The Wonderful Mr Willughby

by Tim Birkhead

  Gloucester Cathedral (1710).

  Had the gallery been built with whispering in mind or was its effect an acoustic accident? Willughby must surely have asked himself this, as I did after my visit. The diarist John Evelyn thought it was deliberate, and after experiencing the gallery in July 1654, wrote: ‘The whispering gallery is rare … and was, I suppose, either to show the skill of the architect, or some invention of a cunning priest, who standing unseen in a recess in the middle of the chapel might hear whatever was spoke at either end.’36

  I suspect it was an architectural fluke, with the narrow passage merely a convenient byway between one side of the east wing and the other. A plan drawn in 1807 confirms this, showing the gallery following the cathedral’s contours.

  Plan of the eastern end of Gloucester Cathedral showing the whispering gallery.

  The gallery being a curiosity long before Willughby’s day, I wondered whether he was asked to pay to experience it, as I was. He ends his scribbled account by asking ‘whither any entrie or vault would not doe [do] as wel’.

  There’s nothing more on this in the commonplace book, but those notes exemplify Willughby’s inquisitiveness and interest in all that was curious and, crucially, his belief that all puzzles were amenable to interpretation. How many other scribbled notes, in other notebooks now lost, were there?

  Shortly after leaving Gloucester, Willughby separated from Skippon and Ray to travel alone. He later wrote to Ray:

  I met with several adventures in the remaining part of my journey after I left you; and among the rest with one very lucky one, of a new discovery of medals. You may remember the day we parted I had intended to have gone to Cirencester, but hearing … of a great deal of treasure that was found in a field, I … diverted my course thither. The field was near Dursly [Dursley] … where I found above forty people digging and scraping; and bought a great many silver medals of them, and one incomparable fair one of gold, that had been found a little before. The whole history of how these came to be discovered, I shall reserve till I see you.37

  Willughby continues, in his letter: ‘I thought to make strict enquiry after the snap-apple bird, but falling very sick at Malverne [Malvern] was forced to give over all.’ So he got his silver and gold coins, but illness prevented him from seeing the mystery bird, which it turns out was the crossbill. This species occasionally appears in large numbers when its normal food (pine seeds) fails; it then sometimes damages apples to gain access to and consume their seeds – hence its local name.38

  The collecting of old medals and coins for their cabinets was fashionable among virtuosi. It was an affordable way of connecting with antiquity and inasmuch as it heralded – eventually – a ‘new archaeology’, it was part of the new science. And, just like natural history artefacts, coins and medals could be categorised and classified.39

  After returning home and recovering, Willughby took himself off to watch birds in Lincolnshire. In a letter that Ray sent to Peter Courthope in February 1663 about the identity of the shoveller duck, he writes: ‘Mr Willughby in one of his letters to me, containing a catalogue [list] of what foules [birds] he gate [watched] in Lincolnshire the last summer, hath one which possibly may be the same with this [i.e. the same as the shoveller Courthope had asked Ray about].’ We know nothing more about this particular journey made by Willughby in the summer of 1662, but it confirms his growing interest in ornithology for Lincolnshire at that time was a vast wetland with a huge abundance and diversity of birds. It was also an area inhabited by those who made their living trapping waders, plovers, ducks and rails for human consumption, providing excellent opportunities for someone like Willughby to examine birds in the hand.40

  With Willughby gone, Ray and Skippon continued from Gloucester into the West Country. Near Padstow they watched ‘great flocks of Cornish choughs’ and learned about the cruel way local fisherman caught gannets ‘by tying a pilchard to a board, and fastening it so that the bird may see it, who comes down with so great swiftness for his prey that he breaks his neck against the board’. From St Ives they visited Godreve Island where they again saw a large number of seabirds, remarking that ‘Here they call the puffins popes and the guillems [guillemots] kiddaws.’ At Penzance they saw and described more fish – and as with the birds, they commented on the different names used for the same species: the ‘tub-fish which is no other than the red gurnard’, wrote Ray, and ‘tomlins, which are nothing but a young codfish’.41

  On reaching Land’s End, Ray and Skippon turned and headed for home, arriving in London in mid-July, where their journey terminated. If he didn’t already know, this must have been when Ray discovered that the new Royalist Parliament required all ministers to sign an oath of loyalty: the Act of Uniformity.

