The antiquarian lawyers did not confuse knowledge of the “desents, genealogees, and petygrees of noble men…& such like stuffe” with true history. The words just quoted come from a primer on the writing of history by the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizzi, as rendered by Thomas Blundeville, who also taught Englishmen mathematics and navigation. Blundeville–Patrizzi specify that true history seeks motives in the backgrounds, parentage, education, ambitions, and habits of the actors, and “tell[s] things as they were done without either augmenting or diminishing them, or swarving one iote from the truth.”26 The most famous of historian–lawyers, Francis Bacon, likewise advised his readers “diligently to examine, freely and faithfully to report, and by the light of words to place as it were before the eyes, the revolutions of time, the characters of persons, the fluctuations of counsels, the courses and currents of actions, the bottoms of pretences, and the secrets of governments.”27
A good indicator of the danger of history is Cotton’s Short View of the Long Life and Rayne of Henry the Third, which circulated in manuscript from 1614 until published in 1627. Almost as compromising in its context as Sarpi’s Trent in papal Rome, Cotton’s Short View exhibits parallels between the corrupt rule of a favorite in England under Henry III and Britain under James, and a more striking anti-parallel: Henry came to his senses, got rid of his favorite and foreign intriguers, cut his expenses, and governed responsibly with the aid of a wise Privy Council.28 Although written against Carr, when published in 1627 it had obvious reference to Buckingham. So did Sejanus: His Fall (1603, 1616), by Ben Jonson, written with the help of Cotton’s books, which details the crimes of Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the favorite of Emperor Tiberius. Its timeliness became clear as Buckingham accumulated power. Cotton’s library continued to supply unwelcome recondite precedents deployed by parliaments. In 1629, King Charles shut it down. He thereby deprived his enemies of, among many other things, two copies of Magna carta and the conjuring apparatus of John Dee.29
Notable users of Cotton’s library included Arundel, Ussher, and Lord William Howard.30 We suppose that the learned and rising John Bankes also belonged to Cotton’s circle, since, like Bankes, Cotton and Cotton’s son held Howard seats in parliament.31 These allegiances by no means precluded occasional cooperation with the Crown. As Attorney General, Heath and then Noy used precedents dug up at their request by Selden, Cotton, and Spelman.32 Selden accepted a commission from the House of Lords to settle with documents the pressing questions whether a peer could take a deer from the king’s forest, whether his privilege of being free from arrest while parliament sat extended to his servants, and whether he could claim benefit of clergy if illiterate. Spelman served on a committee to review legal fees that had grown wildly over time: fees for taking oaths, for burial, and for copying, which in one remarkable case consumed sixty-five skins and £272 more than necessary and in another forty sheets where six would have done. Spelman’s reasonable proposals for reform, based on firm precedents, met with firmer opposition from profiteers and failed to be adopted.33
More successfully, Cotton found a precedent in the reign of Henry IV for parliament’s voting a subsidy before its grievances were redressed; discovered no precedent against the creation and sale of the title of baronet, which for a time brought the crown £30,000 a year; used the relative privacy of his library to open negotiations with Gondomar over the Spanish match; and hunted up, for Buckingham, precedents for ridding the country of obnoxious ambassadors. None of these services kept him out of the Tower in 1629 or reduced his sojourn there.34 Although Bankes supported Cotton and Selden, as usual he managed to avoid compromising himself.35 He did not write books.
The exemplar of the symbiosis between antiquarian research and legal argument was Selden. After training in the Inner Temple, he became a copyist for Cotton’s library and a most effective exploiter of its holdings. He annoyed the Stuarts by demonstrating that laws and assemblies preceded the institution of kingship. In Titles of Honour (1614) he went after the regalia and status of the nobility, including the kings of England, whose crown and scepter, and notions of divine right, he showed were relatively recent inventions. The title “Majesty” came in with Henry VIII, and a “Stuart” was but a thane, a dignity scarcely higher than a baron. Selden reached these conclusions with the help of “that Medium only, which would not at all, or least, deceive by Refractio,”—that is, the perspective (the metaphor of the age) offered in the libraries of Cotton and “my beloved friend that singular Poet Mr Ben Jonson.”36
Selden’s answer to his fellow antiquarian Henry Spelman’s defense of tithes as a divine right of clergy showed what examination through the perspective of document-based history could do. Selden found no evidence of tithing in the early church and no evidence of its establishment in Europe until Charlemagne and in England before Henry III. The claim to dole by divine right was an invention of the popes of the later middle ages. “Experience and Observation” thus wiped out “so much headlong Error, so many ridiculous imposters.”37 The erring establishment did not welcome this enlightenment. The bishops (apart from Selden’s close friend Andrewes) read Selden’s book as a slur on their learning as well as an attack on their revenues. We are not so ignorant, they said, as not to perceive the tendentiousness under the footnotes. “History disputeth not Pro, or Con; concludeth not what should be, or not be…This you have not observed, Master Selden, but made yourself a Party, which no Historian doth.”38 “[The] historical way,” says Bacon, “[is] not wasting time, after the manner of critics, in praise and blame, but simply narrating the facts historically, with but slight intermixture of private judgment.”39 Selden answered the bishops that he had followed the way of Bacon. The facts spoke for themselves, once he had arranged them; to write them down as he had picked them up would have been “too studious [an] Affection of bare and sterile Antiquitie”—that is, worthless. But the bishops prevailed. Selden’s brother in learning, King James, compelled him to retract.
