My story today concerns a brief and ignominious appearance in history, that made by John Selman, of Shoe Lane, who on Christmas Day 1611 got on his best working clothes (and Selman had no other line of work than one that involved trying to look respectable enough to work a crowd without being suspected), and then went to the royal chapel at Whitehall.
The King, Queen, and their children were present to take communion. Selman decided that his mark would be Leonard Barry, the manservant of Lord Harrington. Unfortunately for him, he had been recognised by one Edmund Doubleday, who had himself previously had Selman hover suspiciously close to him when in the ‘Cheker Chamber’ in Westminster Hall, had then suspected what his game was, and been vigilant enough to thwart him: Doubleday was sharp enough to know him again. Under Doubleday’s vigilant scrutiny, “after long hawking, and following of the foresaid Leonard Barry’, Selman took Barry’s purse, and exited the chapel.
Clearly Selman was not a purse-snatcher, for his mark has felt nothing, and Doubleday has not seen any sudden movement, for he goes and asks Barry if his purse is still in his possession. The servant thinks so, but checks his pockets, and it has gone. Doubleday tells Barry who has his purse, and they follow and detain him. The purse was still on his person, Selman didn’t have an accomplice to do a quick switch.
Selman was committed to prison, and then brought from the Marshalsea on New Year’s Eve, and charged with high formality: that being, “within the verge, our Soveraigne Lord the king, being then in his Royal Majesty, at White-hal aforesaid, with force and Arms did make an assault upon one Leonard Barrie, and one purse of the value of one halfe penny and forty shillings ready money in the same purse.”
Selman, caught red-handed, could only plead guilty. It is interesting (and rather pathetic) to see the limited mercy this realistically-minded thief begged for: Thomas Peter asks Selman “what he can say for himself, why sentence of death should not be pronounced against him: to which he answered not anything but prostrating himself on his knees submitted himself to the king’s mercy humbly praying, that after the law was executed, his body might be delivered to his wife to have Christian buriall, and that the goods which he had, (part of which was wel gotten, some otherwise) might not bee taken from her.”
Good enough, but not good enough for the King’s solicitor, Francis Bacon (no less), who says he can have mercy on proviso: “Upon your true Repentance, and revealing of those of your faculty and fraternity, who are still as ready to enter into the presence Chamber of the king, as you were to enter into the house of God.”
It is typical of Bacon to be so inexorable and clever-clever. Nevertheless, Selman nominates “one who was then in the hall, which could (if he would) do good service to the king, by revealing many of that profession, his name as I have heard is I.H.”
Who could this have been? Had some associate of Selman’s come to see his fellow diver into pockets face the inevitable? If so, his curiosity landed him in trouble. But there may be some other explanation.
Then came the great moment in poor Selman’s truncated existence, for even though he was only a pickpocket, he got some high grade Jacobean moralising levelled at him. The anonymous pamphleteer indicates that this is not Francis Bacon verbatim,but the gist of what was said:
“Sir Francis Bacon … proceeded to judgement, and looking on the prisoner, thus or to this effect, in some sort he spake: The first and greatest sinne that ever was committed was done in heaven. The second was done in paradise, being heaven on earth, and truly I cannot chuse but place this in the third ranke, in regard it was done in the house of God, where he by his own promise is always resident, as also for that the cause of that assembly was to celebrate the Feast of the birth of our Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus …
Thou shalt surely bee forgiven at Gods hands … thou shalt bee had from hence to the place from whence thou cammest, and from thence bee brought to the place of execution, which shall be between Charing Cross and the Court gate, and there be hanged by the necke till thou be dead, ad so the Lord have mercy upon thy soule.”
My image is of course the title page. It could be a standard woodcut, but I think it may be a genuine ‘wood block reportage’: Selman, with a purse, but in gentlemanly attire. Woodblock artists were adept at early modern photoshopping, and could re-work blocks with additional details to match the story. The pamphlet is very keen to report on just how this thief infiltrated this regal and divine sanctuary, and explains: “Now, gentle Readers, you must understand, that this Selman came into the kings Chappell in very good and seemely apparel, like unto a Gentleman, or Citizen: viz. a fair blacke cloake laced, and either lined through or faced with velvet. The rest of his apparel in reasionable maner being answerable thereunto. Which was the cause that he without resistance had free entrance into that holy and sanctified place.”
