by John Aubrey
In the following year, Aubrey realised his lifelong desire to travel on the continent. He had made ambitious plans to see the Loyer, and the country of Brittany, and that about Geneva, and after receiving Thomas Hobbes’ best “wishes for your safety and the continuance of your health, which is not to be despaired of in one that can temper himselfe from excesses, and especially in fruit, as you can,” he set out. But as so often happens with one’s fondest ambitions, the trip did not quite come up to his expectations. June 11, landed at Calais, he recorded. In August following had a terrible fit of the Spleen, and Piles, at Orleans. I returned in October. Then Joan Sumner.
The ominous ring of this last note proved fully justified, for poor Aubrey was as unfortunate in his dealings with women, as he was incompetent with money. Since he had left Oxford, he had often been on the point of getting married, but always at the last moment he was foiled. My Mother fell from her horse and brake her arme the last day of April (1649 or 50) when I was suitor to Mris. Jane Codrington, he wrote, and never mentioned the lady’s name again. Probably because in 1651: about the 16 or 18 of April, I saw that incomparable good conditioned Gentlewoman, Mris. M. Wiseman, with whom at first sight I was in love—haeret lateri [the deadly arrow sticks fast in the side], and indeed the wound did seem more permanent than usual for five years later he was still attached to her, however insecurely, for he notes: 1656. This Yeare, and the last, was a strange year to me, and full of Contradictions:—scilicet Love (M.W.) and Lawe-suites. One of these Contradictions must have come from M.W., for in the next year he received a double blow, to his heart and his pocket: 1657: Novemb. 27, obiit Domina Katherina Ryves, with whom I was to marry; to my great Losse (2000 pounds or more, besides counting care of her brother, 1000 pounds per annum). Nothing daunted, however, he tried again: 1665, November 1; I made my first addresse (in an ill howre) to Joane Sumner, and the catastrophe which then unrolled was to put a stop to his matrimonial adventures for ever.
1666: he said: this yeare all my business and affaires ran Kim Kam. Nothing tooke effect, as if I had been under an ill tongue. Treacheries and Enmities in abundance against me. And an entry in the Salisbury Diocesan Registry this year shows how near he came to taking the fatal step. “Awbry, John, of Easton Pierse,” it runs, “and Mris. Joane Sumner of Sutton Benger, sp. Bondmen, William Browne of Sarum, tailor, and Joseph Gwynne of Easton Pierse, yeoman April 11th.”
1667: December: he continued, arrested in Chancery lane, At Mrs. Sumner’s suite.
1668: Febr. 24 a.m. about 8 or 9, Triall with her at Sarum. Victory and 600 pounds dammage, though divelish Opposition against me.
1668: July 26, was arrested by Peter Gale’s malicious contrivance, the day before I was to goe to Winton for my 2d Triall, but it did not retain me above 2 howres; but did not then goe to Triall.
1669: March 5, was my Triall at Winton. from 8 to 9, the Judge being exceedingly made against me, by my Lady Hungerford. With much adoe, gott the Moiety of Sarum verdict, viz. 300 pounds.
Joan Sumner’s decision to go to law with John Aubrey, instead of to the altar, was the coup de grâce to his tottering affairs, and with a sudden crash all his tangled estates tumbled about his ears. Sold Easton-Pierse, and the farme at Broad Chalke, he noted sadly, for his mother’s family, the Lytes, had Easton Piers in Lease and in Inheritance 249 years: sc. from Henry 6th. Lost 500 pounds+200 pounds+goods+timber, he continued, and the result was that in 1669 and 1670 I sold all my Estates in Wilts. Absconded as a banished man. I was in as much affliction as a mortall could bee, and never quiet till all was gone, and I wholly caste myselfe on God’s providence. Never quiett, nor anything of happiness till divested of all, 1670, 1671, he repeats, at what time Providence raysed me unexpectedly good Friends.
For when all was sold, he found relief at last, and his next entry reads: From 1670, to this very day (I thanke God) I have enjoyed a happy delitescency, a statement which is rather belied by the succeeding paragraph, 1671: danger of Arrests.
