I have been sent a link for a trial look at Gale / Cengage Learning’s new database, ‘Witchcraft in Europe and America’. For my medium to small sized institution, they are offering it at £9,995 for an outright purchase, though with a £200 hosting fee per year, or an annual subscription of £2,500. Oh, those figures are minus VAT, which will go up soon.
For the money, you get 914 works, with 263,208 page images (many of the early works on witchcraft are insanely massive, as well as insanely everything else).
But we are already at more than £10 a work. So, what do you get? The search engine is like the search engine for the Gale 18th and 19th century newspaper and periodical databases. Advanced search gives you the usual permutations of author, keyword, document title, with the normal repertoire of Boolean operators, and when you get your results, you can search within an individual document, or, if you have searched for a keyword, it shows you the page number to click on to get your ‘hit’. You can limit your search by date, or by language.
Very regrettably, there is no way to search for documents with illustrations, and when you light upon a work with illustrations, like Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum, 1626, you can’t jump from illustration to illustration, or see the thumbnails of the page images in the way EEBO lets you do (a device that helps you locate charts, chapters, indices, annotations, pictures, etc). Here, you have to go page by page, and look them out, and it’s very good for you not to cut corners.
So, limiting to ‘English’ (and unless I have missed a trick, which is possible, you can’t distinguish English, Scottish, or American works) gives you 214 results, though a few of these are German writings that have had an English title added to them by earlier scholars. 36 items in English carries you to 1650, which seems wrong. Henry Goodcole on Elizabeth Sawyer is not here, and other things can’t be: EEBO returns 61 records for a search on the subject ‘Witchcraft’ from 1473-1650. You’d think you might get page images of the 19th century edition of Edward Fairfax’s ‘Demonologie’ (and images of the manuscript too, at the price).
Here’s one return off the new database, cut and pasted off the site (I have only removed its function in the database as a URL):
The Witch Of Wapping; Or, An Exact And Perfect Relation Of The Life And Devilish Practises Of Joan Peterson, Who Dwelt In Spruce Island, Near Wapping; Who Was Condemned For Practising Witch-Craft, And Sentenced To Be Hanged At Tyburn, On Munday The 11th [Sic] Of April, 1652. Shewing, How The Bewitch'd A Child, And Rock'd The Cradle In The Likeneffe Of A Cat; How The Frighted A Baker; And How The Devil Often Came To Fuck Her, Fometimes In The Likenefs Of A Dog, And At Other Times Like A Squirrel. Together With The Confession Of Prudence Lee, Who Was Burnt In Smithfield On Saturday The 10th. Of This Infrant For The Murthering Her Husband; And Her Admonition And Counfel To All Her Sex In General.
Oh, the devil came to fuck her, did he? Well, maybe it came to that too, but not in a 17th century book title he didn’t. He came to suck her, ‘fometimes in the likenefs of a Dog’: the not well-instructed copy typist has made all the long s’s into F’s. The database’s full text search engine will obligingly find you lots more unnatural ‘fucks’, as it is trying to work by letter-recognition.
It does look a bit half-hearted on the English side of things. Maybe they thought EEBO covers all the STC (and EEBO will find for you discussions of witchcraft which do not feature here, as for instance Anima mundi, or, An historical narration of the opinions of the ancients concerning man's soul after this life according to unenlight[e]ned nature / by Charles Blount, Gent. 1679, a decent and civilised book. I assume that Gale’s own ECCO database also contains the 18th century books.
So, what does it have? The print page images display very well, and you can make them into a full screen display. The collection of European books on witchcraft is excellent, with edition after edition of the major works, and all kinds of unheard of works. The long reach into the late 17th and 18th century is very instructive. The database lets you see the impact of each of the important sceptics, all the nasty backwoodsmen rushing out of their holes when Balthazar Bekker published his ‘Enchanted World’. And I did not know that this translation existed (from Laurent Bordelon’s original):
A History Of The Ridiculous Extravagancies Of Monsieur Oufle; Occasion'd By His Reading Books Treating Of Magick, The Black-Art, Daemoniacks, Conjurers, Witches, Hobgobins, Incubus's, Succubus's, And The Diabolical-Sabbath; Of Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius's, Spectres And Ghosts; Of Dreams, The Philosopher's-Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes, Talismans, Lucky And Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets, And All Sorts Of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments, And Other Superstitious Practices. With Notes Containing A Multitude Of Quotations Out Of Those Books, Which Have Either Caused Such Extravagant Imaginations, Or May Serve To Cure Them. Written Originally In French, By The Abbot B----; And Now Translated Into English1711.
Among the printed works are images of trial transcripts, notes from interrogations, and other manuscript materials. Here's a screen-grab of the database in action, with a manuscript that’s called, intriguingly, ‘How to dishroud a witch’. It’s in Cornell, the main source collection, it’s early 17th century. And that’s what you get: there’s no transcript, no further information, and it just can’t be read at any magnification.