I’ve been reading David Rothenberg’s Why Birds Sing (Allen Lane, 2005), and was charmed to learn of The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (1717): “Choice Observations and Directions Concerning ye Teaching of all Sorts of Singing-birds, after ye Flagelet and Flute, if rightly made as to Size & tome, with a Method of fixing ye wett Air, in a Spung or Cotton, with Lessons properly Composed, within ye Compass & faculty of each Bird, Viz. for ye Woodlark, Blackbird, Throustill, House-sparrow, Canary-bird, Black-thorn-linnet, Garden-Bull-Finch, and Starling”.
I cannot find this agreeable sounding and doubtless diverting book on the ECCO database, but I did ask a colleague if, as an 18th century specialist, she had heard of it. Not only had she heard of it, but down in her cellar, had an LP of performances by Richard and Theodora Schulze (recorders, sopranino), accompanied by a harpsichordist. Academics! – when you think you are being absurdly recondite, but there they are, way ahead of you, head full of knowledge, cellarage a latter day wonder cabinet.
I duly begged the loan of this venerable LP. It isn’t dated, but may be from the 60’s: Stereovox of New York:
for anyone unfamiliar with the technology. Apparently the 1717 collection of tunes for pet birds became important to the recorder player’s repertoire. Richard Schulze has added a second part and the harpsichord, but the original idea was that you played the music on your bird flageolet (they use a sopranino on the recording) until your bird had the tune off perfectly. You then might enter your bird in singing contests, etc.
As a parrot owner, I was especially pleased to find two tunes ‘for the parrot’. Now Barney, my African Grey (see him marking Renaissance Literature exam scripts for me here http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2008/05/mere-parrotting-52.html ) had a poor early upbringing. He can whistle ‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice’, but he then skips the boring bit, and seques straight into ‘Pop goes the weasel’.
Here, however, is a bird doing a very creditable Queen of the Night:
and here’s a rather less highbrow compilation of Leonard the parrot amid cries of ‘Exterminate!’ intermittently doing the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme and singing ‘Red Red What’ instead of UB40’s hit song, ‘Red Red Wine’:
Anyway, my MP3 is of the two tunes for parrot in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, 1717. The first I recognize as ‘The Happy Clown’, which is such an appropriate choice. Like most birds, Barney has a syrinx rather than a larynx, and can make two sounds at once, but it will take a long time to get him up to this (and I think he’s out of his best learning age-range, which is closed in birds). I didn’t try to edit off all the pops and crackles, as they as so many, and they rather add to the parrotty ambience:
To round off, here’s William Cowper’s ‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’. A sad tale of the death of one of those trained birds – with a very apt moment of mock heroic in the final stanza:
‘On the death of Mrs Throckmorton’s bullfinch’
Ye Nymphs, if e’er your eyes were red
With tears o’er hapless favourites shed,
O, share Maria’s grief!
Her favourite, even in his cage,
(What will not hunger's cruel rage?)
Assassin'd by a thief.
Where Rhenus strays his vines among,
The egg was laid from which he sprung,
And though by nature mute,
Or only with a whistle bless’d,
Well-taught he all the sounds express’d
Of flageolet or flute.
The honours of his ebon poll
Were brighter than the sleekest mole,
His bosom of the hue
With which Aurora decks the skies,
When piping winds shall soon arise
To sweep away the dew.
Above, below, in all the house,
Dire foe alike of bird and mouse,
No cat had leave to dwell;
And Bully's cage supported stood
On props of smoothest-shaven wood,
Large built and latticed well.
Well latticed, - but the grate, alas!
Not rough with wire of steel or brass,
For Bully’s plumage sake,
But smooth with wands from Ouse’s side,
With which, when neatly peel’d and dried,
The swains their baskets make.
Night veil’d the pole: all seem’d secure:
When, led by instinct sharp and sure,
Subsistence to provide,
A beast forth sallied on the scout,
Long back’d, long tail’d, with whisker’d snout,
And badger-colour’d hide.
He, entering at the study door,
Its ample area 'gan explore;
And something in the wind
Conjectured, sniffing round and round,
Better than all the books he found,
Food chiefly for the mind.
Just then, by adverse fate impress'’d,
A dream disturb’d poor Bully's rest;
In sleep he seem’d to view
A rat fast clinging to the cage,
And, screaming at the sad presage,
Awoke and found it true.
For, aided both by ear and scent,
Right to his mark the monster went, -
Ah, Muse! forbear to speak
Minute the horrors that ensued;
His teeth were strong, the cage was wood, -
He left poor Bully’s beak.
O, had he made that too his prey!