During this crisis, a meeting had taken place which was to give purpose to the remaining years of Aubrey’s life and was also to provide him with the immortality which he so much desired. For on Thursday, 31st August, 1667, Anthony Wood entered in his accounts:—“Spent with Mr. John Aubrey of Wilts, at Mother Web’s and the Meremaid Tavern, 3s. 8d.”, and it was not until nearly thirty years later that he returned to his Journal to make a fuller and more famous entry: “Aug. 31 S.,” he then wrote, “John Aubrey of Easton-Piers in the parish of Kingston S. Michael in Wiltsh. was in Oxon. with Edward Forest, a Book-seller living against Alls. Coll., to buy books. He then saw lying on the stall Notitia Academiae Oxoniensis; and asking who the Author of that book was, he answer’d the report was that one Mr. Anthony Wood of Merton Coll. was the Author, but was not. Whereupon Mr. Aubrey, a pretender to Antiquities, having been contemporary to A. Wood’s elder brother in Trin. Coll. and well acquainted with him, he thought that he might be as well acquainted with A. W. himself. Whereupon repairing to his Lodgings, and telling him who he was, he got into his acquaintance, talk’d to him about his studies, and offer’d him what assistance he could make, in order to the completion of the work that he was in hand with. Mr. Aubrey was then in a sparkish Garb, came to town with his Man and two Horses, spent high and flung out A. W. at all recknings. But his estate of 700 pounds per an. being afterwards sold, and he reserving nothing of it to himself, liv’d afterwards in a very sorry condition, and at length made shift to rub out by hanging on Edmund Wyld Esq. living in Blomesbury, near London, on James Bertie Earl of Abendon, whose first wife was related to him, and on Sir John Aubrey, his kinsman, living sometimes in Glamorganshire, and sometimes at Borstall neare Brill in Bucks. He was a sniftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased. And being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many letters to A. W. with fooleries, and misinformations, which sometimes would guid him into the pathes of error.”
As can be seen from the tone of this entry, Anthony Wood was an impossible man to get on with. An Oxford don, vain, touchy, spiteful and lacking in every social grace, he was impertinent to his superiors, rude to his equals, overbearing to his juniors, ungrateful to his benefactors and unbearable to his family. The Warden of his own college he described as “the very Lol-poop of the University, a most lascivious person, a great haunter of women’s company and a common Fornicator,” and the Warden’s wife he despised for putting “the College to unnecessary charges, and very frivolous expences, among which was a very larg Looking-Glass, for her to see hir ugly face, and body to the middle, and perhaps lower.” He quarrelled with John Fell, the great Dean of Christ Church, who at his own expense was publishing Wood’s life work. He quarrelled with his fellow dons: “Mr. Roger Brent and I playing at cards, he fell out with me, called me all to nought and struck me. He looked like a rogue, like a whoring rascall, like a whoring rogue.”
The resultant unpopularity only increased his fury and loneliness until everything enraged him: “Mr. Davis looked red and jolly, as if he had been at a fish supper at C.C.C., and afterwards drinking—as he had been:” and a friend’s criticism of his book was met with the comment: “the words as ugly as his face.”
But the climax was reached with his family, for it seems that his sister-in-law at last could stand no more. “Cold meat, cold entertainment, cold reception, cold clownish woman,” Wood noted in his Journal after one meal, and at last, on Easter Day, 1670, “the melancholy, malitious and peevish woman slighted me and rose in the middle of dinner from the table. My brother Kit asked me whether I would be godfather and give a piece of plate to the childe in her belly. She said that she ‘would first see it rot, etc.’ with an envious eye and teeth.” After which scene he “was dismist from his usual and constant diet by the rudeness and barbarity of a brutish woman” and “was put to his shifts. This disaster A.W. look’d upon as the first and greatest misery of his life. It made him exceedingly melancholy and more retir’d.” But he soon justified this is
olation to himself. “He is so great an Admirer of a solitary and retired Life,” he says in the preface to one of his works, “that he frequents no Assemblies of the said University, hath no companion in Bed or at Board, in his Studies, Walks or Journies, nor holds Communication with any, unless with some, and those very few, of generous and noble Spirits, that have in some measure been Promoters and Encouragers of this Work: And indeed all things considered he is but a degree different from an Ascetick, as spending all or most of his time, whether by Day or Night, in Reading, Writing, and Divine Contemplation.”