You see, the database lets you get on with it, saying: ‘Here it is, most of it, you’re a scholar, start reading’. There’s no editorial material appended, title pages are not translated, and sample translations are something you are left to dream of. My main image is just to show how rebarbative the earlier texts can be. It’s from Tractatus Maleficorum D. Angeli De Gambilionibus De Aretio Cum Omnibus Additionibus Novissime Per Ipsum Factis Post Compillatione Hujus Aurei Ac Preciocissimi Operis (Lugduni: 1490). That seems to be a block of the text, wrapped around with learned notes. No wonder these learned folk thought witches were damned, when they were so ready to offer hell to all their readers too.
I am enchanted, I will get my institution to pay for the whole database right now. I trust fairy gold will be acceptable?
Over to Stonor House, which I had not visited for many years. The house sits inconspicuously in dry side-valley of this chalk landscape, three stories high at the front, and just one at the back, orientated south, as if towards countries more favourable to its owners’ obstinately held Catholicism. Considering the history of oppressed faith to which the house has been witness (and more recent troubles) it’s a surprisingly pleasant house, its elements of Strawberry Hill Gothick alleviating what could be an oppressive family history.
Upstairs, in a room dedicated to the memory of Edmund Campion, you can peer through into the place under the eaves where Stephen Brinkley’s fugitive and clandestine press ran off the Decem Rationes, Campion’s suicidally brave ‘Ten reasons for the confidence with which Edmund Campion offered his adversaries to dispute on behalf of our Faith, set before the famous men of our Universities’. From this room copies were taken on horseback for their audaciously direct ‘setting forth’, when Father William Hartley left copies on the benches in St Mary’s Church, Oxford, to be picked up by every student attending a Commencement service (27th June, 1581), a kind of degree ceremony where ‘student supplicants for degrees were required to defend their theses’ (ODNB, Campion).
What a sensational morning that must have been! Campion’s coup perhaps gave pace to his inevitable doom: it was the flow of Oxford students eager to meet and talk with him, and talking about him, that brought his betrayer, George Eliot, to Lyford Grange, a temporary but dangerous refuge from which Campion had already departed, but students insisted that he return there, and preach.
I had never actually read the ‘Ten Reasons’ (to my shame), and the tour of the house persuaded me that I ought to do so. I read the 1632 translation. I had not expected such a spirited read, but this was ignorance on my part: Campion clearly aimed to captivate his young male readership by continuing in the same vein as his previous challenge or ‘brag’: the book enacts his positions of attack and defence in the intellectual duel he was denied (it being Campion’s wish to maintain his faith against the best theologians among his adversary Protestants):
“I did fervently demaund the Combat; not that jocularie and sportfull skirmish, which the vulgar performe in their publike streets; but that severe and grave conflict, by which we may encounter in the Schooles of your owne Universities…”
It is a book of challenge, and charge, of direct combat, with even his opponents conceding the pun on his name: “like a jolly Champion yee challeng the Combat”,
‘this bragging Champion’ who was willing to take on anyone sent out against him (and the first attempts to answer his challenge were utterly, embarrassingly, pedestrian, awkwardly jocose and without any of Campion’s gentlemanly élan).
Campion’s attacks were sweeping, while his defence gave no ground in the cause for which he fought, and for which he would die. Here he assails Martin Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin - Luther for his marriage to his Sister in Christ, Katherina von Bora:
“that unhappie Monke had polluted a Virgin (devoted to God) by incestuous copulation, or that Swash-buckler & Roaring-Boyof Helvetia had conspired against his Countrie, or that Stigmaticall fugitiue had impatronized himself of Geneva.”
The personal attack on Luther is mainly sexual. Campion is addressing young men undertaking study at a university of celibate fellows, far from marriage themselves, so it was effective (and easy) to make Luther sound incorrigibly permissive, establish a common ground between the students and the Jesuit addressing them so directly: “There yet remaine behind certaine most hurtfull gobbetts of Hereticall doctrine, touching life and Manners; the which Luther had vomited out in his papers, that so from the impure belching of his stomach, he might inhale & breath poyson into his Readers. Heare ô you Academians) with patience, but withall blush (for I presume your cheekes cannot endure such vnchast words) and pardon me, being the Relatour. If thewife will not, nor can performe the due of marriadge, let the chamber-mayde come, and stepp in her roome. Certainly the art of Venerie is as necessarieto euerie one, (see what filth he disgorgeth) as meate, drinke, or sleepe. Matrimonie is much more excellent then Virginitie, since from this latterChrist and Paul haue dehorted all Christians.” ~ Luther’s ‘Sermon on Matrimony’, apparently.
