1. A Kentish upbringing (1578–1593): ‘Half Farmer and half Gentleman’

THOMAS HARVEY (1549–1623), William’s father, came from a long line of industrious and prosperous sheep farmers, who owned property and land around Folkestone. The Harveys were proud of their birthplace and their well-to-do yeoman status. Kentish men, famed for their courage and independence, formed a cohesive and immediately identifiable regional group. So singular were they that they were popularly believed to possess tails (a legend possibly derived from their heroic defence of England during the invasion of William the Conqueror, when they reputedly dragged trees behind them, then lifted them above their heads to threaten the French). When the rich twang of the Kentish accent, and their characteristic addition of the letter ‘o’ to words (transforming ‘my’, into ‘moi’, ‘going’ into ‘gooing’ etc.) was heard in the taverns of the English capital, Londoners would mimic the ‘long-Kentish-tailed’ speaker.

Yeomen, who were officially defined as ‘freemen born English’ depending ‘on their own free land in yearly revenue to the sum of [at least] forty shillings’, constituted a no less homogeneous and recognizable class. Their defining attribute was honesty, a combination of integrity and candour, solidity and stolidity. ‘Yeoman’s bread’, which contained only native bran, may have been rougher than foreign bread but it was more honest, being both tasty and filling. Honesty also denoted diligence: ‘Being a good housekeeper’, a social commentator wrote, the yeoman ‘is an honest man; and so he rises early in the morning; and being up, he hath no end of motion, but wanders in his woods so continually that when he sleeps or sits, he wanders also’. As these virtues were seen as quintessentially English, yeomen came to be regarded as emblems of the nation. They were the ‘filling stones’ in the wall of the English Commonwealth, the very ‘pith and substance of the country’.

From character sketches of William Harvey later penned by his aristocratic acquaintances, the doctor emerges as an archetypal yeoman. One noble friend christened him ‘Ye little perpetual mov[ement] Dr Heruye’, because of his boundless energy and unquenchable desire to ‘satisfy his curiosity’ – Harvey would, he said, always be ‘making excursions into the Woods where he was like to be lost’ in order to make ‘Observations of strange Trees, and plants, and earths etc.’ The same aristocrat also referred to the physician as the ‘little honest Doctor Hervey’; nor was he the only courtier to allude to this yeoman virtue. Another praised Harvey’s ‘discreate and honest caryage … and his parents and friends are so honest people, as I dare (and that without daringe) venter lyfe and lymme for him’.

Yeomen, it was said, ‘have a certain pre-eminence, and more estimation than … the rascabilitie [i.e.] husbandmen [tenant farmers], labourers, and the lowest sort of people … yeomen are also for the most part farmers to gentlemen, and with grazing [and] frequenting of markets … do come to great wealth, insomuch that many are able and do buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen’. Although the popular saying had it that the yeoman of Kent was ‘half Farmer and half Gentleman’, the odds were against him ever being absorbed fully into ranks of the aristocracy.

According to sixteenth-century preachers, ‘God hath appointed every man his degree and office, within the limits whereof it behoveth him to keep himself.’ Many gentlemen of the period maintained that ‘Those who rushed upon professions and ways of life unequal to their natures, dishonour not only themselves … but pervert the harmony of the whole world.’ Conservative elements of the establishment wanted to restrict social mobility, proposing a limit on the amount of land yeomen could purchase, as well as a cap on the number of yeomen’s sons entering the Inns of Court, the gateway to the legal profession.

Yet despite such schemes, the sixteenth century was a propitious time for upward mobility, offering numerous opportunities to the enterprising, and where there was a will there was often a way. As a result of a sharp population increase, the more ambitious and fortunate yeomen profited, exploiting new markets, at the expense of those lower down the social scale.

