Many learned Royalists took up or continued residence in Oxford while Charles held court there. Physicians abounded. There were Dr Thomas Clayton, the Regius Professor of Medicine, an enthusiastic Royalist who trained companies of scholars for military service; Mayerne, attendant on Henrietta Maria, pregnant again after the joyful reunion of the royal couple in the summer of 1643; Williams, attendant on young John Bankes; and the score or more of fresh MDs created in 1642–3 by royal order, some of them deserving, like Walter Charleton, but others with few qualification beyond being gentlemen. This batch process exceeded the normal output of Oxford MDs by a factor of ten, creating a light Royalist counterweight to the London College of Physicians, which had a preference for parliament.48 Sir John Bankes knew some of the doctors of Oxford as he had had to clear up legal questions about Clayton’s royal professorship.49
Several of Oxford’s many doctors collaborated with Harvey, who moved to Merton as Warden in 1645. He owed this preferment to Greaves, who had consulted him on the pressing problem of breathing in pyramids, and, as Merton’s Sub-Warden, had petitioned Charles to deprive the absentee rebel Brent of the wardenship. The wheel of fortune continued to spin, however, and Brent, returning in 1648 as President of the parliamentary committee appointed to review the university, turned out the brothers Greaves.50 The charges against John Greaves were alienating college property for the king’s use, being overly familiar with the queen’s confessors, and causing the ejection of Brent. Anticipating that he would be removed, Greaves resigned in favor of Seth Ward, a former student of Oughtred, an informed and reliable Copernican.51 Ward became a close colleague of Wilkins, Galileo’s first English popularizer, who, having married Cromwell’s sister, returned to Oxford in 1648 as Warden of Wadham. According to Ward, writing in 1654 but referring to a pre-existing condition, no one at Oxford able to understand astronomy was Ptolemaic, most being Copernicans “of the elliptical way.”52
Several doctors of divinity and their friends in and around Oxford would have been able to recognize the Galilean reference in Cleyn’s painting. They included King Charles’s chaplain and Prince Charles’s tutor, Bishop Brian Duppa, formerly Dean of Christ Church and Vice Chancellor under Laud, and Duppa’s friend Justinian Isham, a future fellow of the Royal Society. Isham joined Charles in Oxford just after Edgehill and befriended young John Bankes, perhaps through Williams, whose interests in Baconian philosophy he shared. Duppa’s disciple and Bankes’s protégé Jasper Mayne often visited Oxford from his benefice in nearby Cassington.53 Nor can we forget the disputatious Peter Heylyn, who returned to his Mikrokosmos after whitewashing Laud. Aristotle might have written the account of the world system in the early editions of Mikrokosmos. In the new version, retitled Cosmographie, Heylyn silently acknowledged modern astronomy by saying nothing about the earth’s place in the universe. “For though Truth be the best Mistress that a man can serve…yet it is well observed withall, that if a man follow her too close at the heels, she may chance to kick out his teeth.”54
Men of Great Tew
Among those who migrated to Oxford with the king was Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, of the near-by village of Great Tew. During the 1630s he had kept open house in the village for a circle of philosophers, divines, and poets, and had opposed key Crown policies. He had refused to pay ship money, which he blamed on evil councilors, and led the Long Parliament’s attack on the judges by whom “a most excellent Prince hath been most infinitely abused…telling him he might do what he pleased.” And he was one of the spears who headed the prosecution of Strafford in the Lords. Nonetheless Charles made him a Secretary of State. That was in January 1642. Falkland did not want the job but yielded to pressure from his intimate friend Edward Hyde, the future Lord Clarendon, who was acting as Charles’s mole in parliament. Falkland and Hyde were with the king at York in June. There they made common cause with Bankes to nudge the king toward compromise; but, although they had greater access than the Chief Justice, they had no better luck. Their moderate views, in religion as well as in politics, were not opportunistic: they had a reasoned position characteristic of the men of Great Tew.
