John Aubrey: My Own Life (26 page)

Mr Wood has asked me to help him by consulting Thuanus’s
Annals
for honourable mention of my great-grandfather Dr William Aubrey, who is also mentioned in the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots. Thuanus was a president of the Parlement of Paris and the author of a history of his own times from 1546 to 1608.

. . .

I have a mind to make a kind of pilgrimage this summer to see some Druidish monuments in Caernarvonshire, and will go via Weston on my way. The Royal Society has requested that Mr Wood make a list of all the treatises that Lord Bacon wrote.

I have been told
⁶³
that in the library of the Royal Society there is a book that would be of help to Mr Wood in compiling his history of Oxford, it being a collection of several writers of both universities and of the nation.

. . .

6 July

By malicious contrivance I was arrested today, in connection with my proposed marriage to Mrs Joan Sumner, but was retained for less than two hours. I was meant to go to Winton for a retrial tomorrow, but the date has been put back now.

. . .

My servant Robert
⁶⁴
hopes to get employment in Oxford: it is the place he loves and he hopes to make a better livelihood there than I can now offer him in my straitened and beleaguered circumstances. I hope Mr Wood will help him when opportunity arises.

. . .

My lawsuit continues, to my great dismay and financial ruin.

I am collecting my letters from The Lamb in Katherine Street in Salisbury.

. . .

I have been to see
⁶⁵
the Coway Stakes in the Thames, opposite Cowe-way, on the right bank of the river between Sunbury and Shepperton. It is said this is the place where Julius Caesar crossed the river. According to the local people, three of the stakes are visible on a clear day when the water is low. Venerable Bede says the stakes could be seen in his day (at least 500 years ago). The fishermen still avoid casting their nets here. But this summer the Lord Mayor’s Water Ballif had one of the stakes taken up because it hindered the barges and was likely to split them. If I can I will ask the Water Ballif for a sight of this antiquity.

. . .

November

As soon as my lawsuit
⁶⁶
will give me leave, I will lengthen my life a little by reviving my spirit in Oxford. Joan Sumner is an unusually litigious woman: she insists I intended to defraud her and is demanding a retrial, but my defence is that I was sincerely prepared to marry her and still am, despite all the legal troubles she has brought down upon my head.

. . .

The great poet
⁶⁷
Dr Abraham Cowley died at the end of July last year (1667). His will is a testament to true and lasting charity. He has settled his estate so that so much every year is to be paid for poor prisoners cast into gaol by cruel creditors for some debt or other. I have been told this by Mr Dunning of London, a scrivener who is acquainted with Dr Cowley’s brother. I do not think this benefaction is mentioned in the Life of Cowley that has been printed along with his collected works this year. It is certainly the best method of charity.

Sir John Denham has written some excellent verses on the death of Abraham Cowley (which prove that Sir John has fully recovered his wits since the fit of madness that overcame him before his wife died):

His fancy and his judgement such,

Each to the other seemed too much:

His severe judgement giving law,

His modest fancy kept in awe;

As rigid husbands jealous are,

When they believe their wives too fair.

. . .

Anno 1669

25 January

St Paul’s Day
⁶⁸
: I hope Mr Wenceslaus Hollar will make more etchings of my several prospects of Osney Abbey. I fear that the one he made for Mr Dugdale’s book might have melted in the Great Conflagration. Mr Hollar is expected back in England around Candlemas. He has gone on a journey to Tangier with Lord Henry Howard, grandson of the Earl of Arundel, to negotiate with Moulay Al Rashid, the Moroccan Sultan. Mr Hollar, who is His Majesty’s Designer, will make drawings to show the King what his most remote colony looks like.

. . .

If Mr Wood needs
⁶⁹
any records at Rome searched, I think I can arrange this for him through the Jesuits I met in Paris. One of them has suggested to me that Mr Wood should first print his book in English, not Latin, because it will become more famous and sell better that way.

. . .

18 February

I brought my drawing
⁷⁰
of the cloudy star I discovered last year before the Royal Society and it was entered into the Register Book.

. . .

5 March

Early this morning, between eight and nine o’clock, my retrial was heard at Winton. With much ado I got a verdict of damages of 300 li. in my favour. This is half the amount I was awarded in my first trial at Sarum, but it is still something to set against what I must now pay my lawyer.

. . .

23 March

Sir John Denham
⁷¹
was buried today in Westminster Abbey, in the south cross aisle, near Sir Geoffrey Chaucer’s monument.

. . .

Because of my financial troubles, I am in as much affliction as a mortal can be, and it seems I will never be at peace until all has been lost and I wholly cast myself on God’s Providence.

. . .

29 April

Today, I brought before
⁷²
the Royal Society Mr Potter’s account of his experiments in moving blood between animals, which he wrote in 1652, to try and establish that he was the first to attempt this experiment. I helped him with an experiment to move blood between chickens as early as 1649.

. . .

In Mr Samuel Cooper’s studio
⁷³
, which I visited today, I had an interesting conversation with Dr Hugh Crescy of Merton College, a great acquaintance of Lord Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. Dr Crescy says he was the first to bring Socinus’s books into England, and Lord Cary borrowed them from him soon afterwards. Before the civil war, Lord Cary lived at Tew, about twelve miles from Oxford, and the best wits of the University visited him there, so his house, in that peaceable time, was like a college, full of learned men, including my great friend Mr Hobbes. I have heard Mr Hobbes say that Lord Cary was like a lusty fighting fellow that drove his enemies before him, but would often give his own party smart back-blows.