Clergymen held that self-interest and social interest were incompatible, condemning as immoral self-made men who amassed personal fortunes. Thomas Harvey, however, had no qualms about getting on. Capitalizing on Folkestone’s proximity to the Continent, and its extensive national and international trading links, he used the family coffers to found a courier service for goods and letters, which he circulated across Southern England and France. Profits from his business, along with the revenue he drew from the extensive Harvey lands and properties, amounted to a sum well over the annual forty shillings entitling him to yeomanly status. Thomas occupied an exalted position within the yeoman class, as did many of his fellow Kentishmen, who were popularly believed to ‘bear the bell for wealth from all the yeoman rank in England’.

By 1575, the twenty-five-year-old had accumulated enough money to secure an excellent match in the marriage market, wedding Juliana Halke (or Hawke). Following her sudden death a year later, Thomas immediately formed an alliance with one of her cousins, Joan. Although they were not of aristocratic status, the Halkes were wealthy enough to warrant a brass plaque in their local church, at Hasting-Leigh, adorned with their family emblem, the hawk.

Thomas may also have worshipped at Hasting-Leigh, where Joan’s father was a churchwarden. Attendance at church was compulsory on Sundays, on pain of a 12d fine, under Queen Elizabeth’s 1558 Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy. These Acts had re-established the Protestant Church of England (founded by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII) with the monarch at its head, following the five-year reign of Queen Mary (1553–1558), during which the country had reverted to its ‘Old Faith’, Catholicism. The Harveys seem to have successfully negotiated the violent religious vicissitudes, and hostilities, of the period. Thomas certainly had no difficulty conforming to the Elizabethan dispensation, orthodoxy with regard to the next world being a requisite for those who wished to succeed in this one. Not that his attitude to religion was cynical – like all of the Harveys (William included), Thomas sincerely held the broad Christian beliefs of the time, concerning divine providence, the afterlife, and God’s creation and continuing guidance of the natural world. It is likely that Thomas listened dutifully, even approvingly, to the official sermons that issued from the country pulpit, typically delivered ‘against idleness’, ‘un-cleanliness’ and ‘excess of Apparel’.

On 1 April 1578, Thomas and Joan’s first son William was born in Folkestone in a ‘faire-built stone’ house known as the post-house, which was probably the headquarters of Thomas’ flourishing business operations. Mrs Harvey, a ‘Godly harmless woman’, and a ‘charitable quiet Neighbour’ (according to a brass tablet placed in the parish church on her death) matched her husband’s industry, and lived up to her reputation as a ‘provident diligent Huswyfe’, by bearing him six further sons and two daughters.

Nothing is known about Harvey’s childhood, but it is possible to imagine aspects of it from his later life. As an adult, he saw nature in microscopic detail, and was endlessly curious about its operations – and in such cases (the most famous example being Leonardo da Vinci) the child is often father of the man. He gazed intently at spiders, as they were, in the words of his writings, ‘borne through the air by an invisible thread spun from their own bodies’; he listened to the ‘neighing of horses’ and noted how the attendant ‘motion agitated’ their diaphragms; he measured the tongues of dogs, and laughed as they ‘rolled about and scratched themselves’; he was fascinated by the animation of animals in coitus, and amused to see them quite ‘crestfallen’ and ‘pin-buttockt’d’ after the event. He was both drawn to, and repelled by, the strong smell of animal excrement; he felt impelled to put his hand inside the carcass of a pig, to feel the ‘buttery, oyly’ texture of its fat. He was knowledgeable about hens’ eggs, and, after patient study, could tell ‘which hen in a flock had lain a given egg’.

Young William must have delighted in observing such marvels on his jaunts through the rolling hills, cherry-filled orchards and hayfields of Kent, famed as the ‘garden of England’. The boy was doubtless drawn to the sea too, and to its myriad creatures, learning how to identify the various molluscs which clung to the sandstone rocks that cup Folkestone’s beach, and how to ‘flatter’ the ‘cunning’ trout there ‘into destruction with an angle’.

