John Aubrey, page 3
One of the drawings6 Aubrey commissioned of Osney Abbey was engraved for William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, which strove to restore Anglican and Royalist England after 1650 when the episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer were abolished under the Commonwealth. During this time of rupture, antiquarianism gained new urgency. Rescuing or remembering the material remains of lost or shattered worlds became compelling for many who lived through the English Civil War. Aubrey records that7 his antiquarianism was strongly influenced by Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk, a wide-ranging meditation on commemorating the dead. Browne’s book was published in 1658, when the Church of England’s ‘Order for the Burial of the Dead’ had been banned for over a decade. Reflecting on the ancient practice of burying cremated remains in pottery jars, Browne indirectly criticised the Puritan prohibition of funeral rites. After the Restoration8 of Charles II, Browne continued his antiquarian work, explaining to Aubrey that he had made a record of all the remaining brass inscriptions in Norwich Cathedral, lest they be lost to oblivion. Aubrey shared Browne’s conserving passion for the past. William Camden (1551–1623), antiquary and topographer of an earlier generation, was another important formative influence. Camden produced the first chorographical study (or systematic description and mapping of particular regions) of Britain and Ireland, and the first history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He wrote at a time when it was not yet fashionable to talk about ‘Britain’, a time before the union of the crowns of England and Scotland. Aubrey’s grandfather remembered Camden, in pursuit of information for his county-by-county historical survey Britannia (1586), coming to visit the church at Yatton Keynell in Wiltshire when he was a schoolboy. Aubrey was destined to pursue related topographical and antiquarian work, but unlike Camden, he wrote in English, not Latin.
Aubrey’s book-collecting connected his antiquarianism to his enthusiasm for the advancement of learning. He was conscious of living through a revolution in print culture, bookselling and journalism. Alongside his excitement at new opportunities for disseminating information, Aubrey also valued what was being displaced: a rich oral tradition of folklore and old wives’ tales. It was more important to him to make a home in his manuscripts for stories and facts that would otherwise be lost than to limit himself to producing printed books. Looking back, he wrote:
Before Printing9, Old-wives Tales were ingeniouse: and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil-warres, the ordinary sort of People were not taught to reade: now-a-dayes Books are common, and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt all the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the Fayries.
In Aubrey’s time, most books were sold in London, at booksellers’ shops or stalls clustered around St Paul’s churchyard. From here the book trade10 spread out to towns with printing presses: Oxford, Cambridge, York, Ipswich, Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St Andrews. Chapmen or carriers transported books to dealers in the provinces. Distribution became easier after the introduction of the postal service in 1635. Paper in England was more expensive than in the rest of Europe because it had to be imported; there was no successful manufacture of white paper for printing in England until the eighteenth century. When it was sold, it was counted into quires (24 or 25 sheets) or reams (20 quires, so 480 or 500 sheets). Publication of books was funded by an undertaker, usually a bookseller, occasionally an author or printer. It was the financial backer who owned the copyright in this period. Stationers’ Hall, where an undertaker could register ownership of a book after having agreed to finance it, was close to St Paul’s. For the booming book trade, the Great Fire of London of 1666 – known as the Memorable, General or Great Conflagration in Aubrey’s time – was a catastrophe.
Aubrey records that among the many publications burnt in the Great Fire were early issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He became a Fellow11 of the Society in 1662, when it was granted a charter of incorporation, two years after it had been founded in London as a club devoted to the pursuit of scientific research. From its earliest days, the Royal Society received donations of physical objects of scientific or natural curiosity – a bird of paradise, a piece of elephant’s skin, an ostrich egg – and formed a ‘repository’ to house such objects. Aubrey was a frequent attender of the weekly meetings at which discussion and experiment took place. While he was not one of the foremost intellects of the Society – where he coincided with Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle among others – he did make pioneering contributions to archaeology and architecture: he discovered a circle of holes named after him at Stonehenge; he was the first to date systematically buildings by the design of their windows. He saw that just as shells or insects could be collected and ordered, examples of handwriting from the past might be chronologically classified. During the Great Plague of 1665–6, many Fellows fled London and neglected to pay their membership fees. After the Great Fire, the Royal Society needed to rescue its finances and reinvigorate its activities. In this it succeeded triumphantly. As a proud and loyal member, Aubrey played his part in the advancement of learning, even though his own finances were increasingly under strain.
From childhood, Aubrey had looked forward to inheriting a comfortable income from the landed estates acquired by previous generations of his family in Hereford and south Wales. He had a refined temperament to match his privileged lot in life. Gregarious and good at making and keeping friends, he was also sensitive, self-contained and sometimes solitary. He received a gentleman’s education at Blandford School, Dorset, at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the Middle Temple, London. He was fascinated by the present as well as the past – by the arts of drawing and painting and the advancement of scientific and mathematical knowledge. He might have become a scholar – he had passion and intellect enough – but even in more settled times, the world would have doubtless distracted him. He strongly resisted ordination, which was the usual career path of dons at that time. In his thirties, after his father died, it became clear that Aubrey’s inheritance was encumbered by debt. Suddenly far from as secure as he had expected to be, he started to collect observations of Wiltshire, the English county he knew and loved best. His concerns about the material basis of his own life resonated with his passion for preserving antiquities that would otherwise be lost or destroyed.