On matters of doctrine, Campion first, and most astutely, attacks Protestantism for what it had actually dared to do to the Bible Protestants so hotly maintained, particularly in the excision of the Book of Wisdom: “But what would the said Father (i.e., St Augustine) say, if he were here conversing upon earth, and should behold divers Luthers and Calvins to become Bible-makers, who with their polishing fyle and castigation have shaved the Old and New Testament…?”
The New Testament provides the proof text for Catholicism: “The words thereof even depose the Truth in our behalfe; Hoc est corpus meum; hic est sanguis meus”. The sheer directness of this thrust, the brow-beating confidence is the thing: no more really need be said.
Meanwhile, Protestant teachings are heresies which he, Campion, will not allow their authors to disown, and he produces a few prize examples: “I will cause them to owne these their Axioms and Principles: God is the authour and cause of Sinne, willing, suggesting, effecting, commanding, working, and gouerning the flagitious counsells of the wicked: As the calling of Paul, so the adulterieof Dauid, and the impietie of Judas the proditour, was the peculiar hand-worke of God. Campion supplies the incriminatory side-notes, of course, so that his impressionable readers can see for themselves the truth that has been kept from them; Calvin’s Institutes and Peter Martyr on the Book of Samuel being fingered here.
Campion has all the gifts for this sort of thing: alertness for examples, a capacity for witheringly scornful paraphrase and extrapolation, and a brass neck. You’d hardly have thought the murder of the Duke of Guise a tactful choice for the worst of sins, but it’s wittily done, and demonstrates Campion’s utter unwillingness to deviate: the Duke was a Catholic hero, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre nothing to worry about as remotely detracting from the Duke’s status:
“This also is obvious and frequent in their Schoole. That all Sinnes are equall; yet with this cautionarie explication … if God, as Judge, doe ballance them. As if God, who is a most just Judge, (and yet coveteth to overweigh more in Mercie, then Justice) should rather by exaggerating our offence, adde a heape than ease, to our burden. And thus in this trutination of Sinnes, it followeth, that that Cook doth not commit a lesser sinne against God most severely judging, who should kill (when there is no neede) gallum gallinaceum, a dung-hill cock, then that infamous Homicide did, which (being full of Beza) murthered with his pistol Gallum Heroa Guisit(ite?)m, the Noble French Guyse; a Prince of unmatcheable Vertue; then which facinorous act our part of Christendome in this our Age hath seene nothing more detestable, nothing more deplorable.”
(The priestly translator of Campion uses that excellent 16th and 17th century word, ‘trutination’, a mental weighing up.)
Here he brushes aside the charge of bad faith in the tragic case of Jan Hus: “A precipitate and headlong malice did overreach this Incendiarie; For after he had stirred up great combustions and Tragedies in his owne Country of Bohemia, he was commanded to make his stay at Constance; He contemned the prerogatiue of the Councell; demaunded warrant of the Emperour. The Emperour sealed thereto. The Christian World (more potent then the Emperour) unsealed. To renounce his Novelismes, this Arch-heretike could not be induced; he perished.”
Not to be a Catholic will be to end up in Hell with all the other persecutors of the true church:
“But now on the contrarie side, if it please, let us peepe and looke downe into Hell. There lye broyling in a sempiternal conflagration and flames of fire: Who? The Jewes. To which Church professed they an implacable hatred and hostilitie? To our Church. Who more? The Heathens. What Church have they most tyranniously persecuted? Ours. Who besides? Tbe Turks. Whose Temples and Oratories have they demolished and beaten downe? Ours. Who yet? The Hereticks. Against what Church have they made their trayterous Insurrections and rebellious Assaults? Against our Church. For what other Church, then Ours, (still breathing new Spirits of fervour) hath layed batterie against all the gates of Hell?”
Campion points out to his readers that Catholic truth is in all the older theologians: it is useless to try to embargo, or seek out and destroy latter day writings from his church, for historically Catholic teachings remain in every bookshop:
“The day is too short, and indeede the Sunne must runne a greater circle of his course to serve my turne, before I can number the Epistles, Sermons, Homilyes, smaller Volumes, & Disputations of the Fathers; all being filled and stored with unanswerable proofes in defence of the Sentences and Articles of our Catholike Religion. As long as these their Monuments of Learning are to be soulde in the Stationer’s shopps, (in which the Enemie most unworthily pretends, as you have seene, so many chaynes of Errour and Superstition to have beene woven) so long in vaine are our Bookes forbidden to be read; in vaine are the Sea-ports so narrowly kept, for the preventing of their entrance in, in vaine are the houses of Catholiks, their trunks, boxes, and other private receptacles violently broken open; in vaine are so manie minacious & threatening Proclamations sett upon the publike Gates, and other chiefe places in Cittyes; since neither Harding, nor Sanders, nor Allan, nor Stapleton nor Bristoll, doe affect these supposed new dreames, more zealously, or with greater fervour and sedulitie, then these Fathers (above by me mentioned) have donne.”
