Rich as the age was in the diaries of private men and memoirs of public transactions, it did not produce many narratives of private lives in strictly autobiographic form. The most important was that of William Lilly the astrologer, whose character of Charles I. has been already noticed. If, as most think, an astrologer must be either a fool or a knave, there can be no doubt under which class to range this entertaining author. Born (1601) at Diseworth in Leicestershire, ‘a town of great rudeness,’ he was indebted for his grammar-school education to his father’s decayed estate, which made the farm not worth following, and for his transfer to London to his total unfitness for all agricultural work. He walked up to London by the side of the carrier’s waggon, got a place in London as general servant, where ‘I saw and ate good white bread, contrary to our diet in Leicestershire;’ but, on the other hand, ‘sometimes helped to carry eighteen tubs of water from the Thames in one morning.’ Within a few years he made his fortune by marrying his master’s widow, and devoted himself for the rest of his life to mathematical and astrological pursuits. He died, in good circumstances, in 1681, and was honourably interred at the expense of Elias Ashmole, to whom his autobiography is addressed. His numerous astrological writings do not concern us here; his memoirs are no less valuable than entertaining for the glimpses they afford into bygone manners and contemporary feeling on public affairs, and particularly for the lively portrayal of the singular characters with whom Lilly was professionally brought into connection, prototypes of the spiritualistic mediums of a later day, and not unfairly represented by William Hodges, ‘whose angels were Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel; his life answered not in holiness and sanctity to what it should, having to deal with those holy angels.’ The following description of a Welsh conjuror is a characteristic example of Lilly’s graphic touch:
‘It happened on one Sunday 1632, as myself and a Justice of Peace’s clerk were, before service, discoursing of many things, he chanced to say, that such a person was a great scholar, nay, so learned, that he could make an almanack, which to me then was strange: One speech begot another, till, at last, he said, he could bring me acquainted with one Evans in Gun-Powder-Alley, who had formerly lived in Staffordshire, that was an excellent wise man, and studied the black art. The same week after we went to see Mr. Evans. When we come to his house, he having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed, if it be lawful to call that a bed whereon he then lay; he roused up himself, and, after some compliments, he was content to instruct me in astrology. I attended his best opportunities for seven or eight weeks, in which time I could set a figure perfectly: Books he had not any, except Haly de judiciis Astrorum, and Origanus’s Ephemerides; so that as often as I entered his house, I thought I was in the Wilderness. Now something of the man: He was by birth a Welshman, a Master of Arts, and in sacred orders; he had formerly had a cure of souls in Staffordshire, but now was come to try his fortunes at London, being in a manner enforced to fly for some offences very scandalous committed by him in these parts where he had lately lived; for he gave judgment upon things lost, the only shame of astrology: He was the most saturnine person my eyes ever beheld, either before I practised or since; of a middle stature, broad forehead, beetle-browed, thick shoulders, flat-nosed, full lips, down-looked, black curling stiff hair, splay-footed; to give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments, was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome, seldom without a black eye, or one mischief or other: This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he principally subsisted; he understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not at all: He had some arts above, and beyond astrology, for he was well versed in the nature of spirits, and had many times used the circular way of invocating, as in the time of our familiarity he told me.’
Considering the fertility of the age in personal memoirs, its barrenness in biography is remarkable. Apart from the lives by Mrs. Hutchinson and Izaak Walton, to be noticed presently, and a few brief accounts of celebrated men prefixed to their writings, almost the only example is the cluster of valuable and entertaining family histories for which we are indebted to Roger North (1653-1734), and one of these is an autobiography. Roger North, brother of Francis, Lord Guilford, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Jeffreys’s predecessor in the Great Seal, was a barrister, and a man of sound, though hardly shining parts, who owed his extensive practice at the bar to the influence of his relative. It fell off under the malevolent discouragement of Jeffreys, and, at the Revolution, Roger, unable to take the oaths to the new government, retired to his country estate in Norfolk, where he spent a vigorous old age in gardening, building, vindicating the memory of his brothers, writing his own biography, and ‘cheerfully communicating to all, without fee or reward, his great knowledge of the law’—virtuous behaviour, but unprofessional. Two of the Norths were men of unusual ability, the Lord Keeper and Sir Dudley, the eminent Turkey merchant, who returned from a prosperous career at Constantinople to pack juries, as his enemies alleged, in the storms of the Exclusion Bill agitation, and to signalize himself as an authority on questions of trade and finance. The Norths, a jovial race, full of sap and substance, were staunch Cavaliers, and Roger’s biographies of his brothers grew out of a vindication of the Lord Keeper against the attacks of Bishop White Kennett. His apologetic Examen, not published until after his death, though important for the history of the time, can hardly rank as literature. The biographies and autobiography, on the other hand, are very good literature, though Dr. Jessopp is hardly warranted in styling them English classics. They are neither planned with classic