John Aubrey: My Own Life (10 page)

. . .

Osney Abbey is a ruin in Oxford, just south of the Botley Road. A woman named Edith Forne lies in her tomb there dreaming of magpies. When she was alive, she asked a friar to interpret her dream, and he told her the magpies were souls in purgatory needing a church to rest in. She urged her wealthy husband to found Osney, which he did in 1129, and now she rests there herself, surrounded by a picture of her dream of the birds. Osney’s Bell, Great Tom, was taken to nearby Christ Church during the dissolution of the monasteries. Much furniture went too, and the abbey fell into disuse. Almost a hundred years later, I can see the ruin cannot stand much longer. There is a great arch hanging unsupported on one side, waiting to crash down on crumbling walls below. The birds, truly, have come to nest here now. The exposed ledges, the roofless rooms, the always open windows are home to hundreds, maybe thousands, of restless, crying birds. I squint against the sun to try and name them: magpies, as in Edith Forne’s dream; jackdaws like the ones Mr Hobbes baited. The ruins should be drawn for future generations before they disappear further. I could do it myself, but not well enough. Osney and posterity deserve better. I will find someone skilled to do it.

. . .

I am made much of
²⁰
by the scholars. This city suits me well. I studied my reflection in my looking glass today. I am almost seventeen years old and must by now be fully grown: of middling height with a quick look about me. My clothes are smart: black velvet, a plush-gippe and silver shoulder belt. I cut a sparkish figure in the town.

. . .

Tonight I watched
²¹
the King dine in Christ Church. Old Tom rings out the hour. The meal was of mutton and veal (boiled and roasted), capons, hens (with eggs), partridges, pheasants, cocks, larks, beef, mallards, pig, salmon, sea flounder, venison, conies and teales, with baked tart and Pippins to follow. I heard the King tell of a time when he was hawking in Scotland:

‘I rode into the quarry and came across a covey of partridges falling upon the hawk. I swear upon the Book ’tis true. When I came to my chamber, I told this story to my tutor; said he, “That covey was London.”’

The gentlemen of the court rushed to tell him it will not happen: London and its Parliament will not fall upon him; the natural order will stand, not be overturned. But I have heard another story, more peculiar. When the King’s bust in marble, carved by Bernini, from a drawing by Van Dyck, was carried on a barge up the Thames in the open air, a strange bird, of a kind the bargemen had never seen before, swooped down and dropped what looked like a drop of blood upon it. It left a stain that could not be wiped away. There was a seam in the middle of the forehead, which is a very ill sign in metoposcopy, which predicts a person’s character and destiny from the lines on his forehead.

. . .

Many of the courtiers
²²
have brought their wives and families to Oxford. Suddenly the city is full of beautiful women. Lady Isabella Thynne, daughter of the Earl of Holland, aged about nineteen, is staying in Balliol College with her husband, Sir James Thynne. She comes often to visit her intimate friend, fine Mistress Fanshawe, who is staying at Trinity with her husband, John Fanshawe the poet. These two young women came to chapel this morning, half-dressed, like angels. For a frolic, they tried to visit the President’s lodgings, but old Ralph Kettell could see they meant to make fun of him and said to Mistress Fanshawe: ‘Madam, your husband and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather; I know you to be a gentlewoman, I will not say you are a whore; but get you gone for a very woman.’ These dissolute times, the lively courtiers, the soldiers and their rough ways, grieve the President. He has taken to standing by the gate into the college and observing the persons who come to walk in our grove: it has become like Hyde Park in London.

I have heard Lady Isabella play the lute in our grove – which she does outstandingly. She is most beautiful, humble, charitable, etc., and cannot refuse or subdue anyone. One might say of her as Tacitus said of Agrippina:
Cuncta alia illi adfuere, praeter animum honestum
(All other things are present in her, except an honest mind). Mr Edmund Waller adores her and celebrates her in verse:

Of My Lady Isabella Playing on the Lute

Such moving sounds, from such a careless touch,

So unconcern’d her self, and we so much!