While working on tithes, Selden buried, or rather drowned himself, in that investigation of the law of the sea from which he dredged up the doctrine that water could be owned as well as land. As we know, James did not like the conclusion and, going further than he had with Selden’s history of tithes, prohibited the publication of Mare clausum altogether.40 Fortunately James did not know the extent of Selden’s deviancy. The great lawyer regarded the interpretation of Scripture as guesswork and predestination as unintelligible and challenged resurrection by directing that he be buried under ten feet of soil, a large block of marble, and a pile of bricks.41
Like Cotton, Selden sat in Howard seats in parliament, belonged to Arundel’s academy of Italophile savants, and acted as an independent consultant at the highest level. He supplied Bacon with information for his history of Henry VII, catalogued Arundel’s famous Greek marbles, helped Ussher calculate the eve of creation, and advised King James about the dating of the Nativity and the meaning of the number of the beast.42 Selden admired Sarpi’s writings and practiced a similar historiography. He thus found himself in and out of favor with his sovereigns, who liked Sarpi’s approach when directed at the papal, but not at the Stuart court.43
The researches of the legal historians easily exploded the notion of an ancient perfect balance of church, monarchy, and state. When could that have been? Before the dissolution? But then we were all Catholics and the pope had his finger on the balance. Since the dissolution? But in recent years we have seen Magna carta violated, church property destroyed or perverted, T&P illegally collected. There had never been an idyllic past any more than there had been a Brute, descended from Aeneas, who settled the British Isles. There were plenty of indigenous brutes, however, three kingdoms full of them according to their historiographer Camden. Here astrology came to the aid of history. The fiery trigon Aries, Leo, and Saggitarius in collaboration with Jupiter and Mars “maketh [the British] impatient of servitude, lovers of libertie, martiall and courageous.” This flattering picture improves th
e description in Camden’s source, Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, which adds that northern people with close familiarity with Aries and Mars, such as Britons and Germans, tend to be fierce, headstrong, and bestial.44 Camden discovered on his own that, when Saturn sits in Capricorn, plague invariably arrives in London, and that a certain eclipse (unspecified, so as to spare worry) is “'fatall to the Towne of Shrewsbury.”45
The second project proposed to James, which frightened him less than the antiquaries’, called for an “Academ Roial” modeled on Florence’s Accademia della Crusca, which had charge of the literary affairs of Tuscany. Its moving spirit was Edmund Mary Bolton, a Catholic gentleman and minor poet whose friends included John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones. In 1617, Bolton approached Buckingham, a kinsman, with a plan of literary renewal that would cost only £200 a year. Buckingham supported it. James had wanted to set up “an academy for bettering the teaching of youth, and for the encouragement of men of art,” but could not spare money from his hunting to do so. In 1622, he turned the project over to Charles. Nothing came of it. Two years later James took up the arts side of his academy in the form Bolton had proposed and went so far as to concern himself with the design of the group’s seal (himself on one side, Solomon on the other), the rights of precedence of its members, and other essential academic matters. Nothing more came of that either.46
Bolton divided the membership of his proposed academy into two classes: drones (consisting of “Tutelaries” like Knights of the Garter and “Auxiliaries” chosen from ordinary peers) and workers (“Essentials,” leisured gentlemen at least 30 years of age). Many of Bolton’s Essentials were Catholics or well disposed towards them: Ben Jonson, George Gage, Endymion Porter (Bolton’s brother-in-law), George Fortescue, Tobie Matthew, Sir Thomas Aylesbury (a mathematician who invented a way to coin money and became master of the Mint), and that knight of miscellaneous learning, Sir Kenelm Digby, “the Pliny of the age for lying.” Other prime candidates were Henry Wotton and three veterans of Camden’s group, Cotton, Selden, and Spelman.47
The academy would serve (so Bolton told James) “for the universal embetterment of your people, for the more advantage of your kingly prerogative, certainly for your Majesty’s greater comfort, and for the everlasting fresher glories of your name among us.” Its duties included policing translations, especially of classical authors often mangled by hacks; drawing up expurgatory indexes of English books; overseeing the composition of a “spare and free authentic” celebratory history of England; and “keep[ing] a constant register of public facts.”48 Had James lived to endorse these activities, he almost certainly would not have paid for them. This much we can infer from the story of Chelsea College, established with royal backing in 1610.