Soon after the Restoration, around the time of the founding of the Royal Society, Aubrey showed Charles II the ancient stone circles at Avebury and secured protection for the monument from local people foraging for building material for new homes. He noted wryly the similarity between his name and the monument’s, and considered himself its discoverer. Through his wide circle of scholarly friends, he was commissioned to undertake a survey of Surrey. He set off on horseback to make notes on the old buildings, inscriptions and any natural curiosities he encountered on his journey. Other ideas for collections occurred to him: styles of architecture, handwriting and clothing; lists of old place names; an assemblage of folklore. These collections were compiled in notebooks, or on scraps of paper, cross-referenced, revised, corrected over time. Aubrey’s work was fundamentally inclusive and cumulative. Always reluctant to let the practicalities of publication curtail or limit his manuscripts, he published only one short book, about occult phenomena – Miscellanies: A Collection of Hermetick Philosophy (1696) – towards the end of his lifetime. In old age, when the debts he had inherited and those he had incurred living without regular employment had crushed him into bankruptcy, Aubrey began to panic, not about pain or death, but about the future of his precious collections. What should he do with all the piles of paper, the wealth of information, it had been his life’s work to assemble? His antiquities rescued from the deluge of time were as vulnerable as the fragile boats the Ancient Britons sailed on the River Avon – baskets of twigs covered with ox skin called coracles or curricles – still used, Aubrey noted, by poor people in Wales in his time.
Fortunately for Aubrey – and for us – he had like-minded friends more worldly than he was. Elias Ashmole was a collector of markedly different temperament and circumstance: self-made, obsessive, ruthless and rich. He promised to give his own important collection12 of antiquarian artefacts to Oxford University, on the condition that the university erected a new building to house his donation. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683 and Aubrey contributed many rare objects to it. At the end of his life13, he decided there was no better place for his paper collections, among them his most renowned gift to posterity: the compilation of biographical information entitled Brief Lives. It was this collection specifically that Anthony Powell thought such a striking record of Englishmen and their ways. The Brief Lives are mostly lives of seventeenth-century men: eminent writers, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, astrologers, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, dignitaries of the state and the Church of England. There are a few female lives too: some commanding their own biography, others married to or fathered by famous men, outstandingly beautiful, or simply ‘wondrous wanton’. And there are many more unnamed women, caught between the lines – mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, mistresses, whores. They are lives lived amidst the intense social turmoil of civil war, the Great Plague and the Great Fire. They encompass discoveries that changed the future, such as the circulation of blood, and magical spells and folklore from the distant past.
Agnostic and afraid of fanaticism, Aubrey tended always towards tolerance and open-mindedness in his religious and political views. He had both royalist and republican friends. He was close to Protestants, Presbyterians and Roman Catholics. He was captivated by exciting new science and its challenge to more orthodox temperaments. If he believed securely in anything, it was astrology. He collected birth charts for his biographical subjects whenever he could, consulted astrologers about his own life and remained convinced that astrology was a serious science, as did Ashmole and many of their contemporaries. There was a huge popular market for astrological almanacs at this time and beyond. About himself Aubrey concluded14: ‘His life is more remarqueable in an astrologicall respect then for any advancement of learning, having from his birth (till of late yeares) been labouring under a crowd of ill directions.’ Modest and self-deprecating as he was, he felt completely confident of making an important and original contribution in one respect: he knew he was inventing a new form of biography. He cursed the classical tradition15 of high-style panegyrics and selective eulogies: ‘Pox take your orators and poets, they spoile lives & histories.’ A Life, he insisted16, is a small history in which detail and minutiae are all. Contemporaries criticised him for being ‘too minute’ or trivial, but Aubrey was convinced that ‘a hundred yeare hence that minutenesse will be gratefull’. He was right: the fine details he recorded are widely appreciated and the exemplary biographies so dominant in his time are now more a hindrance than a help to modern biographers. The words ‘according to Aubrey’, or ‘Aubrey says’, resound down the centuries to the present day, where they still appear in the introductions to new books on Hobbes, Milton, Jonson, Boyle, Harvey, Hooke, Newton, Wren and other luminaries. His idea was to get at the truth17: ‘the naked and plaine trueth, which is here exposed so bare that the very pudenda are not covered, and affords many passages that would raise a blush in a young virgin’s cheekes’. An example is the Life18 of the brilliant, erudite jurist John Selden, who, Aubrey accurately notes, ‘got more by his Prick than ever he had donne by his practise’. Aubrey heard this from one of the many people discussing the fortune Selden inherited from the widowed Countess of Kent. Aubrey is subtle, his prose florid but precise. He wrote in private, speaking freely to posterity, and has unfairly been characterised as a gossip. When he relates an anecdote, salacious or otherwise, he is careful to indicate its source, sceptically if necessary, and never to stray beyond the story into general inferences about the person concerned. In his book John Aubrey and His Friends (1948), Anthony Powell contrasted Aubrey’s scrupulous regard for the truth with the opportunism of a much later biographical innovator, Lytton Strachey. Strachey, like Aubrey, changed the way biographies were written, liberating the genre from pious expectations and infusing it with the kind of irreverence and wit Aubrey would have enjoyed. But Powell found Strachey lacking where Aubrey was not:
In Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey writes19 of Francis Bacon: ‘an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow’. The story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey’s . . . Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident; he was ‘disgraced’, he may have been ‘shattered’; no doubt at times he was ‘alone’; but Aubrey’s story of stuffing the fowl on Highgate Hill shows Bacon, accompanied by the King’s Physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow; and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel. If Aubrey’s story suggests anything, it is that Bacon’s intellectual faculties were anything but ‘shattered’ and that he was not ‘alone’. This is a trifling instance, though it illustrates how a fragment of a ‘Life’, combined with juxtaposition of epithets, may be used to convey an oblique hint; a method, incidentally, never employed by Aubrey himself.
