The peculiar situation in Oxford bred some tolerance. The pamphlets of Sir John Spelman (son of the antiquary Henry Spelman), who would have been Secretary of State had camp fever not carried him off in 1643, hinted how tolerance might fit the fuzzy concept of mixed monarchy. A frontispiece designed by Sir John’s father, drawn by Marshall, and used for Thomas Fuller’s The Holy State (1642), represents the guiding idea. As in Strafford’s concept of government, the king is the keystone of an arch resting on the twin pillars of church (whose plinth is Holy Scripture) and state (whose plinth is Common Law). Inclining on the arch supported by the sacred writings, naked Truth tans under an emblem of the sun; her clothed opposite number, Justice, carries a sword and scales.15
Spelman explained that laws bind kings, but in a peculiar way, “in Honour, in Conscience between God and them.” The fuzzy state can survive and prosper only if the people, when suffering under ill-intentioned leaders, do not force confrontation. King Charles’s cause did not pit the royal prerogative against the subject’s liberty, “but libertie [against] Ochlocracie [mob rule], the established protestant Religion [against] scisme and heresie.” Most judges, divines, and lawyers, “the visible major part of those Seminaries of Learning the Universities, and the Inns of Court,” and educated people in general favor the king and the mixed constitution of the state.16 He was their sovereign, and yet he was not. He could make no laws without parliament. Although head of the true Protestant church, he could not refuse his protection to his loyal Catholic subjects. The great question was “whether learning, Law, the flower of the Nobility, the best and choyce of the commonality” could manage to muddle through.17 Charles might have led such a coalition had he practiced the advice he offered his successor: allow religious dissent in matters only probable; keep the middle way, listen to many, yield in small things; enforce civil justice and the laws of the kingdom; show no “aversion or dislike of parliaments;” and beware of covert innovators who mask their “thirst after novelties…with the name of reformations.” And, while granting what should be granted to an obedient and grateful people, preserve what should be preserved of the majesty and prerogative of a king.18 Not an easy program!
Within the Holy State illustrated by Spelman’s frontispiece Fuller described the sorts of citizens needed to maintain a moderate, balanced, forbearing Christian polity. Our protagonists are among them. The healthy state needs “the general artist,” that is, young John Bankes, who “moderately studieth [mathematics] to his great contentment,” but does not allow it to “jostle out other arts.” He entertains but does not believe in judicial astrology. He must know history, without which “a mans soul is purblind,” but cannot unless he first master chronology, without which “history is at best a heap of tales.” And he must be acquainted with the universe, through a smattering of cosmography. If the general artist were also a true gentleman, as was young Bankes, he would be as studious at the university “as if he intended Learning for his profession.”19 He would not copy the “pretender to learning,” who looks over books in Greek only when people are looking over his shoulder; nor the true scholar, awkward, unsophisticated, and melancholic, “his minde [being] somewhat too much taken up with his mind.”20
Another necessary citizen, the good judge, exemplified by Sir John Bankes, is patient, attentive, upright, merciful, and above bribery. Where justified, he decides fairly in suits against the sovereign. Kings may not at first like this independence, but they will come to “see with the eyes of their Judges, and at last will break those false spectacles which (in point of Law) shall be found to have deceived them.” Had Charles only listened to Bankes! But why should he? “He is a mortall God…He holds his Crown immediately from the God of Heaven.” The good king should be pious, loving, generous, just, and merciful, and also humble, like Charles, who disliked being praised. “His Royall virtues are too great to be told, are too great to be conceal’d.” Fuller’s description of the good physician fit Williams better than his sketch of the ideal sovereign did Charles. A good physician does not diagnose on the basis of one vial of urine, or experiment on his patients with new or exotic drugs, or hide from them their approaching deaths.21
Charles did not need Fuller’s exhortation to accept the obligation to protect all his loyal subjects, including Catholics. He had to shield them, among other reasons because he could not wage war without them. They had succored him when he was destitute at York and continued to supply him at Oxford. About a third of the gentry families in the county were Catholic. Their distant chief, Pope Urban, sympathized with their king’s cause, although, as he wrote with undiplomatic realism, all the treasure in Castel Sant’Angelo would not recover the crown Charles had lost by his concessions in Scotland. Still, if Charles indicated his intention to rejoin the old religion …22 Charles refused this stale impossible condition. But, while publicly declaring his faith in and support of “the true reformed Protestant Religion, as it stood in its beauty in the happy daies of Queen Elizabeth,” he allowed Catholics to attend mass openly in Oxford. There may have been many of them, for Laud had warned that Jesuits were at work in the university helped by the holy water at the Blue Boar, the Mitre Inn (reputed to be a recusant hangout), and other pubs in town owned by Catholics.23 This was very different from the situation Henrietta Maria had experienced during her previous stay in London.