Chelsea’s purpose was to train controversialists to help James confute the “lyes, slanders, heresies, sects, idolatries, and blasphemies” of Pope Paul’s army of seasoned Bellarmines. As its dowry it had enough timber from a royal forest to build an eighth of its fabric. Its first provost, Matthew Sutcliffe, Dean of Exeter, was a satisfactorily paranoid anti-Catholic. But, although Sutcliffe put his own resources into the college and several future bishops sharpened their teeth there, it did not pay its way and by 1616 was in serious financial trouble. James came to the rescue by ordering the bishops to do so. Most of the little that came in was consumed by the cost of raising it. The college then diverged from royal policy by attacking Arminians as quasi-papists. Cromwell killed it. Not a stone now remains.49
While the Academ Roial was under lethargic consideration, the greatest projector of the time returned to James for support for what he called the Great Instauration, or root-and-branch renewal of the natural sciences. Francis Bacon had tried James just after the Gunpowder Plot, to no avail, although he had taken the trouble to write out a lengthy description and classification of the sciences needing renovation. This was the Advancement of Learning (1605), which coincided, unfortunately for Bacon, with the new king’s launch of the projects that produced the King James Bible and Chelsea College. Even a rich divine-right king might have hesitated, however, over Bacon’s plan to take over three public schools and three Oxbridge colleges.50
But who other than James could bring it about? “There hath not been since Christ’s time any King or temporal Monarch, which has been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human.” Not since Hermes has there been such a miracle: “the power and fortune of a king, the knowledge and illumination of a priest, and the learning and universality of a philosopher.” James’s rare conjunction of admirable traits must be celebrated by a marker as permanent as possible in this our world of flux and transition, by some “solid work, fixed memorial, and immortal monument.” What better way to assure the quasi-immortality of the new Solomon than by directing the winds of learning, by preserving and improving knowledge?51
Bacon offered James three targets or “works of merit” in this line: libraries, universities, and scholars. Universities, with their privileges and endowments, provide quiet and privacy for the thinking man; libraries, shrines for the repose of the relics of learning; scholars, worthy subjects of reward. The works of merit of previous princes left the instruments of learning imperfect: the universities focus on the professions at the expense of the sciences natural, civil, and moral; scholars’ salaries are too small and mean; and libraries, fixated on books, do not supply the experimental apparatus essential for advancing knowledge. A useful set of experiments costs money. In one of his striking strained analogies, Bacon told James that inquiring into the kingdom of nature was like spying on fellow rulers; “and therefore, as secretaries and spials of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spials and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills, or else you will be ill advertised [informed].”52
The advancement of learning is not a matter of money only. The work also needs the guidance of a prince able to understand his investment, to perceive where learning is deficient, and to engage competent people to prosecute underdeveloped sciences. Bacon takes James on a “general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved or cultivated by the industry of man.” In their long walk, which constitutes most of the Advancement of Learning, Bacon notices the barrenness of the fields they pass, but does not stop to improve them; “for it is one thing to set forth what ground lieth unmanured, and another thing to correct ill husbandry in that which is manured.”53 Not knowing how much manure he would be required to hear or buy, and perhaps for other reasons as well, James declined to patronize the Great Instauration.
After rising to Lord Chancellor, Bacon prepared a clearer diagnosis of the illness of learning and its cure, a Novum organum (1620), a new method. The cure was to begin with the compilation of the necessary data, or “experimental natural histories.” The effort demanded more manpower, experiments, machines, and travel than appeared from the Advancement of Learning. Bacon tried James again with the rhetoric he had employed unsuccessfully in 1605. The Great Instauration was the sort of thing Solomon would have done, if he had had a Bacon, and therefore a project worthy of Your Majesty, “who resemble Salomon in so many things—in the gravity of your judgments, in the peacefulness of your reign, in the largeness of your heart, in the noble variety of the books you have composed.”54
James liked the general idea as described in the preface to the Great Instauration, but had not the patience to absorb the details.55 In the end, Bacon could only draw up a blueprint of a utopia located on an island in a distant sea. Solomon’s House, the utopia’s wellhead, employed dozens of savants arranged like bishops in hierarchical ranks to seek information, compile natural histories, do experiments, develop theories, and make medicines and machines. He died before he could specify how Solomon’s House could be transported from its island to the Stuarts’. Arundel made a partial answer by providing in his will for room, board, and clothing for six Solomons who had the qualifications of being poo
r, honest, and unmarried. They would have a good supply of books “and convenient roomes to make all Distillations, phisickes, and Surgerie.”56 Their works, if any, are not recorded.
Had James supported the academies proposed to him, his Academ Roial would have anticipated the Académie francaise (1635); his Society of Antiquaries, the Académie des inscriptions (1663); and his Solomon’s House, the Académie royale des sciences (1666). But he left his court without even the services of an astronomer, such as the emperor provided at Prague in Kepler and the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Florence in Galileo.57
Building
When fire destroyed his Banqueting Hall in 1618, James commissioned his Surveyor General to replace it with a modern building free from the discomforts of the shabby warren of Whitehall, a new fresh palace worthy to receive the Spanish princess he had set his heart on.58 Jones decided on a freestanding Palladian town palace in the shape of a double cube (length 110 feet, height 55 feet); construction began in 1619 and ended three years later, ready for the princess who never came. Although Wotton condemned the Corinthian and Composite capitals on the facade as gaudy Catholic, most observers judged the Banqueting House a great success. “If all the Books of Architecture were lost, the true art of building might be retrieved from thence.”59 James had his portrait painted in front of a detailed representation of it (Figure 20).60
The Ghost of Galileo Page 15