That beak, whence issued many a lay
Of such mellifluous tone,
Might have repaid him well, I wote,
For silencing so sweet a throat,
Fast stuck within his own.
Maria weeps, - the Muses mourn; -
So, when by Bacchanalians torn,
On Thracian Hebrus’ side
The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell,
His head alone remain’d to tell
The cruel death he died.
I have been reading, as Shakespeare probably did in 1605, the anonymous translation of the first book of Pierre de Loyer’s A treatise of specters or straunge sights, visions and apparitions appearing sensibly vnto men. Well, Shakespeare got ideas for Macbeth out of it, while I get an obscure blog posting.
De Loyer’s main argument is about the power of the devil to delude: witches do not fly to sabbaths, nor do they transmute into animal form, the devil merely sends them into an ecstasy in which they believe these things have happened. Book one is a long lead-in to de Loyer’s main argument, and he scours all his considerable learning to come up with all kinds of examples of delusions and successful frauds upon the credulous (though he will insist that the devil is genuinely present and operating the most serious delusional states suffered by confessed witches).
But in this lighter part of his book, de Loyer is almost a sceptic, so many stories does he tell of merely human illusions which look like apparitions. I liked his story of how boys in France would fix candles to the backs of tortoises or crayfish, and set them staggering round graveyards to alarm the locals:
“It is a common trick of unhappy boyes to make especiall choice of Churchyardes, there to terrifie others … in those places they will sometimes set Crevises alive or Tortoyses, and putte a burning candle on their backes: and after will let them go, to the intent those that shall see them slowly marching or creeping neere about the sepulchers, may suppose them to be the soules of dead men” [sig. x1v].
A couple of pages later (sig. x3), Loyer gets onto other ‘haunted’ places:
“Next after Sepulchers and Churchyardes, the Gibets or common places of executions, are greatly feared of the vulgar sort, who do thinke, that spirits do haunt and frequent there also. And for that cause, such fooles doe never cease haunting such places, of purpose to feare and terrifie such as passe neere unto the same.
I remember me of a good jest which was once told me ….”
Loyer’s story following this promising start is of a ‘notorious thief and murderer’ who was hanged and gibbeted near Le Mans. Then, some days afterwards:
“a certaine man travelling that way … laid him down to rest under a tree not far from the Gibbet. But he was scarse well settled to his ease, when sodainly behold there commeth by, another traveler … and as he was right over against the gallowes where the dead body hanged, (whom the partie knew well when he was alive,) he called him by his name, and demanded of him, with an high and loud voice, (as jesting at him) if he would go with him to Mauns. The man that lay under the tree to rest him selfe, being to go to Mauns likewise, was very glad that he had found companie, and said unto the other; Stay for me a little, and I will goe with you. The other to whom he spake, thinking it was the dead theefe that spoke unto him, hasted him away as fast as he could possible. The man under the tree arising up, ran after him as fast, with a desire to overtake him, and still he cried, Stay for mee, stay for mee”.
A seventeenth century reader before me thought that this was a good one. My image is a composite of the two page images from the EEBO microfilm images. The early reader made a synoptic note of this. It has been cropped by some careless piece of re-binding, and I can only get the general drift by reconstructing (if I use lucuna marks, blogger goes crazy, taking them for html tags):
m?an by night under a gibbet, a traveler friend? of the man hang?ed and he jested(?) wheth?er he would go? with him …
But this reader obviously meant to fix so capital a story into his mind, so as to regale his friends with it later on. It would have made a good scene in a comedy (at least, to the robust taste of the time, when a dead body on a gibbet was just one of those things you saw). I wonder how Shakespeare failed to pick up on it. Macbeth really does lack for laughs, doesn’t it?
This blog entry I am writing for students on my ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ course, but also as part of my long term project to make some comment on each 17th century witchcraft pamphlet. Sterne was Matthew Hopkins’ fellow witch-finder, and has much to say about witches’ marks, and their familiar spirits.
The first thing you notice about John Sterne’s A confirmation and discovery of witchcraft …with the confessions of many of those executed since May 1645 (1648) is that, relative to the dozens of analogous texts ‘discovering’ witchcraft, this is a well produced book. The printer, William Wilson also did elite culture poetry, gardening books, royal epistles and books of divinity. His press produced Sterne’s work in an even roman type, with beautifully justified text - strictly in the typographical sense of the word.