Poor brave Campion knew what he fate would be from the moment (against his own protest, quite outspoken for a Jesuit) he left Prague, on a mission compromised by the Pope’s political intervention. He anticipates the treason charge, but his ‘plot’, his ‘machination’, is only to teach the Queen her duty, as an act of love:
“Give eare, ô Elizabeth, most potent Queene; To thee so great a Prophet preacheth, thee he instructeth in thy dutie. I doe confidently averre, that one Heaven in not wide enough, to contayne Calvin and these Princes. Only this thing I plott towards thee, and this I will plott, whatsoever be the event: This is my dangerous machination, this is my trayterous attempt against whome, as against the designed enemie of thy life, the Adversaries so often do threaten the gibbet. All hayle, ô holie Crosse! The day will come (ô Queene Elizabeth) that verie day, I meane, when the veyle of each man’s actions shalbe drawne aside, & when it will evidently appeare, whether the Societie of JESUS, or the broode of Luther did affect thee with Christian Love and Charitie. I hasten forward.”
Returning to Stonor, where the original Latin version of this suicide-belt of a work was produced, I had some talk with the present owner, Ralph Thomas Campion George Sherman Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys, who appeared in his own library. He said that the works there were largely liturgical (and I don’t suppose that any recusant works would have survived raids by Elizabethan searchers). But it’s a big, and early, Catholic library, with a long continuity of use. Had scholars visited? I asked. He very vehemently said not, that the house could afford neither a librarian nor an archivist, and that items would be stolen, instancing thefts from books in the British Library (a place rather replete with librarians and archivists, but one takes his point). Baron Camoys then grumbled at some length about estate duties and inheritance tax. Well, I thought, here’s a man who had had plenty to annoy him in his life:
A great house, with a long history, will have had all kinds of people. Stonor has sheltered a fanatic as brave, and spirited, as Campion, and fanatics of other kinds.
In November 1649, William Lilly published his Merlini Anglici ephemeris for the year ahead, 1650. In it, he came to the effects of an eclipse of the moon, 360 years ago today, on the 5th May 1650. He admits that things will be touch-and-go:
“Such will be the general carriage of Affairs amongst our selves and with our Neighbour Nations, so ambiguous and doubtful the chance and fate of England, and we so terribly threatened, as very many, and they no vulgar fools, will be upon terms of revolting from, or under-hand practicing against, the now established Government, which appears not in their capricious judgments so pleasing as they could desire…”
Well, tough, Lilly (in effect) said: “the State is necessitated yet a while to keep an Army on foot for the preservation of the present Body Politique of this Nation; and to speak more nearly to the matter, even to preserve from ruine those Vipers who would most wretchedly destroy both this Parliament, Councel of State, and themselves, to set up they know not what.” (Sig B4)
So the astrologer embarked on predicting much, much better times ahead: a little bit more patience, he asserted, and then will come the days when we all stand to inherit fortunes or find buried treasure:
“When Jupiter, in a Revolution, is in the fourth house, many men increase their fortunes by inheritances falling unto them, and estates are left unto them from dead men; men increase their fortunes by taking of Farms, by discovering Treasure his under ground, and its recovery, or moneys unexpectedly happening unto them, and by things and matters of great antiquity: Mens sorrows are taken quite away, and such things will be offered them as produce great joy and comfort…” (Sig B6)
Lilly had already given some account of the Land of Cockaigne London citizens will soon be inhabiting: you will be able to give up your jobs, and live on rents from your land:
“A time is coming when they shall live upon the Rents of those Lands, and not upon their Trades, and then they will have cause to rejoice; for treasure may fail them, it being subject to fire, and the casualties of War, but land cannot be moved…” Sig B
Not only all this, but you won’t even have to worry about women (I like the way that in this part of the prediction, he revises the initial ‘generally prove chaste’ to something more reassuring, which he re-iterates, in a ‘Did I mention chaste?’ kind of way):
“Women will generally prove chaste, shall have very good success in their own womanly affairs, all manner of Jewels will be at high rates; all over the whole Nation fertile year may be expected, women will be harmless, truth-speakers, and loyal to their Husbands, chaste, and enjoy quiet lives.” (Sig B5v)
And so William Lilly argued for keeping what you have got, and so live to see an England where “The condition of the people begins to amend, and their minds inclinable to a more familiar obedience to the Edicts of the Parliament than formerly.”
To fill in an explanatory footnote to all this, Lilly was writing at a time when people were concerned about whether it was worth putting money into the purchase of lands sequestered from Bishops, Deans, and Chapters. The obvious fear was that a reversion to an episcopal church would see such purchases declared illegal, and the lands restored without compensation. Go ahead, Lilly says, it will all be lastingly valid and legal – he rather mischievously commends Dr Cornelius Burgess, the City preacher, for his purchase of the Dean of London’s house.
