1949
ANTHONY À WOOD
WHEN Anthony à Wood, the Oxford antiquarian, died in 1695 and left his books, manuscripts and pamphlets to the Ashmolean Museum, a colleague wrote: ‘This benefaction will not perhaps be so much valued by the University as it ought to be because it comes from Anthony Wood.’ He was the best-hated man in the University; he was malicious, he was dangerous because he had a power over words; he noted everything. They burnt his great book, Athenae Oxoniensis, and he recorded the event in his diary with a venomous certainty of posterity’s judgement. In five volumes, published forty years ago by Dr Andrew Clark, the Oxford of his day stands pricked in acid.
There is Mr Smith, of University College, whose lecture in the Theatre was attended by two thousand people. ‘Mr Smith was very baudy among the women: he had a grand auditory, while some lecturers had none – so you may see what governs the world’; he hears certain ‘bachelors’ and masters (he never fails to give names) ‘uttering fluently romantick nonsense, unintelligible gibberish, flourishing lyes and nonsense’; he dines with his brother Kit – ‘cold meat, cold entertainment, cold reception, cold clownish woman’: he writes of poor John Aubrey, and Aubrey’s most passionate defenders cannot deny the truth in the caricature: ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than erased’; the Court comes and goes again: ‘rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, carelesse’. Mr Peter Allan, of Christ Church, ‘with his pupill Lord Shandoes and Mr Jeanson (who the Sunday before preached at St Giles) with Sir Willoughby D’ews’ are eternalized in his diary in the act of entering a bawdy house in Mew Inn Lane. The great Doctor Fell does not escape the pen which notes also ‘a calf with a face like a man’ exhibited at the ‘Golden Lion’, the rotting bones on a gibbet on Shotover, a brass here, a natural phenomenon there.
The Oxford scholars tried to turn the tables. ‘They pretended he had a bastard at Headington, they made him angry by accusing him of keeping drunken company; in the days of the Popish Plot they spread the rumour that he was a papist: ‘a man that is studious and reserved is popishly affected’; but not one of them left a record to supersede his. William Prideaux’s letters to John Ellis confirm Wood’s picture of seventeenth-century Oxford; there is nothing quainter in Wood than Prideaux’s description of Doctor Fell making a surprise visit to the Clarendon Press and finding it secretly employed in printing an edition of Aretine for ‘the gentlemen of All Souls’; of Bodley’s Librarian nearly beaten to death by his wife, ‘an old whore’; of the Vice-Chancellor’s undergraduates ‘bubbeing’ at the ‘Split Crow’ with his approval.
Anthony Wood is not concerned only with local history. The Oxford of the Great Western Railway is more remote from political life than the Oxford which could just be reached in a day by a fast coach from London. It was the birth-place of several of Charles’s bastards, the scene of the most dramatic Parliamentary dissolution of his reign; and James II, too, presented himself as closely as Doctor Fell to Wood’s careful, malicious eyes: ‘Afterwards the King, with a scarlet coat on, his blew ribbon and Georg, and a star on his left papp, with an old French course hat on edged with a little seem of lace (all not worth a groat as some of the people shouted).’ But a certain distance from London had its advantages, and during the terror of the Popish Plot Wood’s study of character and familiarity with slander kept him from running with the crowd. In 1679 he confided to his diary – he would not have been rash enough to have told it abroad – a story of Oates and Bedlow which ended with the words, ‘So the King’s worthy evidence sneaked away.’
1932
JOHN EVELYN
IF it were necessary to play at the Shakespeare-Bacon game with the seventeenth century, and having lost the sources of all its lyrics arbitrarily to choose the authors from those men whose careers are still remembered, The Garden might easily be assigned to John Evelyn, the author of Sylva, rather than to Marvell, the rough satirist, the bishop baiter, the M.P. for Hull. For Evelyn lived very much the life to which Marvell’s poetry is an escape.
The Nectaren, and curious Peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach
well described his life at Sayes Court; and Lord Ponsonby,*4 with his unerring eye for the interesting detail, speaks of Evelyn’s long list in Kalendarium Hortense of apples unknown today, of peaches and nectarines. But a wider gulf than ambition separated the two men. Evelyn, the scholar of gardens, a man so modest that, while he had the entry to the King’s presence and walked Whitehall familiarly with Charles, he petitioned for no office more important than the care of the trees in the Royal forests (and that he was not granted), differed from the poet above all in this: the garden was not his escape from life (an escape which very faintly tinges Marvell’s poetry with sentimentality), but life itself.
Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence thy Sister dear,
Marvell wrote, but to the owner of Sayes Court his garden meant a great deal more, or a great deal less, than quiet and innocence. It meant study (he was the translator of The French Gardener in his youth, of The Complete Gardener in his age). It meant labour:
The hithermost Grove I planted about 1656; the other beyond it, 1660; the lower Grove 1662; the holly hedge even with the Mount hedge below 1670. I planted every hedge and tree not only in the gardens, groves, &c., but about all the fields and house since 1653, except those large, old and hollow elms in the stable court and next the sewer, for it was before, all one pasture field to the very garden of the house, which was but small.
It meant the arid grief of work wasted when Admiral Benbow, to whom Evelyn had let Sayes Court, relet it to Peter the Great, who spoilt the bowling green, demolished fruit trees, and had himself driven daily in a wheelbarrow through the great holly hedge that Evelyn loved. It seems to have been the image by which he could visualize immortality: at his birthplace, at Wotton, to which he returned to live in his old age, he began to labour again: ‘I am planting an evergreen grove here to an old house ready to drop.’ It was certainly his most enduring passion. ‘The late elegant and accomplished Sir W. Temple, tho’ he laid not his whole body in this garden, deposited the better part of it (the heart) there; and if my executors will gratify me in what I have desired, I wish my corpse may be interred as I have bespoke them.’ But this man of few wants seldom had them gratified, and he was buried within the church. Lord Ponsonby speaks of ‘the darkness, the locked door, and the iron railings’.
Evelyn had not Pepys’s power of transmitting himself to posterity. He is himself the least character in his own diary; and his knowledge of other men was no more penetrating than his knowledge of himself. He worked hard on a multiplicity of committees, but these were to him as much an escape from real life as the garden was to Marvell. One imagines him selfless, innocent, taken advantage of. He had no instinctive knowlege of psychology; he believed implicitly in the high moral worth of Lady Sunderland, because she kept her garden in good order; he was puzzled by her husband’s inconsistencies, rather than distressed by his treacheries. Though he was not deceived in the goodness of Margaret Godolphin, his life of her shows no perception of character. She is Virtue as the Court is Sin, she is Alabaster as it is Clay.
No man, indeed, could be less judged by his friendships, but in that strange company, which included Jeremy Taylor, as well as Lady Sunderland, I wish that Lord Ponsonby had found room for William Oughtred, the mathematician, who, according to Aubrey, came very near to discovering the philosopher’s stone, and who died with joy at the Restoration. For Evelyn, who had successfully avoided the slaughterings of civil war, came near to killing his friend, when a grotto in the gardens he had designed at Albury collapsed.
His lack of psychological penetration prevented Evelyn from being a good diarist. His merits as a writer showed themselves when he wrote as a specialist, and he was a specialist not only on gardens, but on salads, on coins, on sculpture, on Spinoza, on navigation. I confess that I have to take Lord Ponsonby’s word fo
r the value of his great work, Sylva. But the same meticulous detail (‘Whenever you sow, if you prevent not the little field mouse, he will be sure to have the better share’), can be seen in Fumifugium with its plan for a green belt round London planted with sweet smelling flowers and herbs. His style is peppered with pedantries, but there is a kind of Baconian beauty in the accumulation of detail, and a touch all Evelyn’s own in the sudden lyrical quickening, the sudden widening of his horizon, as a memory of his early travels comes back on him.
I propose . . . That these Palisads be elegantly planted, diligently kept and supply’d with such Shrubs, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers, and are aptest to tinge the Aer upon every gentle emission at a great distance: Such as are (for instance amongst many others) the Sweet-brier, all the Periclymenas and Woodbinds; the Common white and yellow Jessamine, both the Syringas or Pipe trees; the Guelder-rose, the Music and all other Roses; Genista Hispanica: To these may be added the Rubus odoratus, Bayes, Juniper, Lignum-vitae, Lavender: but above all, Rosemary, the Flowers whereof are credibly reported to give their scent above thirty Leagues off at Sea, upon the coasts of Spain: and at some distance towards the meadow side, Vines, yea, Hops.