Such was his own view, but the truth of the matter was that Anthony Wood had been born in the wrong century. Suspicious, lonely, intolerant, envious, mean, he found himself isolated in that supremely social age: squeamish, disapproving and obsessed with sex, he was revolted by the coarseness of the physical life around him: spiteful, snobbish and pretentious, he flaunted his lack of social graces in the face of all, until his pompousness and prudery finally cut him off entirely from the life around him. And though he continued to look on himself as “a universal Lover of Mankind,” he was forced at length to admit that he was “as ’twere Dead to the World, and utterly unknown in Person to the generality of the Scholars in Oxon.” “As to the Author himself,” he finally confessed, “he is a Person who delights to converse more with the Dead, than with the Living”; for being so ill at ease in his own times, he was at last driven to seek refuge in the past, for only there could he show the affection, which he was unable to give to his contemporaries. “Sweet chucks,” he wrote, “beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man.” But even the dead were not spared his malignity, unless they had been long dead: “March 31. F. died Ann, Duchess of York,” he reported. “She died with eating and drinking; died fast and fustie; salacious; lecherous.”
And so it says a great deal for Aubrey’s charm that, after twenty-five years of friendship, Anthony Wood should merely call him “roving and magotie-headed,” an accusation, moreover, which was not altogether without justification, as we shall see.
That this was not Anthony Wood’s original view is shown by the following letter, dated soon after the first meeting. “You may remember when you were at Oxon,” he wrote to Aubrey on 11th November, 1667, “that you promised upon my enquirie &c., to obtained some intelligence concerning Dr. Joh: Hoskyns sometimes of New Coll: of his birth death and buriall, his bookes that he wrote and that might be worthie memorie of him. If you please to informe me as soone as you can, I shall take it for a verie great favour from your hands. ’Tis probable you might upon recollection informe me also of others that were Oxford men. The which, if you at your leisure can, you would alwaies oblige me to be, Sir, your most humble servant Anth: Woode.” And a few months later he again assured him, “I am glad I have such a friend as you to stir in my business. I would by noe means have put you to this trouble, could I have reposed confidence in any other.”
Anthony Wood
From the drawing by Rose in the Bodleian Library
Sir Henry Lee
From the portrait by Sir Antonio Moro in the National Portrait Gallery
Anthony Wood, at Dean Fell’s suggestion, intended to follow up his “Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis,” with an even more elaborate work entitled “Athenae Oxoniensis: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford from the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh Dom. 1500, to the end of the Year 1690.” But he soon found that his unpopularity was a great hindrance to him in gathering the information that he needed; and for this work, Aubrey’s popularity and wide acquaintanceship were ideal. The offer of help, therefore, Wood accepted with alacrity, but Aubrey responded with such a will that Wood’s tone soon changed towards him. For exactly four years after his original letter he was writing to Aubrey in this peremptory tone. “Allington is not far from you. If you have occasion to goe that way, pray see whether Mr. Nich. Fuller, the Critick have an Epitaph there. If not take the day and year of his buriall out of the Register. I have heard he died there. If you cannot goe, employ your brother and I shall be gratefull to him. If not buried there, perhaps at Salisbury, where he was prebend. He died about 1626.”
As time went on the commands became ever more direct. “Quaere more of Mr. Aubrew,” Wood jotted down on his notes and sometimes one of these formidable lists of queries has survived. “1. Epitaph of Francis Potter; if none, then the day and yeare where buried.—2. Titles of Dr. Pettie’s books published, where borne (Rumney in Hampshire, quaere.)—3. When Dr. John Godolphin died, where he died and where buried; quaere the bookseller that sold his books.—4. Title of books that John Davyes of Kidwelly translated.—7. Register of S. Pancrass Church.—8. Which daughter and heir of Carew Raleigh was married to Sir John Ellwes.—9. To send to Olor Iscanus to answer my letters.—10. To put John Dugdale in mind of John Davenport.—11. Mr. Hook for the Christian name of … Oliver, glass paynter.—12. What is said of Father Simons in his collections.—13. Dr. Walter Charlton, who he succeeded?—14. My letters to be returned.—15. Where Mr. Robert Boyle lived and died.”
