Varia
When, in 1635, John Selden finally issued at Charles’s command the account and proof of British dominion over local waters stifled by James, it went abroad without a frontispiece. This lack was supplied in its English translation of 1652, issued by order of parliament, for which Cleyn created a fine depiction of Britannia sitting splendidly isolated in mid-ocean on a large rock marked Angliae respublica (Figure 47). The rock also supports symbols of the three Britannic countries (formerly kingdoms) now united under parliament and also their discarded arms, crowns, and scepters. A vigorous Neptune arrives from the right drawn on a shell by two horses, literally plowing the sea, underlining Selden’s fundamental claim that water can be owned like land. Neptune hopes for an alliance with the Commonwealth.
Figure 47 Francis Cleyn, frontispiece for Selden’s Of the Dominion…of the Sea (1652).
Of Thee (Great STATE) the God of Waves
In equal wrongs, assistance crave’s, defend thyself and me
For if o’re Seas there be no sway, My Godhead clear is taen away, the Sceptre pluckt from thee.
If “little Venice” can dominate its gulf, should Britannia not rule the seas?
A few years before devising this piece for parliament, Cleyn had contributed one for a collection of poems in memory of the Huntingdon heir, Henry Lord Hastings, who, despite the attendance of “The wise-powerful mayern, (who can give ǀ As much as Mortality can receive),” died of smallpox at the age of 19, on the eve of his wedding. Cleyn’s image shows the nine muses weeping around the shroud that disguises the object of their tears. Urania with her globe stands disconsolate to the right. An anonymous poet with the intriguing initials “J.B.” contributed the suggestive verse:
Blush, ye Pretenders to Astrologie
That tell us stories out of Ptolemie
Kepler, with others; what shall be this year
Th’effects of Saturn joyn’d with Jupiter
But could not tell us that our Sun should set
To rise no more within this Sphere.104
Under the shroud we are no doubt to understand the martyred king, who could not be mourned publicly. “Cease thou to weep; for he and angels sing ǀ Hallelujah in Heav’n, with Charles our king.”105 The astronomy of Lachrymae musarum included a notable invocation by a young poet calling not on immortal gods, as might have been expected, but on dead astronomers. “Come learned Ptolemy, and trial make ǀ If thou this Hero’s Altitude canst take.” Come Tycho, “take [up your] Astrolabe, and seek out here ǀ What new star'’t was did gild our Hemisphere.”106
We must suppose that the collaboration with Sandys sharpened, if it did not awaken, Cleyn’s awareness of contemporary issues in cosmology and geography. Pertinent images occur in the globes in Cleyn’s depictions of the seven liberal arts, a series issued in 1645 by Thomas Rowlett and Robert Peake, perhaps the first English commercial publishers to risk issuing prints intended for art lovers. To reduce the risk and to have something Italianate to appeal to connoisseurs, they engaged Cleyn to do a set based on his tapestries depicting the five senses as well as a series on the hackneyed seven arts. These engravings, by Cleyn and William Faithorne, are rated much superior to earlier British prints.107
Among the liberal arts Astronomy has the first claim on our attention. She is a winged creature depicted leaning against a celestial globe while gesturing at the stars with a surprisingly sleek telescope (Figure 48a). Near her feet are her usual utensils, dividers for angular measure, a pocket sundial, armillary sphere, quadrant. Her bearded companion is her student, recently graduated from instruction by her sister, Geometry, who has taught him the use of dividers on a terrestrial globe (see Figure 31). The features of this globe, like the lines of reference on its celestial counterpart, would not be much use for navigation. Geometry wears a castle in her hair, to indicate her utility in fortification, and dwells among pedestals and pillars, to suggest her prowess in architecture. And what of the snake under the globe? Perhaps it is a relative of the snakelike creature dear to Dialectica, which, having slithered into the sphere of geometry, which allows no doubtful arguments, is duly squashed (Figure 48b). Or, perhaps, as Sandys explained the association, the snake represented to antiquity the heliacal motion of the sun.108
Figure 48a Francis Cleyn, Astronomy from Septem artes liberales (1645).
Figure 48b Francis Cleyn, Dialectics from Septem artes liberales (1645).
