John Aubrey: My Own Life (18 page)

. . .

Mr Harrington has published his
Commonwealth of Oceana
. His genius lies towards politics and democratic government. His main principle is that power depends on the balance of property (usually landed property). His book is well received in the coffee houses. Mr Hobbes says Henry Nevill has had a finger in that pie.

. . .

May

Mr Potter has suggested
⁸²
that I visit a certain ironmonger who sells pliers, hand-vices, and other such tools for goldsmiths and watchmakers. He says there I should be able to obtain for him the steel plate he needs to try another way of making the screw compasses, which will be serviceable for circular divisions.

. . .

My friends
⁸³
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.

. . .

I have started collecting
⁸⁴
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 Lyte
⁸⁵
, 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.

. . .

I have drawn
⁸⁶
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.

. . .

A second coffee
⁸⁷
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.

. . .

My tedious lawsuit
⁸⁸
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 troubled
⁸⁹
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
.

. . .

As I rode
⁹⁰
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.

. . .

I visited Caerphilly Castle
⁹¹
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.

. . .

I went to Monmouth church
⁹²
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.

. . .

September

My good friend Mr Edmund Wylde has a grievous quartan ague.

. . .

My amours with Mary Wiseman continue, but she seems likely to marry another. I have started to pay suit to Katherine Ryves too.

. . .

December

Veneris morbus
⁹³
: I have been sleeping with whores and am stricken now with one of their venereal diseases.

. . .

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 will
⁹⁴
, 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.

. . .

October

My honoured friend
⁹⁵
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 college
⁹⁶
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.

. . .

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.

. . .

Dining at Hampton Court
⁹⁷
, 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.

. . .

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.

. . .

John Wilkins has been made
⁹⁸
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.

. . .

3 September

On this day Oliver Cromwell
⁹⁹
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.

. . .

There has been smallpox in Taunton all this year.

. . .

The experimental philosophical club
¹⁰⁰
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.

. . .

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.

. . .

Anno 1659

21 February

On this day
¹⁰¹
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
.

. . .

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 great
¹⁰²
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.

. . .

Sir George Penruddock
¹⁰³
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.

. . .

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 gallop
¹⁰⁴
, my horse tumbled over and over, and yet (thank God) I was not hurt.