Falkland had developed his tolerance, improbably, in Ireland, where his father had governed, unsuccessfully, as Lord Deputy in the 1620s. Cary (as he then was) graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, fluent in Latin and French and aware that Catholics and Protestants could live together if they tried. He experienced standard prejudice in his immediate family: his maternal grandfather disinherited his mother for becoming a Catholic (and for other reasons too), and his unsuccessful father almost disinherited him for marrying a penniless girl. After death removed the grandfather and old Lord Falkland, the well-to-do new Lord Falkland and his loving and learned and no longer penniless wife began to draw out their intellectual circle. But religion continued to split the family. Falkland had charge of two of his younger brothers, to bring up as Protestants. His incorrigible mother kidnapped them and sent them to France to be raised as Catholics. They became Benedictines, as did four of their sisters.55
“All men of eminent parts and faculties in Oxford” belonged to, or sympathized with, the teachings of Tew; or so Hyde in retrospect defined the reasonable people at the university. Falkland’s circle included the enlightened from many walks of life, some of whom we know: Galileo’s translator Robert Payne, Charles’s intimate Endymion Porter, and Cleyn’s patron George Sandys.56 Sandys’s “graver Muse [had] from her long Dreames awaken[ed]”—that is, by the late 1630s he had switched from translating the Metamorphoses of Ovid to paraphrasing the Psalms of David. (“The Lord my Shepheard, me his Sheep ǀ Will from consuming Famine keep.”) As psalmist, David inspires; as king, exemplifies. Sandys took David to be exemplary, because he submitted to the law; and it troubled him, as it did most others at Tew, to see Charles increasingly deviate from this standard.57
Tew’s political message appears more plainly in the lengthy poem Falkland contributed to Sandys’s Paraphrase. It begins praising the author’s earlier writings for “Teaching the frailty of Human things ǀ How soone great Kingdoms fall, much sooner Kings,” and ends criticizing those who would criticize Sandys for mixing eloquence and things divine. “[A]s the Church with Ornaments is Fraught ǀ Why may not That be too, which There is Taught?” But this line too was decoration: Falkland’s main point was tolerance, not ornament. Like Saint Paul, “Who Iudais’d with Iewes, was All to All,” the church must be open to different approaches to the same fundamental beliefs.58 Falkland made all this clearer and longer a year later in his Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome (1637), which argues that, as no religion possesses the full truth, it is absurd and dangerous to quarrel over adiaphora.
Tew’s tolerance followed in the tradition that George Sandys’s elder brother Edwin had set out in the evenhanded survey of the state of Europe around 1600 with which this story began. The leading men of Tew thought that the Anglican Church was the most reasonable of the Christian communions around which partnership with non-Roman Catholics of France and Italy might be arranged. They disliked clericalism, distrusted Laud, and disdained Presbyterian forms. Hoping to reconcile political as well as religious factions, they remained Royalists though disheartened by the Personal Rule.59 As we know, Hyde and Falkland entered Charles’s service when the Long Parliament was intransigently expropriating his prerogative. They thus were bound in government with at least one Oxford man of “eminent parts and faculties” who shared their worldview: Sir John Bankes.
