John Aubrey: My Own Life (16 page)

We discussed my friend Mr Potter, the 666 divine, and I explained how I keep trying to get him to communicate and publish his experiments and inventions, but not prevailing. I told Mr Hartlib how I have talked to the Earl of Pembroke and my kinsman Sir John Danvers about trying to patent Mr Potter’s invention of a watch without any wheels. We discussed his other inventions too, including a threshing machine, which Mr Hartlib thinks might undo the poor.

Then we talked
³⁹
about our mutual acquaintance Mr Boyle, who is very tall (about six feet high) and straight. His greatest delight is chemistry. He is charitable to ingenious men in need, and many foreign chemists have had proof of his generosity, for he spares no expense in collecting rare secrets.

Mr Boyle speaks Latin
⁴⁰
very well, and I have heard him say that when he was young he learnt it from Cooper’s dictionary, just as I did. Cooper’s dictionary was first published in 1584 and dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Cooper was married to a shrewish woman who resented him sitting up late at night compiling his dictionary. When it was half done she got into his study, threw the manuscript in the fire and burnt it. But Cooper had such a zeal for the advancement of learning that he began the dictionary again and bequeathed us that most useful work.

Mr Boyle says that after seeing the antiquities and architecture of Rome, he esteems none anywhere else. How much I desire to see them too!

. . .

I returned to Eynsham
⁴¹
Abbey today. The twin towers I remember from my last visit have been demolished.

. . .

Anno 1653

February

Following my father’s death, a weight of trouble has fallen on my head. I am his heir but there is much to do before my inheritance can be obtained.

Despite these troubles
⁴²
, I have been to Oxford, where I saw my friend Mr John Lydall and had great entertainment. But he cannot find my box of books, so I must wait until Mr Ralph Bathurst is back in Oxford. He will be able to find it for me, I hope. I miss my books and desire to have them with me again.

Mr Lydall says he will attempt to answer my questions about navigation. He recommends to me Bernhardus Varenius’s
Geographia Generalis
, which is a thick book printed in 1650.

. . .

Mr Lydall has sent
⁴³
me some more advice on the literature of navigation, but he says he has never seen the book I asked about: ‘The Seaman’s Grammar’. Instead he mentions ‘The Mariner’s Dictionary’ (though this does not touch on the more scholastic or geometrical parts of navigation), Wright’s ‘Errors of Navigation’; and a treatise by Richard Norwood, the mathematician, on sailing.

. . .

March

Mr Samuel Hartlib has written to me at Broad Chalke from his house near Charing Cross entreating me to give him an account of worthy and excellent Mr Potter’s life and experiments. I shall happily give him the details of Mr Potter’s inventions concerning bees, crossbows, a machine for double writing, and a new pair of compasses. And I will also describe Mr Potter’s interest in a common language.

Mr Hartlib has a manuscript
⁴⁴
of Lord Bacon’s that was never printed which he has offered to show me. He urges me to view the remainder of Lord Bacon’s manuscripts if I can. And he tells me that if I travel to Italy next month he will improve my opportunities and arrange introductions for me. How much I desire to go.

. . .

Mr Potter was to come
⁴⁵
to see me and my mother this week, but he has been delayed. So far he has failed to make the crooked pipe we need for our experiment on the anatomy of veins, and must try another way. He urges me not to go to Italy in these troubled times when we are at war with the Dutch. He hopes my mother will persuade me to stay at home!

. . .

April

I am trying to find
⁴⁶
friends who will come with me to Italy. Mr Lydall would do it if only he could be confident that his constitution – crazy and sickly of late – would not break down. Mr Bathurst cannot do it. I do not know if I will have time to go and see my friends in Oxford before I leave.

. . .

Dr Harvey has prescribed
⁴⁷
me a purge to prevent an impostumation.

. . .