Thomas Sheafe’s Vindiciae senectutis, or, A plea for old-age which is senis cujusdam Cygnea cantio (1639) is in some ways a charming work. The very distinguished William Gouge explains in his generous address to the “Courteous Reader, Young or old, Here is presented to thee by an Old-Man past his great climactericall yeare, a Treatise of OLD AGE, indited and penned by one who hath attained to those yeares whereunto hee who attaineth is accounted Wondrous old, and dedicated to him that hath almost attained to those yeares beyond which there is no ordinary reckoning.”
Gouge has entered into the foot-notey spirit of the whole work, and his notes on the passage just cited explain that he is himself past 63 (he was 64), that Sheafe the author was prebendary of Windsor and rector of Welford, and 80 years old, while his dedicatee, Dr Laurence Chaderton was a centenarian (his dates in his ODNB entry are given as 1536?–1640).
Gouge commends Sheafe’s choice of dedicatee as highly appropriate: “most wisely hath he made choice of a very fit Patron, who notwithstanding his exceeding great Old-Age, and the small characters in which this Treatise was written, read it without spectacles, and with no lesse perspicacie of judgement then of sight, gave his approbation thereof.” And he adds a graceful note of his own: “I heartily thanke the Author (my Ancient good Tutor, to whom for all the good I received in Kings College Cambridge, under God, I owe all the praise) this Author I heartily thanke for vouchsafing to communicate to his unworthy Pupill these his labours.”
Gouge is aware that his old tutor had a particularly hard act to follow: “There is a Treatise of OLD-AGE of old time written by the purest Latinist that ever spake, or wrote: for the elegancy of stile, for the solid matter of that Treatise, and for many other ornaments wherewith it is decked, it hath ever beene highly accounted of, and learned in most Grammar schooles.” He refers to Cicero’s de senectute, but he makes the point that Sheafe has at least the advantage of being a Christian minister: “yet as farre as divine learning excells humane, as farre as a judicious Divine may goe before a learned Philosopher, so farre is this Treatise here tendred to thee, to be preferred before that”.
Gouge treats Sheafe gently: it was apparently his former tutor’s only publication. But it’s not a very remarkable book, in truth. There’s the odd striking citation: “Socrates was wont to say, that to Old-men death stands before them continually in their sight; but to young- men hee lurks behind, that unawares he may come upon them, as an enemy that lies in ambush.”
Sheafe deals with the main downside to old age, proximity to death, by referring that proximity to prior intemperance:
“The third part of my answer remaines: which retorts the fault (if it be one) of Old-ages being so neere to death, upon the true cause of it: viz. mens intemperance, and disorder in the former part of their life.”
Here’s presbyopia moralised:
“An Old-man sees better a farre off then a younger. So by the inward eyes of his minde, he reaches further then the other, both backward through experience, and forward by providence and forecast.”
Largely, it’s written in a vein of unexceptionable piety:
“Againe, touching our apprehension of Gods promises, which concerne our salvation, is it not most eager and ardent, most hungring and thirsting in elder yeares, when the good fight is fought, and the race neere runne? yes certainely. Wee may have an eye before to the promised inheritance, and to the recompence of reward with Moses: but then, in Old-age, obuijs ulvis, with reached forth armes we embrace it. Then, Come Lord Jesu: then our hand is on it, as it were: then we say with aged St. Paul, Now hence forth is layed up for mee, &c. Then we earnestly endeavour to that which is before us, and more neere us, pressing hard towards the marke: then with old Simeon, we resigne our selves to God, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart, &c.”
But the thing which I just knew was going to happen in this little work duly did: here’s an extract from the index:
Great things done by Old-men, p 13.
Old-men must thinke of their former failings, p. 208.
Old-mens abilities in the graces of the mind, p. 19.
Old men of best use in peace, p. 29.
Old-men best Generalls in warre, page 31.
Old-men best counsellors for warre, p. 32.
Old men not so fit for the Pulpit as young, page 37.
Old men worthy Governors of families, p 45
Old-men best furnished for writing, p 41.
Old-men fittest to cast up their accounts, p 48
Old-men best apprehend Gods promises, p. 49
Old mens motion to heaven the strongest, p. 50
Old-mens care for others good, p. 106.
Old-men best use wealth, p. 108.
Old-men not covetous, p. 110.
The ground of Old-mens parsimony, p. 111.
Old-men warre, p. 112.
Old-men long for better times, p. 112.
Old-men why hard to please. p. 113.
Old-men praisers of former times, p. 113.
Old-men just reprovers, p. 113.
Old-men most think of their former failings, page 208.
Old men see how former yeares might have beene better imployed, p. 203.
Old-men must looke backe to their former passages, p. 206.
And entries for ‘old women’? None, of course none. This game, well-meaning, and devout little book completely ignores their existence. Completely: old age can be commended in men, it seems, but not in women.
Younger women do feature, and again, to predictable effect in our old moralist:
“The most delightfull object of the eye, to a voluptuous man, is the favour and beauty of a woeman, a peece of well fashioned and coloured clay. Yet is favour deceitfull and beauty vanity. which caused Job to make a covenant with his eyes, to bind him not to thinke of a maide. And David prayes, Psal. 119. 37. That his eyes may be turned away from beholding vanity. The eye to many is a very Pandor.”
Though he so resoundingly ignores women, Sheafe does at one point digress onto the topic of breast-feeding:
“I cannot but blame the indiscreet peremptorinesse of some, who doubt not to make this a generall rule or Maxim, that God never makes the wombe fruitfull, and the brest barren: and thereupon stick not to conclude, that no woman may put forth her childe to nurse …
… Yet it cannot be denied, that there are many cases in which the mother not onely may refuse this office (which in it selfe is most naturall, I confesse, and lies neerely upon her) but is a cruell mother to her child (to say nothing of her selfe) if shee doe otherwise: for what weaknesse, and how many deseases may bee derived from a mother (in some cases, I say, and of some constitutions) to the child, to its utter overthrow, and undoing? and besides, it is not true that the mothers breasts are never dry: nor that there can be no other thing, that may justly excuse her refusing to be a nurse. But I leave the digression, having but occasionally and by the way fallen upon it.”
But actually, the old dear is taking a pop at the writer of that letter of commendation in his own work, William Gouge, and his Of domestical duties (1622-27-34). Gouge weighed up the evidence, and was quite firm in his decision:
“God hath giuen to women two breasts fit to containe and hold milke: and nipples unto them fit to haue milke drawne from them. Why are these thus giuen? to lay them forrth for ostentation?”
But this was not a matter two senior Presbyterians could fall out about (for I assume that Sheafe would have shared a view of the church with Chaderton and Gouge).
Gouge was a far, far superior writer and moral thinker about human life. In his introduction here, Gouge does rather adroitly note that God, after all, is old, and white-haired:
“For God himselfe is stiled (Dan. 7. 9.) the Ancient of daies, and the haire of his head is said to be like pure wooll, that is white, not spotted, not stained, not soiled: such as the haire of Old-men useth to be. In allusion hereunto, S. Hierom saith, that the haire of the Ancient of daies is described to bee white, that length of daies may be declared thereby.”
Gouge is known these days to the social historians. Here’s his prime argument in relation to whether husbands may beat their wives:
“ Quest. May not then an husband beat his wife?
Answ. With submission to better judgements, I thinke he may not: my reasons are these.
1. There is no warrant thorowout the whole Scripture.”
And here’s Gouge on abusive parenting, speaking first to the prejudices of his own age, but then bravely saying the unsayable:
“When parents bring vp their children in vnwarrantable and vnlawfull callings, as to be of popish and idolatrous orders; to attend vpon papists; to be stage-plaiers, keepers of dice-houses, &c. Some (which is horrible to thinke of) traine vp their daughters to be common strumpets: and some (which is yet more horrible) traine vp their children to be sorcerers and witches …
… But what may be said of those that are so hellishly enamoured with their children as to commit incest or buggery with them?”
No, not Updike's novel, but yesterday I went in search, very locally, of the Loddon Lilly or, more commonly, 'Summer Snowflake'. Flora Britannica describes the quest exactly: "South of Sandford Mill, the river-edge (i.e., of the Loddon) grows wilder. There are bigger, taller stands of snowflake growing among marsh marigolds under the trees. Follow their trail through the dark alders and nettles, and you enter a quite different habitat, a shifting, humid swamp, caked with a flood wrack of willow branches and leaf litter. And amongst this debris are sheaves upon sheaves of snowflakes, in patches sometimes hundreds of yards square. It is an astonishing sight, but an inhospitable place, and not one likely to tempt an early botanist (Richard Mabey means here, 'one of the early botanists') in a wet April".
This in the context of a dispute as to how such a eye-catching flower escaped all notice until the late 18th century, when it seems to have been described by William Curtis: is it native, or a garden escape? Mabey thinks that the plant is native, and highly particular in its natural habitat (though it is now a common garden plant able to put up with more or less anything).
All I can say is that these stands of the Loddon Lily are protected by outerworks of fast growing stinging nettles, full of spring potency. In a few days from now, I would not have been able to see them in number, unless I had Wellington boots on against the mud and nettles.
Some work by one of my postgraduate students led me to read Nathaneal Richards’s The tragedy of Messallina the Roman emperesse, 1640. The passage in the page image above is the most rewarding moment. Our author ushers his text to the press with an array of dedicatory poems complimenting him on successfully writing such a chaste and inoffensive play about such an unchaste woman. Throughout his text, the author supplies footnote quotations, often for the naughtier moments of his play, deploying pieces of choice Latinity as a fig-leaf for his own inevitable sensationalism. So, the empress’s context with a prostitute as to who can take on most men in a night features in the play (Messalina winning her bet with a total of 25, to the disgust of the bawd Veneria, whose contestant Calphurnia has lost her 10,000 sesterces), and it gets its substantiating quotation from Pliny.
But here Richards manages in a single opening to quote Tacitus (bottom right), and yet have his Roman empress enter with a pistol to threaten Silius (top left). The situation is that Silius opened the play as a virtuous-minded man (he was even reading a book, not itself an entirely Roman moment ). However, as soon as he sees Messalina, he succumbs. She is forcing him to kill his wife:
Silius kneels. Desist faire beauties abstract, I implore; Spur me not on to murders horrid act Which I shall ever rue; let it suffice, I’m only yours, never Syllana’s more; Sworn a perpetual exile from her bed. Exit Messalina.
Vanished so soon, how wondrous strange seems this?
Enter Messallina with a Pistol.
Messalina. Death and destruction satisfy my will Or take’t in thy bosom, I’m intemperate Briefly resolve. Silius.
But I protract delay, there’s danger in’t; Video meliora, proboque, deteriora Sequor. Never was man so infinitely Bewitcht; charm’d, and inchanted as is Caius Silius, to leave a constant wife; farewell,
We must part…
The Latin tag is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Richards has his pistol-toting Romans occasionally given to using a bit of Latin. The effect is disconcerting:
What saies our Roman phrase, Si non letaris vivens laetabere nanquam?
Of course, hunting out anachronisms in a 16th-17th century play is always easy (Richard’s Romans also play tennis). These dramatists did not worry about such things. But a pistol is so egregious an error, in an age which considered the printing press and gunpowder to be two great inventions that distinguished their time from the past, that I wondered what led Richards so far.
My first thought was that he was being deliberately anachronistic, to trigger the audience into seeing his play in contemporary terms. I thought of Richard Brathwait’s verse attack on Frances Howard, Countess of Essex:
‘Upon our Ages Messalina, insatiat Madona, the matchless English Corombona’
Here lies Lust, Revenge, Defame. Woe to man, to woman shame; Faire and false, as great as ill, Weake in Grace, but strong in Will. Honours blemish, Hymens stayne, Virtues poyson, Beauties baine, Albions -Siren, tyrant-woman, Faith-infringer, true to no man; Femall-Divell, plots-contriver, Worths-tormenter, lifes depriver; Tragick actor, blood effuser, Times corrupter, States-abuser; Brothel-Turner, virgin-Trader, Husband-hater, Lusts-perswader; Ages-monster, youths-deflourer …
- there’s plenty more of this outpouring; it appeared in his The honest ghost (1658). Was a Messalina play always going to be a Frances Howard play in Roman dress? The play forcing the audience, at pistol-point, to see the depravity of the present in that of the past?
But reading the play shows what the form is: Richards was a highly derivative writer. His work contains many moments of plagiary; half-quotation, half-imitation:
‘The thanks 'mong Princes of ignoble brain / That shines like rotten wood…’ uses a famous line from Ralegh’s anti-court poem, ‘The Lie’.
An asseveration about having your ‘eye-balls to drop out’ rather than see something unwelcome is Tourneur’s Damville: “Drop out mine eye-balls, and let envious Fortune play at tennis with’em”. “A drab, / Of state, a cloth of Silver slut” is a direct lift from The Revenger’s Tragedy, where Vindice gets indignant about Castiza his sister might become ‘The duke’s son’s great Concubine: / A drab of State, a cloth a’silver slut, / To have her train borne up, and her soul trail i'th dirt.”
Richards’ Messalina threatens Silius with a pistol because Richards was thinking only of the scene in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi when Julia enters to court Bosola at pistol-point. Julia charges Bosola with having put a love-potion in her drink: it is almost as if Richards wants us to be as attuned as him to Webster, as he barely explains that Silius is also dosed with a love potion, and so loses his head.
The ‘drab of state’ phrase also appears in Richards’ commendatory verse to Women beware Women:
‘UPON The Tragedy of My Familiar Acquaintance, THO. MIDDLETON.’
“Women beware Women”! 'tis a true Text Never to be forgot: Drabs of State vext, Have Plots, Poisons, Mischeifs that seldom miss, To murther Virtue with a venom kiss. Witness this worthy Tragedy, exprest By him that well deserv’d among the best Of Poets in his time: He knew the rage, Madness of Women crossed; and for the Stage Fitted their humors, Hell-bred Malice, Strife Acted in State, presented to the life. I that have seen’t, can say, having just cause, Never came Tragedy off with more applause.
Richards commends Middleton for having written such a rattling good anti-feminist play, accurately capturing the immorality of great women. His own play follows the model, and incorporates the same sentiment:
Weake mindes of men they are, fit to be fool’d, Slighted, add scorn’d, whose dull ignorance Knowes not that women in their height of ill, Who barres them their delight, delight to kill.
