John Aubrey: My Own Life (41 page)

I have been reading over some of my notes and it seems to me I could have written four times as much as I have on Malmesbury.

While I was smoking
⁴
a pipe of tobacco in my chamber last Sunday night, it suddenly came to me that it would be a fine thing if I were to write my honoured friend Sir William Petty’s life from his cradle; he can peruse it himself and then it shall be left for posterity hereafter. Now I have my hand in since writing the life of Mr Hobbes, I am minded to scribble a page or two on the lives of some eminent men. About five years ago I lodged with Mr Ashmole some sheets of minutes of the lives of Dr John Dee, Lord Bacon, Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Dr William Aubrey, John Pell and Robert Boyle, etc. I have asked for these to be left with my friend Mr Wood so he can preserve them among his papers.

. . .

The science of astrology
⁵
is not yet perfect. The way to make it perfect is to get an apparatus – or supellex – of true genitures. For this reason, I am taking much care collecting the nativities of the lives I am writing. Astrologers will be able to rely on these, for I have not compiled any of them on random or doubtful information. Instead, whenever possible, I have taken them down from the subject’s own mouth.

. . .

This month
⁶
the Penny Post has been set up. It was first invented by Mr Robert Murray, formerly clerk to the General Company for the Revenue of Ireland, and Mr Dockwra, who joined him in the enterprise. Previously, the post office collected and carried letters between postal towns, but there was no provision for delivering them, so many of them were lost, as I often found to my great chagrin. Now in London there will be a local delivery system charged at the rate of a penny per letter or packet weighing up to a pound. There will be several deliveries a day in London, and for the extra charge of another penny, letters can be delivered to addresses ten miles outside the city.

. . .

Today, at about 3 p.m.
⁷
, I was seized by a fainting fit. I fear that at the age of fifty-four, my death creeps up on me. I have written my last will and testament. I intend to leave my notes for the Lives I have begun to write to Mr Wood – they are like fragments from the shipwreck of the past.

Mr Wood warns me
⁸
to be careful if I am to play any part in writing the life of Mr Hobbes: I should write fair things, or someone else will be on my back.

. . .

March

I have persuaded
⁹
Sir William Petty to sit to have his picture painted by Mr Loggan the engraver. In 1659, Mr Samuel Cooper drew him in miniature and the result was one of the likest portraits that prince of limners ever drew.

. . .

12 March

Today is my birthday, which falls close to the Roman Quinquatria (19 March), the feast dedicated to Minerva.

. . .

My honoured friend Edward Davenant has died. I have heard Sir Christopher Wren say that he was the best mathematician in the world thirty or thirty-five years ago. But being a divine, he was unwilling to print his work, lest the world should know how he had spent the greatest part of his time.

I will write to his executor to ask if we may have the honour and favour of conserving his manuscripts in the library of the Royal Society, and of printing what is fit.

He was my singular
¹⁰
good friend, to whom I have been more beholden than to anyone else besides. I once borrowed 500 li. from him for a year and a half and he would not let me pay him any interest on the loan.

. . .

25 March

Sir Jonas Moore
¹¹
was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society today.

. . .

Mr Dryden (Poet Laureate) has complimented Mr Blackbourne’s style in compiling the life of Hobbes. These two are agreed on leaving out all the minuteness: they will have the truth, but not the whole truth. For example, they will make no mention of Mr Hobbes having been a page. I am letting the grass grow under my feet, and Mr Blackbourne will have all the glory if I do not hurry up. I say that the offices of panegyrist historians are one thing: but a Life is a short history in which minute details about a famous person should be gratefully recorded. I never yet knew a wit write a proper epitaph (unless he was an antiquary) which did not leave the reader ignorant about the subject’s provenance, what countryman he was, etc.

I have made an index
¹²
for my Book of Lives: it includes fifty-five persons (I have done ten of them already, including four pages on Sir Walter Raleigh). It will be a pretty thing when it is finished. I am so glad my researches for Mr Wood and my promise to write the life of Mr Hobbes have led me to collect these other lives. I do it playingly. This morning, I got up by 10 and wrote two lives. One of them was the life of Sir John Suckling, on whom I wrote a page and a half in folio. I will add to it the scoffing ballad that was made against him, his fine troop and his running away. Sir John replied with another ballad: ‘I . . . thee foole, who ere thou be/ That maketh this fine sing song of me.’ Perhaps Mr Wood will search Mr Sheldon’s ballad collection for me.

If I could get up
¹³
by 7 a.m., I could finish my Book of Lives in a month.

Here is a list of the Lives I have done so far:

Sir William Petty (the first)

Edward Davenant

Sir John Suckling

Mr Edmund Waller

Thomas Randolph

Mr Camden (half a page)

Mr William Oughtred (full)

Viscount Falkland

Quaere
¹⁴
: who has Mr Camden’s papers? I must remember to ask Mr Dugdale. I think he has Mr Camden’s minutes of King James’s life, and also his own life, written by himself, but very brief, just two sheets of paper in his own handwriting. Mr Dugdale got these manuscripts from the Bishop of Coventry, who filched them from Mr Camden as he lay dying. It is said that Mr Camden had bad eyes, lippitude I guess, or else was short-sighted, which is a great inconvenience to an antiquary.

Mr Dryden tells me
¹⁵
he will write his life for me himself. I can then add it to my collection.

I could afford
¹⁶
to put in the life of Dr Ralph Kettell, who was President of Trinity College when I first went there. Though no writer, he was a good man and a good governor of the college. I have among my books Dr Kettell’s copy of Sir Thomas Overbury’s translation of Ovid’s
De remedio amoris
.