Sterne’s document itself is a lot less sophisticated: we have that familiar tone of witchcraft texts, in which the convinced writer seems embattled by doubters, despite evidence which is to him overwhelming and unanswerable. It is clear that the author had not taken notes during his various interrogations, and he will say when he can’t quite remember if an incriminating detail came up precisely in the case he’s currently recapitulating. Everything has to come from his memory, and there were so many witches… But, to his bemusement, he finds that he has to say something to justify the actions he participated in: “what hath beene done, hath beene for the good of the common wealth, and we free from those aspersions cast upon us, and that I never favored any, or unjustly prosecuted others.”
Sterne does not write as a theorist of sorcery. After being involved in the hanging of ‘about two hundred’, he has finally “as my leasure hath permitted me … given my selfe to the reading of some approved relations touching the arraignement and condemnation of Witches” - hardly presenting himself, then, as a conscientious ideologist: do the executions first, read up on the demonology afterwards. Contemptuously characterizing Satan’s victims as “silly ignorant persons many of them”, he scarcely opens up much intellectual distance from them. Rather, he presents himself as having been a straightforward man involved in a partial local cleansing of a gigantic national stain. For Sterne, doubting or debating the very existence of witches is in the face of all the evidence. First, there’s all the witchcraft references he recollects from the Bible. Then, in his own immediate experience, the counties where he operated with Hopkins were simply seething with witches. The guilt of those witches was manifest by signs which he finds unambiguous – the ‘marks’ of the witches, and the spirit familiars which sucked at them. These reasons for confidence meant that he could go on with the methods necessary to produce the all-justifying confessions.
By his own account, Sterne has seen scores of witches’ marks, with multiple examples on most individuals accused. He confidently describes the typical witches’ mark in detail, and refutes other explanations of such pathologies that he has heard given: “some will say, These are Emrod-marks, and piles.” This is what he has to say about witches’ marks: “They are to be known by these tokens, as by the insensiblenesse of them, sometimes like a little teat or big, that is when it remains as the Imp or Familiar sucks thereof: if outward, then nothing to be discerned but as a little bit of skin, which may be extended and drawn out, and wrung, much like the finger of a glove, and is very limber, and hath no substance in it, except it be when their Imps have newly sucked them, and then it may be there may be a little watrish blood perceived, but may be known from natural marks several ways; for it hath no scar, but at the very top a little hole, where the blood cometh out.”
Sterne’s brutal forensic confidence about witches’ marks is bad enough. But inevitably the supernumerary teats could not be discovered on everybody brought before the two witch-finders. Sterne demonstrates the strategy evolved for coping with any failure in the accused person’s body to provide the sign that he and Hopkins sought: he tells his reader that, given a chance, witches will remove them. They will slip into their houses, protesting they must change before being searched for a third or fourth time, and put on some kind of magically concealing shift. They will hear that the Hopkins-Sterne team of ‘searchers’ is coming to town, and cut them off. Or they will pull them off with their finger nails: “Sometimes the flesh is sunk in a hollow, that is, when they pull them off, and pull them out with their nails, or otherwise cause them to be pulled off; as one of Over in Cambridgeshire confessed, it being so found and laid to her charge, that she heard of our coming to town, and plucked her marks off the night before.” “One Clarke of Keyston in Huntington-shire, a young man, who was so found, and set at liberty, expecting to have been searched another time, when he should not know of it; but he soon after confessed he had cut off his marks, saying they were fools that were found with the marks.”
It is the same story with the familiars, which Sterne classifies into the visible and the invisible. Experience and intuition helps him to know when a witch, even when under surveillance, is even then feeding an invisible familiar. Witches will also have the devil stand in as their body double, while they exit from a room, through holes however small, to feed their spirits (these people have kept it up for ten, fifteen, twenty years; in the related pamphlet A true relation of the araignment of eighteene vvitches. that were tried, convicted, and condemned, at a sessions holden at St. Edmunds-bury in Suffolk, the anonymous author (Sterne again?) has the witches “mightily perplexed and much tortured for want of his, her, or their sucking Impes”). When the familiars are reported in the confessions to have manifested as such a weird variety of lower animals (“One like a Dow, called Tib; One like a Miller called Tom; One like a Spider, or a Spinner called Ioane; and the other like a Waspe called Nann”), any living creature that’s seen in proximity to the witch is claimed to be the familiar in its visible form – a fly circling in the room becomes an object of horror and awe.
To get the initial confessions, Hopkins and Sterne used sleep deprivation (the suspect placed on a high stool at the centre of a room, sitting with her feet unable to reach the ground, and further kept awake by periodic ‘walking’. People even then objected, and Sterne has to justify the processes he had used (I break up a long paragraph):
“I desire to Answer one objection before I proceed further (that is) some say, and many will and doe say; But you watched them, and kept them from meat, drinke, or rest, and so made them say what you would. A very unnaturall part so to use Christians.