Cleyn’s reputation as a designer of prints won him commissions for teaching materials—models of ancient gods, grotesque patterns, and the sports of the little boys and angellini incontinently distributed on the canvases and tapestries of the time. These materials must have been consumed by use, as copies are rare.109 One Cleynigkeit in the British Museum deserves attention. It features Justice, Minerva, and flying putti bringing a laurel wreath to Hercules. The globe, compasses, book, and what may be a telescope at Hercules’ feet suggest that he and Cleyn have been studying astronomy.110 The same props recur in the portrait of Bankes and Williams.
Cleyn’s major work around 1650 was illustrating all the fables of Aesop. The commission came from John Ogilby. Although Cleyn followed the tradition of continental Aesops by adapting the classic realistic depictions of Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, he added some telling details to go with Ogilby’s clever and innovative adaptations of the stories to contemporary events.111 The very first of Cleyn’s eighty-one illustrations captures Aesop’s character as tradition has it: dull, physically deformed, and yet, when exposing human foibles through vignettes about animals, brilliant.112 Davenant had a place for it in his version of Solomon’s House, among the books on moral philosophy.
Esop with these stands high, and they below
His pleasant wisdome mocks their gravitie
Who Vertue like a tedious Matron show
He dresses Nature to invite the Eie.113
Cleyn’s dressing of the opening fable, “The Jewel and the Cock,” sneaks a topical reference from Ogilby’s text into Gheeraerts design. The story is familiar: the cock pecks about on his dung heap and finds to his great disappointment an inedible precious stone: what has great value for us means nothing to a bird.
Ogilby squeezes more from this story than its trite moral by identifying the jewel with learning and the fowl with people who ignorantly prefer the evident attraction of a full belly to the usual side effect of study, “a head stuft with melancholic vapours.” And so Ogilby’s moral:
Voluptuous Men Philosophie despise
Down with all Learning the Arm’d Soldier cryes
On Glaeb, and Cattell, greedy Farmers look
And Merchants only prize their Counting Book.
Cleyn emphasized the moral by placing a schoolhouse behind the cock and jewel. We see pupils at desks and books on shelves, as in Cleyn’s paintings in Kronborg.114 Ogilby understood the power of the image. As he put it in his limp verse:
Examples are best Precepts; And a Tale
Adorn’d with Sculpture better may prevaile
To make Men lesser Beasts, than all the store
Of tedious volumes, vext the world before.115
Among the lesser beasts that act like men are frogs. A pond-full of them, enjoying untrammeled liberty, decided they needed a god and applied to Jupiter for one. He gave them a log. King Log made a big splash at his entry, but then disappointed his subjects by behaving woodenly. The frogs requested a replacement. Jupiter gave them energetic King Stork, whose favorite activity was eating them. They now begged for the return of old King Log, but Jupiter would not indulge them further. Ogilby did not have far to seek for a lesson:
No government can th’unsetled Vulgar please
Whom change delight’s, think quiet a disease
Now Anarchie and Armies they maintain
And wearied, are for King and Lords again.116
Cleyn’s accompanying figure (Figure 49) shows a vicious stork (parliament) feeding off ignorant frogs (the mob) who try to find safety on old King Log (the
past) while an unsympathetic Jupiter (innovation) looks on.
Figure 49 Francis Cleyn, Of the Frogs Desiring a King, in Ogilby, Aesop (1651), fable XII.
8
The Setting
The Parties
Oriel College’s Buttery Books, which record charges for food and drink, show that young John Bankes arrived in June 1643, a month before his matriculation on 10 July 1643, and continued in residence through 1644, including the summer. Entries for him cease in the fall term of 1644–5, covering, in all, six terms and a week. As a fellow of Oriel, Maurice Williams ran up buttery bills throughout the same period and left the college five weeks after John did, although he remained on its books into 1646. Perhaps John withdrew late in 1644 to be with his father, who by then was seriously ill. Williams may also have attended Sir John, who died on 28 December 1644.1 Our picture probably dates from the period when Bankes and Williams resided together at Oriel.
