John Aubrey: My Own Life (7 page)

Today I watched Sidney’s funeral on the screen while my father talked of business in Alderman Singleton’s study. I know something of Sidney already. I have heard my great-uncle tell stories of how, out hunting on Salisbury Plain, he would stop suddenly to make notes for his
Arcadia
in a pocket book; I like the idea that the muses visited Sidney on horseback. I wonder what it would be like to be visited by muses?

In the parlour I turned the pin to make the figures walk forwards and back, over and over, so I could study their faces and clothes more carefully. The figure of Daniel Bachelar caught my eye, a boy like me, Sidney’s page, perched on a great horse caparisoned with golden cloth. I have heard people say that when Sidney lay dying, Daniel sang him verses from
Arcadia
:

Since nature’s works be good, and death doth serve

As nature’s work, why should we fear to die?

Since fear is vain, but when it may preserve,

Why should we fear that which we cannot fly?

Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears,

Disarming human minds of native might;

While each conceit an ugly figure bears,

Which were not ill, well viewed in reason’s light.

But I am not brave like Sidney. I am frightened of death.

When my father’s business was done today, I rode my own small horse home beside him. I love but scarcely know my father. He was born for hawking, whereas I know already that I am made for books and drawing. What I desired to do today was to sketch the contours of the countryside from Gloucester to Cirencester and back home to Easton Pierse, taking note of all the old buildings that we passed on our way. But it would have angered my father to wait for me on his tall horse, treading a muddy impatient circle. So I will save my drawing for the long empty days in our parlour, where there is no moving screen to distract me. I wish I could see and turn that screen again. I will always remember it.

. . .

My grandmother, Rachel Danvers
²⁶
, was widowed in 1616, when my father was about thirteen years old. Afterwards, she married Alderman Whitson of Bristol. She was his fourth wife and they had no children of their own. Alderman Whitson was a good stepfather to my father. He taught him to hawk. He cut down woods my father had inherited and never gave him any compensation, but did him plenty of good too. My father says his stepfather lived nobly: he was the most popular magistrate in the city; always chosen as a Member of Parliament. Alderman Whitson was my godfather, but he died when I was about three years old, so I do not remember him. He was pitched from his horse and hit his head on a nail that stood on its head outside a smith’s shop. Seventy-six poor old men and women followed his coffin: one for every year of his age. He was the colonel of the trained band, who came to his funeral with black ribbons on their pikes and black cloth on their drums.

. . .

Since Alderman Whitson’s death
²⁷
, my grandmother lives outside Bristol, at Burnett in the parish of Compton Dando, about two miles from Keynsham. About four miles from Burnett is Stanton Drew, where I go whenever I am staying with my grandmother because there is a monument of ancient stones behind the manor house there, which the people round about call the Wedding: it is far bigger than Stonehenge. The story (which I do not believe) is that on her way to be married, a bride and the company she was with were all turned into these stones, which are grouped together, hard as marble and nine or ten feet high. One is called the bride’s stone, another the parson’s stone, another the cook’s. The stones are a dirty reddish colour and take a good polish. I cannot help wondering how they really came to be there, and why.

. . .

When we are not
²⁸
at Easton Pierse in north Wiltshire, we live at Broad Chalke farm in south Wiltshire, close to the River Ebble. Here the bells of Broad Chalke church ring agreeably alongside the music of the running river. Just a short walk across the valley from our farm there is Wilton House, where Sir Philip Sidney and his beloved sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, lived in their time. Our families are distantly connected. I have not tried to count the many volumes in the grand library at Wilton. There are a great many Italian books, books of poetry and polity and history. There is Sidney’s translation of the whole Book of Psalms into English verse, bound in crimson velvet and gilt. There is a manuscript of a Latin poem from Julius Caesar’s time. There are books of coats of arms and genealogies and histories of the English nobility: all well painted and written.