I answer so it were. But I never knew any deprived of meat, drinke or rest, but had what was fitting till they were carried before some Justice of Peace to be examined, and had provision to rest upon, as bolsters, pillowes, or Cushions, and such like, if they were kept where no beds were; yet I doe not deny but at first, some were kept two, three, or foure dayes, perchance somewhat baser, but then it hath been, either when no Justice of Peace was neere, or when the witnesses against them could not goe sooner, but then they have had beds.”
Here, he seems to allege that, after a confession induced by deliberately exhausting the accused, a softer regime was used. He goes on with an even more implausible assertion:
“and for other provision, I never knew any kept, of what ranke or quality soever, but that they had better provision, either meate or drinke, then at their own houses.”
After this incredible assertion, his main point: “For the watching, it is not to use violence, or extremity to force them to confesse, but onely the keeping is, first, to see whether any of their spirits, or familiars come to or neere them; for I have found, that if the time be come, the spirit or Impe so called should come, it will be either visible or invisible, if visible, then it may bee discerned by those in the Roome, if invisible, then by the party.”
Hopkins and Sterne were a peripatetic insanity vortex, strengthened by publicity, and by the customary sermons in these Puritan counties, dwelling always on the power of the devil. To them were drawn the crazed, the suicidal, and the formerly religious who had fallen into despair. In return for assent to their leading questions, lonely widows told the story of the devils that had come to their bed after the death of their husbands (able to have sex, but not to produce ‘nature’ – semen, these women tend to confirm to their interrogators). Those who had despaired of escaping the fires of hell so often drummed into them by their church sprang their pathetic (and fatal) counter-theologies of the devils who came and offered them, if not escape from hell itself, at least a remittance from hell fire and pains, in return for their souls.
I will conclude with Sterne’s account of Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree, one of his most remarkable suspects. She was, for instance, virtually alone in being able to show Sterne and Hopkins ‘perfect money’ which she had been given by the devil (Sterne notes that in general these witches never acquired any wealth in return for their souls). After three days and nights of enforced wakefulness Bess Clarke was suddenly willing to display her ‘imps’ (I have modernized the spelling here):
“ ‘if you will stay, I will show you my Imps, for they bee ready to come’. Then said Mr. Hopkins ‘Besse, will they doe us no harm?’ ‘no’ said she, ‘what? did you think I am afraid of my children? you shall sit down’, so wee did, where she appointed us … and so presently fell a smacking with her lips and called ‘Lought’ two or three times, which presently appeared to us eight (For there were six which were appointed to bee with her that night before we went) in the likeness of a Cat, as she had formerly told us; for she told us before what shapes they should come in, and so that presently vanished; then she called again as before, ‘Jermarah’, then appeared another, like a red or sandy spotted dog, with legs not so long as a finger (to our perceivance) but his back as broad as two dogs, or broader, of that bigness, and vanished, and so after that called more, as before, by their several names, which came in several shapes, One like a Greyhound, with legs as long as a Stag; Another like a Ferret; And one like a Rabbit, and so in several shapes they appeared to us, till there were some seven or eight seen; Some by some of us, and others by other some of us; then I asked her if they were not all come, for there were more come then she spoke of, she answered that they came double in several shapes, but said, one was still to come, which was to tear me in pieces, then I asked her why, she said, because I would have swum her, and told me that now she would bee even with me, and so told in what manner it should come, black, and like a Toad, and so afterward did come, as the rest averred that saw it”
There’s a special pleasure to be had from a truly bad poet, and I have therefore been enjoying looking at the verse of Alexander Craig (1567?-1627), the Scottish Petrarchist who came south with King James in 1603, hung around at court, and published The amorose songes, sonets, and elegies: of M. Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane in London in 1606. He then left for Banff, with a curt poem of regret for the time he had wasted (not that he makes court life sound all that bad):
His regrate for the lose of time at Court.
O how Time slips, and slelie slids away,
God is forgot, and woe is me therefore:
I waste the night, and weare away the day,
I sleepe, dres, feed, talke, sport, and doe no more:
Far better were with care to have redemed,
Nor sell for noght the thing I most estemed.
