The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (22 page)

The second great English natural philosopher is Thomas Harriot – the same Harriot who teaches himself Algonquian and sails to America in 1584. Having charted the Roanoke area and written his book on Virginia, he devotes his time to mathematics. He works out a means of correcting the apparent distortions of Mercator’s projection of the world in two dimensions. He discovers the sine law of refraction, establishes how to describe the parabola of a cannonball in flight, and makes the first ever astronomical observations using a telescope. Not only does he apply the instrument to the moon’s surface four months before Galileo, he also makes observations about Jupiter’s satellites and sunspots before the great Italian. And astronomy is just his hobby: his main achievement is in the field of algebra.

Probably the greatest Elizabethan natural philosopher, however, is William Gilbert. A trained physician, he is highly successful in his medical practice and obtains a coat of arms in 1577. Being acquainted with the explorers Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, he becomes interested in nautical affairs, especially the mathematics of navigation. He publishes his great work,
De Magnete
, in 1600. In this book he argues that the Earth is one great lodestone or magnet. He explains how the nautical compass works and puts forward suggestions as to how mariners might calculate longitude as well as latitude. He demonstrates that magnetism is an immaterial force, capable of operating through solid bodies and empty space. He is one of the first to formulate the idea that space is a vacuum and that the Earth revolves along the axis of its magnetic poles. Galileo sits up and takes note. But that is not all. Gilbert is also the father of electricity, on account of his experiments with new electrostatic substances and his observations of the electrostatic properties of matter.
⁴⁸

It is fitting that, when it finally appears, Bacon’s
Novum Organum
has a picture of a ship as its frontispiece, sailing off in search of new lands. Science as exploration enlarges the understanding of the flora and fauna of the world. William Harrison considers it a wonder ‘how many strange herbs, plants and annual fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americas, Taprobane [Sri Lanka], the Canary Isles and all parts of the world’. William Turner, ‘the father of English botany’, publishes his great three-part listing of all the English plants,
The New Herbal
, in 1568. Henry Lyte updates it ten years later, and the most famous botanist of them all, John Gerard, produces
The Herball, or the Generall Historie of Plants
in 1597. This is a truly impressive work, containing references to every plant imaginable, including exotica such as the ‘Indian nut tree’. Coconuts have been known for many years – cups have been made out of them since the late Middle Ages – but Gerard’s book contains an image of the actual tree as well as the fruit, and a description of the leaves and the white flesh of the nut as well as the taste of the milk.
⁴⁹
His work is methodologically much more thorough than that of earlier botanists too. He notes, for example, that although it is commonly supposed that the mandrake takes the shape of a man’s legs and will shriek and cause the death of the man that uproots it, this is

false and most untrue. For I myself and my servants also have dug up, planted, and re-planted very many: & yet never could either perceive shape of man or woman, but sometimes one straight root, sometimes two, and often six or seven branches coming from the main great root.
⁵⁰

The educated elite in Elizabethan society now has the intellectual means to question received knowledge and to direct new research. It is not surprising that one in ten books published during the reign is in a field of science.
⁵¹

Superstition and Witchcraft

Mathematical brilliance and minds attuned to scientific experimentation are perhaps to be expected among the educated elite, but what about the more humble elements of society? When writers tell you
that you can cause a man to feel great pain by burning his excrement, that you should not lend fire to a neighbour or else your horses will die, or that if a woman loses her hose in the street it means her husband is unfaithful, you have to suspect that your world view may not be compatible with those of the locals.
⁵²