Great Tew occasionally indulged in fun and science. For fun it had its member John Earle’s bestseller Microcosmographie (1628+) with its weak caricatures of lawyers, doctors, divines, scholars, and antiquaries. Thus, of the young gentleman at the university, “[o]f all things hee endureth not to be mistaken for a Scholler.” Having succeeded in countering this mistake, the young man proceeds to the Inns of Court, “where he studies to forget, what he learned before.”60 Great Tew’s science was more sophisticated. It linked to Oxford through Payne at C
hrist Church and Gilbert Sheldon, the Warden of All Souls, who had shocked the university as a bachelor of divinity by denying that the pope was anti-Christ. A mind so large also had room for mathematics. So did Hyde’s. His library preserved the manuscripts of Harriot given him by his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Aylesbury, one-time acolyte of the Wizard Earl of Northumberland, and, at the time of our painting, Master of the Mint converting the silver plate of Oxford into coin of the tottering realm. Perhaps more pertinently, Hyde urged “observation and experience,” as exemplified by Bacon, as the way to advance natural knowledge.61 It is said that the men of Tew looked to the laws of mechanics for guidance in their analyses of politics and religion. And, if they also looked into the copy of Galileo’s Dialogue owned by George Morley, a member of their circle and, like his good friend Payne a canon of Christ Church, they would have seen its famous frontispiece in the original version by della Bella.62
Morley’s Galileo is now in Winchester cathedral, whose bishop he became during the Restoration. He succeeded Duppa, translated from Salisbury in 1660, a move that made him Prelate of the Knights of the Garter and the donor of another notable artifact. He gave the Knights’ mother church, St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, “the picture of Christ and the Twelve at Supper” recorded as a modern piece in the chapel’s inventory of 1672; a painting of the same subject now hangs in the Parish Church of St John the Baptist in Windsor. The parish advertises it as a national treasure, which it may be, and as a Cleyn, which may be doubted. The inventory also mentions a hanging given by Duppa with “the pictures of Christ and His disciples at Supper;” thus the national treasure may be a copy or model of a Mortlake tapestry, whence the ascription to Cleyn may have arisen.63 A welcome advertisement in any case!
To continue with the fates of Tew’s veterans under Charles II: Earle became Bishop of Salisbury; Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury; and Hyde, Lord Clarendon and Lord Chancellor. Falkland did not reach the Restoration. “Melancholy” brought on by the intolerance, rigidity, violence, and inhumanity of the Civil War, or, as Aubrey has it, by the death of his mistress, drove him to court death. During a battle in 1643 he sought a spot where enemy bullets filled the air and galloped straight toward it.64
Starry Messengers
The stars were never far from the battlefield during the first years of the Civil War. Our astrological docent, George Wharton, set up his shop in Oxford after fighting for the king at Edgehill. His learning as a chronologist recommended him to the university’s historians and mathematicians, while his mathematics and predictions made him welcome to the military. In Oxford he worked in the ordnance office under Sir John Heydon, a second-generation astrologer, son of the Elizabethan adept and defender of astrology, Sir Christopher Heydon. Elias Ashmole, another of Sir John’s amateur artillerymen, took up astrology under his influence and reissued an epitome of old Sir Christopher’s unanswerable defense of it previously blocked by “the error or rather malice of the clergy.” John Aubrey, who matriculated in May 1642, likewise fell in with Sir John and became an addict. The examples of Wharton and Heydon were reassuring. Apparently honest practitioners existed among the “divers Illiterate Professors (and Women are of the Number) who even make Astrologie the bawd and Pander to all manner of Iniquity, prostituting chaste Urania to be abus’d by every adulterate Interest.”65
Wharton’s prognostications were more uplifting than correct. For example, he advertised on the shaky basis of the positions of the moon and Mars when Charles marched his army south in May 1645 that the rebellious capital would soon fall. “Believe it (London) thy Miseries approach, they are…not to be diverted unless thou seasonably crave Pardon of God for being Nurse to this present Rebellion, and speedily submit to the Princes Mercy.” The cor Leonis was rising, the sun auspiciously surrounded by Jupiter and Venus and clear of menacing aspects from Saturn and Mars. So what? “These are undeniable Testimonies of the Honour and Safety of the Famous University and City of Oxford.”66 Alas, Wharton had overlooked the approaching conjunction of Saturn and Mars on 12 June 1646, from which some “barking mongrel” (astrologers addressed one another as if they were mathematicians or theologians) had predicted, correctly, that Oxford would soon surrender. Wharton: the barking mongrel had not taken into account the recurrence of that dire conjunction on 28 June 1648, “[which] will be assuredly fatal to London.”67
