MY FATHER’S caution1 has prevailed. I am come home again to a sad country life. I recovered from the smallpox after the end of Trinity Week (Trinity Sunday was 4 June) and my father sent for me. Here I converse with none but servants and rustics and quartered soldiers, to my great grief. Horace’s Odes come to mind: Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (I hate the profane rabble and steer clear of them). I am scarcely acquainted with my father. I am in the prime of my youth and I am without the benefit of ingenious conversation, and have hardly any good books. I am almost a consumptive. I have carried some books from Oxford home with me: Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, printed last year, has opened my understanding. And I have Sir Kenelm Digby’s ‘Observations on Religio Medici’, printed this year, to keep my thoughts company.
. . .
Dr Ralph Kettell has died2. He was a good man and a good president of Trinity College. He was over eighty years old, but I believe would have lived well for longer without these wars. He might even have made a century. The wars grieved him deeply. He was used to being in charge of Trinity absolutely. It was hard for him to bear the affronts and disrespect of the soldiers garrisoned at the college.
. . .
I have met a soldier garrisoned near Broad Chalke who is the brother of John Birkenhead, who set up the newsbook Mercurius Aulicus in Oxford after the Battle of Edgehill.
My grandfather Isaac Lyte has a precious document in his keeping. It is a copy of the entertainments for the visit of Queen Henrietta Maria in August 1636 to Thomas Bushell’s hermitage and grotto at Enston in Oxfordshire entitled: The Severall Speeches and Songs, at the presentment of Mr Bushell’s Rock to the Queenes Most Excellent Majesty. It was given to my grandfather by Old Jack Sydenham, the servant who worked for our neighbours in Easton Pierse, who fed my youthful fancy with stories of the olden days. He once also worked for Mr Bushell. From Old Jack, I have heard many stories of Mr Bushell, who, as a young man, waited on the Lord Chancellor Bacon. Like Mr Hobbes, Mr Bushell was one of Lord Bacon’s amanuenses. After Lord Bacon died in 1626, Mr Bushell married and went to live at Enston, where he built a marvellous grotto.
. . .
I went to visit Mr Bushell3 today and he showed me his famous grotto, dug into the hillside, where rocks hang down like pendants, as they do at Wookey Hole in Somerset (which is not far from Lytes Carey, where my grandfather grew up). Before the wars, Queen Henrietta Maria gave her name to Mr Bushell’s pleasure palace. It is surrounded by beautiful walks. A decade ago, when Mr Bushell was designing his gardens, he decided that he was advanced enough in years to mean he could not plant his hedges in the usual way and wait for them to grow, or he would hardly live to enjoy them. He sent his workmen all over the country, searching for white-thorn, plum trees and so on that had already reached fifteen or twenty feet. He transplanted them in the month of October, before All Saints Day, and they did very well. I have never seen better hedges. This story fits with the Somerset proverb:
For Apples, Peares, Hawthornes Quickset, Oakes
Set them at All-hollowtyde and command them to grow
Set them after Candlemas and entreat them to grow.
Mr Bushell demonstrated his device for simulating rain and causing a rainbow at the grotto’s entrance. I made a drawing of the little pond opposite the grotto: there stood Neptune on a scallop shell, with his trident in his hand, aiming at a duck that swam perpetually round, chased by a spaniel. The statue is of wood and about three quarters of a yard high. It looks very pretty.
. . .
Since before these wars began, Mr Bushell has been minting money for the King. He had huge medals of twenty shillings and ten shillings struck in silver and handed them out to the King’s soldiers on the eve of the Battle of Edgehill. When the King came to Oxford he moved his mint there from Shrewsbury, and Mr Bushell became joint warden of it with Sir William Pankhurst, warden of the Tower mint. Since July, when Bristol was taken for the King, Mr Bushell has been erecting another mint in the castle there.
In this time of civil war4, he has swathed his grotto at Enstone in soft black woollen cloth. His bed has black curtains, and hangs from four ropes wrapped around with more of the black cloth, instead of bedposts. When Queen Henrietta Maria came to Oxford this month to join the King, I hear that she brought with her (I think, unless someone gave it to her in Oxford) an Egyptian mummy that she presented to Mr Bushell. He has placed it in the grotto that bears the Queen’s name, but I fear that is too damp a place and the mummy will grow mouldy. Something so old and rare should not be ruined.
. . .
