John Aubrey, page 13
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My friends83 Sir John Hoskyns, Mr Stafford Tyndale and I went to visit a weaver in Pear-poole Lane today to see a loom for making stockings. The machine was invented in the last century by William Lee, a poor curate who had observed the pains his wife took knitting a pair of stockings. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, has made it a crime to export the loom, to ensure it is known in no part of the world but England.
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I have started collecting84 natural remarks for the county of Wiltshire. I do not think I will write of gardens, the pleasure of which was unknown to our great-grandfathers, who were content with potherbs and did chiefly mind their stables.
Henry Lyte85, of Lytes Carey in Somersetshire, my honoured ancestor, translated Rembert Dodoens’s Herbarium into English and dedicated it to Queen Elizabeth near the beginning of her reign. He had a pretty good collection of plants for that age, and some of them are still alive. In his edition of the Herbarium, he added some notes about the Somerset plants and their habitats. He hoped to contribute something to the renown of his country as well as to the health of its people. And he was very interested in genealogy, thinking the British to be of Trojan descent. His second book, also dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, was The Light of Britayne: A Recorde of the Honorable Originall and Antiquitie of Britaine (1588).
This ancestor of mine is an inspiration.
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I have drawn86 from memory a model of Lord Bacon’s Verulam House, which will now be sold by the current owner, Sir Harbottle Grimston. This view of the house is from the entrance into the gate from the highway. I cannot remember if there were bay windows on the east side, or whether there were five or seven windows on the east side, but to the best of my remembrance there were five. I wish I had measured the front and breadth of the house when I visited it.
My friend Lord Charles Seymour has commissioned a portrait of me.
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A second coffee87 house has opened in London, set up by Mr Farr, a barber, at the Rainbow by Inner Temple Gate. Sir Henry Blount, of Trinity College, a great friend of Francis Potter’s, now drinks nothing but water and coffee. He first discovered coffee when he was travelling in Turkey, but now he can drink it in London easily.
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My tedious lawsuit88 over the entail in Brecknockshire and Monmouthshire has begun. The entail in question is a matter of 600 li. a year, but in order to prove my claim to it I must go to Chaldon in Surrey to search the parish register there for the record of the burial of my great-grandmother, Dr William Aubrey’s widow, Wilgiford Williams. What legal and financial troubles I am embroiled in since my father’s death!
But I am cheered in this tedious business by one of my counsels, Walter Rumsey, who is being exceedingly kind to me. He has invited me to stay with him at his house, where he has many fine things, both natural and antiquarian. He is an ingenious man with a philosophical head, very interested in grafting, inoculating, planting and ponds.
Mr Rumsey is much troubled89 by phlegm. He has a method for relieving it which is to tie a rag to the end of a fine tender sprig and pass it down his throat to the top of his stomach: he has also tried this with a whale bone and says it works wonderfully for fetching up the phlegm. But when I tried, I could not make the device go down my throat. Mr Rumsey recommends taking an eluctuary made from coffee powder, butter, olive oil and honey, before swallowing the instrument, which he calls a ‘provang’. He thinks that coffee promotes vomiting and farting and that unless the fore-door and back door of the body are kept open it will be destroyed by undigested meat fermenting the whole moisture of a man’s body. He is working on a treatise called Organon Salutis: An Instrument to Cleanse the Stomach.
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As I rode90 from Brecknock to Radnor on the top of a mountain (I think not far from Payn’s Castle), I saw a monument of stones like a sepulchre, but much bigger than that at Holyhead. The stones are great and rudely placed. It think people call it Arthur’s Chairs, or some such name.
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I visited Caerphilly Castle91 today. It seems to me the oldest and most entire piece of Roman architecture that I know of in this Island. I wonder it is so little taken notice of.
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I went to Monmouth church92 today. There is a sash window with a very old escutcheon, as old as the church, belonging to the Sitsilt of Monmouthshire family, which is of great antiquity. The window was hanging a little dangerously. I fear it will fall and be spoiled.
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September
My good friend Mr Edmund Wylde has a grievous quartan ague.
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My amours with Mary Wiseman continue, but she seems likely to marry another. I have started to pay suit to Katherine Ryves too.
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December
Veneris morbus93: I have been sleeping with whores and am stricken now with one of their venereal diseases.
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Anno 1657
26 June
On this day I attended the funeral of my honoured friend William Harvey, who died earlier this month. He was buried in the vault of the church of Hempstead, Essex, which his brother Eliab Harvey built. He is lapt in lead and on his breast in great letters: DR WILLIAM HARVEY. I helped to carry him into the vault.
In his will94, he has left the house he was born in at Folkestone in Kent, a fair stone house that is now the post-house, to Caius College, Cambridge.
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October
My honoured friend95 John Lydall, whose health was never strong, died suddenly on 12 October, at four in the morning, aged about thirty-two. He has been buried in Trinity College: his coat of arms was on his hearse. He was an outstanding tutor to the young.