My father’s will has been proved. He has left me the farm at Broad Chalke, a manor at Burleton in Herefordshire, which he inherited from his own father, and some other smaller properties at Brecon and at Monmouth near the Welsh border. There are small bequests to charity and servants, but there are also debts of 1,800 li. and my brothers’ portions of 500 li. each to be paid from the estate. I do not know how much will be left for me after these debts and portions are paid. Also my entails in the properties at Brecon and Monmouth may be disputed and difficult to secure.

I hope I can erect a little inscription in white marble to the memory of my father. I would like it to be an ell (or cubit) tall, or more.

. . .

My friend Anthony Ettrick
⁴⁸
of the Middle Temple, a very judicious gentleman, has been observing the witch trial of Anne Bodenham at Salisbury, and is not satisfied. He tells me the crowd of spectators made such a noise that the judge, Chief Baron Wild, could not hear the prisoner, nor the prisoner the judge. Words were handed from one to another by Mr Chandler, and sometimes not truly reported. It is now decided that Anne Bodenham is guilty and she will be hanged. She was once the servant of John Lambe, the astrologer and conjuror who was stoned to death by an unruly crowd in London in 1628. At her trial it was rumoured that Anne Bodenham could summon the devil and turn herself into a dog, lion, bear, etc.

. . .

Mr Potter’s brother
⁴⁹
Hannibal, who slanders him and accuses him of folly, is holding up all his experiments, so he has not yet sent me the full account of them, which I promised to obtain for Mr Hartlib. Mr Potter tells me he can have replicas of the screw compasses made for me if I find them useful, will gladly make me a quadrant, and he thanks me for my
Thaumaturgia Mathematica
. But still he does not send me what I need for Mr Hartlib. Instead, he preaches me a severe religious lesson, urging me to mark my infirmities and keep God ever in mind, condemns his brother for pride, foolishness and neglect of his duties, and bemoans his own misery and penury. No man, he says, will stir for him, except possibly me.

. . .

June

Mr Lydall urges me to be in Oxford for the summer degree ceremony that will begin on the morning of Saturday 9 July and end on the night of Monday 11 July. He tells me to arrive on the Friday to be sure to be there in time to hear Mr Ralph Bathurst present some of his work on anatomy.

Following my questions
⁵⁰
about anatomy, Mr Lydall has recommended books by Bartholemus and Johannes Riolanus, but he still has not found anyone willing to accompany me on my journey to Italy. Neither Mr Bathurst nor Dr Willis will come with me.

. . .

October

Mr Potter has written
⁵¹
to me explaining in more detail his ideas for moving blood between two living animals (he has been corresponding with Dr Harvey on the subject). He imagines it can be done by means of a little bellows which must have two flexible pipes made of some small animal’s windpipe, one of which must be inserted into the vein of one arm, the other into the other arm from which the blood will come.

. . .

16 December

On this day Oliver Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.

. . .

At Kington St Michael
⁵²
, at Sir Charles Snell’s after dark, we walked out into the court full of very thick mist. We saw our shadows projected on to the fog as though against a wall by the light of lanterns, about thirty or forty foot away. I am told that people who go bird-bating on winter nights have seen such things too, but rarely.

. . .

As you ride
⁵³
between Cricklade and Highworth in Wiltshire you find roundish stones, as big as or bigger than one’s head, which I think they call brain-stones because nature has worked on the outside like the ventricles of the brain: these are petrified sea-mushrooms.

. . .

Captain Stokes
⁵⁴
, in his
Wiltshire Rant
, recites the strangest extravagancies of religion ever heard of since the time of the Gnostics. I think that the rich wet soil makes the Wiltshire people hypochondriac. The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant at Oxford is Capricorn, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men. If this is so, then surely the same influence runs through north Wiltshire, the vale of Gloucestershire, and Somersetshire. In all changes of religions these people are more zealous than others; in the time of the Roman Catholic religion there were more and better churches and religious houses founded in Wiltshire than in any other part of England; and now they are the greatest fanatics, even to the point of spiritual madness.

. . .