symmetry nor executed with classic elegance; but are charming from their artless loquacity and the atmosphere of fraternal affection in which they are steeped, as well as most entertaining from their wealth of anecdote and their portraits, partial, but not intentionally unfair, of remarkable men. Two elements in these books are sharply contrasted, the political and the anecdotic. The former affords a melancholy but useful representation of the factious unreason of political parties in that age, especially Roger’s, and of the prejudices which kept Englishmen apart until they learned toleration from Locke and Hoadly. It is to Roger’s credit that, although he had done his best to put it into James II.’s power to overthrow the Church and trample on the laws, he recoiled when the crisis came. A page or two after expressing his opinion that good citizens never resist arbitrary power, he is found inconsistently, though very rightly, lauding his brother Dudley for refusing, under the strongest pressure from James, to mortgage his vote in Parliament; and the whole tenor of his memoirs shows that, although his principles would not allow him to acquiesce openly in the Revolution, he was at the bottom of his heart by no means sorry for it. His antipathy to Jeffreys, who had enacted towards his brother the part which Laud had formerly performed towards Abbot, may have had something to do with this attitude. His portraits of eminent lawyers, such as Hale, Saunders, and Maynard, though sometimes disfigured by party feeling, have signal value. The anecdotic part of the memoirs, on the other hand, is delightful reading, being full of good-natured fun, shrewd observation, and interesting glimpses of the manners of the times, sometimes well worth noting, as, for example, this testimony to the popularity of the Church of England in Wales in Charles II.’s time: ‘I remember the doctor’ (Roger’s brother John, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge) ‘told us that when he came to his parish, he found the humour of the people very different from what, on like occasions, was often found in England. For, instead of grumbling at and affronting a new tithe-monger came down amongst them, too often known in English villages, the parishioners came about him and hugged him, calling him their pastor, and telling him they were his sheep.’ There are two especial repositories of anecdotes in North’s volumes, that of stories of circuits and eminent lawyers in his memoir of the Lord Keeper and his own autobiography, and the Turkish and Levantine sketches in the life of his brother Dudley. The latter gives a most curious picture of the relations of Mussulmans and Christians in the days when this was the fashion in which unbelievers were noticed by sultans:
‘The great officers about the Grand Signor, with whom he [Dudley North] had transacted and familiarly conversed, told his majesty that there was now in the city of Constantinople an extraordinary gower [Giaour], as well for person as abilities to transact the greatest affairs. The Grand Signor declared that he would see this extraordinary gower: and accordingly the merchant was told of it; and at the time appointed an officer conducted him into the seraglio, and carried him about till he came to a little garden, and there two other men took him by the two arms and led him to a place where he saw the Grand Signor sitting against a large window open in a chamber not very high from the ground; the men that were his conductors, holding each an arm, put their hands upon his neck and bowed him down till his forehead touched the ground; and this was done more than once, and is the very same forced obeisance of ambassadors at their audiences. After this he stood bolt upright as long as the Grand Signor thought fit to look at him; and then, upon a sign given, he was taken away and set free again by himself to reflect on this his romantic audience.’
This ‘extraordinary gower’ appears to have been the perfect ideal of an orientalized John Bull. Having, as his brother assures us, ‘an uncommon disposition to truth,’ it is surprising to find him actively concerned in the subornation of perjury in Turkish law-courts, but this Roger considers a demonstration of the strength of his mind:
‘One must have a strong power of thought to abstract the prejudices of our domestic education and plant ourselves in a way of negotiating in heathen remote countries.’
Mrs. Hutchinson’s Life of Col. Hutchinson.
Another biography of the time unknown to the age which produced it, but a standard work and general favourite since its republication early in the nineteenth century, is the life of Colonel Hutchinson, by his widow. Lucy Hutchinson, third daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Governor of the Tower, was born in 1620, and in 1638 married Colonel John Hutchinson, of a good Nottinghamshire family, who, after having taken an active part on the parliamentary side during the Civil War, acted as one of the king’s judges, and retired into private life rather than accept employment under Cromwell. He escaped prosecution at the Restoration, but afterwards, upon suspicion of engaging in plots, was imprisoned in Deal Castle, where he died from the unwholesomeness of his quarters. His widow wrote his life between 1664 and 1670, but it was not published until 1806. It is naturally an unqualified panegyric upon her husband, redeemed from insipidity by the conjugal affection and devotion which inspire it, and the elegant simplicity of the style. In panegyrizing her husband, Mrs. Hutchinson unwittingly extols herself; she has no doubt that he was among the wisest as well as the best men of his time, and her simple conviction is so touching, that the reader is almost persuaded to think so too. One of the most high-minded he certainly was, but his independence verged upon impracticability. The strictly historical value of the work is small, except as regards incidents of the Civil War in Nottinghamshire. Mrs. Hutchinson was a highly accomplished woman, and made a metrical translation of Lucretius, which is extant in MS. in the British Museum. The time of her death is not known.
Religious Biography: Izaak Walton, 1593-1683.