My friend and tutor5 William Browne writes with news from Oxford. Like me he was educated at Blandford School and was a great help when I arrived at Trinity College. He tells me that since the Battle of Newbury, all goes well in the north. Legates from the pontiffs of Ireland are said to be approaching the King and seeking conditions of peace. The garrison of Abingdon will create trouble for that of Oxford. The soldiers in Reading, Henley and St Albans are said to be converging, and it is reported that envoys from London are coming to Oxford to seek terms from the King. How I wish I were back in Oxford.
. . .
Dr Hannibal Potter (brother of the monkish Francis) will be the next President of Trinity. It is rumoured that he has not been lawfully elected, but forced upon the Fellows by the Bishop of Winton. Dr William Chillingworth was a competitor for the presidency, but he has been inconsolable since the death of his friend Dr Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at the Battle of Newbury.
According to William Browne6, when William Chillingworth was a student at Trinity College, he did not study much, but when he did, he did much in a little time. He delighted in Sextus Empiricus and would walk often in the College Grove contemplating, and there he would meet some cod’s-head or other, and dispute with him and baffle him. I think disputing was something of an epidemic then, but now it has fallen out of fashion and is considered unmannerly and boyish.
. . .
William Browne says7 that whilst they are safe in Oxford, anxiety rises by the day. Sir William Waller and his Parliamentarian forces still elude the King’s army, and the Parliamentarian garrison of Poole remains strong. But at least well-munitioned Bristol Castle has been captured, along with Nantwich, and Oliver Cromwell, one of the leaders of the Parliament’s forces, has suffered a defeat in Lincolnshire. The King is summoning the Great Council to meet in Oxford, and it is said Prince Rupert has been made commander-in-chief.
. . .
There has been an explosion at Osney Abbey, where they are making gunpowder for the King. I thank heaven that I had the remains of the abbey drawn before this happened. I was fearful the ruins would collapse from neglect, but war has helped them on their way.
. . .
Some time before Bristol Castle was captured, Mr Bushell got away. He is now on Lundy Island, in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, which is still loyal to the King.
The King has set up a new Parliament in Oxford for the conduct of the war. He has summoned the members from London to assemble in Christ Church Hall. Most of the House of Lords and about a third of the House of Commons have heeded his summons.
. . .
Anthony Hungerford, Member of Parliament for Malmesbury, obeyed the King’s summons to attend the Oxford Parliament in December. As a consequence, the London Parliament has fined him, disabled him and appointed a new member for Malmesbury: Sir John Danvers, my honoured kinsman on my mother’s side.
. . .
Sir Francis Dodington has blown up part of Wardour Castle in Dorset, the seat of Lord Henry Arundel, whose father died in Oxford of battle wounds last year. Edmund Ludlow’s garrison of Parliamentarian forces held Wardour Castle this past year, but soldiers loyal to the King, led by Dodington and Arundel, laid siege last December. Now it is surrendered, damaged irreparably, to its rightful owner. It will never be used as a fortress again.
I rode over8 to see the ruins of Wardour Castle the day after the explosion. The mortar it was built with is so good that one of the little towers reclining on one side still hangs together and has not fallen to pieces.
. . .
Parliament directed the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which oversees the conduct of the war, to review its forces. The result is the establishment of a new-modelled army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax.
. . .
The King’s forces have garrisoned Faringdon House. All the small towns on the main roads through Berkshire – Wallingford, Abingdon, Faringdon, Wantage, Newbury, Hungerford, etc. – have seen either the King’s soldiers or the Parliament’s riding in with their troops.
. . .
The Parliament’s soldiers9 are destroying the ancient monuments, which they consider idolatrous.
. . .
On this day10 Dr George Bathurst, brother of my friend Dr Ralph Bathurst, was killed in the Battle of Faringdon fighting for the King. He was one of thirteen sons and like a step-grandson to Ralph Kettell.
. . .
Mr William Browne writes11 to me from Oxford. He believes it a mistake to suppose that the University can preserve its privileges if the State perishes.
The King’s soldiers have been defeated at Abingdon this month, despite the King’s instructions that it be held at all costs. Oxford is threatened now. My friends there are afraid.
. . .
On this day, in a battle at Naseby, the King’s army was all but destroyed by the Parliament’s new-modelled army.
. . .
The fine high steeple at Calne, which stood upon four pillars in the middle of the church, has collapsed. One of the pillars was faulty, and the churchwardens were dilatory, as is usual in such cases. Mr Chivers of that parish foresaw this but he could not prevent it, and brought down Mr Inigo Jones to survey the steeple. This was in about 1639 or 1640: he gave him 30 li. out of his own purse for his pains. Mr Jones would have underbuilt the steeple for 100 li. But it fell down on Saturday, and brought the chancel with it too; the parish will be charged 1,000 li. to make a new heavy tower. I fear the same fate will befall our steeple at Kington St Michael. It is impossible to persuade the parishioners to go out of their own way to invest in such repairs before it is too late.
When I was a boy12 I was told that the figures in the south aisle window of Kington St Michael church were King Ethelred and his Queen. Since then I have looked in the Legier Book of Glastonbury and found that they gave the manor of Kington and Langley to the abbey, so I think what I was told must be true since it was a common fashion in those days to place in the windows the effigies of pious benefactors to inspire others.
. . .
There is a church13 in Salisbury – St Edmund’s – that had curious painted glass windows, especially in the chancel. One of the windows (I think the east window) was of such exquisite work that Gondamar, the Spanish ambassador, offered to buy it for some hundreds of pounds. In another of the windows there was a picture of God the Father, like an old man, which gave offence to Mr Henry Shervill when he was recorder of the city in 1631. Out of zeal he clambered on one of the pews to be able to reach high enough to break the window, but fell down and broke his own leg. For this he was brought into the Star Chamber and heavily fined, which, I think, ruined him. But what Mr Shervill left undone, the soldier vandals have seen through: there is not a piece of glass painting left now.
. . .
I am once more a brother! My mother – who is now aged thirty-five – has given birth to another baby boy, this one named Thomas.
. . .
My friend William Browne14 writes from Oxford and tells me my gown has been mouldering in a box, so he will convert it into a divine’s gown for himself. I am glad this friend of mine has need of my gown. But I regret that beloved item was ever abandoned by me, who could have been a scholar, who still wishes to be. I left that gown behind because I thought I would return to my studies. Circumstance conspires against me. Yet I persevere. Mr Browne has promised to replace the gown if I go to Oxford to take my degree. But he says the soldier spoils the scholar in that town, and I would do better by going to the University of Leyden, which is cheaper and safer. He has sent me two of the books that I asked for, but not my Tacitus, which he cannot find. He thinks I must have locked it in my trunk, which I left in Oxford.
. . .
William Browne has another suggestion for my future: that I move to London, if my father will not let me go to Oxford to take my degree. He will not. Mr Browne asks whether my mother and grandfather will intervene on my behalf and not let my father ‘stop all good notions’. But my father’s anxiety has blocked my path my whole life. London would be as cheap as Oxford. One way or another, I am plotting my escape from sequestered rural life.
. . .
My father had to go to Falstone House near Wilton to hand over more money to the Parliamentarian committee that sits there, raising funds by force for its bad but prospering cause. He has already paid 7 li. in North Wiltshire, and now for our Broad Chalke farm and other property in Herefordshire must pay 33 li. in sixty fat sheep and 60 li. in money. I have been to Herefordshire myself recently, to review our holdings. There I glimpsed the father of the famous courtesan Bess Broughton, who is one of the 5th Earl of Dorset’s mistresses and among the greatest beauties of her age. Bess’s father, old Mr Broughton15, an octogenarian, seemed to me the most handsome, well-limbed, straight old man that I have ever seen. He has a good wit and a graceful elocution. Small wonder that his daughter is so beautiful. There is a ballad sung about her:
Old Mr Broughton brought in the husbandry of soap ashes. When he was living at Bristol, where much soap is made, and the haven there seemed likely to be choked up with it, he undertook an experiment to see if soap ash, like compost, improves the soil. He duly improved his land near the city in this way. My grandmother remembers Bess’s mother (who was her neighbour) and I have heard her say she was as great as her husband.
. . .
They have started watering the meadows about Marlborough and Hungerford, and Mr John Bayly, of Bishop’s Down, near Salisbury, is making great improvements by watering near St Thomas’s Bridge. This practice is as old as the Romans. Virgil alludes to it in his Bucolica: ‘Claudite jam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt’ (‘Stop the currents now, young men, the meadows have drunk enough’). The improvement of watering meadows began at Wylye, in about 1635, and it was around that time – when I was about nine years old – that I remember the same practice introduced at Broad Chalke.