London’s astrologers knew better. A typical tract warned of “the great eclipse of the sun, or Charles his waine, over-clouded by the evill influences of the Moon [‘the destructive perswasions of his Queen’], malignancie of ill-aspected planets [his ‘Cabinett Counsell’], and the constellation of retrograde and irregular stars ['the Popish faction’].”68 But, although the prognostication was correct, it lacked the persuasive argot of an accomplished practitioner like William Lilly, the first authority in the realm, widely read, generally respected, and too often right. He was self-taught and initially restricted his practice to the usual questions about marriage, health, travel, and business. His first major work, England’s Prophetical Merline (1644), begins with an analysis of the opposition of Jupiter and Saturn on 15 February 1643, which he found, retrospectively, to have announced the troubles of the kingdom. The trouble was evident much earlier to informed people. Ptolemy knew that the effects of major comets could extend for a generation and more; as late as 1644 the comet of 1618, then the last seen in Europe, still afflicted England and most of the Continent. Considering also the badly aspected solar eclipse of 1639 and the bizarre grand conjunction of 1642–3, which “preposterously and irregularly” occurred in the wrong Triplicity, Lilly could only conclude that things would go badly for Charles.69
Several old prophecies also announced the doom of the Stuarts. Here is a clear one, which Lilly learned from a priest in the last years of King James: “Mars, Puer, Alecto, Virgo, Volpes, Leo, Nulus,” which, interpreted, signified Henry VIII (warrior), Edward VI (boy), Mary (fury), Elizabeth (virgin), James (fox), Charles (lion, for ruling without parliament), No One. A similar prophecy, recorded in 1588, ran “When Hempe is sponne, England’s done,” which ditty, unveiled, signifies that after Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip, and Elizabeth, a Scottish king would undo England.70 Right again. But, however persuasive such prophecies, they were only footnotes to messages from the stars.
Lilly deduced his judgments from “pa[s]t and present configurations of the heavenly bodyes, expectant effects of Comets and blazing Starres, influence and operation of greater and lesser Conjunctions of Superior Planets, famous Eclipses both Solar and Lunar, Annual congresses, [and] the remaining effects of prodigious Meteors.” To foretell the fate of rulers, however, he had to inquire into “the removal of the Aphelion of the Superior bodies out of one [trigon] signe into another, by which alone, high and deepe Knowledge is derived to the Sonnes of Art concerning the fate and period of Monarchies and Kingdomes.”71 As for that particular monarchy that reigned in the British Isles, a deeper sign than a passing conjunction declared its doom. As the great astrologer Girolamo Cardano had observed, England fell under the dominion of Mars. It was “a Rebellious and Unluckie Nation,” destined for civil strife.72 Knowing all this, Lilly forecast a parliamentary victory for the very day on which the royal army suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Naseby.73 And this in the teeth of Wharton’s prophecy of victory against London!
Professional disagreement and mutual vituperation did not prevent stargazers from gathering in an informal guild. They met annually in a Society of Astrologers for conviviality and mutual encouragement. At its conclave of 1649, it listened to a minister of the Church of England, Robert Gell, confirm that God governs the world through angels and stars. As interpreters of starry messages, astrologers ranked almost with angels; “almost” because sometimes astrologers miss or misinterpret the news. Gell gave a bizarre example. At the time of the nova of 1572, a hill in Herefordshire gamboled over 400 yards before coming to rest. (There was such a landslip at Marcley Hill in February 1571.) Now, when
Israel crossed the Red Sea, “[t]he mountains skipped like rams, the hills like young sheep;” the astrologers ought to have coupled the bounding hill with the nova and announced a new age in religion.74 Gell’s clerical colleagues did not think much of his hermeneutics, denounced him for defending conjurors and advocating tolerance, but (such is the power of the stars) failed to turn him out of his rich London parish.75
Lilly and Wharton lived to save one another from peril. With impeccable professional courtesy, Lilly helped extract Wharton from imprisonment by parliament in 1650, which service Wharton, who received knighthood from Charles II, reciprocated in 1660–1. Lilly further demonstrated his professionalism by advising the first Charles confidentially while demonstrating his doom publicly. Lilly recommended days on which Charles should attempt his escapes from Hampton Court in 1647 and the Isle of Wight in 1648. Had Charles heeded Lilly the second time, he might have succeeded.76 Instead he followed his own star, which portended for him personally what, according to King James, Tycho’s nova signified for us all. “By this starre great Tycho did contend ǀ To show that the World was coming to an end.”77
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