More Roman money
⁵⁵
has been found at Sherston during ploughing this year. I now have a piece of silver from the time of Constantine the Great from there.

. . .

Anno
1654

I am at Llantrithyd, Glamorganshire, staying with my kinsman and cousin Sir John Aubrey. Here I have begun to enter philosophical and antiquarian remarks into pocket memorandum books. This is a habit I mean to keep up, since I realise that if I do not keep careful notes, my observations will be lost. No one else will make these records in my place.

Sir John’s estates have been sequestrated by the Parliament.

. . .

Today I rode from Llantrithyd to Caerleon, where Roman baths have been discovered. There I measured the altar stone and saved a Latin inscription from being pulverised into scouring powder by the local women. I am horrified by how much damage had been done to the remains in a single month through carelessness and ignorance.

I think I will send
⁵⁶
my copy of the inscription to Mr Hobbes’s honoured friend Mr John Selden for safe keeping. Mr Selden, aside from being the most distinguished scholar of England’s ancient laws and constitution, is a polymath: he is the most learned of men.

. . .

In Weekfield
⁵⁷
in the parish of Heddington the ground has been dug up deeper than it is when ploughed, and many Roman remains have been found: foundations of houses, hearths, a great deal of Roman coins, both silver and brass. I have a pint of them: some little copper pieces no bigger than a silver halfpence. Quaere: are they Roman denarii?

. . .

Mr Samuel Hartlib
⁵⁸
has given me a copy of his book,
The True and Ready Way to Learne the Latin Tongue
, printed this year. He is extremely interested in education and shares some of the ideas of the Puritan reformer Jan Amos Comenius. In Bohemia, Comenius was a minister of the Church of the Bohemian Brethren. He was exiled on account of his religion. When he came to London in 1641, he lived with Mr Hartlib for nine months. Previously, they had corresponded about Lord Bacon and his ideas for a reformed natural philosophy.

. . .

I am planning to leave England on a Grand Tour at last, and have made my will in preparation.

The draft of my will
⁵⁹
:

– To my loving grandfather, Mr Isaac Lyte, 50 li., and to my grandmother, 50 li.

– A decent inscription of white marble for my father and the like for myself (Mr Anthony Ettrick to write my epitaph).

– To Anthony Ettrick of Berford, Dorset, I bequeath 10 li. to buy a piece of plate, my sapphire ring, Sir Walter Raleigh’s history and my copy of Philip Comineus’s history.

– My executors will buy for Trinity College, Oxford, a college pot of the value of 10 li., with my arms inscribed on it; and I bequeath my honoured friends, Mr Ralph Bathurst of Trinity College and Mr John Lydall, 10 li. to spend on mathematical and philosophical books.

– I give to the library of Jesus College, Oxford, my Greek
Chrysostum
, Bede’s two tomes, and all the rest of my books that are fit for a library, as Mr Anthony Ettrick or Mr John Lydall shall think fit, excepting those books that were my father’s which I bequeath to my heir, my brother.

– I bequeath to John Davenant, Esq., of the Middle Temple, a ring of the value of 50s., with a stone in it.

– . . . to Mr William Hawes of Trinity College a ring of the like value.

– . . . to Mr John Lydall of the aforesaid college a ring of the like value.

– . . . to Mr Ralph Bathurst of Trinity College aforesaid a ring of the like value.

– . . . to Miss Mary Wiseman of Westminster, my best diamond ring and . . .

I wonder what else I might leave to Miss Mary Wiseman, whom I love.

. . .

November

Mr Potter has still not
⁶⁰
made my quadrant. He tells me he is either too busy, or else too filled with melancholy. He has returned the essay by Edmund Wingate about logarithms that I lent him last spring.

Mr Hobbes’s friend
⁶¹
, the great scholar of ancient English laws and jurist Mr John Selden, has died of dropsy, alas! Now I will need to find another place for the Roman inscription I copied near Caerleon. I had intended to give it to him for safe keeping.