There are otters16 in the River Wylye, and perhaps in other rivers too. The otter is our English beaver.
. . .
To my great pride and joy, I have been admitted to Middle Temple, where I hope I will be able to make new friends and study the law. I intend to divide my time from this day forth between London and Oxford. No more secluded rural life for me!
The Middle Temple gardens17 run alongside the River Thames. There are fewer buildings on the bankside opposite.
. . .
But alas! Despite my good intentions, my father’s sickness and business do not permit me to settle to my studies.
The war goes badly. There is little food and no cheer in Oxford. Mr Dobson is running out of painterly materials that cannot be sent for or fetched from London. The war has reduced the thick impasto of his earlier canvases to thin skim paint. Even so, he works with what he has. There is a new portrait of the King in his studio, nearly finished. It is done almost entirely in black and brown. The King wears military dress: his proud head and shoulders fill the canvas, ready to do battle, yet there is anxiety, sadness about his dark eyes. He seems much older than when he first came triumphantly into the city like Apollo; his face narrower, his hair thinner, his lips pressed tight together; a stubborn and a frightened man.
On this day Oxford surrendered.
. . .
Sir Thomas Fairfax18, Lord General of the Parliament’s army, has set a good guard of soldiers to preserve and protect the Bodleian Library. It is said that during their garrison of the town, the King’s army did much damage to the library, embezzling the books and cutting off the chains that hold them in place. Lord Fairfax is a lover of learning, who will take care that our noble library is not further destroyed.
. . .
While the King19 had his court at Oxford, after the Battle of Edgehill, John Birkenhead, a Fellow of All Souls, wrote up the news wittily enough in his newsbook Mercurius Aulicus. Now that Oxford has surrendered, he will stop.
. . .
Many of the King’s party, some already known to me, have come to London. I love not their debauches. I have friends who are not debauched, but even so their conversation is not improving: I find it unfit for the muses.
. . .
I have heard that Dr William Harvey has come to London to live with his brother Eliab, who is a rich merchant with a country house at Roehampton. I hope I will make his acquaintance before long.
. . .
Lundy Island, where Mr Bushell has been commandant for the King, has finally surrendered.
. . .
The painter William Dobson has died, aged just thirty-five. Like other supporters of the King who have left Oxford now the Parliamentarians have it, he came to live in London recently. But he was soon imprisoned for debt and died in poverty. I must see Judith, his sweet-faced widow, soon.
. . .
My honoured neighbour20, Sir Charles Snell, has told me of an interesting sepulchre called Hubbaslow (or Barrow Hill) on the road from Chippenham to Bristol, and has shown me a reference to it in the first edition of Stow’s Chronicle. I will see it.
. . .
To my great joy21, I am returned to Trinity College, Oxford. The Fellows make much of me, and I am again amidst their learned conversation, books and music: ingenious youths, as rosebuds, imbibe the morning dew.
. . .
The Parliamentarian Visitation22 – which has been sent to Oxford to reform and regulate the University – came to Trinity today. Hannibal Potter, Pro-Vice Chancellor at the moment, as well as President of Trinity, does his best to protect the antiquities and elude the Visitors. Last month, Dr Potter was summoned to appear before the Visitors but he declined to attend. Now he has been called before a parliamentary committee of Lords and Commons in London, but still refuses to go.
I went to visit the ruins of Eynsham Abbey – the Benedictine monastery that was dissolved in 1538 – and greatly admired the two high towers at the west end. The ruins set my thoughts working to make out their magnificence in former times.
. . .
Dr William Petty teaches anatomy at Brasenose College and keeps a partially pickled dead body for this purpose. He brought the body to Oxford from Reading by water. He is beloved by all the scholars, especially Ralph Bathurst of Trinity College (brother of Dr George Bathurst, who was killed in the Battle of Faringdon), John Wilkins (astronomer and natural philosopher), Seth Ward (mathematician), Thomas Willis (royal physician), etc. Together they pursue experimental philosophy.
. . .
Ralph Bathurst says23 the poet Ben Jonson was a Warwickshire man (though others dispute this). Jonson came to Trinity College with an Exhibition after a benefactor overheard him reciting Greek verse from Homer as he worked on the wall between Lincoln’s Inn and Chancery Lane alongside his stepfather, a bricklayer.
. . .
