Aubrey's Brief Lives Read online

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Foreword

  The Life and Times of John Aubrey

  George Abbot

  Thomas Allen

  Lancelot Andrewes

  Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Albans

  Isaac Barrow

  Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

  Sir John Birkenhead

  Sir Henry Blount

  Edmund Bonner

  Caisho Borough

  James Bovey

  Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork

  The Hon. Robert Boyle

  Henry Briggs

  Elizabeth Broughton

  Thomas Bushell

  Samuel Butler

  William Butler

  William Camden

  William Cartwright

  Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland

  Sir Charles Cavendish

  Charles Cavendish

  Thomas Chaloner

  William Chillingworth

  George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland

  Sir Edward Coke

  Jean Baptiste Colbert

  John Colet

  Thomas Cooper

  Richard Corbet

  Abraham Cowley

  Sir Charles Danvers

  Sir John Danvers

  Edward Davenant

  Sir William Davenant

  John Dee

  Sir John Denham

  René Descartes

  Sir Everard Digby

  Sir Kenelm Digby

  Venetia Digby

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Baron Fairfax

  Carlo Fantom

  Sir William Fleetwood

  John Florio

  Francis Fry

  Thomas Goffe

  John Graunt

  Edmund Gunter

  John Hales

  Edmund Halley

  William Harcourt

  Thomas Hariot

  James Harrington

  William Harvey

  Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury

  George Herbert

  Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

  William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke

  William and Philip Herbert, 3rd and 4th Earls of Pembroke

  Thomas Hobbes

  William Holder

  Wenceslas Hollar

  Robert Hooke

  John Hoskyns

  Henry Isaacson

  David Jenkins

  Sir Leoline Jenkins

  Ben Jonson

  Ralph Kettell

  Richard Knolles

  Sir Henry Lee

  William Lee

  Richard Lovelace

  Henry Martin

  Andrew Marvell

  Thomas May

  Sir Hugh Middleton

  John Milton

  George Monk, 1st Duke of Albemarle

  Sir Jonas Moore

  Sir Robert Moray

  Sir Thomas More

  Sir Thomas Morgan

  Robert Murray

  Richard Napier

  John Ogilby

  William Oughtred

  John Overall

  John Pell

  William Penn

  Sir William Petty

  Katherine Philips

  Sir William Platers

  Sir John Popham

  Francis Potter

  William Prynne

  Eleanor Radcliffe, Countess of Sussex

  Sir Walter Raleigh

  Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick

  Charles Robson

  Walter Rumsey

  Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset

  Sir Henry Savile

  Sylvanus Scory

  John Selden

  William Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset

  William Shakespeare

  Olive Sherington

  Sir Philip Sidney

  Sir Henry Spelman

  Edmund Spenser

  Thomas Street

  Thomas Stump

  Sir John Suckling

  Thomas Sutton

  Silas Taylor

  John Tombes

  Nicholas Towes

  Thomas Triplett

  William Twisse

  Thomas Tyndale

  Henry and Thomas Vaughan

  Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

  William de Visscher

  Edmund Waller

  Seth Ward

  Walter Warner

  John Whitson

  John Wilkins

  John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

  Thomas Wolsey

  Glossary of Persons

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  * * *

  John Aubrey was a modest man, a self-styled antiquarian and the inventor of modern biography. His ‘lives’ of the prominent figures of his generation and the Elizabethan era, including Shakespeare, Milton and Sir Walter Raleigh, have been plundered by historians for centuries for their frankness and fascinating detail. Collected here are all of Aubrey’s biographical writings, a series of unforgettable portraits of the characters of his day – still more alive and kicking than in any conventional work of history.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  Born 12th March 1626 in Wiltshire, antiquary and biographer John Aubrey was the eldest surviving son of an affluent family. Having experienced a lonely childhood he later immersed himself in society, associating with many of the most distinguished figures of his time. He documented their lives in unique accounts, contained in manuscripts which were deposited in the Ashmolean Museum by the antiquary Anthony Wood in 1693. He had a keen interest in archaeology and is credited with a number of significant discoveries in Britain, including the ruins of Avebury, and the ring of chalk pits at Stonehenge which bear his name. He died 7th June 1697 and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen in Oxford.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  * * *