John Bankes’s Oxford offered much to inquisitive minds unaffected by stench and overcrowding. The town and university had to accommodate the royal court, cavaliers, hangers-on, a large garrison, and the means of making war. Magdalen College hosted workshops and an artillery park, Christ Church a cannon foundry, New College a powder magazine, and the Schools storehouses: uniforms in Music and Astronomy, grain in Logic, and (someone still had a sense of humor) Corn and Cheese in Law.2 Charles and his immediate entourage occupied Christ Church; Henrietta Maria and hers, the Warden’s accommodation at Merton; the queen thus replacing Nathaniel Brent, who, having served Laud slavishly, had judged it expedient to throw in his lot with parliament. At Oriel, located between the colleges occupied by the royal couple, the Executive Committee of the Privy Council, to which Sir John Bankes belonged, held its meetings. The king and queen held theirs too, through a special passage erected through the gardens of the intervening colleges. In June 1643, Charles invited, and in December ordered, parliament to assemble in Oxford. The loyalists who obeyed amounted to 83 lords and 175 commoners.3
In all, some 3,000 “strangers” served and protected the court, ran the military enterprises, established a mint to coin silver plate extracted from the colleges, and catered, victualed, and fortified the town, an increase in population of over 30 percent. Good accommodation became scarce, overcrowding inescapable; soldiers were quartered on citizens, ladies on colleges, aristocrats on grocers. Sir Richard and Lady Fanshaw can stand for them all. The family fled from its fine apartments to “a baker’s house on an obscure street…a very bad bed in a garret…one dish of meat, and that not the best ordered.” The Fanshaws had no money or spare clothes. They spent their time looking out of their window at “the sad spectacle of war, sometimes plague, sometimes sickness of other kinds.” Their daughter did better. Mistress Fanshaw obtained lodgings at Trinity College. Perhaps, like her friend who lived at Balliol, she employed a lutenist to alert admiring collegians to her comings and goings.4
The city’s filthy streets and rivers brimming with animal carcasses combined with close living to invite the scourges witnessed by Lady Fanshaw. In summer of 1643, an epidemic of typhus imported by soldiers hit Oxford. Rats multiplied in the grain stores, and citizens died by the score. The City ordered the bailiffs to remove the pigs from the streets. Physicians recommended eating garlic, which might have helped by discouraging intimacy. Was the outbreak the plague? No, no, said the royal doctor Edward Greaves, that is enemy propaganda: we are dealing with a malignant fever. Has God sent it directly to punish our sins? No, God works through secondary causes, which we can combat. Are the stars the cause? No. Look rather to dirty streets, bad beer, filthy dishware, and the unwholesome army. Besides cleanliness, good air, mild purges, spare diets, and soporifics, cordials, and other ancient remedies can alleviate symptoms. The greatest danger is to fall into melancholy. Therefore, Greaves advised: “Be Cheerful and Pleasant, as far as the disease will give leave, avoid all sad thoughts, and sudden passions of the mind, especially Anger, which addes fire to the [fever’s] Heat, inflames the Blood, and Spirits, and at length, sets the whole Fabrick in Combustion.”5
And yet, for those with good health, insensitive noses, and strong stomachs, Oxford during the first years of the Civil War, when the Royalists had reason to think they might prevail, was an exciting place, full of soldiers, gallants, men of action, ladies, spies, schemers, crooks, and prostitutes. Students had a broad real-life education under Oxford’s dreamy spires. They came in contact with cavaliers occupying rooms in their colleges and with soldiers with whom they worked on fortifications, thereby becoming, according to an eyewitness, “much debauched.”6
Oriel fared better than most of the colleges. In 1643, only nineteen strangers appear on its books, including a lady. The king’s demand in January that all colleges send their silver plate to the new mint weighed less heavily on Oriel, which surrendered £82, than on All Souls (£253) and Magdalen (£296). Further to the war effort, Oriel probably accommodated the editorial office of Mercurius aulicus, a weekly news and propaganda sheet, begun in January by Peter Heylyn, the author of Mikrokosmos and Laud’s collaborator in hounding Prynne.7 The hound and hare changed places with Laud’s fall and Prynne’s rise; found “delinquent by Parliament,” Heylyn retired to Oxford, where, in the capacity of a royal chaplain, he practiced as a spin doctor.8 He soon hived off his Mercurius to another of Laud’s protégés, John Birkenhead, and occupied himself rewriting history. He concluded that the archbishop’s “martyrdom” (which had yet to take place) was the forerunner and herald of all subsequent troubles. Troubles aplenty there were already, owing, according to the yet-to-be-martyred Laud, to Charles’s sacrifice of Strafford. “[Knowing] not how to be, or to be made, great,” the king acquiesced in the murder of his minister and released the forces that would destroy him.9