. . .

Philip Herbert, 7th Earl of Pembroke, my patron, has at Wilton fifty-two mastiffs and thirty greyhounds, some bears, a lion, and a matter of sixty fellows all more bestial than they.

. . .

1 April

Today I was
¹⁷
at Jonathan’s coffee house with Mr Hooke. He is a bachelor and I believe will never marry: a person of great suavity and goodness.

. . .

St George’s Day

I have collected together my notes on Lives and I find I have written a book that is two quires of paper, which I will send to Mr Wood at the beginning of May.

. . .

I am sending
¹⁸
Mr Wood a copy of Mr Hobbes’s considerations on his own reputation and loyalty (first published anonymously in 1662). Originally, there were about 300 copies, and I had two or three. Now the book has been printed anew from one of my copies (the original having sold out).

. . .

May

I have been very ill
¹⁹
with a cold lately. But even so, I have now written sixty-six of my Lives. Having begun my own Book of Lives, I feel I cannot be quiet until I have finished it. I have such an impulse on my spirit.

Recently, after coming round from a fainting fit, I wrote my will and humble request on the first page of my manuscript that my Book of Lives be transmitted to Mr Wood if I should die. They are fine things, my Lives, but few of them are fit to be printed in my lifetime, or Mr Wood’s. If he dies, his papers will all fall into the possession of Dr Wallis (
ex officio
) as Keeper of the Archives, and there be stifled: for I am like Almansar in the play, who spares neither friend nor foe. I am religious John Tell-Troth.

I have decided
²⁰
to rename my Templa Druidum; now it will be called Monumenta Britannica.

. . .

3 June

Today at the Royal Society we discussed monstrous births. I read out Mr Paschall’s letter about the two children born at Hilrewers in Somerset, joined into one body about the navel, but separated into two distinct bodies both above and below the belly. They eat, suck, cry, sleep and void their excrements separately and freely. They seem likely to live.

I also described
²¹
a creature born to a rabbit but fathered by a cat, which Sir Christopher Wren has heard of too. Others spoke of cross-breeding between partridges and pheasants and poultry; and between ducks and sea fowl. It was generally observed that all the progeny of this cross-breeding are barren, and will not go on to propagate.

. . .

I have written my minutes of Lives tumultuarily, or as they occurred in my thoughts, or, occasionally, as I had information of them from others. My friend Mr Wood, antiquary of Oxford, could easily reduce them to order by numbering them according to time and place. They are Lives chiefly of contemporaries, but not only.

When I first began to write my Lives, I did not think I could have drawn out so long a thread. I have laid down the truth, as near as I can, and as religiously as a penitent to his confessor, nothing but the truth, the plain and naked truth, which is exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and there are many passages that will raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheeks. I must ask Mr Wood to sew on some fig leaves, to make a castration, to be my
index expurgatorius
.

What uncertainty do we find in printed histories, which either tread too close on the heels of truth that they dare not speak plain, or else for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and dark. In my Book of Lives I do not repeat anything already published (to the best of my knowledge) and I imagine myself all along discoursing with Mr Wood. Thus he makes me renew my acquaintance with old or deceased friends: this is the pleasure of old men.

I have now lived over half a century of years in the world, and been much tumbled up and down in it, so I have a wide and general acquaintance. Also, I have the advantage of London’s new coffee houses. Before they opened, men only knew how to be acquainted with their own relations or societies. They were afraid and stared at all who were not of their own communities.

I wish someone
²²
had written a Book of Lives like mine a hundred years ago. How many worthy men’s names and notions are swallowed by oblivion because no such book exists for the last century! Perhaps this Book of Lives of mine is the most useful piece I have ever scribbled. Had Mr Wood not urged me to write it, many of these lives would have been swallowed up in oblivion too. General Lambert used to say: ‘the best of men are but men at the best’, and there are many examples in my rude and hasty collection of Lives, which is not fit to let fly abroad for another thirty years: the author and persons, like medlars, ought to be rotten first.

. . .

July

The Earl of Rochester
²³
, aged only thirty-three, has died of venereal disease at Woodstock Park. In his last illness, he was exceedingly penitent. He sent for his servants, even the piggard boy, to hear his palinode. His immature death puts me in mind of these verses of Propertius:

Vere novo primoque in aetatis flore iuventae

seu rosa virgineo pollice carpta, iaces.

(In early spring and the first flower of youth,

like a rose plucked by a maiden’s hand, you lie dead.)

. . .

August

I have sent Mr Wood more answers to his questions, and in return asked him if, when he goes to Westminster, he will transcribe out of the ballad book the song on Lord Chancellor Egerton’s son. I have also asked him to send me the name of the inventor of the engine for weaving silk stockings. Mr Wood has sent me some gloves, for which I am most grateful.

A friend tells me
²⁴
that in the time of the Rump Parliament they talked of the dissolution of the universities and concluded that they were unnecessary.

. . .

September

My Book of Lives
²⁵
will be in all about six-score individual lives, and I believe never before in England were lives delivered so faithfully and with such good authority. I will include in my Life of King James the hostile ballad that was sung at the time of his coronation in 1603:

And at the erse of them marched the Scottish peers

With lowzie shirts, and mangie wrists, went pricking-up their ears . . .

Perhaps Mr Wood can search Ralph Sheldon’s ballad book for me to see if he can find it.

. . .

I have given
²⁶
my Book of Lives to Dr Pell, hoping he will make some additions and amendments. Before I gave it to him, I pleased myself reading over the Lives I have written so far and transcribing a few excerpts into this diary: