Solomon's Secret Arts (8 page)

No matter how isolated their home towns may have seemed, these provincial enthusiasts read alchemical publications just as avidly as did their metropolitan counterparts. John Beale, one of Hartlib's correspondents, kept up with the latest alchemical debates while residing in rural Herefordshire. John Webster, a former Anglican clergyman who became a radical sectarian and an ardent alchemist, collected together a remarkable library of books, including over a hundred volumes on occult philosophy, at his home in Clitheroe, Lancashire. Webster was the editor of a beautifully produced English translation of
The Last Will and Testament of Basil Valentine
, which appeared in 1670.
¹²
Decades later, John Yardley, a glover turned silversmith of Worcester, claimed to have developed his own spagyric process out of reading “all the Chymical authors I could procure.”
¹³
Presumably, he procured them in Worcester.

Wales may have been poorer than England, but it was certainly not backward in generating alchemists. Bassett Jones of Glamorganshire studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, became a medical doctor and in 1648 published a book on the Philosopher's Stone. According to his friend Samuel Hartlib, copies became so scarce due to high demand that within a few years not even Jones himself could find one.
¹⁴
Another graduate of Jesus College was Thomas Vaughan, the Welsh-speaking rector of Llansanffraid, a remote parish in rural Brecon. He was twin brother of the poet Henry Vaughan, known as “the Silurist” or South Welshman. John Heydon mocked Thomas Vaughan for his “Welch Philosophie,” but did not hesitate to plagiarize him.
¹⁵
A royalist, Vaughan withdrew to London during the Civil War period, where he wrote a series of important magical-alchemical works in English under the pen name
“Eugenius Philalethes.” This brought him to the attention of the Hartlib circle. More interested in alchemical philosophy than in ministering to his parish, he declined to return to his duties in Brecon after the Restoration.
¹⁶

The kingdom of Scotland was no less noted for producing devotees of the art. Thomas Vaughan's later alchemical experiments depended on the financial support of Sir Robert Moray, Charles II's deputy lieutenant for Scotland. According to his friend John Aubrey, Moray was “a good Chymist and assisted his Majestie in his Chymicall operations.”
¹⁷
In the 1650s, Moray wrote frequently to his Scottish friend the earl of Kincardine on alchemical matters, and confided in him the occult meaning of his “mason mark,” a pentacle or five-pointed star.
¹⁸
Scotland was also the reputed homeland of the mythic Alexander Seton, thought in the early seventeenth century to be identical with “Elias Artista,” the wandering “Cosmopolite” who possessed the secret of the Stone. With its many medical schools and university courses in “Chymistry,” Scotland harboured a number of active alchemical communities. One of Samuel Hartlib's alchemical correspondents in the late 1640s was William Hamilton, who had taught at the University of Glasgow before moving to London.
¹⁹
The high regard in which the Hermetic art was held among medical practitioners in Scotland can be judged from the earl of Cromarty's gift of his grandfather's collection of alchemical manuscripts (including a “Ripley Scroll,” a set of beautifully illustrated verses supposedly written by George Ripley, medieval canon of Bridlington) to the Edinburgh College of Physicians in 1707. The earl bragged that his grandsire was “a great student in natural philosophy, even to a considerable advancement in the Hermeticke schoole,” which must have impressed the learned doctors of Edinburgh.
²⁰

Physicians were prominent among alchemical adepts everywhere in Britain. They included men of considerable influence and renown, like Dr Edmund Dickinson, physician in ordinary to Charles II; Dr Albert Otto Faber of Lübeck, the king's personal physician; and John Twysden, brother of an eminent Parliamentarian.
²¹
Works of alchemy were advertised and sold by medical booksellers like Dorman Newman.
²²
So popular was alchemy among doctors that William Salmon, MD, did not feel it necessary to apologize for devoting the vast majority of pages in a general treatise on medicine to the pursuit of making gold.
²³
His readers may have included the anonymous doctor living near London who left a manuscript, dating from the late 1680s, that intersperses various accounts of medical treatments with recipes for finding the Philosopher's Stone.
²⁴
Alchemy, which held out the promise of an elixir of life and a cure for all diseases, offered obvious benefits to physicians, especially those who were forward enough to espouse the controversial “iatrochemistry” of the German doctor Paracelsus, based on medicines made from metals.
²⁵