A cycle ride down to Alton, and a visit to the church there, which like the churches at Burford and Painswick, was the scene of fighting during the Civil War. My picture is of the church door. If you click to see it at full size, the old scars of its history can be seen: musket ball holes are evident, what is thought to be a loophole like a vertical slot for defenders in the church to fire out, and a ragged cross-shaped hole perhaps made by a pike.
The door has been patched with old metal surrounds for key-holes; one of the rings is a medieval sanctuary ring. But sanctuary counted for little in 1643, when the established, tithe-supported church would have been just another building held by the enemy for the parliamentary soldiers.
The desperate struggle at this church is partly told in the brief pamphlet published in London three days after the fighting, A narration of the great victory, (through Gods providence) obtained by the Parliaments forces under Sir William Waller, at Alton in Surrey the 13. of this instant December, 1643. Against the cavaliers: where were taken neer a thousand prisoners, a thousand arms, two hundred horse, with divers officers of great quality. As it was delivered by a messenger sent by Sir William Waller, to the committee for safety of the kingdom, and divers of the house of Commons, and approved by them appointed to be forthwith printed and published. Printed for Edw. Husbands, Dec. 16 1643.
What happened at Alton was that Sir William Waller led one of his speciality night-time troop movements, from Farnham to the east, setting off at seven in the evening (this was on December 13th). I think the idea was to give the impression to any potential informants that he was heading towards the siege at Basing House, but on the way west, turned abruptly south towards Alton, where a substantial royalist force had been billeted since the start of December, and by detaining everybody the force met with, getting within half a mile of the town without being spotted, or having their approach revealed.
Ludovic Lindsay, the 16th Earl of Crawford, was in command of the royalist cavalry forces in the town. Learning that a substantial force was almost upon him, this former mercenary first tried to escape eastwards with most of his cavalry, but ran into parliamentary cavalry deployed on the road towards Winchester, retreated back into the town, then fled south. Waller’s forces were determined to prevent more escapes, closing in on the town from all sides:
“The horse were immediately appointed to make good all passages, so that the enemy could not have the benefit of their accustomed running away, but were taken by our horse, our foot in the meantime behaving themselves like men, with great expedition, beat the enemies out of their workes of the North-west, and East parts of the Towne, and possest themselves thereof, where they displayed their colours in the sight of their Enemies, then our men advanced speedily into the Market-place, and the Enemy being all Musquetiers drew themselves into the works neere the Church, where they had double trenches and a Halfe-Moone, and made the Church and a Barne there their chiefest refuge, here grew then a very hot fight, which was continued neer two houres, by reason of a Malignant, who willingly fired his own Barne, and other houses, thereby to offend our men with the smoake; by reason of which smoake, we lost about three men: the fire and smoak abating, our men fell close to their worke againe, and forced the Enemy to retreat into the said Church, and Barne, where they were all taken prisoners. The Towne thus being taken on all sides, the Enemy desired and obtained quarter…
In this fight were taken prisoners 700 in the Church, neere 100 in the Barne; above 100 in the field, with divers Irish men and women: also neer 200 Horse, 1000 Arms, one Colonell, one Major, one Lieuetenant Colonell, thirteen Captaines, three Coronets, one of which with the Princes Armes, another the Earl of Straffords, with divers other Colours hid in the Church; there were slaine of the Enemie neere 40 amongst which was Colonell Richard Bolles: the Enemies word was (Charls) Ours (Truth and Victory).
The mighty providence of God was seene in this, and as in many other mercies towards us: for in this Fight for a certaine truth, there were not above five of our men slaine, and about six wounded, and about six scorched with powder, by reason of their owne negligence: This done, our worthy Major Generall caused the people of the said Towne to slight the Workes: tooke the Prisoners, and tied them two by two with Match, and are now in Farnham Church and Castle, where they heare better Doctrine then they have heard at Oxford, or amongst the Irish Rebels.”
About what you would expect of propaganda: minimum casualties for the reporting side, disaster for their enemy. In the present-day Church itself, the report is that Colonel Bolles killed seven or eight men himself, before finally being killed in the church pulpit. This too, is too good to be true. Did he have 700 men with him, and do all the fighting himself? The parliamentarian pamphlet claims no more than 40 of the royalists killed in all the fighting. Perhaps it was a pattern of minimal resistance, and successive withdrawal, followed by surrender. I imagine the colonel fighting on at one side of the church, while elsewhere his men were busy laying down their weapons.
The church’s own pamphlet about this fighting supplies a local detail, that the corpses of dead horses were piled in the church porch by the retreating defenders to impede the attackers. That scene of horror around this door gets us close to the reality.
A small defeat for the King’s cause, but dismaying in its totality. Charles, hearing of the death of his Colonel Bolles, apparently said: “Bring me my mourning scarf; I have lost one of the best commanders in this kingdom”. His imprisoned fighters were marched off in cords improvised from musketeers’ slow-matches, for re-indoctrination at Farnham.