  John Aubrey

  Aubrey’s bookplate

  PLATE

  I. A page of Aubrey’s manuscript

  II. A page of Aubrey’s manuscript

  III. Easton Piers as it was at the time of Aubrey’s birth

  IV. Easton Piers after its rebuilding by his father

  V. Easton Piers, northern elevation

  VI. Sir James Long and John Aubrey Hawking

  VII. Anthony Wood

  VIII. Sir Henry Lee

  IX. George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland

  X. George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury

  XI. Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland

  XII. Ben Jonson

  XII. Thomas Hobbes

  XIV. Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset

  XV. Venetia Digby

  XVI. Sir Kenelm Digby

  XVII. Sir John Suckling

  XVIII. James Harrington

  XIX. Samuel Butler

  XX. Richard Lovelace

  XXI. Abraham Cowley

  XXII. Andrew Marvell

  XXIII. Sir Walter Raleigh

  XXIV. Sir Philip Sidney

  XXV. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

  XXVI. The Hon. Robert Boyle

  XXVII. William Penn

  XXVIII. John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

  John Aubrey

  From the drawing by William Faithorne in the Bodleian Library

  TO

  Sir Stephen Tallents

  John Aubrey’s Bookplate

  Introduction

&nb
sp; All lives, even the long-lived, are brief when measured against the march of time. John Aubrey (1626–97) congratulated himself on coming from ‘a longaevous race’.fn1 His mother and three of his four grandparents lived well into old age and told him treasured tales of the olden days. Aubrey’s maternal grandfather still wore an Elizabethan doublet and hose and remembered seeing Sir Philip Sidney composing poetry on horseback on Salisbury Plain. From childhood, Aubrey felt himself inclined to antiquities, or the collection of facts and artifacts that would otherwise be lost to ‘the teeth of time’.fn2 He believed that antiquaries, like poets, are born and not made: some people, in every generation, are naturally drawn towards treasuring the past and salvaging what they can of it for posterity.

  Aubrey’s life coincided with the most tumultuous social and constitutional crises England has experienced yet. He was born a gentleman in Wiltshire. He lived through England’s Civil War, which began in 1642 while he was a student at Oxford. He was twenty-two when Charles I was executed. He saw Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, and Richard Cromwell’s brief succession. He witnessed the Restoration of Charles II, the short reign of James II, who lost his throne in 1688, and the Glorious Revolution that replaced him with William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II. Aubrey died in 1697, ten years before England and Scotland joined their parliaments to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

  Aubrey was seventy-one when he died: a decent age to have reached in the 17th century and today. Like all of us fortunate not to be taken in youth, he became more concerned about the brevity of life as he aged. He began ‘to consider that we are all mortal men, and that we must not lose TIME’.fn3 He noticed that ‘my candle burns low’ and feared that ‘heartbreaking cares will shorten my life’. To his friend and literary collaborator Anthony Wood he wrote, ‘God blesse you & me in this in-&-out-world’.fn4

  The story of the collaboration between Aubrey and Wood is at the heart of Brief Lives. They first met in Oxford in 1667 when Aubrey was browsing books on a bookseller’s stand outside All Souls College. He came across William Fulman’s history of Oxford University, Notitia Academiae Oxoniensis (1665), and was mistakenly told the author was Anthony Wood who could be found in Merton College. Aubrey sought Wood out and they talked about their shared passion for antiquities in the Meremaid Tavern. Wood was six years younger than Aubrey, but both had witnessed the destruction of war-torn England: the old buildings, monuments and manuscripts wantonly destroyed by Puritan fanatics. Aubrey offered to help Wood collect information for the book he had been researching for the last six years on the history of Oxford. Until Wood’s death in 1695, aged sixty-two, they exchanged letters, manuscripts, books and a wealth of biographical information about their contemporaries and predecessors. Wood would send Aubrey lists of Wikipedia-type questions: Where was so-and-so born? When did he die? Where is he buried? What books and pamphlets did he write? And Aubrey would find the answers.

  United by their love of antiquities, Aubrey and Wood were very different men. Aubrey had a genius for friendship and a vast circle of acquaintance which included wealthy patrons, like the Pembroke family; early founders of the Royal Society, like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle; distinguished writers, painters, architects, statesmen, politicians, lawyers, bishops, booksellers, tradesmen, shopkeepers etc. Aubrey seems to have had the ability to make friends with anyone and everyone. Wood, in contrast, was irascible and reclusive; he seldom left Oxford. He fell out even with his closest relatives, even with Aubrey. And yet their friendship endured for three decades. Wood brooding and obsessively working at the centre of the city of learning represented something of irreplaceable value to Aubrey: a still point in this fleeting world. Aubrey saw Wood as a ‘candid historian’, to whom worldly fripperies – money, sex, power – meant nothing, whose only concern was the truth.fn5

