John Aubrey: My Own Life (4 page)

One of the drawings
⁶
Aubrey commissioned of Osney Abbey was engraved for William Dugdale’s
Monasticon Anglicanum
, which strove to restore Anglican and Royalist England after 1650 when the episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer were abolished under the Commonwealth. During this time of rupture, antiquarianism gained new urgency. Rescuing or remembering the material remains of lost or shattered worlds became compelling for many who lived through the English Civil War. Aubrey records that
⁷
his antiquarianism was strongly influenced by Sir Thomas Browne’s
Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk
, a wide-ranging meditation on commemorating the dead. Browne’s book was published in 1658, when the Church of England’s ‘Order for the Burial of the Dead’ had been banned for over a decade. Reflecting on the ancient practice of burying cremated remains in pottery jars, Browne indirectly criticised the Puritan prohibition of funeral rites. After the Restoration
⁸
of Charles II, Browne continued his antiquarian work, explaining to Aubrey that he had made a record of all the remaining brass inscriptions in Norwich Cathedral, lest they be lost to oblivion. Aubrey shared Browne’s conserving passion for the past. William Camden (1551–1623), antiquary and topographer of an earlier generation, was another important formative influence. Camden produced the first chorographical study (or systematic description and mapping of particular regions) of Britain and Ireland, and the first history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He wrote at a time when it was not yet fashionable to talk about ‘Britain’, a time before the union of the crowns of England and Scotland. Aubrey’s grandfather remembered Camden, in pursuit of information for his county-by-county historical survey
Britannia
(1586), coming to visit the church at Yatton Keynell in Wiltshire when he was a schoolboy. Aubrey was destined to pursue related topographical and antiquarian work, but unlike Camden, he wrote in English, not Latin.

Aubrey’s book-collecting connected his antiquarianism to his enthusiasm for the advancement of learning. He was conscious of living through a revolution in print culture, bookselling and journalism. Alongside his excitement at new opportunities for disseminating information, Aubrey also valued what was being displaced: a rich oral tradition of folklore and old wives’ tales. It was more important to him to make a home in his manuscripts for stories and facts that would otherwise be lost than to limit himself to producing printed books. Looking back, he wrote:

Before Printing
⁹
, Old-wives Tales were ingeniouse: and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil-warres, the ordinary sort of People were not taught to reade: now-a-dayes Books are common, and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt all the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries.

In Aubrey’s time, most books were sold in London, at booksellers’ shops or stalls clustered around St Paul’s churchyard. From here the book trade
¹⁰
spread out to towns with printing presses: Oxford, Cambridge, York, Ipswich, Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St Andrews. Chapmen or carriers transported books to dealers in the provinces. Distribution became easier after the introduction of the postal service in 1635. Paper in England was more expensive than in the rest of Europe because it had to be imported; there was no successful manufacture of white paper for printing in England until the eighteenth century. When it was sold, it was counted into quires (24 or 25 sheets) or reams (20 quires, so 480 or 500 sheets). Publication of books was funded by an undertaker, usually a bookseller, occasionally an author or printer. It was the financial backer who owned the copyright in this period. Stationers’ Hall, where an undertaker could register ownership of a book after having agreed to finance it, was close to St Paul’s. For the booming book trade, the Great Fire of London of 1666 – known as the Memorable, General or Great Conflagration in Aubrey’s time – was a catastrophe.

Aubrey records that among the many publications burnt in the Great Fire were early issues of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
. He became a Fellow
¹¹
of the Society in 1662, when it was granted a charter of incorporation, two years after it had been founded in London as a club devoted to the pursuit of scientific research. From its earliest days, the Royal Society received donations of physical objects of scientific or natural curiosity – a bird of paradise, a piece of elephant’s skin, an ostrich egg – and formed a ‘repository’ to house such objects. Aubrey was a frequent attender of the weekly meetings at which discussion and experiment took place. While he was not one of the foremost intellects of the Society – where he coincided with Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle among others – he did make pioneering contributions to archaeology and architecture: he discovered a circle of holes named after him at Stonehenge; he was the first to date systematically buildings by the design of their windows. He saw that just as shells or insects could be collected and ordered, examples of handwriting from the past might be chronologically classified. During the Great Plague of 1665–6, many Fellows fled London and neglected to pay their membership fees. After the Great Fire, the Royal Society needed to rescue its finances and reinvigorate its activities. In this it succeeded triumphantly. As a proud and loyal member, Aubrey played his part in the advancement of learning, even though his own finances were increasingly under strain.

From childhood, Aubrey had looked forward to inheriting a comfortable income from the landed estates acquired by previous generations of his family in Hereford and south Wales. He had a refined temperament to match his privileged lot in life. Gregarious and good at making and keeping friends, he was also sensitive, self-contained and sometimes solitary. He received a gentleman’s education at Blandford School, Dorset, at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the Middle Temple, London. He was fascinated by the present as well as the past – by the arts of drawing and painting and the advancement of scientific and mathematical knowledge. He might have become a scholar – he had passion and intellect enough – but even in more settled times, the world would have doubtless distracted him. He strongly resisted ordination, which was the usual career path of dons at that time. In his thirties, after his father died, it became clear that Aubrey’s inheritance was encumbered by debt. Suddenly far from as secure as he had expected to be, he started to collect observations of Wiltshire, the English county he knew and loved best. His concerns about the material basis of his own life resonated with his passion for preserving antiquities that would otherwise be lost or destroyed.