Imagine how I feel to see power wrested from the King, Catholics persecuted, priests hanged, our servants fleeing for their lives for having tried to serve the King…It seems that God wants to afflict both of us…but my afflictions are greater, for the suffering of religion is above everything.24
The relatively tolerant Oxford of 1643 harbored representatives of many of the sects and religions that Andrew Ross lovingly disparaged in a catalogue he published in 1642. Heading the list, “the worst of all Creatures,” was the Atheist, followed immediately by the Papist, who “acknowledges no High Power but the Pope.” The half-Papist Arminian came next (leaving aside Jews), lusting after a hierarchical clergy, “Altars, Cushions, Wax-Candles…with many other superfluous Ceremonies.” Ross did not overlook Libertines, “so overcome with the flesh they cannot pray;” Communists, who enjoy wives and other things in common; Anabaptists, Waiverers, and Time-Servers, with no fixed church; Canonists, who want, and Lutherans, who do not want, bishops; Separatists, who rightly decry bishops but wrongly admit lay elders; Brownists or Quakers; and Puritans, “the most commendable,” who long to follow the Scottish kirk.25
Ross left for last Rattle-Heads and Round-Heads, equally misguided, who were already at loggerheads. The Rattlers are “haire-brain’d, spittle-witted coxcombes with no time for law or religion”—that is, Cavaliers, “[who] regard nothing but to make mischief, build castles in the Ayre, hatch Stratagems, invent Projects.” The Rounders, though desiring orderly performance of church services, “yet they are the chief Ring-Leaders to all tumultuous disorders, they call the Common Prayer Porridge, and they will allow no doctrine for good, nor any Minister a quiet audience, without he preach absolute damnation.” The catalogue ends with its pious compiler “Praying to God the Author of true peace ǀ That truth may flourish and dissension cease.”26
For six months or so after Bankes had joined his king at York, he worked for truth and against dissension. He remained persona grata to parliament, which asked that he be kept in his place as Chief Justice. After the failure of the last efforts toward peace, however, he subscribed liberally to Charles’s cause and, in the spring of 1643, addressing a Grand Jury in Salisbury, accused Essex and other parliamentary commanders of high treason. Parliament responded by ordering his impeachment and the forfeiture of his property. A parliamentary force besieged his castle. Lady Bankes commanded the defenses of the upper ward with a force consisting of her daughters, maidservants, and five soldiers. The siege lasted six weeks before the Roundheads withdrew with more than 100 casualties. Sir John was then able to rejoin his heroic mate and create their fourteenth child, who entered upon the miser
ies of this world in June 1644. The following July parliament repeated its order depriving the Bankeses of their property and charged Sir John with high treason for giving judgment the previous December against its generals. It was a devastating blow to so faithful a public servant, to a man of whom contemporaries said, as Tacitus did of Rome’s great general and architect Agrippa: “There was this very rare about him, his affability did not lessen his authority, nor his severity diminish his love.” He had done his best. But he failed, as did all other wise and well-meaning councilors, to bring the king to agree to a compromise long enough to effect it.27
The distress Bankes felt at his treatment by parliament and his inability to prevent or blunt the oncoming disaster might well have hastened his death. He was buried in Christ Church, where he could continue to witness Charles’s ineptitude. His epitaph reads, after a recital of his various offices, “Peritam integritatem fidem ǀ Egregie praestetit,” “he stood far above others in knowledge, integrity, and honesty.” For once an honest monument! After all his work and service, he died land poor. Besides Corfe Castle, he had property in London and elsewhere, but a recorded income at death of only £1,263.28 He left various benefactions, a portrait of himself in the robes of Chief Justice (see Figure 16), and an admonition to his son John. “My eldest sonne must be contented to follow his studyes until he attaine the age of 24 yeares and to spend his time at the universitie, Innes of court, or travail, and when he enters upon his estate he is to be helpful to his brothers and sisters.”29 John would choose travel.