Lord Cary adhered
⁷⁴
to the King when the civil wars began, and after the Battle of Edgehill he became Principal Secretary of State, together with Sir Edward Nicholas. Lord Cary died in 1643 at the Battle of Newbury, where he rode in between the two armies – the Parliament’s army and the King’s – like a madman, just as they were starting to engage. And so he threw his life away. Some say this was because he had given the King bad advice, but others say it was because his mistress at court, whom he loved above all creatures, had recently died, and this was the secret cause of him being so madly guilty of his own death.

. . .

June

I have sent
⁷⁵
Mr Edward Davenant Euclid’s
Data
. Lately he has been working very hard at mathematics, especially on the problem of the doubling of the cube geometrically. But now he tells me he is so oppressed by other business that he has little time to think about mathematics.

. . .

July

Mr Wood has quarrelled
⁷⁶
with his sister-in-law and been thrown out of the house where he was born opposite Merton College. He is also slowly becoming deaf, which makes him more melancholy and retired than ever.

. . .

August

I have now but one horse fit to be ridden, otherwise I would send one to Oxford for Mr Wood so that he might come to stay with me in Wiltshire.

. . .

September

The work of making
⁷⁷
the River Avon navigable from Salisbury to Christ Church has commenced. Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, dug the first spit of earth, and pushed the first wheelbarrow. His lordship has given at least a hundred pounds of his own money to finance the digging.

. . .

Seth Ward tells me
⁷⁸
that at Silchester in Hampshire, which was once a Roman city, it is possible to discern in the ground where corn is now grown signs of the old streets, passages and hearths. He saw this with Dr Wilkins (now Bishop of Chester) in the spring.

. . .

This searching
⁷⁹
after antiquities is a wearisome business, yet nobody else will do it.

. . .

At Bemarton
⁸⁰
, near Salisbury, is a paper mill, which is now over a hundred years old, and the first that was erected in the county of Wiltshire. The workmen there told me it was the second paper mill in England. I remember the paper mill at Longdeane, in the parish of Yatton Keynell, was built by Mr Wyld, a Bristol merchant, in 1635. It supplies Bristol with brown paper. No white paper is made in Wiltshire.

. . .

Mr Wood has been summoned
⁸¹
by the Delegates of the University Press and told that they will give him 100 li. for his manuscript of
The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford
, on the condition that he allows the book to be translated into Latin, under the supervision of Dr Fell, Dean of Christ Church. But I am certain it would bring more fame and sell better in English.

Dr Fell made another (more helpful) suggestion: that Mr Wood should begin to compile short biographies of all the writers and bishops who have attended Oxford University. I would be more than willing to help him in this.

A new idea
⁸²
for a treatise on education has come into my head.

. . .

October

I am in Broad Chalke
⁸³
. Before I left London I left a cloak in the warehouse of the carrier Mr Wood uses. The carrier’s wife has since sent me a cloak, but it is a much shorter one, not mine. I hope Mr Wood can speak to the carrier’s wife about this for me, but I am sorry to trouble him about so mean a business. I am going to Easton Pierse next week.

. . .

I have heard
⁸⁴
that my Oxford tutor, Mr William Browne, has died, aged fifty-one or two. About eight years ago he was made vicar of Farnham in Surrey. He died of smallpox, infected by burying a corpse that had died of the disease.

. . .

Anno 1670

January

I have presented
⁸⁵
the Royal Society with a portrait of Mr Hobbes by Jan Baptist Jaspers: an excellent painter and a good piece.

. . .

February

I was to see
⁸⁶
Mr James Harrington last Wednesday night, but he proved unable to meet me. He lives in the Little Ambry in a fair house on the left side, which looks into the Dean’s yard in Westminster. There is a pretty gallery in the upper storey where he commonly dines, meditates and takes his tobacco.

I have a short poem
⁸⁷
by Mr Harrington in his handwriting:

On the State of Nature

The state of Nature never was so raw

But oaks bore acorns and there was a law

By which the spider and the silk worm span;

Each creature had her birth right, & must man

Be illegitimate! Have no child’s part!

If reason had no wit, how came in Art?

He is wont to say, ‘Right reason in contemplation is virtue in action,
et vice versa
. To live according to nature is to live virtuously, but the Divines will not have it so.’ He also says that when the Divines would have us be an inch above virtue, we fall an ell (an arm’s length) below.

Mr Harrington suffers
⁸⁸
from the strangest sort of madness I have ever found in anyone. He imagines his perspiration turns to flies, or sometimes to bees. He has had a movable timber house built in Mr Hart’s garden (opposite St James’s Park), to try an experiment to prove this delusion. He turns the timber structure to face the sun, chases all the flies and bees out of it, or kills them, then shuts the windows tight. But inevitably he misses some concealed in crannies of the cloth hangings and when they show themselves he cries out, ‘Do not you see that these come from me?’ Aside from this, his discourse is rational.

. . .

My former servant
⁸⁹
, Robert, sends word from Rome where he is accompanying his new master, having visited Florence and Pisa and expecting to proceed to Naples. He tells me that they have seen the great duke’s palace at Pisa, but not the jewels, and that the carnival is not taking place, as the Cardinals have not yet elected the new Pope. It is one of my most lasting sorrows that my mother interfered with my plans to visit Italy.

. . .

5 April

Easter Tuesday
⁹⁰
. I must now take leave of my beloved Easton Pierse, where I first drew breath in my grandfather’s chamber. Cruel fate dictates that I cannot afford to keep the house in which I was born, the house that was my mother’s inheritance. Four years ago, before my troubles with Joan Sumner began, I had an income of around 700 li. per annum from my estates, and I went around in sparkish garb with a servant and two horses. Now all my estates will soon be sold, my servant is gone, and I live in happy delitescency, free from responsibilities.