What Art is this, that with so little Pains

Transports us thus, and o’er our Spirits reigns! . . .

. . .

I have seen Dr William Harvey
²³
come to Trinity College to visit my friend Ralph Bathurst’s brother George, who is a Fellow here too. I feel too shy, too unimportant, to press for an acquaintance with the famous doctor.

Dr William Harvey was at the Battle of Edgehill with the King last October. When the fighting began, he was given charge of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, aged twelve and ten. He took them to sit under a nearby hedge, produced a book from his pocket and began reading to them. Soon afterwards, a bullet from a great gun grazed the ground nearby, so they moved further off.

I have heard another
²⁴
story about the Battle of Edgehill: terrifying and miraculous. Sir Adrian Scrope was seriously wounded and left for dead, his body stripped like the other corpses. It was cold, clear weather and there was a frost that night which staunched his bleeding. He woke around midnight among the corpses and pulled one of them on top of him to keep warm. I pray that I never lie on a battlefield.

After the Battle of Edgehill, Dr Harvey followed the King to Oxford. Here he keeps busy, tending the King’s health, and pursuing his own researches.

In George Bathurst’s rooms
²⁵
there is a hen laying eggs, which he and Dr Harvey dissect. They are repeating Aristotle’s experiments, hoping to see the progress and way of generation. Their interest is in the interior of the egg and the first beginnings of the chick, which can be seen, like a little cloud, by removing the shell and placing the egg into warm clear water. In the midst of the cloud is a tiny point of blood, as small as the point of a needle, which beats.

. . .

I hope I can find
²⁶
someone to draw the ruins of Osney Abbey before they fall down. I have sought out William Dobson, the court painter, in his rooms on the High Street almost opposite St Mary’s Church. Dobson is a painter of genius, but poor. He became court painter just last year after Van Dyck died, at a time when everything was changing. His father was a St Albans man who helped Lord Bacon build his magnificent Verulam House, within the bounds of the old Roman city walls: a talented man, but a lover of many women, who left his son to make his own way in the world. In his studio today I saw a wonderful work in progress: a sumptuous portrait of the Prince of Wales, commemorating his participation in the Battle of Edgehill. The Prince’s figure dominates the canvas, seeming too big to fit upon it, as he tramples underfoot the head of Medusa and the horrors of war. It is hard to reconcile Dobson’s splendid portrait with Harvey’s story of the young princes being read to under a hedge as the fighting began. Dobson has a new wife called Judith who has accompanied him to Oxford. Her flesh is luminous and her face very sweet and pretty. There was a cast of her hands on a pedestal in that chaos of canvas and paint that I coveted. Dobson is probably too occupied to draw Osney Abbey for me himself, but he says his friend and assistant Mr Hesketh will do it for twenty shillings.

. . .

Robert Greville (Lord Brooke), married to the daughter of the Earl of Bedford, was killed this month on 2 March at the siege of Lichfield. The story is that he was armed head to foot, but his lower face and neck were exposed because his bevor was open.

. . .

April

Camp fever is raging
²⁷
in Oxford. I have fallen sick with smallpox: it will unpolish my complexion. My father is summoning me home again, for fear I cannot recover in this disease-racked city. But I am bedridden and cannot leave, nor do I wish to. I know what a lonely life awaits me in the country, far from books, far from ingenious conversation. Whereas here I lie, a scurvy antiquary, entertained by my faithful friends at least. Mr William Radford, in his third year here at Trinity, comes to see me every day for several hours, saving me from melancholy. Dr Ralph Kettell, who cannot be reconciled to long hair, or hairy scalps as he calls them, once cut off Will’s hair with the bread knife from the buttery hatch when we were all eating in hall. He sang:

And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d? Tonedi, Tonedi.

Then he turned to our friend John Lydall and asked: ‘Mr Lydall, how do you decline
tondeo
?
Tondeo, tondes, tonedi?
’ As to periwigs, Dr Kettell believes them to be the scalps of hanged men, cut off after death.

