John Aubrey: My Own Life (8 page)

Lord Bacon has argued
³⁸
that antiquities are ‘remnants of History, which have escaped the shipwreck of time’. I am drawn irresistibly to the past. Old objects and stories delight me.

. . .

I have found
³⁹
as much roguery at Blandford School as there is said to be at Newgate Prison. I know now the wickedness of boys. The ones who are stronger than me mock and abuse me, so I must make a friendship with one of them to protect me from the others.

. . .

A terrible day
⁴⁰
. The master flexed his cane and looked away. I have seen it before: that hard look of anticipation, so deep, it is almost behind his eyes; the quick flick of his tongue across thin lips. It has happened before, happened so often already that I know there is nothing to hope for in catching his gaze or holding it. There is only endurance, and pain. He tells me to bare my buttocks and bend over the chair. I go to another place in my head: the bank of the brook at Easton Pierse, or the tree-lined riverbank at Broad Chalke, where I count the flowers and arrange their names in alphabetical order. I hear the cane hiss through the air, high above his head, before the burning begins, one stroke after another:
hic, haec, hoc; hic, haec, hoc
. The cane cuts as precisely as the Latin declensions. I do not, I will not, cry out. I am not in this scene; I am somewhere else, with the soothing sound of water running by. He beats me then about the head for insolence.
Hic, haec, hoc
: more brutal blows, less precisely aimed, but still the same rhythm. It is the grammar and rhetoric of violence. A language I will not learn, though the whole school seems to speak it. My face is running now with tears, blood and snot.
Hic, haec, hoc
; I wonder will my wits ever recover, or has something been smashed inside me that cannot be mended? My speech falters and my stammer will be worse in the morning. I will fall asleep thinking nothing.

. . .

Saturday. A play-day. Now that we are old enough, we boys are let out of school on Saturday afternoons to walk round Blandford in pairs, or larger groups. I have made friends with Sir Walter Raleigh
⁴¹
’s grand-nephews, Walter and Tom. I take them with me to visit old Mr Harding the glass painter’s workshop and furnaces again. I am fascinated by the ancient craft and by the furnaces. I like the gentleness of laying one thin coat of dilute colour across another, slowly and carefully, until the colour is perfect. Like a limner, or painter of manuscripts, a heavy hand makes the paint go on too thick, then it cracks and the effect is spoiled. This is how I would rather learn: slowly, gently. Inventive children (I know this is true of me) tend not to be tenacious. It is better to let the knowledge sink in slowly, calmly. If a child’s mind is parchment, or glass to be painted on, thick, vehement strokes – the harsh
hic, haec, hoc
of the master’s cane – will tear or smash it to pieces.

. . .

Sir Walter Raleigh is remembered with misgivings among our friends and neighbours in Easton Pierse because he all but ruined Sir Charles Snell by getting him to invest in the
Angel Gabriel
: a ship destined for Guyana. The ship cost Snell the manor of Yatton Keynell, the farm at Easton Pierse, Thornhill and the church lease of Bishop’s Canning. Raleigh’s grand-nephews are clever, proud, quarrelsome boys with tunable (but small) voices, who play their parts well on the viol. They tell me that their great-uncle had mapped out an apparatus for the second part of his
History of the World
, but when his publisher complained about the sales of the first part, he burnt it in disgruntlement, saying, ‘If I am not worthy of the world, the world is not worthy of my works.’ How I wish he had not done that! Now no one will know what would have been in the second volume of his book.

. . .

I have heard my grandfather
⁴²
Lyte say that Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to bring tobacco into England and make it the fashion. In north Wiltshire, my grandfather remembers a silver pipe being handed round the table from man to man. Ordinary people smoked through a walnut shell and straw. Tobacco was sold for its weight in silver, so when our old yeomen neighbours went to Malmesbury or Chippenham market, they kept their biggest shillings to place in the scales against the tobacco. Sir Walter Raleigh smoked a pipe of tobacco before he went to the scaffold. Some people thought this scandalous, but I think it was well and properly done to settle his spirits. My grandfather remembers when apothecaries sold sack in their shops.