My Trinity friends24, Thomas Mariett, William Radford and Ned Wood, have had a frolic on foot from Oxford to London. Never having been to Windsor before, they passed through it and visited Mr John Hales, Fellow of Eton College, general scholar and poet, who has a noble library of books. When the court was at Windsor, the learned courtiers much delighted in his company, but the Parliamentarian Visitation of 1642 ejected Mr Hales from his position as Canon of Windsor. My friends presented themselves to him as scholars, so he treated them well and gave them ten shillings.
. . .
I went to visit William Stumpe25, out of curiosity to see his manuscripts (I remember seeing some of them in my childhood); but by now they are mostly lost. I have never forgotten how he used to abuse them, lining the corks of ale bottles with precious pages. His sons are gunners and soldiers who follow their father in their disrespect for manuscripts and scour their guns with them. But Mr Stumpe showed me several old deeds granted by the Lords Abbots, with their scales annexed, which I suppose his son Captain Thomas Stumpe of Malmesbury – he who had adventures as a boy in Guyana – will inherit.
. . .
Despite all the disruptions26 and distractions of this troubled time, I am continuing my studies at Middle Temple. This evening we were finishing our common meal when Sir John Maynard came in from Westminster Hall, weary with the business of the day and hungry. He sat down by Mr Bennett Hoskyns, son of the poet Serjeant Hoskyns, and some others who were discussing the meaning of the text: ‘For a just man one would dare to die: but for a good man one would willingly die.’ They asked Sir John what the difference is between a just man and a good man. He said it was all very well for those who had eaten to begin on such a discourse, but he was hungry. Then, after a couple of mouthfuls, he said: ‘I’ll tell you the difference presently: Serjeant Rolle is a just man and Matthew Hale is a good man.’ That is all he said before returning to his food. There could not be a better elucidation of that text. Serjeant Rolle is just, but naturally penurious (and his wife makes him worse). Whereas Matthew Hale is not only just, but charitable, open-handed, and no sounder of his own trumpet, as hypocrites are.
. . .
James Harrington and Thomas Herbert have been appointed to His Majesty’s Bedchamber at Holmeby House, by order of the Parliament. I am told that Mr Harrington passionately loves the King, and they often dispute together about government, but the King will not hear talk of a Commonwealth. I hope to meet Mr Harrington: he was a gentleman commoner at Trinity College before my time.
. . .
‘How it comes to pass27, I know not; but by ancient and modern example it is evident, that no great accident befalls a city or prince but it is presaged by divination or prodigy, or astrology, or some way or other.’ This is from Book I, Chapter LVI of Machiavelli’s Discourses, and I believe it true. On the first day of this month of May, my mother saw a sign of dire things to come when she went outside to read the time on our horizontal dial at Broad Chalke. It was a very clear sunny day, but from just before eleven until twelve, two circles appeared in the sky: a rainbow and a reversed rainbow, its bow turned down and the two ends standing upwards. The sun was caught inside the intersecting circles. My mother was the first to see it. She ran back into the house and told all the servants, who went outside and saw it too. The vicar and his family also saw it, and others who were hunting on the Downs.
. . .
On this day a young officer in the Parliament’s new-modelled army, Cornet George Joyce, carried King Charles prisoner from Holmeby House. My mother saw a portent of this terrible news last month.
. . .
On this day Dr Hannibal Potter was formally removed from the Presidency of Trinity College, but he refuses to leave his lodgings.
. . .
I am at Broad Chalke. My friend Mr John Lydall writes to me from Oxford. He hopes to be able to send me some Aurum Fulminans – or exploding gold – as soon as our chemist (Dr Thomas Willis) has prepared it. It is extremely susceptible to friction when heated and might have medicinal uses, as well as being helpful in our investigations into the nature of combustion. Aurum Fulminans is one of the few explosives not compounded with nitre.
Mr Lydall has not yet received28 my books, but expects them daily. His caution money is 3 li. Mr Ralph Bathurst and my other Trinity College friends send me their love via Mr Lydall: how much I miss their company.
. . .
Mr Lydall has done29 as I asked and delivered my two pairs of sheets and pillow-bed to the carrier: but my towel is still at the laundress’s in Oxford. Mr Bathurst has sent me a catalogue of the writers of the Saracen history. My friends assure me that they are as unhappy as I am that I am deprived of their company and the comforts of my study. They recognise me as one born for the honour and preservation of learning. How I miss them.
. . .
