EIGHTEEN
LUMLEY’S LIBRARY AND TAVERN WITS
As if the gods conspired to advance Henry’s ambitions, his host at Nonsuch Palace, Lord Lumley, died in April 1609. Lumley’s exceptional library, a resource for the prince and his tutors since they arrived at Nonsuch, passed to Henry. Should Henry succeed in his push to have full control of his princely inheritance, then he would be more than able to look after Lumley’s beautiful books and manuscripts. Henry paid one of Lumley’s librarians Anthony Alcock £8 13s 4d to catalogue the items, to ensure nothing went missing when he moved them. By July the bulk of the collection had been transferred to his principal palaces, St James’s and Richmond.
James shared his son’s excitement, offering to pay to improve the fabric of the library at St James’s. Father and son added shelves and tables to display maps and manuscripts, and ordered new desks and chairs. They had the walls brightly painted and sent the books they thought especially significant away to be bound in red leather and tooled in gold leaf with Henry’s arms, and ‘HP’ – Henricus Princeps – cipher. Adding Lumley’s collection to the old royal library of Elizabeth I, Henry re-founded the Royal Library as the country’s major archive of learned texts.
The library’s science section included the standard authors on subjects as diverse as mineralogy, zoology, botany, ichthyology, mathematics, alchemy, and astrology. Of all the sciences, Lumley, like Henry, loved geography most and had books showing routes that could expand the prince’s reach across the globe. Contemporary accounts of voyages by Purchas, Hakluyt, and Ralegh, sat with records of the great modern historical voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Space was made for ancient accounts of journeys to Malacca, Ethiopia, Egypt, Persia and India, Tartary, Asia and Sumatra. Edward Wright, Henry’s genius navigator and tutor, became the Science Librarian. He added to Lumley’s core collection, gradually putting together a large, practical body of work on mathematics, cosmography, and navigation.
Lord Lumley’s love of astrology and astronomy showed in his extensive collection of almanacs and treatises on the spheres. Henry’s collegiate court had the classical astronomers, Ptolemy and Strabo, with their maps of the heavens and the earth. On cosmology, Aristotle, Philo, Pomponius Mela, and Cicero were all available for consulting. Under Henry’s patronage, the contemporary cosmographers Thomas Lydiat and Johannes Kepler came to gather evidence to refute the Ptolemaic system of a static, earth-centred universe. Lydiat enjoyed the salaried post of his royal Cosmographer and Chronographer – the prince’s mapper of the heavens and theorist of the nature of time. Henry added in his own books on religious themes and all aspects of the military arts. Books on these subjects, dedicated to him, arrived at court continually.
Henry’s exceptional possessions formed the bank of materials. His prestige gave the possibility of funding for research, available pretty much nowhere else in England. Long-term inmates of the Tower, Sir Walter Ralegh and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had their own library and laboratory men came to use. But Prince Henry’s collections would be the major centre of information in the future. Like the great library at Heidelberg in the Palatinate, and Tycho Brahe’s island laboratory in Denmark, Henry’s courtly college exerted a magnetic pull on some of the best minds in Britain and Europe. The library at St James’s drew in scientists, explorers and ‘projectors’.
Henry loved history. History analysed kingship, statecraft, national security, territorial expansion, prosperity, legitimacy and the roots of the laws of England, and leadership in peace and in the wars – subjects of compelling relevance for a future ruler. The library’s history section contained over 600 volumes on Greek, Roman, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Hebrew and world history. (Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was catalogued under history.) Controversial authors, favourites of Henry’s, like Tacitus, sat with approved (by James) writers such as Caesar and Xenophon; all of them mixed in with various ancient chronicles, and histories of England by living historians such as Sir John Hayward, who had written his history of The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV for the late Earl of Essex and soon began a history of the first three Norman kings for Prince Henry. This section of the library also housed the contemporary political tracts of men such as William Camden.
The influence of Cranmer, architect of the Reformation under Henry VIII, showed in the theology section. Its volumes were busily annotated with Cranmer’s comments. Many books had both Cranmer and Lumley’s names on the front page. Some were rebound in Prince Henry’s bindings, drawing all three men together. The oldest book was Cranmer’s eighth-century copy of Augustine, looted from Canterbury Cathedral.
Lighter material in the philosophy and belles-lettres section included Jodocus Willich’s cookbook, a volume on The Art of Magic (1583) and a book of jokes. There was plenty of poetry, though nothing too lowbrow: no broadsheets, ballads or plays. So, no Shakespeare or Jonson dramas.
Masses of music books and manuscripts of works by Tallis, Byrd, chansons and motets by various hands; the scores of Ruffo and Gabrielli, waited for Prince Henry’s musicians to pick them up. One manuscript was ‘a song of forty parts made by Mr Tallis’, Spem in alium nunquam habui. These were the sounds of Henry’s world. He heard music every day. The twelve musicians who ended up on his payroll needed a huge repertoire of French, English and Italian romantic songs, new and old, madrigals, vocal pieces for differing numbers of voices. Henry added to them constantly. His household processed one invoice after another for the ‘pricking of books’ for musical notation.