He left the college96 one of his most valuable books, Claudius Mydorgius’s Sectiones Conicas, and our friend Ralph Bathurst, in his capacity as college librarian, has entered Lydall’s name in the book of college benefactors, and written this eulogy: ‘No one was quicker or more acute in exploring the inner chambers of nature. No one was more the Lynceus (or sharp-sighted) in mathematics. No one erected more fruitfully the foundations of medicine by means of anatomy, botany, and chemistry.’
Our grief is overwhelming.
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November
Katherine Ryves, of the Close, Sarum, Wiltshire, whom I was to marry, has died, to my great loss. She will be buried by her father and mother at Blandford Forum. Her portion was more than 2,000 li. a year, and her husband would have been the guardian of her brother’s portion too (worth another 1,000 li. a year). She has left me a bequest of 350 li. and a mourning ring for my mother. Her death is a terrible blow for us.
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Dining at Hampton Court97, I heard Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector – who rules with kingly, and more than kingly, power – tell Lord Arundel of Wardour that he has been in all the counties of England and finds Devon husbandry the best.
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Anno 1658
I have been thinking about the antiquary William Burton, who died last year. His posthumous commentaries on chorography showing the importance of Roman remains have been printed recently: A Commentary on Antoninus his Itinerary, or Journies of the Roman Empire, so far as it concerneth Britain. My friend Mr Hollar did the engravings. I am struck by these commentaries and minded to devote more time from this day forward to my own interest in chorography. William Burton left his manuscripts and collections to the Bodleian Library.
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John Wilkins has been made98 Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The experimental philosophical club he founded in Oxford sometimes meets in London now, at the Bull Head tavern in Cheapside. Mr Wilkins is a lusty, strong-grown, well-set, broad-shouldered person, who revived experimental philosophy in Oxford. Experimental philosophy is inspired by the teachings of Lord Bacon.
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3 September
On this day Oliver Cromwell99 died of quartan ague. A short while ago a whale came into the River Thames and was taken at Greenwich. It is said Oliver was troubled at it. Perhaps he thought it a portent. Perhaps it was. Oliver’s son Richard has been made the new Lord Protector.
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There has been smallpox in Taunton all this year.
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The experimental philosophical club100 that once met in Oxford, and has lately been meeting in the Bull Head and other London taverns, will now meet in William Ball’s chamber in the Middle Temple and from henceforth there will be paper records of the discussions that take place.
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December
The Lord Protector’s Privy Council has called a Parliament to address the problem of the regime’s debt, which is said to be two million li.
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Anno 1659
21 February
On this day101 my honoured grandfather, Isaac Lyte of Easton Pierse, died. He will be buried in the church at Kington St Michael. Among his old books I have found one of the sermons of George Feriby (who was one of King James’s chaplains), called Life’s Farewell.
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March
I attended a meeting to choose the Knights of the Shire, and some present expressed the wish that our county of Wiltshire, where there are many observable antiquities, should be surveyed in imitation of the antiquary Mr William Dugdale’s Illustration of Warwickshire, which was printed three years ago.
Wiltshire is too great102 a task for one man, so Mr William Yorke (counsellor at law and lover of this kind of learning) advised a division of labour. He will cover the middle part of the county himself; I will undertake the north part, and collect notes on all the antiquities there. Three others will assist us. I hope this design does not just vanish into tobacco smoke.
In former days, the churches and great houses of this county so abounded with monuments and things remarkable that an antiquary would have been deterred from taking notes on them all. But now, like Pythagoras, who guessed the vastness of Hercules’s stature from the length of his foot, there are just enough remains among the ruins to guess at what noble buildings were made by the piety, charity and magnanimity of our forefathers. I think my eyes and mind are no less affected by these stately ruins than they would have been by the buildings themselves.
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Sir George Penruddock103 of Broad Chalke and I have made ourselves churchwardens of Broad Chalke church, for fear it will fall down from the niggardliness of the churchwardens of mean condition who have been looking after it until now. We will arrange for repairs of the building and intend to add a sixth bell.
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Yesterday I visited Ely. I nearly broke my neck in the minster, where I had climbed on to a high ledge to better examine the cathedral’s windows and stonework.
Today, riding at a gallop104, my horse tumbled over and over, and yet (thank God) I was not hurt.
My stammer has been troublesome since these mishaps.
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April
I have gone105 with Mr Hobbes’s brother Edmund to visit the house where my friend the eminent philosopher of Malmesbury was born. I hope to prevent mistakes or doubts hereafter as to the birthplace of this famous man. So we went into the very chamber where his brother says Mr Hobbes was born, in their father’s house in Westport, which points into (or faces) the horse fair, the farthest house on the left as you go to Tedbury, leaving the church on your right. It is a firm house, stone-built and tiled: one room (with a buttery or the like within) and two chambers above. It was in the innermost of these chambers that Mr Hobbes first drew breath on Good Friday 5 April 1588. It is said his mother took fright at the invasion of the Spanish Armada and went into labour early.
