John Aubrey: My Own Life (34 page)

The news is that England’s alliance with France is over. Now we shall join the rest of Europe on the side of the Dutch and go to war with France.

I doubt how strongly the Church of England stands; and if it falls what shall I do? I am no enemy of Roman Catholics, unless they are Irish bigots. I say that a little superstition is a good ingredient in government. But what public spirit, what common honesty, is left? Among the clergy, humility and charity are very rare, except when you come across an honest bachelor parson. It is rumoured at the Vice Chancellor Mr Ralph Bathurst’s table that Mr Wood has become a Roman Catholic.

I am so importuned
¹⁷
that I could scarcely sleep last night. I am stormed anew by friends who would have me turn parson and keep an honest curate in a parsonage of 200 li. per annum. They drive me to my wits’ end. Lord, how should I look in a cassock? But in some respects my friends are right: I love not business, and rising early in the morning is a death to me. As a parson I would not be troubled, could enjoy my friends in London and Oxford, and have a gentle competency.

. . .

Mr Hobbes tells me
¹⁸
he has great esteem for Mr Hooke as man and philosopher. But he has considerably less for the Royal Society. Mr Hobbes knows that he stands in great esteem throughout the learned world, so has no need to seek endorsement from the Royal Society, which has not even protested against the evil words and disgraces put out against him by Dr Wallis, who has been engaged in a bitter controversy with Mr Hobbes ever since
De corpore
was published in 1655. He cannot see why the Royal Society would object to his vindicating himself when they do not bother to vindicate him themselves.

De corpore
included a proof for squaring the circle, which Dr Wallis attacked. Mr Hobbes has since withdrawn it, but only to substitute new proofs. He believes the Royal Society to have unfairly taken Dr Wallis’s side in their disputes, which are both philosophical and personal.

According to Mr Hobbes, Dr Wallis is no philosopher or geometrician of any standing, and is also a personal enemy. For this reason, Mr Hobbes will not agree to any of his work passing through Dr Wallis’s hands. I have consulted their nativities and it is clear that their Mercuries are in opposition. Thus it is no surprise that they find themselves on such rancorous terms.

. . .

I have had to break
¹⁹
the news to Mr Hobbes that the Dean of Christ Church, Dr Fell, has interfered with the account of his life in Mr Wood’s book
²⁰
Historia et antiquitates universitatis oxoniensis
. The Old Gent did not receive this news well. Mr Wood says that Dr Fell has inserted many base things into his book, about Mr Hobbes and others, to ‘please his partial humor and undoe the author’.

Mr Wood’s book is the result of ten years’ work. In it he lists each of Oxford’s colleges and halls, mentioning the writers that were educated there in order of their matriculation and listing the books they wrote. Dr Fell (who has plenipotentiary power over the University Press) is reading every page before it is printed and expunging and inserting whatsoever he pleases. It was Dr Fell who insisted the book appear in Latin.

. . .

1 March

I spent the day
²¹
with Mr Hooke, helping to arrange his papers and things.

. . .

3 March

I was at Garraway’s
²²
with Mr Hooke and Mr Wylde. Mr Wylde says the shriek that an oak gives before it falls can be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting its demise.

. . .

5 March

I was arrested on this day
²³
for a 200 li. debt by Sergeant Gardiner: a lusty, fair-haired fellow, proud, insolent, and everything like that (
et omnia id genus
).

. . .

9 March

On this day I was released. Providence provided better for me than I could have imagined or done for myself. A friend has undertaken to manage my concern in Brecon, one of the last remaining troubles from my father’s estate, and I shall be able to pay my debts.

. . .

Mr Hooke has newly
²⁴
in print
An Attempt to prove the Motion of the Earth
. I hope it will hold. I am engaged in writing the Catalogue of the Repository of the Royal Society, which will hardly be finished by the beginning of May. I am doing it according to the incomparable method of Dr Wilkins’s Philosophical Grammar. Mr Hooke began this before me, intending that the Royal Society’s collection should be catalogued in accordance with the categories of Dr Wilkins’s
Essay towards a Real Character, and Philosophical Language.

. . .

April

Mr Hobbes has suggested that Mr Wood should write him a letter of complaint, of the kind he wrote to me, about the changes Dr Fell has made to
Historia et antiquitates
. Mr Hobbes will then be able to answer the letter and vindicate himself by correcting the errors that Dr Fell has introduced.

I saw Mr Hobbes
²⁵
on Good Friday (5 April) for his birthday. He is now aged eighty-six. We discussed the
Odyssey
. When Ulysses on his travels comes to a town where at one end it was day and at the other night, Mr Hobbes observes that Homer did not believe this, but took pleasure in contemplating how much the learned could make the ignorant believe.

I am reminded
²⁶
of the stories of King Arthur’s court, Camelot, that are believed in Somersetshire. Stories verily believed by old women are often passed to their daughters, who can hardly be of any other opinion, since custom joined with ignorance is so powerful a thing.

. . .

I think I am likely to be spirited away to Jamaica by my lord John Vaughan, who is newly made governor there, and urging me to go with him. He promises to find me employment worthy of a gentleman. He intends to model Jamaica’s government on our English Parliament, to stop piracy, to encourage sugar plantations and negotiate slave prices with the Royal African Company.

Other friends urge me
²⁷
to take a living in the church. But, fough! The cassock stinks: it would be ridiculous! Life in Jamaica with Lord Vaughan would be better – I would miss all my ingenious friends, but I could send letters to England every month or six weeks.

. . .

Mr Hobbes plans
²⁸
to vindicate himself against Dr Fell’s charges at the end of his new translation of Homer’s
Odyssey
, which is about to be printed.