  Historiated initial ‘C’ showing Charles II – from the charter accompanying Gloucester Cathedral’s sealed copy of the Book of Common Prayer 1662.

  The Act meant that anyone holding office in the Church of England – like Ray – now had to follow the form of prayers and ceremonies as laid down in the Book of Common Prayer and whose use was now compulsory in church services. This was ‘one of the measures enacted by the Cavalier Parliament to secure the authority of the restoration regime of Charles II’.42 The Act undermined Ray’s religious beliefs and together with some 2,000 others, he refused to sign and was thrown out of the Church, losing his Fellowship at Trinity College and with it his livelihood. It also meant forfeiting any further involvement as a clergyman. As a result, on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1662, at the age of thirty-five, Ray found himself unemployed.

  Although this seems like an abrupt and worrying change in his circumstances, Ray had been thinking for some time about leaving Cambridge and taking a position in a private school. A possible reason for this is that after the Restoration in 1660 and the return of the previously evicted Royalist Fellows to Trinity, who – crucially – assumed their original positions in the college pecking order, Ray must have recognised that his chances of working his way up that hierarchy were now much reduced.43

  Nonetheless, concerned about what the Act might mean, he wrote to Peter Courthope:

  August 24 has passed by now and I have not returned to Cambridge: consequently, the die is cast; behold I have been ejected from the fellowship [at Trinity] without any rights to return; for me, therein nothing more is [to be] sown or reaped; and I must seek a new way of life in some other direction.44

  Ray may also have been concerned about the atmosphere at Trinity. Prior to 1660 he had been part of a circle of like-minded colleagues who included John Wilkins, Isaac Barrow, Henry More and John Cudworth, all of whom had been actively engaged in the new science that included animal dissection, experiments in ‘chymistry’ and botany. Following the Restoration, such activities seemed – to Ray at least – less popular and less exciting.

  With little option but to ‘cast himself upon Providence and good friends’, Ray returned to his mother’s house at Black Notley in Essex.45 Willughby at Middleton, meanwhile, had been thinking hard about their earlier conversation regarding the makeover of natural history. Having decided that such a project, including a protracted research trip to the continent, was feasible, Willughby wrote to Ray:

  I am likely to spend much of my life afterwards in wandring or else in private studiing at Oxford, having but little heart to thinke of settling or ingaging in a family. I shall bee verie glad of your constant company and assistance in my studies and must again desire you by no means to part with your bookes.46

  This was a lifeline, both intellectually and financially, I suspect, for Ray, and the beginning of a new career for both himself and Francis Willughby.

  Buzzing with excitement at the prospect of this bold venture, Francis Willughby attended his inaugural meeting of the Royal Society in London on the first day of October 1662. He had carried with him for the ‘show-and-tell’ that was the Society’s format, a single snake’s egg, which was duly opened for the benefit of an audience that included Robert Boyl
e, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, John Evelyn, Christopher Merret, George Ent and John Wilkins. The egg, which I suspect was that of a grass snake, contained a well-formed embryo within a few days of hatching, whose yolk sac the Fellows likened to a placenta. Also of interest was the presence of ‘two little protuberant parts near its tail, taken by some for a geminus penis’, that is, the snake’s two hemipenes. It was already known that snakes and lizards possessed a pair of penises, but it was not known then that these develop outside the snake’s body during embryogenesis and are drawn inside the cloaca only on hatching. Stimulated by the little snake, the audience went on to discuss the different modes of development with vipers, as was well known, which brood ‘their eggs within their bellies, and bring forth live vipers’, whereas others – such as the grass snake – ‘lay their eggs in dunghills, by the heat of which they are brooded’. One (unidentified) ‘member of the society added, that he had seen a snake lie upon its eggs in the manner, that a hen sits upon hers’.47