. . .

Sometimes, on holy days
⁴³
or play-days, we boys go to tread the maze at Pimpherne, which is near Blandford.

. . .

Sauntering through Blandford
⁴⁴
today, dreaming of seeing the sea, the harbours and the rocks I have read about in books, I met a man weeping on the bowling green. He spoke English with a strong German accent. He sat upon the grass and rocked himself, like a nurse rocks an inconsolable infant. I sat down beside him and he told me he had been driven from his estate and country by the wars that rage there. Before the wars came, he had as good an estate as any Englishman. Now he is forced to maintain himself by surveying the land. He told me it is good to have a little learning for no one knows to what shifts and straits he might be brought. The German was not an old man, my father’s age, perhaps. I thought of Easton Pierse and the farm at Broad Chalke. I wondered how I would live, if I had to, without them, and in my mind’s eye I saw them suddenly ravaged by flames and blackened with soot. Would I earn my bread by painting then, or be employed to survey the land like this poor man?

. . .

Anno 1639

Monday after Easter: my uncle Anthony Browne’s bay nag threw me today. She ran away with me and gave me a very dangerous fall. Just before, I had an impulse of the briar under which I rode that tickled the nag at the upper end of Bery Lane.
Deo gratias!

. . .

Anno 1640

13 April

On this day the King summoned Parliament for the first time since 1629.

. . .

5 May

The King dismissed Parliament after only three weeks.

. . .

3 November

The King recalled Parliament, hoping it would pass financial bills.

. . .

7 November
⁴⁵

There was a debate in the newly convened Parliament in which preaching in support of absolute monarchy was attacked.

. . .

Fearing that he might be called to account for his argument that sovereignty must be absolute, Mr Hobbes has fled to France.

. . .

Anno 1641

15 February

On this day Parliament passed the Dissolution Act. This means that the King can no longer rule without Parliament, which from henceforth must meet for a least one fifty-day session every three years.

PART II

Oxford

Anno 1642

May

MR HOBBES ENCOURAGED
me
¹
to come to Oxford and I am here now, in Trinity College. I have matriculated; I have written my name in the buttery book and paid my 3d caution money. I study logic and ethics. I lie in bed some mornings in my chamber, looking at the canonised saint in one of the windows: Gregory the Great. I was born on St Gregory’s Day, 12 March 1626, so am glad to have this window. The painting is as good as any I saw in old Mr Harding’s workshop. I cannot tell who the saint in the second window in my chamber is because it was broken before I got here: perhaps the students who slept in this chamber before me were less careful than I am; cared less for glass and other precious things. It is spring, and summer is coming. In my study window, there is a crucifix. I think of Mr Hobbes, and the stories he has told me of his student days in Magdalen Hall. He says he used to rise very early to catch birds at his college window. First he tied leaden weights to pieces of string, then dipped them in birdlime, then baited them with cheese-parings. Jackdaws would spy the parings from high in the sky, as far away even as Osney Abbey, and swoop for the bait. The string, lime and weight would pinion their wings, holding them fast and netted. Perhaps Mr Hobbes cooked and ate them, or let them go, remarking to himself on the wonderful eyesight that could see cheese-parings from that great distance up in the air.

. . .

All this time
²
I am falling deeper and deeper in love with books. Here in Trinity, Dr Ralph Bathurst has an excellent collection: well chosen and broad-ranging. He lets me turn them over and peruse them, for which I am truly grateful. Many of the currish fellows will not let their pupils touch their precious books: they are like churlish trade masters – carpenters, for example – who make money from taking on apprentices but never teach them the mysteries of the trade.

. . .