Today we commonly take for granted that there is a fundamental conflict between scientific knowledge and religious beliefs. It is also widely assumed that, as science expands its reach, so superstition and religion diminish.
⁵³
These assumptions are wrong. Just as the typical sixteenth-century man cannot separate the physical from the metaphysical (as we have seen in the previous chapter), so he cannot separate scientific knowledge from his faith. In fact, many discoveries are rooted in religion. One sixteenth-century medical work carries a pertinent quotation from the Bible on its title page: ‘God hath created medicines of the earth and he that is wise will not condemn them.’
⁵⁴
Ordinary people express similar views. Maria Thynne comments to her husband that, ‘Though God’s power can work miracles, yet we cannot build upon it that because He can, He will, for then He would not say He made herbs for the use of man.’
⁵⁵
Some believe that God has created remedies for all the diseases in the world in the form of plants, and mankind has a spiritual duty to discover them through expanding its botanical knowledge. It follows therefore that any scientific discoveries which help men navigate the world and bring back exotic remedies also have their divine purpose. Religion is the father of science.

Given this, it is hardly surprising that natural philosophy extends far beyond what we would consider the boundaries of science. Numerology, alchemy and astrology are just three of the ‘pseudosciences’ that are regarded as quite acceptable subjects for natural philosophers. Numerology has a long history; in the words of John Dee: ‘all things (which from the very first being of things, have been framed and made) do appear to be formed by the reason of numbers’.
⁵⁶
Alchemy is the old chemistry that inspired Paracelsus and which still has many practitioners. In 1564 the queen makes a contract with an alchemist called Cornelius Alvetanus to manufacture 50,000 marks of pure gold each year. Unfortunately for both parties, he fails and is locked in the Tower for his deception.
⁵⁷
As for astrology, while some people deplore attempts to discern the future from looking at the stars, it is a valid branch of scientific investigation for many others.
The physician Simon Forman consults his astrological charts not only to know the best time to draw blood or diagnose a sickness but also to predict his clients’ future. In 1601 seventy-two women visit him seeking astrological advice: they ask him about their marriage prospects, whether certain men love them, when and if their seafaring husbands will return home, whether they should set out on a journey and whether they should buy property. Clergymen too rely on the stars: a Mr Broughton comes to Simon seeking information on whether he will be made dean of Chester Cathedral.
⁵⁸
Even the government has been known to ask for astrological advice. Dr John Dee is summoned to cast a horoscope to divine the most auspicious date for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1559.
⁵⁹

Men explore superstitious phenomena in the belief that they are investigating the real world. The very sense that
anything is possible
is what allows experimentation to be so open-minded. If you can’t distinguish between scientific truth and superstitious belief, it is not irrational to investigate any phenomenon as if it might be a scientific truth. In 1582 Dr Dee embarks on a series of experiments with another alchemist, Edward Kelley; together they seek knowledge of angels through séances. In April 1587 an angel called Madimi orders the two men to hold everything in common, even to the extent of sharing their wives with each other. They seek clarification ‘whether the sense is of carnal use (contrary to the seventh Commandment) or of Spiritual love’. ‘Carnal use,’ replies the angel. Who are they to stand in the way of science? The alchemists and their wives duly comply.

As you can see, ignorance shades into superstition and credulity, and these in turn shade into faith and knowledge, just as they do today. Dreams are interesting: no one can deny that they happen, but
why
do they happen, and what do they mean? Many people believe that dreams can be interpreted systematically to establish the future, just as the biblical Joseph explained the pharaoh’s dreams. In 1576 Thomas Hill publishes his
The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams
. If you open his book at random, you find the statement that ‘if a woman dreameth that her lover cometh to present her a swine’s head as a friendly gift, declareth that she shall after hate her lover and forsake him, for the hog is ungrateful to Venus’s works’. On the facing page there is something even more bizarre: if a man: ‘dreameth that he hath three privy members standing together’, it means he was an apprenticed servant and is now a free man and will
have three names where once he had but one. But if he dreams that three ears of corn are growing out of his breast, and he has them plucked away, he will have two sons who ‘through an evil calamity and mishap shall be slain and thieves also beset his house’.
⁶⁰
Odd, you may think, and hardly scientific. But dream interpretation intrigues all generations – you only have to think of Freudian psychoanalysis to realise that Thomas Hill is not alone in trying to interpret dreams meaningfully.

