John Aubrey: My Own Life (56 page)

I never go out
³³
of my lodgings until noon these days.

. . .

2 March

Mr Thomas Tanner called
³⁴
on me.

. . .

I am receiving
³⁵
my letters via my friend Dr Gale, Master of St Paul’s. I have received one from Mr Lhwyd asking if I have given the books I sent to the Ashmolean Museum, or only temporarily deposited them there for custody. He says Mr Thomas Tanner gave him the key to my box and that Mr Tanner now has my Monumenta Britannica, and will send for my History of Wiltshire.

. . .

Mr Thomas Tanner has asked
³⁶
me to do him the favour of visiting his brother, who lives at an address in Clement Lane, near Lombard Street. He urges me to visit Oxford too, where I am promised good company.

. . .

The Earl of Pembroke
³⁷
is very impatient for his picture. I have asked Mr Lhwyd to send it on as soon as possible. I have decided to make a gift to the museum of the books I sent with Mr Kent. Mr Tanner has obtained a history of Wiltshire in which there is a pedigree of the Aubrey family. I would like a copy for my cousin Sir John Aubrey.

. . .

I have been ill with a fever.

. . .

I need to send Mr Lhwyd the information he needs.

. . .

Several Roman coins
³⁸
have been found lately at Caerphilly Castle. Sir John Aubrey tells me he welcomes my help in making Caerphilly better known in the new edition of Camden.

. . .

I have written to Mr Lhwyd asking if he has my manuscript of Remaines of Gentilisme. I fear it is too light for the University. I have asked him to insert my manuscript of the Antiquities of Wiltshire in the museum catalogue, but not my letters.

Major Beach of Bradford says he would be glad to have Mr Lhwyd visit him. There is a woman living near him who is celebrated for botany and who supplies all the Bath doctors with samples.

Lord Pembroke has received
³⁹
his picture and is very pleased with it. He has put it in a noble gilt frame and sent it this week to Wilton. Sir John Aubrey will get Mr Webb to draw and paint a copy of the Aubrey pedigree.

. . .

April

Mr Lhwyd has written
⁴⁰
to thank me for my observations on the Remaines of Gentilisme, which he hopes may encourage study of that subject at Oxford. There are only a few at present in the University who pursue the study of antiquities. But Mr Lhwyd’s view is that even if some young man or other might undervalue my work, that should not prevent it being presented to the library. He says that Mr Gibson, noting my family’s pedigree in Wiltshire, may be able to trace it into Brecknock. He thinks that my letters are a valuable treasure, but recognises that it would be improper to prevail on me to donate them to the museum.

. . .

At last, Mr Thomas Tanner
⁴¹
has consigned to the carrier, called Matthew’s Wagon, my Monumenta Britannica, my dreams manuscript, and a sheet of Dr Pell’s notes about the taking of Rome. His delay this past three weeks made me angry. Now he has apologised for keeping them so long and explained that he has marked the passages that he has borrowed, that he has borrowed very sparingly, and has taken care not to plagiarise. He is very pleased that I have donated my Antiquities of Wiltshire to the museum, but agreed to leave the manuscripts in his hands until he has completed them with the illustrations he is engaged on.

. . .

It seems more and more unlikely that my Monumenta Britannica will be printed. I despair of the manuscript ever becoming a book in four volumes. I begin to wonder if I should print another of my manuscripts, one that is less lengthy perhaps? My collection of Hermetick Philosophy? Before I die, I hope to dedicate at least one printed book to my patron, Lord Abingdon.

. . .

I have got to know Sir Henry Chancey, Serjeant at Law, who is writing the Antiquities of Hertfordshire, with more diligent extraction of the records than anyone else has done. He requires the names of the last abbots of St Albans and I said I would ask Mr Wood.

Sir John Aubrey
⁴²
has invited me to Borstall for the last week of April.

. . .

May

By Mores’ Wagon I have sent my English copy of Pliny’s
Natural History
and my Reden and Holyoks Dictionary to Oxford for the museum. My Pliny is in three volumes and has annotations by me throughout. I have carefully distinguished the cures Pliny lists that depend on magic from those that depend on herbal remedies. The dictionary is not worth much, but I am sending it to show how I found out the proportion of the several different languages of which present English consists.

I hope to be
⁴³
in Oxford with my friends in a fortnight.

. . .

I remember that
⁴⁴
on Shotover Hill in Oxfordshire, not long before the civil wars, and within living memory, there was an effigy of a giant cut in the earth, like the white horse by Ashbury Park.

. . .

I hope Mr Lhwyd
⁴⁵
received the books I sent by Mores’ Wagon ten days ago: I made sure to pay the carriage. I think I will get to Oxford by about the middle of June. Mr Gibson tells me that the University will not print my manuscripts: they let them lie amongst the rubbish.

. . .

Mr Lhwyd says
⁴⁶
the books I have given to the museum have arrived and he has entered my English Pliny in the catalogue. He will make a list of all my pamphlets and donations, but he can say nothing about the printing of my manuscript of Monumenta Britannica till the Press has perused it. At the present time, Dr Lister and I are the library’s only benefactors of note for books and other curiosities, aside from Mr Ashmole.

. . .

St John the Baptist Day

Today is Midsummer’s Day
⁴⁷
. I was walking in the pasture behind Montagu House, Bloomsbury, around ten o’clock, when I saw twenty-two or three young women, most of them well dressed, busy on their knees, as though weeding. I could not understand what they were doing, until a young man explained that they were looking for a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their heads tonight, so they will dream of their future husbands. It is said that the coal can only be found on this day at that hour.