Craig’s big idea was to have multiple poetic mistresses of different natures - “I have in these amorous Sonets and Songes matchles Idea, virtuous Cynthia, grave Lithocardia, sweete Kala, lovely Erantina, lascivious Lais, modest Pandora, liberall Penelopae, painted my Love…” as a way of generating lots of verse, for he seems to have been primarily interested in quantity, and neglectful of quality. He signs off his dedication to Queen Anne with a fine flourish of self-deprecation:
“I am bold (divine Ladie) to borrow thy blessed name, to beautifie my blotted Booke … My Sonnets & Songes are (gracious Princesse) for the most part, full of complaints, sorrow, and lamentations … wishing your Highnes as many happie yeares, as there be wordes in my Verses, and Verses in my worthles Volume: I am Your Maiesties most obsequious Orator, Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britan.”
In this sonnet, my favourite among his works, he has the startling idea of comparing himself to a leper (hoarseness seems to be one of the many symptoms of Hansen’s Disease), and his sonnets to the leper’s begging bowl or ‘clack-dish’, noisily soliciting mercy on his behalf when he can no longer speak himself.
To Idea
The Leper man, whose voice cannot be heard,
With doleful hoarse unpleasant tune will cry,
And crave ‘for love of Jesus Christ’ reward,
And alms of such as chance for to pass by:
But when (alas poor soul) he doth espy
That no man hears, not yet regards his voice,
No longer then takes he delight to lye,
But claps his dish, and keeps his language close.
Right so as curst, and careful is my Cross,
Suppose the Fates have not deform’d my shape,
No words I use for to lament my loss,
But make my Lines to be the Leper’s Clap.
Go Sonnet then and beg, I thee beseech,
Some grace to him, whom fear deters from speech.
If you can ignore its inappropriateness of this to romance, the idea has a kind of appropriateness: a leper would beg for mercy and alms, and use a clack dish if his voice failed. Also, Craig’s sonnets are monotonous and grating. He seems to have meant it seriously: as he tells Idea in another sonnet:
“Thou art that Dame whom I shall ay adore
In spight of Fortune and the frowning Fats,
Whose shining beautie makes my Songs to sore
In Hyperbolik loftie heigh conceits…”
His lines as the 'leper's clap' must have been just one of these hyperbolic conceits. Leprosy seems to have been one of Craig’s pet-subjects. Among his multiple references to Sidney’s Arcadia, the episode where the tyrant Demagoras infects Parthenia with leprosy for refusing his love gets a sonnet all to itself, and Craig kicked off his dedication of the whole book to Queen Anne with something he has picked up about Timur-e-Lang having a programme of euthanasia for lepers:
“Great Tamburlan cloaked his fantasticall crueltie hee exercised on Lazars and Leprous men, with a foolishe kind of humanity, putting all he could find or heare of, to death, (as he said) to rid them from so painefull & miserable a life: Though my Poyems (incomparably bountifull, incomparablie beautifull, and so peerelesse Princesse) be painefull to me, and unpleasant to the delicat Lector; shall I with Tamburlan destroy them?”
In this rather jolly admission, all Craig’s poems are lepers, unpleasant to ‘delicat Lectors’. There’s some truth in it, and if only more poets were prepared to say as much.
Part of Craig’s trouble was his pedantry, his trick of allusions that are so obscure they have to be explained at a length that takes over the poem (“That Ichthiophagic Aethiopian slave, / Who boyls his angled Fish by Phaebus beams / Upon a Rock”) - that kind of thing in a love sonnet. One of Craig’s more moving poems is one ‘TO HIS DEAR FRIEND Mr. AL. DICKSON Mr. of the Art of Memorie who dyed at Winchester in England. EPITAPH.’ Craig suffered as a poet from too much recourse to the ‘art of memory’ at the expense of feeling.
My image is a leper, extracted from Cosimo Rosselli's 'Sermon on the Mount'.
The image above is a Hilliard of an unknown lady (in the collection of the Metropolitan museum on their pleasing website here: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/liza/hd_liza.htm); but I thought I’d expound a little on one of his lost works, one that would have been the companion piece to his famous ‘Young Man Amongst Roses’. The lost portrait was commended in a sonnet by Henry Constable:
‘To Mr Hilliard, upon occasion of a picture he made of my Lady Rich’
If Michael the archpainter now did live,
Because that Michael he an angel hight,
As partial for his fellow-angels, might
To Raphael’s skill much praise and honour give.
But if in secret I his judgment shrive,
It would confess that no man knew aright
To give to stones and pearls true dye and light,
Till first your art with orient nature strive.
But think not yet you did that art devise;
Nay, thank my Ladie that such skill you have;
For often sprinckling her black sparckling eyes,
Her lips and breast, taught you the [.....]