One who tried to make Charles great was Henrietta Maria. While abroad pawning jewels to purchase the stuff of war, she urged her husband to concede nothing to his enemies. Her return to England in February 1643 showed the iron of her constitution. She landed her supplies at a village in Yorkshire closely pursued by five ships commanded by rebels. They parked offshore and amused themselves at night by shelling her lodgings. She scrambled out of bed. The fusillade continued. “I was on foot some distance from the village and got shelter in a ditch. But before I could reach it the balls sang merrily over our heads and a sergeant was killed twenty paces from me.”10 The tough queen proceeded to York, where she stopped for the winter. In the spring, as she prepared to travel to Oxford with her 150 carriages of arms and ammunition, parliament impeached her for high treason. Her arrival in Charles’s new capital in July was perhaps the high point of the war for the Royalists. The king sallied out to meet her with a cavalcade of lords, officers, and servants. The royal reunion moved the sensitive soul of Mercurius aulicus: “Cursed will they be (and so find themselves by this time) who forced so tedious a separation of these sacred bodies, whose soules are so entirely linkt in divine affection.”11
The University Orator, William Strode, who in happier days had entertained her with The Floating Island, welcomed her back to Oxford with prose more purple than Mercurius’s.
Most Gratious and Glorious Queene…[your] Absence, so barbarously forc’d with danger, so bitterly perused with Calumnies, so patiently born, in leaving that Company out of pure love which you most Lov’d, in sequestering your selfe from the Armes of Your Royall Husband to furnish His Hands with Strength, to send him the sinewes of Mars for the Venus-like Brests which you carried hence, such an absence, after perills by Sea and Land, now turn’d to a powerfull Returne, calls us out of ourselves; our Spirits beyond our Eyes, our Hearts before our Tongues, to greet your most desired Presence; which, in beholding Your Picture, we longed for, and in beholding Your Person, we are ready to dye for …12
Strode’s extravagance ends a book of welcome-home poems to which young Bankes and his tutor contributed Latin verses. Bankes: “O Queen, we celebrate the indomitable ardor of your love!” We know that yo
u once fearlessly exposed yourself to Charles, when he was confined to bed suffering from a disease that turned him an “unbecoming shade of scarlet.” You have performed heroically again, heedless of personal safety, in running the risks, dangers, perils, of wind and wave, land and sea, and armed enemies. “Fearing nothing, Maria triumphs.” Williams: “six glasses [of wine] to dry Charles, two-thirds to each of the children [Carolidi], nine to Henrietta!” With wine there must be verses. “We take pleasure in amiable [facili] Charles, while we sing of Maria.” From these hints, we guess that Bankes and Williams agreed with those who regarded the queen as determined and uncompromising, and the king as indecisive and uxorious.13 Their poems suggest the familiarity of neighbors, who could refer to the complexion of the king and order bumpers for the queen, rather than the distance of subject from sovereign. She knew both of them, Bankes as the son and heir of her husband’s top lawyer, Williams as one of her own physicians.
The campaigning season of 1643 left military matters much as they were at the end of 1642. During the summer of 1644, however, the Royalist position declined along with the number of students at the university. Rebel forces were closing in. Charles fled in June across the Cotswolds to Worcester. Henrietta Maria had withdrawn in April to Exeter, ill and pregnant, attended by Mayerne and Lister. According to the spin doctors at Mercurius aulicus, “Her Majestie made choice to enjoy the present peace and quiet of [the West], rather than Oxford, where she was in the middest of H.M.’s Armies, which afforded security but too much noyse and businesse.” She gave birth to a daughter in mid-June and left for France on 13 July, not to return before her son had succeeded his martyred father.14
The Ghost of Galileo Page 30