  Willughby must have been delighted by the response to his initial performance. The fact that he attended three consecutive weekly meetings of the Society that month indicates that he was in London for the duration, presumably seeking advice from other Fellows and securing the necessary papers for the forthcoming continental journey.48

  His time at the Royal Society that month allowed Willughby to familiarise himself with, and absorb, its aims, objectives and boundaries, beyond merely seeing things for himself. Still finding its feet, the Society made a public statement that its business was to ‘improve the knowledge of natural things and all useful arts, manufactures, mechanic prectises, engynes and inventions by experiments … and … explicating all phenomena produced by nature’. At the same time the Society made it clear that there would be no ‘meddling with divinity, metaphysics, morals, politics, grammar, rhetoric or logick’. It also urged its members when reporting their findings to use plain language, ‘bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness, as they can’. The Society was also obsessed with keeping meticulous records, partly as a way of advertising its seriousness, but also as a way of ensuring its own permanence.49

  Willughby and his travelling companions were to keep very careful records during their continental journey. It is ironic that Willughby’s are now lost, but we are fortunate that both John Ray and Philip Skippon kept extensive notes, and it is their accounts that allow us to relive those exhilarating days.

  4

  Continental Journey: The Low Countries

  After months of planning, on Friday 17 April 1663, John Ray and Philip Skippon mounted their horses at Leeds Castle in Kent and rode the thirty-five miles to Dover to meet up with Francis Willughby, Nathaniel Bacon and two servants. At two o’clock the following afternoon they boarded the packet boat, having paid ‘five shillings a man for [their] passage, and five shillings for the use of master’s cabbin [sic]’. By eight in the evening they were becalmed and ‘forced to lie two leagues short Calais till the morning’, arriving eventually at dawn. There they were met by two French boats and forced to pay ‘three-pence a-head to the master of the ferry … but before they would let us ashore, after much wrangling with those brawling sharking fellows, we were forced to give them six-pence apiece’.1

  So began the first day of their monumental journey through Europe. Why monumental? Not just because of the distances they were to travel, on foot, on horse and mule, by coach, boat and barge, but because of the sheer magnitude of their undertaking. Their aim was to see, document and absorb everything – including birds – they encountered. The success of this carefully planned educational adventure depended upon diligent, sustained reporting.

  As an undergraduate Francis Willughby had enthusiastically imagined himself enjoying some form of educational travel. His father and many of his Trinity colleagues had journeyed to the continent, and Willughby must have seen and heard first-hand how stimulating, valuable and occasionally frustrating it could be. As early as the 1500s travel was widely acknowledged as enhancing, complementing and completing a young gentleman’s education. Indeed, it was almost expected, and as Willughby’s commonplace book makes clear, he had read widely about foreign travel while at Cambridge.

  James Howell’s Instructions for Forreien Travell published in 1642 must have been among Willughby’s most important sources of inspiration and information as he and Ray made their preparations during the winter of 1662–3. Educated at Jesus College, Oxford, Howell was a well-travelled historian, linguist and prolific writer, and ‘one of the earliest instances of a literary man successfully maintaining himself with the fruits of his pen’.2 A major theme in Howell’s book was the way foreign travel enriched the mind, a notion that Willughby undoubtedly relished. Howell also provided vital information on the value of letters of introduction, the costs of travel, which countries were barren or fruitful, crossing the Alps, and significantly the difficulties of travelling in Spain, a notion that seems to have captivated Willughby.3