To diamonds, rubies, pearls, the worth of which
Doth make the jewel which you paint seem Rich.
In his rather stilted first quatrain, Constable sets off on Michaelangelo having a high opinion of Raphael, product of an angel-Angelo’s bias towards another angelically-named painter. But, says Constable, if I had a living Michaelangelo’s secret opinion disclosed to me under confession, he would drop this bias, and confess to Hilliard’s superiority. The specific superiority is in representing jewels with undiminished lustre. Joan Grundy in her edition of Constable makes a very apposite citation of Hilliard’s own ‘Arte of Limning’: ‘Limning excelleth all other painting whatsoever in sundry points, in giving the true lustre to pearl and precious stone’. This shows that Constable was following Hilliard’s own opinion: the highest art is shown in rendering the most precious things.
But he was also working towards a play on ‘Rich’. He next tells Hilliard that actually he owes these skills to having painted Penelope Rich’s eyes, lips and breast: it was doing this that taught Hilliard how to render jewels. The sonnet ends with a clever commingling of Penelope Rich in the miniature (a true likeness), and the miniature painting as a piece of composite jewelry, because of her brilliant eyes, ruby lips, etc. Only by being very convincing can the precious things depicted contribute to a convincing Penelope Rich.
The gap in the manuscript leaves us three syllables short. Park in 1812, Joan Grundy noted, suggested ‘art you gave’. I thought ‘way most brave’ – the best way to learn how to depict precious stones, with a hint of the authentic 16th century attention to getting riches for yourself from your patroness.
But, so sadly, the miniature doesn’t survive. Joan Grundy suggests that Henry Constable may have taken the miniature up to the Scottish court in 1589, when the Earl of Essex and Penelope his sister were making overtures to James VI of Scotland, indicating their future loyalties lay with him rather than Arabella Stuart. How could the greatest miniaturist’s portrait of Sidney’s Stella ever have been so undervalued as to be lost? It must have been comparable to his famous image of her brother as the young man among roses. I imagine its fate: King James subsequently gave it to Charles Blount, it passed down in that family until someone wanted to re-use the case for another portrait miniature. Lady Penelope, limned on uterine vellum wrapped round card, got placed in a drawer. A 17th century teenage boy thought she was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen, and stole her away.
So we have to make do with a sonnet about the painting of the lady in the sonnets. Lady Penelope Rich, a dark-eyed blonde, is associated throughout ‘Astrophel and Stella’ with light, as ‘star’ and in many other imaginative ways (‘and Stella spied / Who hard by made a window send forth light’, 53 – ‘and hath she vanished by?’, 105). I imagine, then, Hilliard’s miniature as Lady Rich wearing stunning jewels, and with glittering dark eyes. The care Hilliard took in painting the pupil of an eye! Freshly made paint of the blackest black, the pigment made utterly smooth with a mounted tooth of a squirrel as a diminutive grinder, the finical care lest a mote of dandruff fall down from the artist’s head… If only we had the portrait that complemented those Sidney sonnets!
I’ve been looking at verse materials published in commemoration ofSir Philip Sidney: Thomas Churchyard’sSir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true virtues, Angel Day’s Upon the life and death of the most worthy, and thrise renowmed knight, Sir Phillip Sidney and John Philips, The life and death of Sir Phillip Sidney, late lord governour of Flushing his funerals solemnized in Paules Churche where he lyeth interred; with the whole order of the mournfull shewe, as they marched thorowe the citie of London, on Thursday the 16 of February. 1587.
What was the cause of all this grief, asks Day’s poem rhetorically, and answers that it was the loss of:
the choice of all the powers divine:
The influence self, where Virtues erst did flow,
The very work of all the Muses nine:
The care of earth and skies, in one self twine,
The rarest Type of courtly gentleness:
Adorned erst with stem of nobleness …
None of these writers know about ‘Astrophel and Stella’, but Day knows about the prose and other poetry:
Arcadia now, where is thy sovereign guide,
who stately Pembroke erst did to thee knit,
Where be the notes, his skill did erst divide,
In sundry meters, wound from finest wit,
Which he so well in covert shapes could fit…
‘Which he so well in covert shapes could fit’: I suppose Day refers to Sidney’s use of pastoral personae. But the subject of my post here, and shown in one of the two composite images above, is the use of overt shapes in the learned elegies on Sidney’s death. It seems from the Oxford collection of neo-Latin elegies, that beyond the normal elegiac meters, concrete poetry was in fashion locally, and so we get tapering pyramids and bulging columns in Exequiae illustrissimi equitis, D. Philippi Sidnaei, gratissimae memoriae ac nomini impensae. , Oxonii : Ex officina typographica Iosephi Barnesii, anno Domini (1587).