I have seen a book
²⁹
in Wilton library on hunting, hawking and heraldry, written in verse by Dame Juliana Berners, a nun from Henry VIII’s time, keen on field sports and fishing – who was perhaps the first woman to write a book in English. The book was printed in the time of Edward IV. Dame Juliana Berners says in her book that a hoby is a priest’s hawk and a merlin is a lady’s hawk, so it seems that in those olden days priests and ladies kept hawks too. When my father and I go hawking together his birds land on my gloved and outstretched arm.

. . .

I wander in the parklands at Wilton, imagining myself in Sidney’s
Arcadia
. I have fallen in love with the house, the grounds, and the beautiful old paintings in the long gallery. I have been shown them so many times by old servants and friends of this noble family that I am a good nomenclator of these pictures – I could make a portrait in words to set alongside each of them.

Here is the 1st Earl of Pembroke
³⁰
, William Herbert.

The last time I was staying with my grandmother near Bristol, she told me the story of black Will Herbert, who was a mad fighting young fellow. Once when he was arrested in Bristol he killed one of the sheriffs, then escaped via Back Street, through the great gate into the marsh, and so to France. Afterwards, the city gate was walled up, leaving just a little door and turnstile for foot passengers. Will Herbert joined the army in France, and fought so well that favours were heaped on him. At the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII gave him Wilton and its surrounding lands. He was much envied: a stranger and an upstart in our county. Toward the end of his life, he had a little reddish picked-nose dog (not of the prettiest), which loved him; when the Earl died, the dog would not leave his body, but pined away, starving himself to death. There is a picture of the dog in the gallery at Wilton that hangs below the picture of Will.

Here is Mary, Countess of Pembroke
³¹
.

She was Sir Philip Sidney’s sister; married to Henry, the eldest son of Will Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. That subtle old Earl predicted that his witty daughter-in-law would horn his son, told him so, and advised him to keep her in the country and not to let her frequent the court. She had a pretty sharp-oval face. Her hair was of a reddish yellow. She was very salacious. For example: each spring, she had the stallions brought close to a part of the house where she had a special place to stand and watch them mounting their mares. She had many lovers who mounted her, including Cecil, the crooked-back Earl of Salisbury. This is her epitaph:

Underneath this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse:

Sydney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.

Death! Ere thou kill’st such another

Faire and wise and learn’d as she,

Time will throw a dart at thee.

Here is Sir Philip Sidney
³²
, Mary’s brother.

Not only an excellent wit, but extremely beautiful, he is said to have much resembled his sister. His hair was not red; it was a dark amber colour. Perhaps it was not masculine enough; and yet he was a person of great courage. He was the reviver of poetry in those dark times. He bought Queen Elizabeth a bejewelled whip as a sign of his submission (which she had come to doubt).

In one of the pictures of Sir Philip Sidney are these verses:

Who gives himselfe may well his picture give,

Els were it vain, since both short time doe live.

In Mary’s time, Wilton was like a college: full of learned, scholarly people. She collected the library. She was a great chemist and set up a laboratory alongside the library. She talked of her experiments with her brother, and he in turn described them to Dr Dee. Philip dedicated his
Arcadia
to her, declaring: ‘Now it is done only for you, only to you.’ They loved each other so much that people wondered if they slept together. These siblings, one auburn-headed, the other amber, who live so vividly in my imagination, are not even ghosts in the garden now; or if they are, I cannot see them. I walked sombrely on the terraces at dusk this evening, trying to catch sight of them. But they are gone, and their fair bodies laid to rest: hers (I think) in Salisbury Cathedral beside her first husband, Henry, Earl of Pembroke; and his in St Paul’s. I shudder to think of it:

England, Netherlands, the Heavens and the Arts

Of . . . Sydney hath made . . . parts;

. . . for who could suppose,

That one heap of stones could Sydney enclose.

. . .