Will brings me stories of our other Trinity friends: Tom Mariett and Ned Wood especially. Tom Mariett is from Whitchurch in Warwickshire: a passionate supporter of the King. Ned’s family live in the old stone house, Postmaster’s Hall, opposite Merton College; his father died early this year, his older brother is fighting for the King. Today Will told me how Ned’s younger brother Anthony, six or seven years ago, was playing in the street outside their house when the university carrier rode over him on a horse named Mutton and bruised his head badly. Ned’s family were worried for a while that Anthony had been damaged and made slow by the accident, but he has grown into a clever boy, as interested as I am in antiquities. I hope we meet when the pox has passed.

. . .

Smallpox is periodical
²⁸
. There was smallpox in Sherborne during 1626 (the year of my birth), and during the year 1634, and it has been back again since Michaelmas last year. Such facts and observations in the great towns should be recorded, but few care for these things.

. . .

I am not there
²⁹
to see or mourn it, but I have heard of the demolition of the Malmesbury church, St Mary Westport. That church was very pretty, consisting of a nave and two aisles, and it had a very tall spire, with five tunable bells, which will be melted down now the church is nothing but rubble on the ground. Sir William Waller, who fought before in Germany, commanded it in the Parliament’s cause. He approached from Tetbury on 21 March, crossed Newton River by Stanes Bridge, occupied Westport and laid siege to Malmesbury, declaring it the best naturally defended place he ever saw inland. And it is true: Malmesbury, where the Bristol Avon and Tetbury Avon almost meet, where the Bristol Road and Oxford Road cross, is surrounded by steep hills, almost cliffs. Westport, outside the old town walls, is a weakness in those defences granted by nature. Waller entered through Westport, then pulled down the church, lest others follow him and lay siege that way. I think it sacrilege to disarrange those stones. When there is thunder and lightning, it is customary in Malmesbury, to ring St Adelm’s bell at the abbey. I have heard it said that this ringing of the bell exceedingly disturbs spirits. I imagine many spirits walk abroad now that soldiers occupy the town.

. . .

Sir William Waller’s soldiers
³⁰
have broken the head of the handsome Gothic monument of King Athelstan in Malmesbury Abbey. I think the monument is workmanship from the time of the Conquest. On the figure’s left hand, I remember, a carved falconer’s glove, with a knob or tassel to put under his girdle, as is still used in falconry. King Athelstan deserves a shrine of gold for bringing in the statute of trial by a jury of twelve men. Instead, Waller’s soldiers have broken the head of his monument to pieces.

. . .

My kinsman, Major Morgan of Wells, has been lying for almost a month under my father’s roof at Broad Chalke. He was marching west with the King’s army when fever overtook him at Salisbury. They took him to my father’s house in secret to recover. I have heard that there is a sparrow that comes to the window of his garret every day and pecks, always at the same lozenge of glass, knocking the lead beside it, over and over, in the same place. Two of my father’s servants have observed this sparrow. I predict that when my kinsman leaves to re-join the King’s forces, the bird will cease to visit.

. . .

I have become a brother at the age of seventeen. My mother, in these troubled times, has given birth to a new baby boy named William.

PART III

War

Anno 1643

MY FATHER’S
caution
¹
has prevailed. I am come home again to a sad country life. I recovered from the smallpox after the end of Trinity Week (Trinity Sunday was 4 June) and my father sent for me. Here I converse with none but servants and rustics and quartered soldiers, to my great grief. Horace’s Odes come to mind:
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
(I hate the profane rabble and steer clear of them). I am scarcely acquainted with my father. I am in the prime of my youth and I am without the benefit of ingenious conversation, and have hardly any good books. I am almost a consumptive. I have carried some books from Oxford home with me: Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici
, printed last year, has opened my understanding. And I have Sir Kenelm Digby’s ‘Observations on Religio Medici’, printed this year, to keep my thoughts company.