It is remarkable that Aubrey resisted employing the method for which Powell rebukes Strachey. It is one of the tricks of the trade for working up the oblique hints, the small brushstrokes that accumulate gradually to become a finished portrait by the biography’s end. But Aubrey never did this. He stayed strictly within the frame of the story, anecdote or incident he found revealing of a Life. He made no attempt to interpret definitively, still less judge or account for, the Lives he wrote. He set out more modestly to record about each of them some things that were true. He was especially concerned to capture the small and incidental details that would otherwise be lost.
I first encountered Aubrey through Anthony Powell’s edition of Brief Lives in the library of my school in Slough: ‘a very dirty place’, according to Aubrey, who once passed through the town on a visit to Eton. Brief Lives is an evocative title, full of drama and poignancy – I did not know then anyone who had died, still less died young. I first wanted to write about Aubrey when I lived in the Wiltshire village of Wylye in my early twenties. Aubrey’s places – Stonehenge, Wilton House, Salisbury Plain, the rivers and meadows and undulating hills – seemed still touched by his presence. He is one of the finest English prose writers there has ever been. Like all great writers, he lives on in the words he arranged on paper, no matter how scrappy or fragmentary or difficult to decipher the pages in his archive are. He lives on too in the places he loved and wrote about.
It is hard to turn the tables and write a biography of England’s first great biographer. Aubrey was a mild-mannered man who did not impose himself strongly on his subjects. Instead he captured them for posterity, without presuming to know what posterity would make of them. He was a listener. Among the manuscripts and letters20 that he deposited in the Ashmolean Museum towards the end of his life were some scant autobiographical jottings, ‘to be interponed as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a Booke’. Aubrey’s idea that his record of his own life might serve as endpapers to a book about something or someone else is typically self-effacing. He was, we can be sure, wonderful company. He pursued a wide range of historical and scientific interests and knew or corresponded with a large number of people – many of them cleverer, more confident or flamboyant than he was himself. He was in high demand as friend, guest, intellectual or literary collaborator, informant and recorder. Though impecunious, he survived well in a culture of hospitality, where it was important for the wealthy to fill their homes with interesting guests. When he could no longer afford21 to maintain his own household, he was welcomed into the homes of wealthier friends for weeks on end, paying only with his time. He knew the price was high and would mean that much of his work would be left incomplete, ‘on the loom’, at his death. Aubrey saw himself as a resource for honing other people’s talents; he doubted the power of his mind, doubted even the quality of his distinctive prose, and claimed gratitude to others as his own greatest virtue. In describing himself22, he echoed the words of the poet Horace – ‘I perform the function of a whetstone, which can make the iron sharp though is itself unable to cut.’
The chaotic and fragmentary nature of Aubrey’s work, punctuated as it is by gaps into which he hoped information would be inserted later by himself or others, is matched by the fragmentary record of his life. Aside from his few pages of autobiographical notes, the main sources for Aubrey’s life are the remains of his correspondence, which are necessarily uneven and often oblique. Sometimes it is possible to tell exactly where Aubrey was and what he was doing on a particular date. Sometimes weeks, even months, go by where he cannot be traced. His relationships, especially the most intimate, flash past, illuminated only instantaneously, like a dark landscape beneath a clouded sky when the moon breaks through fleetingly. Unlike Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and other celebrated men of the seventeenth century, Aubrey did not leave a diary. If he wrote one – regularly, intermittently or occasionally – it has disappeared. When I was searching for a biographical form that would suit the remnants of his life, I realised that he would all but vanish inside a conventional biography, crowded out by his friends, acquaintances and their multitudinous interests. Aubrey lived through fascinating times and has long been valued for what can be seen through him; there is no shortage of scholars who appreciate the use that can be made of him. But the biographer has other purposes: to get as close to her subject and his sensibility as possible; to produce a portrait that captures at least something of what that person was like. In the pencil portrait of Aubrey23 that survives, he looks like an unremarkable seventeenth-century gentleman, his bland face square between the curtains of a heavy wig. A portrait in words – one that does him more justice – is what I determined to write.