Faced with a list like this in an age when there were no books of reference to turn to, Aubrey set about gathering his information as best he could. Sometimes his friends helped him, but though Izaak Walton wrote part of the life of Ben Jonson and Sir Thomas Browne contributed to John Dee’s biography, they could not always be relied on, as that blank page shows which is headed John Dryden, Esq. Poet Laureate. He will write it for me himselfe. For as Aubrey was well acquainted with all the great figures of his time, it was mainly with the previous generation that he needed help, which meant that he had to appeal to his seniors for information, and his seniors were by now growing very old. The Lives of John Dee, Dr. Nepier, Sir William Dugdale, William Lilly, Elias Ashmole, Esq., he informed Anthony Wood, Mr. Ashmole has and will doe them himself; as he told me, but nowe he seems to faile.
At other times, his information came in a far more roundabout way. Dr. Bathurst was able to tell him about Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, because a mayd that lived with my Lord lived with his father: nor was this backstairs method neglected by Aubrey himself: Jack Sydenham was wont to carry me in his armes: a graceful servant, he said, recalling his childhood, he gave me this account: and stone cutters and tradesmen were often pressed into use. Sermons, too, provided some amusing stories and contributed largely to the lives of the Great Earl of Cork, his daughter Mary, Countess of Warwick, and Colonel Charles Cavendish. Then again, church registers were searched, sometimes in vain, it is true: My brother Tom searched the Register of Wilton from the beginning and talk’t with old men. Philip Massinger was not buried there: but at other times with unexpected results. When I searched the Register of the Parish of St. Saviours, Southwark in 1670, for the Obit of that eminent Dramatick Poet Mr. John Fletcher, Aubrey wrote to Anthony Wood, the Parish-Clerk, aged above 80, told me that he was his Taylor, and that Mr. Fletcher staying for a Suit of Cloaths before he retired into the Country in the great Plague, 1625, Death stopped his Journey and laid him low here.
Tombstones were scanned for dates, and often proved fallible, for though Aubrey noticed that there was something wrong about the following: Pray for the soul of Constantine Darrel Esq. who died Anno Domini 1400 and his wife, who died Anno Domini 1495: he had no way of checking on Spenser’s epitaph in Westminster Abbey, which, being forty-two years in error over his birth and three years over his death, made him eighty-six at his death, instead of forty-seven. Nevertheless tombstones had to be depended on for these facts, and often they yielded more: Ellenor, wife of Sir John Denham was a beautiful woman, he reported, as appears by her Monument at Egham. And every now and then he stumbled upon a veritable gold mine: Did I tell you, he wrote excitedly, that I have met with old Mr. Beeston who knew all the old English Poets, whose lives I am taking from him: his father was Master of the Playhouse. And although Mr. Dryeden calles him the Chronicle of the
Stage, Aubrey had a virtual monopoly of his information, for he concludes the more to be admired—he was not a company keeper; lived in Shoreditch; would not be debauched; and if invited to Court, was in pain.
His fellow historians looked askance at some of these methods. In my last I gave you some Memoirs of Cardinall Morton, Aubrey wrote to Anthony Wood, and that the Tradicion of the Countrey people in Dorset, when I was a Schooleboy there at Blandford, was that he was a Shoemaker’s son of Bere: but Sir William Dugdale sajes ‘by no means I must putt in writing Heare-Sayes.’ Despite this warning, the most fruitful source of all turned out to be casual conversation, and as Aubrey’s taste for gossip was rather undiscriminating, mistakes would keep creeping in and were savagely resented by Anthony Wood, who made no allowances. I remember, Aubrey wrote apologetically after one such rebuke, Sam. Butler (Hudibras) one time at the Tavern sayd, that ’twas this Earl of Dorset’s father that translated the Comoedie called the Cid. writt by Corneille. Me thinkes he should not be mistaken: but the world is mighty apt to it you see. And later he was to protest: I heard an old Lawyer of the Middle Temple, 1646, who was Sir Edward Coke’s country-man, say that he was born to 300 pounds land per annum, and I have heard some of his country say again that he was borne but to 40 per pounds per annum. What shall one beleeve?