was born is still standing. He told his cousin: ‘A stag, when he is hunted, and near spent, always returns home.’ This makes me think of my family home at Easton Pierse, where I was born, and where I shall not be able to go to die.