Ghosts are another interesting case. In the modern world many people still believe in ghosts. In the sixteenth century, the denial of Purgatory by Protestants implies that the souls of the deceased go straight to Heaven or Hell and so they cannot return to Earth. The Puritan William Perkins is therefore astounded that good Protestant folk can be so ‘ignorant’ as to believe that the dead might reappear. However, as Shakespeare’s plays
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
both show, the belief that the ghosts of the dead might appear between midnight and cockcrow is as current in Protestant England as it was in the Catholic Middle Ages. In 1599 Thomas Platter remarks on a building near Tyburn so haunted that no one can live in it.
⁶¹
Yet there are many superstitions which are not shared by all. While William Horman’s
Vulgaria
includes such lines as ‘old witches do make a great matter of paring of a man’s fingernails’, you are also told that ‘the readers of dreams often times expound them more to please than to say truth’ and that ‘the world can never be delivered clearly of superstitious opinions’. Clearly Horman himself is one of the less superstitious. Another line reads:

some make search and divination by water, some by basins, some by axes, some by glasses, some by the nail of the finger, some by dead carrion, some by conjuring of a soul, and such other and all be accursed or peevish; yet lewd folk take great heed and credence of such things.

There you have it. Although sixteenth-century knowledge incorporates much that we call superstition, there are Elizabethan sceptics who disbelieve many of the old wives’ tales and folklore of the time. Given that most people don’t rightly know whether Earth goes round the Sun or the Sun goes round the Earth, it is hardly surprising that people have doubts about the meanings of dreams and the existence of ghosts.

WITCHCRAFT

In 1552, when Elizabeth is still a young woman, Bishop Latimer writes: ‘a great many of us, when we be in trouble or sickness, or lose anything, we run hither and thither to witches or sorcerers, whom we call wise men’. Eighteen years after her death we read in Robert Burton’s famous
Anatomy of Melancholy
, ‘sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind’.
⁶²
Across the reign, therefore, you will find a widespread belief in the power of witchcraft. In some places it is the fourth most common form of crime, after sexual offences, non-attendance at church and violent assault.
⁶³
You might think of it as a superstition, but in Elizabethan England witches not only exist, but are
officially recognised in law
as having the power to hurt and kill people with their cunning. If you are accused of bringing about someone’s death through witchcraft, you might end up being sentenced to hang for the crime – even if you have no idea of how to cast a spell.

Note: you risk being hanged, not burnt. The English do not burn people for witchcraft; that sort of thing only goes on in Scotland and Continental Europe. In England witchcraft is not regarded as a religion or a heresy: in theory you can be a good Christian and a witch. Witches at this time do not yet congregate as a body, nor do they celebrate the
sabbat
together – that all comes later, in the next century.
⁶⁴
Nor are witches yet presumed to make a compact with the Devil; that too is a later development. There is even a time in Elizabeth’s reign when, technically speaking, witchcraft is not against the law. In 1542 an Act of Henry VIII makes witchcraft a hanging offence, but it is repealed on the king’s death in 1547; thereafter there is no anti-witchcraft law until the second Witchcraft Act of 1563. This is far more lenient than Henry VIII’s legislation. It does not sanction the execution of all practitioners of the dark arts, nor does it condemn witches to death for the lesser magic arts of finding lost things, destroying cattle and goods, and causing men to fall in love. The 1563 Act only makes it a felony: (1) to invoke evil spirits (regardless of the purpose); and (2) to cause the death of someone by witchcraft. That is all. If an attempt to kill someone through
witchcraft is proven, but unsuccessful – if the victim is only maimed, for example, or if only animals are killed – then the punishment is merely a year in prison, albeit with quarterly appearances in the pillory.
⁶⁵
Even when someone is found guilty of murder by witchcraft, the authorities are very cautious about rushing to hang the culprit. In 1565 Matilda Parke and Alice Meade, both of Exeter, are convicted of practising magic upon their fellow citizens, but the magistrates do all they can to avoid hanging them.
⁶⁶