He could not return home. Toward the end of 1645, regiments of Cromwell’s New Model Army tried their luck at Corfe. They put their artillery in the village church, stored their powder in organ pipes, made missiles from the lead roof, and fashioned shirts from surplices. Despite these pious preparations, Lady Mary’s troop held out again. On 7 February 1646, a passing detachment of Royalists relieved the siege. Nine days later, betrayed by one of the officers left there, an inglorious Colonel Pitman, the castle fell. Perhaps he would not have acted so if Lady Bankes had been there. She had left her castle, perhaps soon after Sir John’s death, in order to improve her position in compounding for her estates, which she did with the help of her co-trustee of young John’s inheritance, the Mr Green to whom Sir John had described his increasingly difficult relations with the king. Since Lady Mary was in or around London with her unmarried daughters from July 1645 until March 1646, she was spared the sight of her neighbors stealing her furniture and Corfe’s conquerors demolishing her home.30 Neither she nor her sons could recover its valuable paintings or tapestries, although its library, which included some of Noy’s books, survived for a time. By Act of Parliament, it went intact to Sir John Maynard, an eminent lawyer and parliamentarian who served on the committees that condemned Strafford and Laud. Maynard became a Royalist champion in good time and had the opportunity to restore the books to Bankes’s heirs, but few have made their way to the library at Kingston Lacy.31
The Audience
John Greaves
Astronomy in Oxford had a tinge of the exotic about it. The astronomer Bainbridge taught himself Arabic to be able to read his Muslim predecessors directly, lest he be “hoodwinked” by Arabists who knew no astronomy. He found it hard going, he told Ussher, “but the great hopes I have in that happy Arabia to find most precious Stones…do overcome all difficulties.”32 As part of his program to encourage the study of mathematics and Eastern languages at Oxford, Laud commissioned a former fellow of Merton, John Greaves, who would succeed Bainbridge as Savilian professor, to hunt up Arabic manuscripts for him in the Middle East. Greaves intended also to measure the latitudes of eastern cities. For this enterprise he had the support of another powerful bishop, Laud’s protégé William Juxon, risen to Bishop of London and Lord Treasurer of England. Juxon knew that such work as Greaves proposed was much desired “by the best astronomers, especially Ticho Brahe and Kepler…as tending to the advancement of that science.”33
In 1631, after graduation from Balliol (1621) and further improvement under the Savilian professors, Greaves became professor of mathematics at Gresham College, London, with the support of Bainbridge, Brent, and Abbot. He soon gained leave to study in Padua. He went on to Rome, where he ran into Harvey at the English College, and had serious talk with the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (on magnetism), Cardinal Bentivoglio (on foreign travel), the Barberinis’ librarian Lucas Holstein (editions of Copernicus), and Galileo’s disciple Gasparo Berti (the sights of Rome). Greaves’s easy travel in Italy suggests an easygoing religion, if not crypto-Catholicism.34 His commission from Laud to live and collect among Muslims further evidences his courage and tolerance.
Greaves’s most splendid acquisition on his trip to Arabia was a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest stolen for him from the library in the Seraglio in Istanbul, “the fairest book [he wrote] that I have ever seen.” What other fair things did he see or hear there? Enough to add some particulars to a book about the seraglio composed by Ottaviano Bon, an intimate of Sarpi’s circle, who served as the Venetian agent in Istanbul between 1604 and 1608. Bon’s book describes the exotic life of the seraglio diplomatically, with an occasional titillating detail. Item: the “young, lusty, and lascivious wenches” of the harem had a taste for cucumbers, which were never served them whole, “to deprive them of the means of playing the wanton.”35 Greaves’s version of Bon and other results of his exotic travel made him an unusually alluring professor of mathematics.