The mature Harvey retained the country-boy’s idiomatic and colourful manner of speech, often uttering curses such as ‘damme’. His ‘ordinary drink’, a friend said, ‘whereof he used to drink much’, was ‘pleasant Water-Cider’, a classic Kentish yeoman’s beverage, which Harvey himself brewed. ‘Take one bushel of Pippins,’ his recipe went, ‘cut them into slices … boil them till the goodness of them be in the water … put a point of Ale-yeast to it, and set it working two nights and days … till the yeast fall dead at the top … Within a fortnight you may drink of it.’ Here the voice of Harvey’s childhood can be heard, speaking the language and lore of Kent.

Harvey’s father had two aims in life: to raise himself (and thereby his sons) to the status of a gentleman, and to see his boys become wealthier than himself and any of their forebears. Gentlemanly status was often difficult to secure – an official government grant of the right to bear a coat of arms being a prerequisite. The acquisition of arms, according to a commentator, ‘set upon [the yeoman] like an ague … it breaks [his] sleep, takes away his stomach, and he can never be quiet till the herald hath given him the cuckoo … or some ridiculous emblem for his arms. The bringing up and marriage of his eldest son is an ambition which afflicts him as soon as the boy is born, and the hope to see his son superior … drives him to dote upon the boy in his cradle.’

The eldest son bore the full burden of his father’s expectations. While his brothers would be bound as apprentices in trade, a step that involved relatively little expense for the head of the household, William was instead bred to learning. Education was costly but Thomas was determined that his firstborn advance in the world, and he knew that his best hope of doing so lay through study. Sending their eldest sons to school was a characteristic strategy of yeomen who defied the common prejudice that knowledge of husbandry, and Scripture, was more than enough for their offspring. Gentlemen, as well as preachers, fulminated against the foundation of grammar schools, which catered for ‘the vulgar sort, who be subject [only] to obey’.

Nevertheless grammar schools proliferated in the sixteenth century, nurturing the minds of countless ‘upstarts’ and ‘mushrooms’ from the yeoman class such as William Shakespeare.¹ The nearest grammar school to Folkestone was the King’s School in Canterbury, which had been established in the middle of the century for the benefit of ‘fifty poor boys, both destitute of the aid of friends and endowed with minds born and apt for learning’. ‘Let the poor man’s child’, the statutes read, ‘enter the [school] room’; William Harvey entered it in 1588, at around the age of ten.

At King’s Harvey learned a little Greek and a smattering of Hebrew. The focus of the lessons was Latin – the language in which most of them were taught, and in which the student had to respond at all times. The school day began at six, opening with lengthy prayers, followed by long lessons until seven in the evening. During classes any inattention was punished with a severe beating. ‘If any … boy’, the statutes read, ‘be remarkable for extraordinary slowness and dullness [he will be] expelled and another substituted that he may not like a drone devour the honey of the bees.’ Mealtimes offered a welcome break, but little in the way of pleasure: the frugal diet consisted of milk, eggs, bread, butter and a little meat.

William is unlikely to have complained about the exacting academic demands, the regimented school life, or the food; it is impossible to picture him as Shakespeare’s ‘whining schoolboy’, creeping ‘like a snail unwillingly to school’. He had been brought up strictly, and no doubt on honest yeoman fare. In any case, to have complained would have been tantamount to disobeying his father, and a sixteenth-century son was expected to obey his father in all things. On encountering Thomas, in public as well as in private, it was customary for William to kneel down and ask his father’s blessing.

With the encouragement of Thomas, and the support of a family renowned in the community for its solidarity, Harvey excelled at school. He convinced the schoolmasters (and, more importantly, his father) that he had the requisite industry and intelligence to embark on a university degree, and could justify the expense this would entail. At the age of fifteen William became the first ever Folkestone Harvey to attend university.

1 Harvey evidently recognized the importance of grammar schools, both for himself and for the commonwealth as a whole. He would later found his own grammar school, leaving money in his will for the establishment of a sizeable institution in Folkestone. The school was founded in 1674 by his nephew, Sir Eliab Harvey, executor of Harvey’s estate. The Harvey Grammar School for Boys is one of only 150 or so state-funded secondary education grammar schools that remain open in England today.