In regard of the recent contempt of Fellows, officers and members of the University of Oxford towards the authority of Parliament, all who will not submit to it shall be removed from their positions in colleges and halls, and the Parliamentarian Visitors will appoint others to their places.
It is difficult to evade the simple question: ‘Do you submit to the authority of Parliament in this Visitation?’
. . .
Hannibal Potter30 has escaped a violent ejection from his lodgings by fleeing in advance. He was found guilty of contempt of the Parliament and will be replaced by a Puritan.
. . .
On this day Parliament passed an Ordinance enabling the Committee for the University of Oxford to send for convicted malignants and to destroy superstitious relics.
. . .
My good friend William Radford has been removed from his Fellowship at Trinity by the Parliamentarian Visitors.
John Wilkins, whose father was an Oxford goldsmith, has been made Warden of Wadham College by the Parliamentarian Visitors.
. . .
The south front31 of Wilton House has burnt down while the rooms were being aired. Philip, Earl of Pembroke, will rebuild it, from designs by Mr John Webb, who is married to Inigo Jones’s niece. Mr Inigo Jones is now too old to come himself to Wilton.
. . .
At Morecomb-bottome32, in the parish of Broad Chalke, on the north side of the river, it has been observed time out of mind that when the water breaks out there, it foretells a dear year of corn. It has happened again this year.
. . .
The walls of the church33 at Broad Chalke, and of the buttery at the farm there, shoot out nitre and a beautiful red, it is lighter than scarlet, an oriental horseflesh colour.
. . .
The River Thames34 runs through Wiltshire on its journey to Oxford. The source of the river is in Gloucestershire, near Cubberley, where there are several springs. Through Wiltshire it visits Cricklade, a market town, and gives its name to Isey, a nearby village, where its overflowings make a most glorious verdure in the spring season.
. . .
Clay abounds in Wiltshire35 and particularly about Malmesbury, Kington St Michael, Allington, Easton Pierse, Draycot Cerne, Yatton Keynell, Minty and Bradon Forest. At Minty, and at a place called Woburn, in the parish of Hankerton, there is the very good absorbent clay called fuller’s earth. Last week I took up a handful of the fuller’s earth at Minty Common, at the place called the Gogges: it was as black as black polished marble; but, having carried it in my pocket five or six days, I find it has become grey.
I believe the name36 Malmesbury comes from Malme, which signifies mud or clay. Some say it comes from the name of the first religious man who settled here – Maidulf – hence Maidulphi Urbs, that is Maidulph’s City, but such an etymology seems forced to me. This is a place of mud.
. . .
Since Christmas Eve, my father has been dangerously ill. My mother is more anxious than ever. In these empty days it is a relief to get out of the house to hunt with friends who live close by: Lord Charles Seymour and Colonel John Penruddock, who was at Blandford School six or seven years before me. Two of John’s younger brothers have been killed fighting for the King, and his father, Sir John Penruddock, like mine, is ill.
. . .
We set off with the hounds37 this morning from the Grey Wethers, which are stones as hard as or harder than marble that lie scattered across the Downs around Marlborough. In some places these stones are sown so thick that travellers in the twilight at a distance take them for flocks of sheep (wethers): hence their name. We headed north through countryside I do not know and it seemed to me we were passing through the place where the Giants fought with great stones against the Gods as described by Hesiod. Then, to my astonishment, we came upon megaliths in a village called Avebury to rival the ones I have known since childhood at Stonehenge. I had not previously heard of these Avebury stones, so when the sight of them burst upon me I reined back my horse and dismounted in wonder. The rest of the hunt passed on, but I stayed marvelling at the bank and ditch and strange stone circles. I tried to picture how they must have looked in olden times. I think Druids erected the circles, and they were complete long ago. I was lost to the present, until suddenly I heard the hounds again and hastened off to overtake them. We rode on to Kennett where there was a good dinner. I will return to draw those stones. It seems to me that Avebury excels Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church.
. . .
On this day, at last38, I met Francis Potter. He is the brother of Hannibal, who was our president at Trinity until the Parliamentarian Visitors ejected him recently, and the author of An Interpretation of the Number 666. Francis is like a monk, quite long-faced, with clear pale skin and grey eyes. He was at Trinity when I first went to Oxford, together with his brother, but we never met. Since then, he has succeeded his father as parson of Kilmington in Somerset. Like me, he was much given to drawing and painting when a boy, and of a very tender constitution in his younger years. He says that when he was beginning to be sick, he would breathe strongly to emit the noxious vapours.