The situation of Wilton House
³³
is incomparably noble. King Charles loves it above all places and comes here every summer. He prompted the present Earl, Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke, to make the magnificent garden and grotto, and to extend the side of the house that fronts the garden, with two stately pavilions at each end, all ‘al Italiano’. His Majesty intended to have his own architect, Mr Inigo Jones, do it. But Mr Jones was too busy with His Majesty’s buildings at Greenwich, so recommended another architect, Monsieur Solomon de Caus, a Gascoigne, who performed it very well; but not without the advice of Mr Jones.

There is a picture
³⁴
of King Charles at Wilton, which Sir Anthony Van Dyck copied from Whitehall. The King is on horseback, with his French riding master on foot, under an arch, all life-sized. Next to it is a picture of the famous white racehorse Peacock, also life-size and by Van Dyck.

Peacock has run
³⁵
the four-miles course in five minutes and a little more. He used to be owned by Sir Thomas Thynne of Longleat and valued at 1,000 li. Philip, Earl of Pembroke, gave 5 li. just to have a sight of him. Now, at last, his lordship owns him (I think he was given to his lordship as a gift). Peacock is a bastard barb. He is the most beautiful horse ever seen in this age, and is as fleet as he is handsome.

Philip, Earl of Pembroke, is a great patron to Van Dyck and has more of his paintings than anyone in the world.

. . .

I have been shown the armoury at Wilton. It is a very long room – full of weapons. The collection is as great as the manner in which it was obtained. During the Italian war, when Queen Mary was on the throne, there was a victory at the Battle of St Quentin, in Picardy, in 1557. At that battle, William, 1st Earl of Pembroke, was General, Sir George Penruddock of Compton Chamberlain was Major General, and my great-grandfather, William Aubrey, was Judge Advocate. The spoils collected were arms enough for sixteen thousand men on horse and foot.

. . .

On the south down of the farm at Broad Chalke, there is a little barrow called Gawen’s-barrow. I sit there sometimes, thinking of how the barrow must have been named for the Knight Gawain, nephew to King Arthur, whose exquisite manners are commemorated in Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’:

That Gawain with his old curteisye . . .

. . .

Anno
1638

This autumn, Broad Chalke
³⁶
is sickly and feverish; I walked through the churchyard earlier today and saw three open graves.

. . .

My father has a pin, or web, in his eye, like a pearl, or a humour coming out of his head. The learned men of Salisbury could do him no good, but a good-wife of Broad Chalke, a poor woman named Holly, has cured him these past few days.

. . .

Mr Peyton is now
³⁷
vicar of Broad Chalke, and I have made friends with his wife’s brother, Theophilus Woodenoth, who was at Eton and then a scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and is now come to stay at the vicarage. He talks to me about books, old English proverbs, and answers my questions about antiquities. He has advised me to read Lord Bacon’s essays, which I have found among my mother’s books. Mr Woodenoth is writing a book of his own, a little manual called
Good Thoughts in Bad Times
.

. . .

I am now a boarder at Blandford School in Dorsetshire: the most eminent school for the education of gentlemen in the West of England. Here books are covered with old parchments and leases, never with manuscripts, so far as I have seen. But there were no abbeys or convents for men in these parts before the Dissolution, so far fewer manuscripts flew around afterwards.

. . .

My health is improving. I am excelling at Latin and Greek: am the best among my peers. I have been lent a copy of Cooper’s Dictionary –
Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae
, printed in London in 1584 and dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the Chancellor of Oxford – which is new to me. I am reading all the Terence parts first, then will move on to Cicero.

Reading Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, translated into English by Sandys, leads me to understand the Latin better and is a wonderful help to my imagination.

I find Tully’s
Offices
too dry.

I prefer Lord Bacon’s
Essays
for an introduction to morals, excellences of style, hints and transitions. My mother has told me that Lord Bacon used to visit her kinsman, Sir John Danvers, at Chelsea and delight in his garden. Sir John helped Lord Bacon with his
History of Henry VII
, with more honesty and better judgement than any scholar.