In 1665, an attempt was made to obtain a royal patent for a Society of Chymical Physicians, in opposition to the existing College of Physicians, which was accused of resisting the new medicines. Thirty-five chemical adepts signed a petition in favour of the Society, including Marchamont Needham, a prominent Parliamentary publicist and physician.
²⁶
The project failed, probably due to resistance from outraged members of the College of Physicians. In spite of this setback, the opinions of sceptical observers regarding chemical remedies tended to be cautious rather than hostile. The theologian Meric Casaubon, who despised ritual magic and was suspicious of the philosophical claims of alchemy, nonetheless praised its contributions to medicine, confessing that, while a student at Oxford, he had been cured of a near-fatal disease by “some Chymical composition” given to him by an unconventional doctor. If there was a “new medical regime” in the late seventeenth century, one that united medical practice with scientific theory and experiment, then alchemy was without doubt a factor in its rise.
²⁷

It was not only doctors who developed a taste for alchemy. Lawyers like Elias Ashmole and clergymen like Thomas Vaughan and John Beale made equally eager adepts. Men of lesser social status occasionally pop up as assistants in alchemical laboratories. Yworth, for example, was aided by John Baker, a periwig-maker who had a shop in the Strand.
²⁸
The most noted alchemists, however, tended to be men of the learned professions or skilled craftsmen. These occupations were closed to women, and there were no women among the prominent alchemical writers of this period. Women could read alchemical works, of course, and in one copy of Ashmole's
Way to Bliss
appears the commanding inscription, “Mary Marston Her Book Steal not this.”
²⁹
Women could also practise alchemy. Hartlib claimed that the mother of his friend Thomas Henshaw was a “great chymist.” He further referred to one “Mistress Ogleby,” who owned manuscripts by George Ripley, as “a rare chymical gentlewoman.”
³⁰
Thomas Vaughan's wife assisted him in his chemical operations.

Leaving aside the occasional female adept, the alchemists were, by and large, men of the professional “middling sort,” living in towns rather than the countryside. They might call themselves “gentlemen,” and many were related to gentry families. They were literate and used to the idea of protecting the “secrets” of their professions from outsiders. They needed money to buy equipment and supply their experiments, but few of them could be called wealthy. In a culture that was dominated by the landowning classes, it is noteworthy that relatively few serious adepts were substantial landowners or peers. There were exceptions, of course, especially in Scotland where spagyric knowledge seems to have been handed down in aristocratic families like those of Balcarres or Cromarty. Several “chymical gentlemen” in England set up
furnaces on their estates, among them Sir Cheney Culpeper of Kent, one of Hartlib's correspondents. Robert Boyle was the wealthy son of the fabulously rich earl of Cork (together with his many brothers and sisters, Boyle can still be seen praying in effigy on his parents’ magnificent funeral monument in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin). Another aristocratic seeker of the Stone was Henry Carey, earl of Dover, who entered into “secret transactions” with George Starkey in 1654.
³¹
Goodwin Wharton, son of the puritan Lord Wharton, wasted a fortune in the early 1680s funding an alchemist named Broune. His partner in this venture was the former republican and compulsive conspirator Major John Wildman. After Broune's laboratory burned down, Wharton and Wildman turned to other ventures, including communicating with angels and finding fairy treasure.
³²
Most alchemists, however, were from humbler origins than Wharton and lacked his financial means. If they sought gold, it was in part as a means to social mobility.

Elias Ashmole may not have been typical in his dazzling success at climbing the social ladder, but he was a model of advancement to other alchemists. The son of a saddler of Lichfield, he used his mother's gentry relatives to promote his status. He became a lawyer, amassing property and prestige through carefully planned marriage alliances. By attaching himself to the royalist cause early in the Civil War, Ashmole gained a lucrative position with the excise. Litigious and grasping, he fought his in-laws for control of family estates, and compelled Hester, the widow of John Tradescant the younger, to recognize his right to her husband's collection of curiosities, which later formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum. After the Restoration, Ashmole's loyalty to the Stuarts was rewarded with the comptrollership of the excise, along with the post of Windsor Herald, which involved the validation of family titles and coats of arms. Ashmole grew rich from the fruits of two quite different offices: the excise, which looked forward to the bureaucratic state; and the heraldship, redolent of a hierarchical, aristocratic past.
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The combination of dynamism and conservatism that drove Ashmole's career was not unusual among professional men in the late seventeenth century. Another self-made man, Samuel Pepys, praised Ashmole as “a very ingenious Gentleman” after their first meeting in 1660, when the two of them sang together in the study of William Lilly, the astrologer. Ashmole later assured Pepys “that frogs and other insects do often fall from the skye ready-formed,” a wonderful piece of biological misinformation that was widely believed at the time.
³⁴