The seventeenth century has been lucky lately in its biographers; Lord Ponsonby’s Evelyn has followed hard on the heels of Mr Bryant’s Pepys; it is not Lord Ponsonby’s fault that he cannot lay claim to finality in his study. Mr Bryant had at his disposal the complete diary, and all the papers collected by Tanner and Wheatley. But Evelyn’s diary remains to-day in great part unpublished, and Lord Ponsonby was denied access to the manuscripts at Wotton, and was even refused permission to see the house and grounds. All the more praise is due to him for a biography which certainly ranks as high as Mr Bryant’s. There is no nonsense about Lord Ponsonby’s work, no trying flowers of fancy, and the character of Evelyn emerges, the more clearly for his biographer’s restraint, in its slight conceit, its rather silly pedantry (‘You will consult,’ Evelyn wrote to Pepys, when the latter was contemplating his history of the navy, ‘Fulvius Ursinus, Goltzius, Monsieur St Amant, Otto, Dr Spon, Vaillant, Dr Patin and the most learned Spankemius’), in its essential goodness.
1934
BACKGROUND FOR HEROES
‘HE drank a little tea and some sherry. He wound up his watch, and said, now he had done with time and was going to eternity.’ So Burnet on Lord William Russell’s last hour. History may no longer consist of the biographies of great men, but perhaps our deepest pleasure in Miss Thomson’s analysis*5 of the account books belonging to the Bedford household at Woburn remains in our awareness that this is the way of life of a familiar hero, the life he set a period to with the winding of his watch. William, the fifth earl, with whose domestic economy this book chiefly deals, was happy in having no history, but there is an extra-special interest in the fact that his heir, William Russell, was brought up among these surroundings, the huge house of ninety rooms, including the little artificial grotto with the gilt chairs and the Bedford arms among the shells and stalagmites; that he read in this library so ponderously stocked with the works of Baxter (not one play, not a single volume of even sacred poetry), took his impress even from the gardens designed and stocked (the details are here) by the beloved John Field, was fed and clothed out of the family bank, the great chest in Bedford House made in the Netherlands ‘painted in the characteristic Dutch fashion, squares showing prim landscapes and flowers, roses and tulips’.
Miss Thomson in a book of great fascination – with little but account books to draw on she has composed a picture of a family as complete as that contained in the Verney Memoirs – analyses the duties and expenditure of the various officials belonging to a household more than regal in its wealth: the receiver-general dealing with the money chest in Bedford Street, the steward of the west looking after the estates in Devon and the neighbouring counties, the steward of the household, the gentleman of the horse, the clerk of the kitchen, the tutor buying books for the library, the gardener plants for the Woburn gardens. The household leaps into life in the small details: the maid Rose lending her master five shillings at a moment of sudden need, sixpence given to a scolding woman who wasn’t satisfied with the bargain struck for the hire of a horse, a ‘hawk called Tomson’.
Historically the chief interest is in the financial change towards the technique of modern banking from the early cumbrous method by which all the money for the household was kept in the great chest (the income from the western estates being paid by bills of exchange drawn on a London goldsmith, the money fetched by porters, a thousand pounds at a time, in sacks from Lombard Street to Bedford Street). For the first time in the middle ’60s the money for the chest was laid out first on deposit and then on credit account with the goldsmith, and modern banking methods may be said really to have started in 1687, when the rents were paid directly into the account with Child and Rogers and the great chest lay almost empty. We watch other changes: the first appearance in the wine cellars of glass bottles instead of stone (1658), in 1664 the purchase of ‘Shably’, the first mention of the wine in any account book known to M. André Simon, in 1665 the first purchase of ‘Shampaigne’, and in 1684 of port. It is like the gradual development of a family photograph. William Russell may still in his studied scaffold gestures belong to the obscure heroic age, but the details of a life we share are springing up all round him.