Once the Nonsuch library was settled in, the royal librarians pointed out gaps, decided what to sell – mostly legal and medical volumes and duplicates – and guided Henry to buy editions they lacked. Henry would acquire more books in the next three years than James did in his whole lifetime.
Men applied, implored even, for a place in Henry’s household, adding to the hundreds here, who were causing Sir Thomas Chaloner such logistical and budgetary nightmares to accommodate. Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher and champion of modern science, wrote little advices to himself on how to get a toehold close to Henry. He was an ambitious politician, and yet another follower of the late Earl of Essex who was now drawn to Henry’s court. One of the notes to self read: I am ‘making much of Russell that depends upon Sir David Murray, and by that means drawing Sir David, and Sir Thomas Chaloner, [and] in time, the Prince. Getting from Russell a collection of phenomena, of surgery, distillations, mineral trials.’ Thomas Russell was ‘a mineral projector’, an associate of David Murray and Thomas Chaloner.
Henry persuaded Chaloner to commandeer part of the Savoy hospital, on the Strand, in order to modify it for chemical experiments by those who were using his scientific books and instruments. Despite Bacon’s well thought-out networking, his personal brilliance and connections to the old Essexians in Henry’s household, his plotting did not manage to get him in.
Although a genius like Bacon failed, plenty of professional men, on lower rungs of the social ladder, were given a seat at Henry’s supper tables. Especially if they amused him. Some of these newcomers were part of an expanding tavern society in London. Several attended a formal drinking club called the ‘Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen’, or Sireniacs, which met in the dining rooms of the Mitre tavern in Fleet Street, or the Mermaid tavern in Bread Street. Thomas Coryate, ‘traveller for the English wits’, was their resident master of ceremonies. Their activities threw light on the tone of Henry’s supper tables.
A tavern wit might be a member of the Inns of Court, an MP, one of Prince Henry’s followers, or, say, an investor in the Virginia Company – and often several of these. Lawyer-orator wits, the bane of King James, and later Charles I, gathered round Henry. Ambitious overachievers of the middling sort, they competed for preferment. From Henry’s circle, the Sireniacs included: Sir Robert Phelips, Richard Connock, Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson, Sir Henry Goodyer, Coryate, George Chapman and Sir Robert Dallington.
The tavern wits met to banter, dine and drink, and debate affairs of God and state, in an environment neither private nor public, court nor common, but halfway between the two. Beaumont’s epistle to Ben Jonson captured the heady pleasure of those nights:
… what things we have seen,
Done at the Mermaid? Hard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one …
Had meant to put his whole wit in a Jest …
They spoke with daring and freedom about the liberties they enjoyed as Englishmen, and those they lacked. Jonson contributed, by ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, promising:
No simple word
That shall be utter’d at our mirthfull board
Shall make us sad next morning: or affright
The libertie, that wee’ll enjoy to-night.
They indulged in wide-ranging political discourse on the state of the nation, away from the ruling aristocratic elites. ‘Libertie’ was the watchword.
At one Mitre tavern meeting they held a convivium philosophicum. A classical Roman convivium was a satiric feast. Back from his travels, Coryate’s role at the meeting, and at Henry’s home, was to relax the guests and heighten the atmosphere. Sireniacs were expected to stay poised between sobriety and drunkenness all night, as they explored an edgy mix of pleasures and poetic libels and the social and political tensions of the times. One thing was essential: the right to speak ‘hard words’ came with the use of ‘wit’ or ‘jest’, but not invective.
At this particular convivium, the Sireniacs discussed Henry and his growing frustration with the limits on his political role and power. One of them wrote a long anonymous poem afterwards, recalling all they said, and about whom. ‘Prince Henry cannot idly liven,/Desiring matter to be given,/To prove his valour good.’
They added to the chorus criticising court decadence, sympathising when ‘Suffolk seeking in severe sort,/The King his household to coerce,/Is still defatigated’ in his efforts to restrain the king from his incontinent engorging of ‘court Cormorants’, such as Carr – flapping their ‘silken scarves and their spangles’ to attract his attention.
‘Sweet-meats and Coryate’ made up the last course at all court entertainments at St James’s, as they did in the Mermaid and Mitre taverns. Coryate ‘was the Courtier’s anvil to try their wits upon, and sometimes the anvil returned the hammer as hard knocks as it received’. No one called Coryate a fool with impunity, except ‘those who had as much learning as himself’. As a group, their preferred tone of competitive tavern banter would have bubbled up to enliven the aristocratic world of Henry’s court. Hardly anyone lived at court full-time. When not on the rota to serve the prince, members of Henry’s household moved back into these other worlds.
Such individuals, engaged in an exciting spirit of discussion, freedom of expression and movement, were nurturing the tentative shoots of a civic political nation, as an alternative to the aristocratic one. Returning to St James’s, they connected Henry to the discourses of the wider Jacobean world, beyond palaces and courts. They could imagine working under King Henry IX, to reform the establishment along the progressive, Tacitus-inspired political lines they discussed in the taverns and at St James’s. But if the circle around Henry thought and talked for change and political progress on these contractual, Tacitean lines, could the genie be put back in the bottle under a more conservative ruler?