We cannot be certain whether a greater number of individuals who thought like Elias Ashmole existed in Britain between 1650 and 1688 than in earlier or later periods. We do know, however, that more material on alchemy was published in those decades than previously or afterwards—a statement that
applies not just to Britain, but to Europe as a whole. Equally important, these books and pamphlets appeared in vernacular languages, not in Latin, which made them available to a wider reading public. In his old age, Arthur Dee, son of the famous magus John Dee, was shocked by this. He complained to Elias Ashmole, who translated one of his own alchemical works from Latin into English, that since scholars already derided alchemy, “how then can th
^t
any way be aduanced by the vulgar [multitude]”?
³⁵
It may not have been advanced socially by “middling” men, but its appeal had certainly broadened. What explains this success?

The first and most important cause may have been the breakdown of the Anglican Church during the Civil War and Interregnum period from 1642 to 1660. As a result, a pool of underground religious ideas was carried to the surface that would previously have been condemned as heterodox or blasphemous. Alchemical writing was frequently accompanied by religious speculation, which might have led to prosecution in an earlier period. A second, connected cause was the loosening of censorship. At the start of the Civil War, Parliament deprived episcopal authorities of their powers to inspect and license works of the press. The privilege of licensing books was now to be shared between the Company of Stationers and various appointed officials. Political and religious divisions among the licensers, however, rendered censorship largely ineffective.
³⁶

The impact of these two factors changed again after 1660, when the Church of England was restored along with the monarchy, and licensing of the press became much stricter.
³⁷
At the Restoration, however, continuing divisions within Anglicanism prevented the Church from maintaining a united front against speculative religion. In addition, a number of prominent alchemists in England—for example, Ashmole and Moray—had been royalists during the Civil War period. They could argue that their alchemical work was not motivated by radical religious views and was consistent with support for the king. Charles II clearly sympathized with them, as he set up his own chemical laboratory at Whitehall Palace, directly beneath his closet, as early as 1669. Although little is known about the king's involvement with alchemy, it has been suggested that his experiments eventually led to chronic mercury poisoning, which caused his death by kidney failure in 1685.
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As for renewed censorship by the Stationers’ Company, which regained its monopoly on licensing in 1660, it tended to focus on political sedition rather than on unusual philosophical views.

It seems fair, then, to call the period 1650–88 an alchemical heyday. This did not mean that alchemy was accepted by everyone, or that its practitioners necessarily felt they were in the ascendant. On the contrary, most were convinced that alchemy was losing ground to an ill-founded scepticism. Ashmole himself lamented, in the preface to his translation of Arthur Dee's
work that alchemy was being traduced “as
false
and
deceitful
.” Employing an argument based on his own reason and experience, Ashmole begged the sceptics, “these (otherwise well accomplisht)
Men
,” to “but consider how many occult, specifick, incomprehensible, and inexplicable qualities there lies dormant and observed in
Nature
.”
³⁹
The self-styled “Astromagus,” George Thor, who prided himself on his fluency in Greek, was more dismissive of “those who look upon this Sacred Science (as the wise
Democritus
calls it) as on … Aristophan's
Cuccou Town in the Clouds
.” Such critics “were such as are shut up, by a wonderfull, and necessary providence of God, under the vast, heavie cloud of the vulgar, from which they are never like to escape.”
⁴⁰
To deny the truth of alchemy, according to Thor, was to reveal oneself as unlearned, uneducated, unprofessional—exactly what the critics thought about those who practised alchemy. Yet scepticism was evidently widespread, even in the mid-seventeenth century. The philosopher's Stone was called “a chaste whore” by the learned John Wilkins in his 1648 treatise
Mathematical Magic
, “because it allures many and admits none.”
⁴¹
Of course, such views may have arisen from disillusionment and a failure to produce results rather than from a perception that the search for gold was inherently a waste of time.