In London, I get lost among the piles of books for sale in St Paul’s churchyard; most of them are sold in sheets, but some are already bound. I pick up one after another without any idea where to begin: the books that are bound all look alike. How to tell which will be worth buying with my spare money? I come away empty-handed, overwhelmed, as though the books have become trees again and I am wandering blind in a forest. Back in Dr Bathurst’s library, I can explore more calmly; I am starting to find my way.

. . .

Because I am busy
³
and happy, the summer has come quicker than ever before. This morning, I attended a rhetoric lecture in hall. Dr Ralph Kettell, the President of Trinity, often attends our lectures and exercises with an hourglass. He has been president since 1598 – the second president since the foundation of our college in 1555 – and is now almost eighty years old, with sharp grey eyes, white hair and a fresh ruddy complexion. He is over six foot tall, gigantic and terrible in his russet cloth gown, surplice and hood. He drags one foot – his right foot – so we hear him coming before he rounds the corner, like a rattlesnake.

‘Turds! Tarrarags!
⁴
’ These are his names for the worst kind of boys. ‘Rascal-Jacks! Blindcinques! Scobberlotchers! Get to your books and lessons, good-for-nothing idlers!’ Such are his names for the boys that do no harm but do no work either, idling around the college grove with their hands in their pockets and telling the number of trees, etc. The President is a man of great charity. When he notices diligent boys with little money, whose friends have more, he is wont to drop money in at their windows at night. By day he walks up and down the college, peeping in at the keyholes to see if we boys follow our books or not. We mock him but we love him. ‘Seneca writes as a boar does piss: by jerks,’ he tells us. Our college has the best beer in Oxford, since Dr Kettell observed that colleges with small beer force their students out into town to comfort their stomachs. At Trinity we have no cause to drink outside our own college and have the fewest drunkards. He tells us to keep our bodies chaste and holy.

This morning we were listening to a lecture in the hall when there was a knock at the door and Dr Kettell was called away on college business. A raucous murmur rose, higher and higher pitched, before falling straight down, like a hawk to its prey, when the door opened again and an armed man entered. Jack Dowch, a boy in front of me, whom I have never liked, raised his arm to point at Dr Kettell’s hourglass. The man smirked and smashed it with the butt of his rifle. There was silence. War is coming. The King and his Parliament cannot agree. Dr Kettell returned and the lecture continued as if nothing had happened. I heard nothing. I stared at the light refracted through the broken glass on the floor. I hoped Dr Kettell would not drag his foot through it. Lots of the young scholars are training instead of attending lectures; in New College gardens there are two squadrons taking shape, one wielding pikes, the other halberts; there are roadblocks and trenches between the colleges. Oxford is becoming a garrison town. My father is summoning me home. I do not wish to go.

. . .

In Dr Ralph Kettell’s dining room
⁵
hangs a picture he commissioned of the late Thomas Allen (1542–1632), who was educated here at Trinity College and became a Fellow before retiring to Gloucester Hall. In those dark times, astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things, and the vulgar verily believed Thomas Allen was a conjuror. He had a great many mathematical instruments and glasses in his room, which confirmed the ignorant in their opinion, and his servant used to frighten freshmen and simple people by telling them he had seen spirits coming up Thomas Allen’s stairs like bees. I was told this before I came up to Trinity by an old man in Kington St Michael, who was at Oxford over seventy years ago. Looking at Allen’s picture today, it seems to me he was a handsome, sanguine man of excellent habit and body. I have been told he had a wide circle of acquaintance that he visited in the long vacation. Once at Holm Lacy, staying with Mr John Scudamore, he left his watch in his chamber window (watches were rare then). The maid came in to make the bed and hearing a thing in a case cry ‘Tick, tick, tick,’ concluded it must be the devil. She picked up the watch with fire tongs and flung it out the window into the moat to drown out the devil. But the watch was saved when the string caught on a sprig of elder that grew up from the moat (confirming in her mind that it was indeed the devil). So good old Allen got his watch back again. He is buried in Trinity College Chapel, but I cannot tell where exactly, as there is no stone with his name over him.