  Above all else Howell emphasised ‘the preeminence of the eye’ – the true value of seeing things for oneself – and this must also have struck a chord with Willughby and his Royal Society colleagues. You might be forgiven for thinking that Howell had written the seventeenth-century version of a Lonely Planet Guide: in a way he had, but in contrast to today’s travel guides one has to work hard to extract the relevant information, for brevity and clarity were not Howell’s forte. But Willughby would have been used to that style of writing – despite it being so different from his own. The true value of travel was – and still is – beautifully summed up by the Flemish travel writer Justus Lipsius, who referred to those content to stay at home as being like ‘sillie birds cooped up in a pen’.4

  Reading about travel was, literally, only the beginning. The most important challenge was the itinerary, made easier by the fact that in the mid-1600s gentlemen travellers had already established two well-trodden tracks across the continent – referred to as ‘the circle’. The first, through France via Paris and Montpellier, ended in Italy; the second reached Italy via the Netherlands, the major cities of Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. The Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, Russia and Turkey were not recommended.5 Where and when Willughby’s party went was dictated partly by the need to avoid any trouble arising from a slightly frosty phase in Anglo-French relations at that time,6 and partly by who and what they wanted to see. Unlike many of their predecessors, Willughby and his companions also needed to be at particular locations in the appropriate seasons to see particular plants and animals. For these reasons they rejected ‘the circle’ and devised their own route instead.

  Contacts were crucial, and scattered across Europe were numerous Trinity College men who formed a loosely connected intellectual brotherhood into which Willughby knew he and his companions would be warmly received. There were also particular individuals who they were keen to meet, such as Christiaan Huygens, one of Europe’s most eminent scientists, famous for his studies of astronomy, optics and games of chance.

  What to see? High on their list were the great universities of Europe: Leiden for its expertise in medicine, philosophy and natural history; Padua for anatomy; and Montpellier for its botanical and pharmaceutical experts. Other priorities were museums and collections, most of which were in private hands, and many of which, like the impresario Athanasius Kircher’s ‘closet of raritys’ in Rome, were well known to continental travellers.7

  Letters of introduction from eminent and trustworthy individuals were essential. Willughby, for example, carried a letter of recommendation from John Wilkins to Huygens; and knowing – contrary to advice – that he would travel through Spain, he had also obtained letters of recommendation written in Spanish from his colleague Charles Baworth.8

  Passports were obtained from Whitehall and cash was acquired from London merchant houses. Recognising that dissection was to be an essential part of their endeavours, Willughby and his colleagues carried guns and sets of surgical instruments – sc
issors, lancets, knives, forceps, hooks, probes and seekers – all possibly contained in a small chest. They also needed boxes to hold insects and bird specimens, and presses to preserve their botanical specimens.

  Today’s travellers interested in natural history might carry a compact field guide either as a book or on their iPad, but of course nothing so convenient was available for Willughby’s party. There were books – those of their predecessors – but these were inconveniently bulky and they cannot possibly have carried them all. Nonetheless, they probably did take some and there’s a hint that one of these was Guillaume Rondelet’s book on marine animals, De Piscibus.9 It is hard to imagine them being able to achieve what they did en route without access to the earlier literature, and I suspect they consulted the standard texts whenever they had access to the libraries of people they visited. In addition, they probably carried some of the travel guidebooks mentioned above.

  Notebooks were indispensable. Unfortunately, all of Willughby’s have been lost, but we know that John Ray used small, slim, handmade notebooks comprising sheets measuring 10 x 15 centimetres stitched into oatmeal wrappers.10 Between Willughby, Ray, Skippon and Bacon there must have been many such notebooks. Essential too would have been a ‘system’, most obviously a different notebook for each topic: one for their general observations, one for birds, one for fish, for language, antiquities, trades and so on. Willughby’s and Ray’s observations were so diverse that without careful organisation and a conscious effort to keep records separate their notes would soon have degenerated into a mess. As well as notebooks, they also carried with them prepared questionnaires, including word lists such as those they had used previously in Wales.