I have only one complaint to make of this ingenious book, and that is that Miss Thomson does not print, in an appendix, the complete catalogue of the 152 books in the Duke’s library at Woburn and the 247 in Bedford House. A great many Baxters and other divines (curiously enough Miss Thomson mentions nothing by Burnet, that popular death-bed vulture who was with William Russell at the end), a few books of ceremony, a little travel, the usual crop of anti-Catholic works published at the time of the Plot, and for light relief a few ‘twopenny dreadfuls’, Murder in Gloucestershire, The Murder in Essex, The Prentice that Murdered his Mistress: it is a sombre collection and compares oddly with another contemporary library known to us, with its Juvenal and Homer, Dryden and Burton, Milton, Donne, Denham and Montaigne and ‘the Matchless Orinda’. A family library is a breeding-place of character, and the great Puritan family would have felt justified in their aversion to poetry and the humanities if they had been able to contrast the library in which the political martyr studied with that of ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, Sir Charles Sedley, ‘a very necessary man among us women’.
1937
A HOAX ON MR HULTON
NO one, I suppose, will ever discover the authors of the odd elaborate hoax played on Mr Hulton, the elderly printseller of Pall Mall, in 1744; the story itself has been hidden all these years in an old vellum manuscript book I bought the other day from a London bookseller. With its vivid unimportance it brings alive the geography of eighteenth-century tradesman’s London, the wine-merchants at Wapping, the clockmakers in Fleet Street, the carriers and printers and bust-makers, all the aggrieved respectable victims of an anarchic imagination, and in the background memories of Layer’s conspiracy and the word ‘Jacobite’ and a vague uneasiness.
The story is told in letters and occasional passages of dialogue with notes in the margin on the behaviour of the characters. It might be fiction if these people did not all belong to fact. Who copied it out? It is hard to believe that any innocent person could have known so much. Mr Hulton suspected his apprentices, and the whole world; there was a young man called Mr Poet Rowzel, who knew more than he should have done; and an auctioneer, for some reason of his own, spoke of an upholsterer.
It began quite childishly on 21 January 1744, with a letter which purported to come from Mr Scott, a carpenter of Swallow Street, who wrote that he had many frames to make for the Prussian Ambassador, that he was ill of the gout and his men were overworked, and would Mr Hulton call on him. Mr Hulton had the gout himself, but he limped to Mr Scott’s house, when ‘finding the whole was an imposition upon him and Scott, he hobbled back again mutt
ering horrible imprecations against the letter-writer all the way’. Two days later the hoax really got under way. A stream of unwanted people arrived at Mr Hulton’s shop: Mr Hazard, a cabinet maker of the ‘Hen and Chickens’ in London’s Inn, with a quantity of Indian paper; Mr Dard, a toy maker from the King’s Arms in the Strand, who had received a letter from the pseudo-Hulton offering to sell him a curious frame; a surgeon to bleed him, and a doctor from Bedlam. It would take too long to describe the events of these crowded days, how a Mr Boyd brought snuffboxes and Mrs Hulton had to buy one to quiet him before her husband returned, how Mr Scarlett, an optician, arrived loaded with optic glasses, and was so ill-used by Mr Hulton that he threatened proceedings, how Mr Rutter, a dentist of Fleet Street, came to operate on an impostume, and was turned away by Mrs Hulton, who pretended her husband had died of it. Three pounds of anchovies arrived, and the printer of the Harlaeian Miscellany, who was pushed roughly out of doors, and Mr Cock, an auctioneer in the Great Piazza, who ‘muttered something of an Irish upholsterer’, and a female optician called Deane – Mrs Hulton bolted the door against her, and spoke to her through the pane, which Mrs Deane broke. ‘Mr Hulton at the noise of breaking glass came forth from his little parlour into the shop, and was saluted by a porter with a dozen of port wine.’ By this time he was losing control, and when Mr Rogers, a shoemaker of Maiden Lane, wanted to measure him, ‘Mr Hulton lost all temper . . . and cursing, stamping and swearing, in an outrageous manner, he so frightened Mr Rogers that the poor man, who is a Presbyterian, ran home to Covent Garden without once looking behind him.’ After that Mr Hulton shut up his shop, and went to bed for three days, so the man who had been told he had a perukemaker’s shop to dispose of failed to get him. Even when the shop reopened, Mr Hulton thought it safer to stay upstairs and leave things to his son. His son too was choleric and what he did to a young oculist who thought his father needed spectacles is unprintable here.
Collected Essays Page 21