There are other magical secrets women have handed down for this purpose. On St Agnes Night, 21 January, take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying an Our Father and sticking the pins in your sleeve, and then you will dream of him or her you shall marry. This makes me think of Ben Jonson’s verse:

And on sweet Agnes Night

Please you with the promis’d sight,

Some of Husbands, some of Lovers,

Which an empty Dream discovers.

I never married.

. . .

July

I am at Borstall
⁴⁸
. I find it more troublesome to write to my friends from here than from London, because Sir John Aubrey’s servants are full of business and have no time to carry my letters to the post.

. . .

August

Mr Wood makes such demands
⁴⁹
of me! His most recent list of queries includes:

– Where does Mr Bagford live?

– Can I find out from Mr Hooke the Christian name of . . . Oliver, the glass painter?

– Can I send him Mr John Gadbury’s almanac for the year 1693?

– Can I ask Mr Thomas Jekyll for an account of himself and find out from him the date and place of burial of Sir William Waller?

– Whom did Dr Walter Charleton succeed: John Davies of Kidwelly or Sir Edward Sherburne?

– Can I ask Mr Birkhead about Sir Henry Janson?

– Where did Mr Robert Boyle live and die?

– What is Mr Ashmole’s obit?

. . .

I have had an unsuccessful visit to Oxford.

. . .

September

I have been ill since returning from Oxford of a surfeit of peaches. I wondered if I should send to the chemist Mr Kit White for a good lusty purge, but I have not eaten a piece of flesh for six days and abstinence has pretty well settled me again. Mr Wood’s unkindness and choleric humour added to my illness.

He treats me badly. I do not know how to deal with him and must seek the advice of Mr Lhwyd and Mr Tanner. His unkindness almost breaks my heart. I have asked him to return my prospects of Osney Abbey, which I paid to have drawn by Mr Hesketh when I was a student at Trinity College, and the pamphlet for the entertainment of the King and Queen at Bushell’s Rock. I know that if Mr Wood should die, his nephews and nieces will not value them, and they will be lost. Worse, he has cut out the index and around forty pages from one of my volumes of Lives – was ever any lady so unkind? I thought he was a dear friend, in whose hands I could have trusted my life. His unkindness breaks my heart.

Lord Abingdon has told me that the Earl of Clarendon never maligned me or blamed me for the libel in Mr Wood’s book. He only told me he had in banter and to frighten me (which he certainly did succeed in doing!).

Sir John Aubrey and his lady
⁵⁰
, who treat me with all kindness and respect, urge me to accompany them to Glamorganshire in a fortnight’s time. I have not been very fit for riding of late.

. . .

Mr Wood is furious
⁵¹
with me. He says I have treated him badly by not letting him know sooner that Lord Abingdon was only bantering when he said the Earl of Clarendon suspected me to be the source of the libel printed in his book. He says I left it a long time to pass this comforting news on to him and then only mentioned it by accident. He berates me further for running away with ‘my books in my codpiece’ and abandoning him when the Earl of Clarendon commenced his libel suit. Nevertheless he proposes a meeting. He says he will come to Beckley next Monday afternoon, which is two or three miles away from Borstall, and he asks me to meet him around 2 p.m. at an alehouse called the Earl’s Arms. He has more work for me to do.

. . .

October

I am with my lord Abingdon in Lavington again. I wish I could go to Oxford for ten days, or even two weeks, but my lord desires me to travel through Wiltshire with him en route to London, where I will be until round about the time the sitting of Parliament begins in November.

I miss my friend
⁵²
Mr Wood and will answer more of his queries when I get back from London. I regret now that I wrote a page about his ungrateful dealings with me to be bound up with my Lives after he cut ten pages from them and removed the index. I have asked my friend Mr Lhwyd to remove that page of my complaints against Mr Wood from the stitched volume.

. . .

When I last wrote
⁵³
to Mr Lhwyd, I forgot to ask him to insist that Mr Wood give back my original drafts of Osney Abbey and the sheets he has cut out of my Book of Lives.

. . .

Anno 1695

March

I have been ill
⁵⁴
with a great cold since 25 January, St Paul’s Day, and have only been up and about for a week. While I was ill, I received an angry letter from Mr Wood that very much discomposed me and made my illness worse. I have always been ready to serve him, but have received no thanks or credit. I wish him well, even so, and will answer his queries.

It has been a most unnatural
⁵⁵
start to the year: no signs of spring yet, while the cold weather continues.

. . .

St Mark’s Day

Coming through Bagley Wood
⁵⁶
, on my journey to Oxford from Abingdon today, I discovered what I think are two chalybeate springs in the highway. At the gate of Wotton Common, near Cumnor in Berkshire, is a spring which I have great reason to believe is such another. And also, at the foot of Shotover-hill, near the upping-stock, I am confident by the clay, is such another spring. Deo Gratias.

. . .

26 April

I was in Fleet Street
⁵⁷
at the Fleur-de-luce today with Mr Wood, Mr Martin, Mr Kennett and Mr Tanner.

. . .

10 May

Today I tested
⁵⁸
the Bagley Wood springs. When I mix the waters with powder of galles they give as black a tincture as ever I saw. Afterwards, one may write as legibly with the waters as with black lead. Bagley Wood belongs to St John’s College, so I have presented a phial of the water to the President, Dr Levins. He tells me there are a number of water-drinking Fellows of the college who go every summer to Astrope in Hertfordshire. Tomorrow morning a group of us will set out to try the Bagley Wood water together to see how it compares.

. . .

The water-drinking Fellows of the college found the Bagley Wood water much more diuretic than the Astrop water. Word will soon spread through Oxford. Tomorrow I plan to show the Principal of Gloucester Hall the little spring called Woodroffs Well near Wotton Gate that I discovered in 1692.

. . .

June

Mr Wood has been pardoned and allowed to return to the University.

. . .

July