Mr Hobbes’s horoscope106 is Taurus with a satellitium of five of the seven planets in it. It is a maxim of astrology that a person who has a satellitium in his ascendant becomes more eminent in his life than an ordinary person who does not. Oliver Cromwell had this, same as Mr Hobbes.
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May
After less than nine months as Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell has fallen from power. He had no confidence in the army, and the army had none in him. Now one of the army’s factions has undone him. He refused the army’s demand to dissolve the recently elected Parliament, so troops assembled at St James’s Palace to force his hand. The recent Parliament has been dissolved and the Parliament of 1648 has been recalled. The Parliament of 1648 is called the Rump Parliament because it is what was left after the Long Parliament was purged of all members hostile to putting the late King on trial for high treason.
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25 May
On this day the Rump Parliament agreed to pay Richard Cromwell’s debts and give him a pension in return for his resignation as Lord Protector.
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I have made my will and settled my estate on trustees, and intend to leave the country to see the antiquities of Rome and Italy. When I return, I will marry, since I am now thirty-three years old and I must secure my fortune in this world.
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July
Mr Stafford Tyndale107 has written to me from Alençon. He urges me to join him in Paris. He says I should come abroad now while times are favourable and travel cheap: it will be much cheaper and safer to travel in company than alone. He says that if I allow myself just 200 li. a year I can live and travel like a prince in the company he will introduce me to. Convinced I will have a rambling fit before I die, he insists that if I do not take this opportunity I will never have so good a one again. He sends his respects and services to my mother.
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My mother, to my inexpressible grief and ruin, has hindered my plan to travel abroad. She simply forbids me to go, and I feel I cannot disregard her wishes.
Dis aliter visum (it seemed otherwise to the Gods).
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I have sold the old manor108 of Burleton in Herefordshire, which I inherited from my father, to Dr Willis for 1,200 li.
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I have sold the smaller manor of Stretford, which I inherited from my father, to Herbert Croft, Lord Bishop of Hereford. I sold it to pay debts, but in part I am glad to be free of another property: ownership comes accompanied by weighty responsibilities that keep me from my studies.
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I am taking a course of lessons with the Danish mathematician Nicolas Mercator, but truly my life is dominated by debts and lawsuits – opus et usus – borrowing of money and perpetual riding. I have no time to settle to my studies.
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I am sharing lodgings109 in London with my friend Tom Mariett, of Whitchurch in Warwickshire. He is in correspondence with Prince Charles in exile and I have seen letters in the Prince’s own hand in our rooms. Tom and Colonel Edward Massey are tampering daily with General Monck, commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary forces, to see if he will be instrumental in bringing the Prince back to England, but they cannot find any inclination or propensity to this purpose in General Monck. Late every night in bed I hear an account of all these transactions. Sometimes I think I should commit these accounts to writing while they are still fresh in my memory.
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Michaelmas
I am an auditor110, or listener, at Mr Harrington’s new Rota Club, which is a coffee club that meets every night in the Turk’s Head in the New Palace Yard, at one Mr Miles’s house next to the stairs. Here there is an oval table with a hole cut in one side for Mr Miles to stand and serve the coffee. These meetings are a forum for exchanging republican views, and the discourses I have listened to at them are the most ingenious and smart that I have ever heard, or expect to hear.
After the meetings we often repair to the Rhenish-wine house.
At our meetings we have a formal balloting box and we ballot about how things should be carried by tentamens or experiment. The room is crammed full every evening, as full as it can be, with gentlemen diverting themselves with philosophical or political discussions.
My Trinity College friend111 Sir John Hoskyns is a member of the Rota Club, as is the learned Dr William Petty. Dr Petty troubles Mr Harrington with his arithmetical proportions and ability to reduce politics to numbers. It seems that every day in the coffee house, Mr Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and Henry Nevill’s discourses make new proselytes.
Mr Harrington recently printed a little pamphlet called Divers Modells of Popular Government, and now another called The Rota. His doctrine is being taken up, the more because there seems to be no possibility of restoring the monarchy. And yet the greater part of the Parliament’s men hate Mr Harrington’s design for allocating political office through rotation by balloting. The Parliament’s men are cursed tyrants in love with the power they would lose if Mr Harrington’s method of rotation came in. The model provides that a third of the senate should be replaced every year by ballot, so that it will be completely renewed every nine years, and no magistrate should continue in office more than three years. There is nothing invented that is more fair and impartial than choosing by ballot. The pride of senators appointed for life is insufferable and they can grind anyone incurring their ill will to powder. They are hated by the army and their country: their names and natures will stink for years to come.
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I have often heard Mr Harrington speak of the late King at the Rota meetings, with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable. Mr Harrington was so grief-stricken by the King’s execution that he contracted a disease: never did anything touch him so closely.