I went to visit
²⁹
Mr Hooke, who had stayed in bed until 11 this morning after drinking a gallon of plain posset and vomiting last night. We went to Garraway’s. He discussed an experiment where a magnet was found not to attract a stronger piece of iron after it had been touched there before.

. . .

The Earl of Thanet
³⁰
importunes me to accompany him to his estate in the Bermudas. He has written to me about old Richard Norwood who has recently died in the Bermudas, aged over ninety. Mr Norwood captained the ship in which my lord sent his gardener and vines to the Bermudas. His book,
The Seaman’s Practice
, first printed in 1637, verifies a fundamental problem in navigation, namely the compass of the earth and sea and the quantity of a degree in our English measure. He has also written most usefully on plotting and surveying and the latitude of the principal places in England. The Royal Society used to send him questions.

. . .

May

I do not think
³¹
it will be my fate to go to America this summer. I hope to see my mother and brother at or around Whitsuntide and to get to Oxford to see Mr Wood.

. . .

June

Mr Hooke and I
³²
observed the resistance of air to be duplicate to the velocity, or rather in musical proportion.

. . .

Mr Wood has suggested to Mr Hobbes that he write a letter of protest on a single folio broadside for inclusion in the second volume of his
Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis.
Mr Hobbes needs to know how long and broad the paper must be and how many copies will be needed.

. . .

I have sent
³³
Mr Hobbes’s letter of protest to Mr Wood. Mr Wood has shown it to Dr Fell, and Dr Fell has remarked that Mr Hobbes is an old man, has one foot in the grave, should mind his own business, and trouble the world no more with his papers. Little does Dr Fell know. Mr Hobbes recently saw the King in Pall Mall in St James’s Park, and told him how ill served he has been by the nefarious Dean of Christ Church. The King seemed troubled and has given Mr Hobbes permission to vindicate himself as long as he limits his complaint to Dr Fell’s ill treatment of him and does not criticise Oxford University more generally.

. . .

27 June

Mr Hooke lent me
³⁴
another ten shillings. He lent me twenty back in November, and another five since then.

. . .

2 July

Two dozen copies
³⁵
of Mr Hobbes’s letter of protest have been sent to Oxford today, and other copies circulated in London.

. . .

6 July

I took leave
³⁶
of my cousin Sir John Aubrey’s wife on her sickbed.

I have given Mr Hooke more of my books for the Royal Society’s library:

Pappus Alexandrinus,
Mathematicae Collectiones
, 1588

Apollonius Pergoeus,
Conicorum libri IV
, 1655, and
Conicorum libri V–VII
, 1661

Diophantes,
Arithmeticorum libri VI
, 1621

Copernicus,
De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium
, 1566

Bacon,
De Mirabilibus Artis et Naturae
, including Dr Dee’s
Monas Hierioglyphica
, 1564

Gebri,
Alchimia

Llull,
Testamentum
, 1663

Hartlib on engines and husbandry

Napier,
Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio
, 1614

Brerewood,
De ponderibus
, 1614

Alexander Anderson, Tracts LXXIV

Descartes,
De Lumine

Pell in high Dutch:
An Introduction to Algebra
, by J. H. Rhan, translated out of high Dutch by T. Brancker, and altered by Dr John Pell, 1668

Pecquet,
Experimenta nova anatomica (Dissertatio de Circulatio Sanguinis)
, 1661

Galileo
Tractus de Proportionum Instrumento
, 1635

. . .

9 July

Mr Hooke lent me
³⁷
another five shillings.

. . .

11 July

Mr Hobbes’s letter
³⁸
has been distributed today among all the coffee houses and stationers’ shops in Oxford, crowded with visitors for the degree ceremony.

. . .

28 July

Mr Hobbes left London and went towards Derbyshire this morning.

Mr Wood has sent me
³⁹
a copy of his book, volume 1 of
Historia et antiquitates universitatis oxoniensis
, printed at Oxford earlier this month, in which he has included my name. Now, like a wild olive tree or polypedium, my name will live upon this never-dying structure.

. . .

1 August

A very rainy morning
⁴⁰
: I visited Mr Hooke.

. . .

3 August

Mr Hooke lent me
⁴¹
another five shillings, which means I now owe him forty shillings.

. . .

Mr George Ent, my honoured friend and old acquaintance and fellow traveller to France, has moved to Oxford. I have given him a letter of introduction to Mr Wood, together with the manuscript Historia Roffensia, and my full set of the journal
Mercurius Pragmaticus
, all of which I intend to give to the Bodleian Library.

I have also sent to Mr Wood (via George Ent) the following:

– My precious drawings of Osney Abbey, which I had done when I was a student, so that one of them can be engraved for the volume of illustrations that will be published to accompany his book. I do not know, and I must find out, whether the plate that was made of one of the drawings of Osney Abbey for Mr Dugdale’s
Monasticon
was melted in the Great Conflagration of 1666.

– A fine prospect of Godstowe nunnery and adjacent parts, taken from the bastion by St Giles’ Church, which will be helpful when he prepares a description of Oxfordshire. I desire Mr Wood to return the originals after he has had the drawings engraved.

– The pamphlet description of the entertainments for the King and Queen at Bushell’s Rock.

George Ent desires
⁴²
very much to have a copy of Mr Hobbes’s life in prose, so I have asked Mr Wood to let him have one (Mr Ent has promised not to show it to anyone else).

I have a curious manuscript
⁴³
in the hand of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, which I would give to the college library if I thought it would be chained there and safely kept, but I hesitate to do so, for fear it might be given away or lost.