Soon after the Restoration, around the time of the founding of the Royal Society, Aubrey showed Charles II the ancient stone circles at Avebury and secured protection for the monument from local people foraging for building material for new homes. He noted wryly the similarity between his name and the monument’s, and considered himself its discoverer. Through his wide circle of scholarly friends, he was commissioned to undertake a survey of Surrey. He set off on horseback to make notes on the old buildings, inscriptions and any natural curiosities he encountered on his journey. Other ideas for collections occurred to him: styles of architecture, handwriting and clothing; lists of old place names; an assemblage of folklore. These collections were compiled in notebooks, or on scraps of paper, cross-referenced, revised, corrected over time. Aubrey’s work was fundamentally inclusive and cumulative. Always reluctant to let the practicalities of publication curtail or limit his manuscripts, he published only one short book, about occult phenomena –
Miscellanies: A Collection of Hermetick Philosophy
(1696) – towards the end of his lifetime. In old age, when the debts he had inherited and those he had incurred living without regular employment had crushed him into bankruptcy, Aubrey began to panic, not about pain or death, but about the future of his precious collections. What should he do with all the piles of paper, the wealth of information, it had been his life’s work to assemble? His antiquities rescued from the deluge of time were as vulnerable as the fragile boats the Ancient Britons sailed on the River Avon – baskets of twigs covered with ox skin called coracles or curricles – still used, Aubrey noted, by poor people in Wales in his time.

Fortunately for Aubrey – and for us – he had like-minded friends more worldly than he was. Elias Ashmole was a collector of markedly different temperament and circumstance: self-made, obsessive, ruthless and rich. He promised to give his own important collection
¹²
of antiquarian artefacts to Oxford University, on the condition that the university erected a new building to house his donation. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683 and Aubrey contributed many rare objects to it. At the end of his life
¹³
, he decided there was no better place for his paper collections, among them his most renowned gift to posterity: the compilation of biographical information entitled
Brief Lives
. It was this collection specifically that Anthony Powell thought such a striking record of Englishmen and their ways. The
Brief Lives
are mostly lives of seventeenth-century men: eminent writers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, astrologers, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, dignitaries of the state and the Church of England. There are a few female lives too: some commanding their own biography, others married to or fathered by famous men, outstandingly beautiful, or simply ‘wondrous wanton’. And there are many more unnamed women, caught between the lines – mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, mistresses, whores. They are lives lived amidst the intense social turmoil of civil war, the Great Plague and the Great Fire. They encompass discoveries that changed the future, such as the circulation of blood, and magical spells and folklore from the distant past.

Agnostic and afraid of fanaticism, Aubrey tended always towards tolerance and open-mindedness in his religious and political views. He had both royalist and republican friends. He was close to Protestants, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics. He was captivated by exciting new science and its challenge to more orthodox temperaments. If he believed securely in anything, it was astrology. He collected birth charts for his biographical subjects whenever he could, consulted astrologers about his own life and remained convinced that astrology was a serious science, as did Ashmole and many of their contemporaries. There was a huge popular market for astrological almanacs at this time and beyond. About himself Aubrey concluded
¹⁴
: ‘His life is more remarqueable in an astrologicall respect then for any advancement of learning, having from his birth (till of late yeares) been labouring under a crowd of ill directions.’ Modest and self-deprecating as he was, he felt completely confident of making an important and original contribution in one respect: he knew he was inventing a new form of biography. He cursed the classical tradition
¹⁵
of high-style panegyrics and selective eulogies: ‘Pox take your orators and poets, they spoile lives & histories.’ A Life, he insisted
¹⁶
, is a small history in which detail and minutiae are all. Contemporaries criticised him for being ‘too minute’ or trivial, but Aubrey was convinced that ‘a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull’. He was right: the fine details he recorded are widely appreciated and the exemplary biographies so dominant in his time are now more a hindrance than a help to modern biographers. The words ‘according to Aubrey’, or ‘Aubrey says’, resound down the centuries to the present day, where they still appear in the introductions to new books on Hobbes, Milton, Jonson, Boyle, Harvey, Hooke, Newton, Wren and other luminaries. His idea was to get at the truth
¹⁷
: ‘the naked and plaine trueth, which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheekes’. An example is the Life
¹⁸
of the brilliant, erudite jurist John Selden, who, Aubrey accurately notes, ‘got more by his Prick than ever he had donne by his practise’. Aubrey heard this from one of the many people discussing the fortune Selden inherited from the widowed Countess of Kent. Aubrey is subtle, his prose florid but precise. He wrote in private, speaking freely to posterity, and has unfairly been characterised as a gossip. When he relates an anecdote, salacious or otherwise, he is careful to indicate its source, sceptically if necessary, and never to stray beyond the story into general inferences about the person concerned. In his book
John Aubrey and His Friends
(1948), Anthony Powell contrasted Aubrey’s scrupulous regard for the truth with the opportunism of a much later biographical innovator, Lytton Strachey. Strachey, like Aubrey, changed the way biographies were written, liberating the genre from pious expectations and infusing it with the kind of irreverence and wit Aubrey would have enjoyed. But Powell found Strachey lacking where Aubrey was not:

In
Elizabeth and Essex
, Lytton Strachey writes
¹⁹
of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. The story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s . . . Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident; he was ‘disgraced’, he may have been ‘shattered’; no doubt at times he was ‘alone’; but Aubrey’s story of stuffing the fowl on Highgate Hill shows Bacon, accompanied by the King’s Physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow; and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel. If Aubrey’s story suggests anything, it is that Bacon’s intellectual faculties were anything but ‘shattered’ and that he was not ‘alone’. This is a trifling instance, though it illustrates how a fragment of a ‘Life’, combined with juxtaposition of epithets, may be used to convey an oblique hint; a method, incidentally, never employed by Aubrey himself.