As a travel writer Greaves tended more toward arithmetic than ethnology. He reports of his visit to Santa Croce in Florence that its holy relics include a nail of the true cross (weight, a shilling and sixpence), and two thorns from Christ’s crown (length, 2 inches). About St Peters and the Pantheon in Rome he records little more than their linear dimensions. But he was able to work out the length of an ancient Roman foot, which he reported in a book dedicated to Selden, and the exact size of the pyramids.36 In Venice he admired the glassworks—not for giving beautiful ware to the world, but for providing good lenses for Galileo. No more than two such lenses existed, the professor of mathematics in Siena told Greaves, after neither of them had managed to see more than one of Jupiter’s satellites through the telescope they had to hand.37 The instrument Greaves had brought with him sufficed, however, to measure the latitudes of Constantinople, Rhodes, and Alexandria to a new degree of accuracy. He published these data, with due criticism of his predecessors, via a letter to his friend Ussher.38
For much of his journey to the east, where he spent over a year between stays in Italy, Greaves had the company of the first incumbent of Laud’s chair of Arabic, Edward Pococke. After returning to his professorship at Gresham College in 1640, Greaves visited Pococke and other colleagues in Oxford from time to time, and so was on the spot when Bainbridge died. He “immediately” succeeded to the Savilian chair, “either because of the pure faith [he] reposed in the King or because of greater expertise in universal mathematics.”39 He was entirely at home, almost literally, for, besides the society of his cronies Harvey, Pococke, and Ussher, he had the company of his brothers Edward (the royal physician), who had studied at Padua, and Thomas (a Fellow of Corpus Christi), who had learned Arabic from Pococke and translated a portion of the Qur’an. There is good reason to think that Maurice Williams made part of the company of physicians, mathematicians, and orientalists around Greaves and his brothers, and that young John Bankes was one of Greaves’s students.40 Certainly Sir John Bankes knew the merit of the new professor. He was on the committee that elected Greaves.41
Like many sevententh-century mathematicians, including Galileo, Greaves had an interest in finding longitude at sea. He preferred a method using our moon rather than Galileo’s scheme of exploiting Jupiter’s.42 Unlike Galileo, he had experience in long voyages and allowed himself a sneer at idle “persons of quality” who looked down on navigators and other practical folk. Among such idle persons could be found fools who still opposed the Gregorian reform of the
calendar because a pope had brought it forth. Greaves proposed to eliminate the calendrical discrepancy between Britain and Europe by making ten successive leap years ordinary ones. His advice did not prevail; Britain remained Julian until 1752. It would be wrong to say that Greaves’s applied chronology had no positive outcome, however, for it helped Ussher to discover when Adam lived.43
Doctors of Body and Soul
When William Cavendish was called to court in 1638 to instruct the future Charles II in horsemanship, perhaps with Hobbes’s “Considerations touching the facility or difficulty of the motions of a horse” in his saddlebag, the Cavendish’s mathematician, Robert Payne, arrived in Oxford, perhaps clasping his copy of Galileo’s Systema cosmicum. Payne’s official post was chaplain of Christ’s Church and soon also royal chaplain, thus becoming a colleague at-a-distance of Alexander Ross, the scourge of novelty-mongers.44 Payne found himself thoroughly at home with the sort of science flourishing at Oxford around 1640, which produced, among other curiosities, a disputation at Queen’s in 1638 on ocean tides and lunar life.45
Payne’s fellow chaplain Chilmead had just published his translation of Hues’s Tractatus and was turning his attention to music. In the manner of Williams, he developed his ideas in a critique, or “Examination,” of questions posed by Bacon. His most penetrating analysis answered the question, why the sound of a bell depends on how it is struck, via an extraordinary analogy to the Copernican system. A bell has the ability to vibrate in different ways simultaneously, “which [modes] are to be conceaved to stand with the [fundamental] Primigeniall Motion, as the Copernicans, in their Sphericall doctrine, conceave the Earth, to make 365 circles in the Diurnall Motion, while it is finishing One Annual Course about the Sun.” Chilmead left this magnificent simile in manuscript lest it and other bits of his “Examination” offend the growing band of Baconians in Oxford, “so over-ruling is the name of Ld Verulam.”46 The fans of Bacon, “our English Aristotle,” had raised their standard at the university in 1640, in an amusing frontispiece to the English edition of De augmentis (see Figure 60).47
The Ghost of Galileo Page 31