Mr Potter says that the idea of moving blood from one body to another came to him ten years ago from reading Ovid. He is haunted by the barbarous Medea, mixing her witch’s brew: roots, juices, flowers, seeds, stones, the screech owl’s flesh and its ill-boding wings. He sees her, hair all unbound and blown about as she dances round, throwing more ingredients into the gruesome mix: the head of an old crow, the scaly skins of small snakes. Medea slit her lover’s father’s throat. She drained the blood of old Aeson and replaced it with her youth-giving medicine. Aeson’s hair turned black again, colour came to his cheeks, his flesh plumped up behind his skin and his wrinkles disappeared.
Mr Potter says he will try moving blood between chickens. He is brooding on the quills or tubes that might allow the transfer from one bird to another to take place. He intends to make a little bag, perhaps from the craw of a pullet, to catch the blood when it comes down the tube, and hold it there until it can be transfused into another bird. He is wondering how it might be possible to fix the quill to the bag so it will not let the blood seep out and spoil the experiment. I have promised to help him.
Mr Potter does many experiments. He showed me bees’ thighs under a microscope. He gave me a copper quadrant and a silver one, and showed me that the best way of making an arch is with a parabola and chain. This he demonstrated by taking the girdle from his cassock and holding it against a wall. He has a pretty square garden with the finest box-hedges I have ever seen. They are planted on a mount at the centre of the garden, and cut to look like fortifications, with high pillars of box standing out, looking very stately both summer and winter. It troubles me that a man of Mr Potter’s gifts should lie mouldering away in a place like Kilmington, where he has no one to discuss his ideas with. He is like an old carrying pail growing moss in an orchard. Mr Hobbes has often said to me that such isolation is a great setback, even to the deepest-thinking of men.
. . .
These are the peaks39 in Wiltshire: Clay-hill, near Warminster; the Castle-hill at Mere, and Knoll-hill, near Kilmington, which is half in Wiltshire, and half in Somersetshire; all of them seem to have been raised (like great blisters) by earthquakes. Mr Potter takes great delight in Knoll-hill. We climbed it together today. It gives an admirable prospect every way; and from the summit you can see the Fosse Way between Cirencester and Gloucester, which is forty miles away. And you can see the Isle of Wight, Salisbury steeple, the Severn Sea, etc. It would make an admirable station for someone intending to draft a geographical description of Wiltshire or Somerset.
. . .
Mr Potter tells me stories40 of his great Trinity friend Sir Henry Blount, who travelled to the Levant. Sir Henry was pretty wild when young and especially addicted to common wenches. He appears in Henry Nevill’s satirical pamphlet, The Parliament of Ladies (1647), responsible for spreading the dangerous doctrine that it is far cheaper and safer to lie with common wenches than with ladies of quality. He is gentleman pensioner to the King and was with him at the Battle of Edgehill, and afterwards in Oxford. When he returned to London, he walked into Westminster Hall with his sword by his side. The Parliamentarians all stared at him; they knew he was a Cavalier who had fought with the King. He was called before the House of Commons, where he insisted he was only doing his duty, so they acquitted him.
. . .
The trial of the King has ended and his fate is decided. The court has decreed: ‘That the King, for the crimes contained in the charge, should be carried back to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of execution, where his head should be severed from his body.’ My kinsman Sir John Danvers has been serving on the committee that tried the King and will now be one of those that signs the death warrant.
Mr Emanuel Decretz41, Serjeant Painter to the King, tells me that the bed of state erected in Westminster Abbey for the King’s father’s funeral was designed by Inigo Jones from plaster of Paris and white calico: it was very handsome and cheap, showing as well as if the caryatids which bore up the canopy had been cut from white marble. The present King must expect a lesser funeral.
. . .
On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid. The executioner was masked, so no one could tell his name.
On the scaffold, the King declared: ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ It is said that James Harrington and Thomas Herbert were with him on the platform and that before he died, the King gave them watches. And it is said that while he was a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle, and on the eve of his execution, the King recited Pamela’s Prayer from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: ‘Look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance unto me.’
I read these lines in the library at Wilton. I walked on the terrace there, when I was a boy, hoping to see the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney or his sister Mary. The world since then is changed utterly. His Majesty loved Wilton above all places; now he is dispatched to a place outside of time. We who remain behind must weather the disturbance of the world. The King is dead.