  Aubrey modestly hoped that the help he was giving Wood would earn him an acknowledgement in print and in this way his name would live on after his death ‘like an unprofitable elder or ewe-tree on some noble structure’.fn6 Fortunately for Aubrey and for us he began another project, in tandem with the work he was doing for Wood, which grew into a noble structure of his own: the paper monument that is Brief Lives. Aubrey had long been interested in biography when he was asked to write the life of his fellow Wiltshire-man, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose views on religion and state power were perilous in times of constitutional change. Hobbes had good reason to fear that accounts of his life would be censored and distorted, so he asked good-natured Aubrey, whom he had first met aged eight, to help him. Aubrey, out of friendship and admiration for the older man, agreed. He fulfilled his promise in 1680 after Hobbes’s death. ‘My hand now being-in’ for this kind of writing, he decided, while smoking a pipe of tobacco in his chamber one Sunday afternoon, to scribble a page or two on some other eminent men. Before long he had made an index of fifty-five Lives, but the list of those he wanted to include kept growing. He wrote to Wood, ‘I fancy myselfe all along discourseing with you; alledgeing those of my relations and acquaintance (as either you know or have heard of), so that you make me to renew my acquaintance with my old and deceased friends, and to rejuvenescere [grow young again], as it were, which is the pleasure of old men.’fn7

  Aubrey did not envisage that his Brief Lives would be published – certainly not in his lifetime, almost certainly never. He thought he was compiling an archive in which future generations would be able to find valuable information that would otherwise be lost. He did not presume to know what use posterity might make of the biographical remnants he salvaged. He was concerned with accuracy like a scrupulous modern-day journalist, but he was also patiently insistent that controversial components of his work should not be cited until after his death. Aubrey thought that some of what he had written and shared with Wood was unsuitable for publication until the author and his subjects were rotten in the ground, ‘like medlars’.fn8 There were things he had written that he feared could cut his throat. With his eye fixed on the future, he tried to steer a steady path between gathering information, which might turn out to be the sometimes scurrilous source of truth, and due respect for the damage gossip can do.

  For all his caution, Aubrey became embroiled in a scandal when Wood printed a story he had sent him about the Earl of Clarendon accepting bribes under the Restoration. Clarendon’s son prosecuted Wood and the offending pages were publicly burnt. Wood was fined £40 and temporarily expelled from the university in July 1693. The friendship between Aubrey and Wood was almost destroyed, caught, as many subsequent friendships have been, in the crosscurrents of hearsay, truth and print. Aubrey had entrusted his manuscripts to Wood, who destroyed forty-four pages of the second of the three volumes of Brief Lives. Aubrey wrote, ‘I thought you so deare a friend that I might have entrusted my life in your hands: and now your unkindenes doth almost break my heart.’fn9 But such was Aubrey’s talent for friendship and generosity of spirit that by August 1695 he was collaborating with Wood again. After Wood’s death later that year, Aubrey wrote, ‘I am extremely sorrowful for the death of my deare Friende and old correspondent Mr Anthony Wood: who (though his spleen used to make him chagrin and to chide me), yet we could not be asunder, and he would always see me at my Lodgeing, with his darke Lanthorne, which should be a Relick.’fn10

  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 that command their own biography: women married to or fathered by famous men, outstandingly beautiful, or simply ‘wondrous wanton’. And there are many more ordinary or unnamed women, caught between the lines – mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, mistresses, whores. Theirs are lives lived amidst the intense social turmoil of civil war, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. They encompass discoveries that changed the future, such
as the circulation of blood, and magical spells and folklore from the distant past. Aubrey was proud of the fact that he did not ‘disdain to learn from ignorant old women’.fn11 When he was seeking information to pass on to the future about eminent men, it was often women’s voices and experiences he recorded.

  Generous almost to a fault towards his wide circle of scholarly friends, Aubrey was an unusually self-effacing person. He saw himself as a whetstone for other people’s talents, doubted the power of his own mind, doubted even the quality of his distinctive prose, and claimed gratitude to others as his own greatest virtue. In one respect, however, he was completely confident of making an important and original historical contribution – he knew he was inventing the modern genre of biography. He cursed the classical tradition of high-style panegyrics and selective eulogies: ‘Pox take your orators and poets, they spoile lives & histories.’fn12 A Life, he insisted, is a small history in which detail is all. He realised that while political regimes stand or fall, the minutiae of particular human lives matter most. Contemporaries criticised him for being ‘too minute’ or trivial, but Aubrey was convinced that ‘a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull’.fn13

  He was right. The fine details Aubrey recorded are essential for the study of his subjects and a spur to subsequent biographers. The detail that the philosopher Hobbes, when young, had such black hair his schoolmates called him Crow is irrelevant to his theory of the State, but delightful to know. The fact that Sir Walter Raleigh spoke to his dying day with a broad Devonshire accent is trivial, but potent enough to change for ever our image of the famous courtier. Aubrey specialised in such rich details, he knew they would be lost if he did not collect them. 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 Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren. He wanted to get at the truth: ‘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 cheeke’.fn14