Such picture poems did not appear in the Cambridge volume, which gets upside of its Oxford rival by including elegies in Greek, and one in Hebrew:Academiae Cantabrigiensis lachrymae tumulo nobilissimi equitis, D. Philippi Sidneij sacratae per Alexandrum Nevillum , Londini : Ex officina Ioannis Windet impensis Thomae Chardi, Anno salutis humanae, M.D.lxxxvij.
Cambridge students did, though, seem to have a weakness for acrostics, and I was pleased to find a neo-Latin acrostic whose ingenious author has managed to make his first and last letters on each line spell out the latinised form of Sidney’s name.
But I will end this with John Philips’ closing stanza: in his poem, the dead man speaks from beyond the grave, and has a very simple message:
Thus from my grave I bid you all adieu.
Your Sidney’s words remember rich and poor,
Though dead, my life doth daily call to you.
Think ye how death knocks daily at life’s door,
Provide your lamps of oil prepare you store,
My tale is told, and I my race have run,
My body earth, my soul the heavens hath won.
Somehow I doubt that the neo-Latinists said anything that much better than this gauche directness.
Alas, I have digressed today from reading Petrarchist poetry to seventeenth century smut, in the anonymous novella, The Practical part of love. Extracted out of the extravagant and lascivious life of a fair but subtle female. (1660). The main narrative, after the author’s prologue, is entitled ‘The History of the exorbitant and Lascivious Life of Lucia and her daughter Hellena’.
This is wretched and tawdry stuff indeed, hack writing that only rarely shows any kind of engagement between writer and subject. The prologue itself has some flourishes defending the human sex drive:
“Our affections once touched by Loves Loadstone, puts the Axle-tree of our Microcosme, into a trembling motion, and never is quiet till it stands opposite to that point, where that Gulf is that Sir Francis Drake shot when he was first married. The Worlds Creator ordain’d that there should be pleasure in copulation, to the end that men might delight in procreation.”
The narrative, though, switches from ‘men’ delighting in procreation to the insatiable woman pornography seems to require. But the tale is humdrum throughout. First Lucia, and then her daughter Hellena, have an appetite for lots of sex. The would-be pornographer barely approves, and can hardly suppress his own desire for moral reprisal.
In one of his more committed pieces of writing, he gets to imagining the library at the ‘love’s academy’ the exquisite and hot blooded Hellena attends:
“This Gallery is the introductorium to the Library. Opposite to the door stands always open on a Desk Aretins postures in Folio done to the life; and just by it lies chaind Embammata amoris; by this in a Manuscript, fairly written with a Frontispeece stands a Pece called Venus undrest, likewise the Life of Mother Cunny, never yet printed, in Folio. The Anatomy of Cuckoldry, Luteners lane decipher’d, cum mille aliis. On the right hand stood Francions bawdy History, Folio, bound in Turky lether, Jovial drollery, marbled Venus and Adonis, Lusty Drollery, Venus her Cabinet unlockt, Ovids Art of Loving, Natures chief Rarities, The crafty whore reprinted in Folio, with the English bawd, and errant rogue, together with a catalogue of all the Whores in this Citty, containing thirty sheets of paper. There were likewise all sorts of books of Midwifery, as Culpepper’s Midwife, the compleat Midwife, the birth of Mankind, Child-birth, &c”
Pornography and fine books have always gone round together: but what a limited collection this is: Aretine, Ovid, and then he’s scratching around. The Emblemata Amoris I’ve seen is just not erotic: it’s here because it sounds as though it might be. Poor old Venus and Adonis gets dragged in again. Other items seem to qualify this list for ‘The Invisible Library’ (link below), the online catalogues of imaginary books mentioned in other books: so ‘Mother Cunny’ seems to have been the alias of a brothel keeper (she appears in the title The ladies champion confounding the author of The wandring whore, by Eugenius Theodidactus … Approved of by Megg. Spenser Damrose Page Priss. Fetheringham Su. Leming Betty Lawrence Mother Cunny, 1660). My writer imagines a biography of this lady. ‘Luteners Lane’ is similarly a feature of the London underworld re-imagined as a book. Prostitutes working off that street feature in Poor Robins Character of France:
“the first time I came to London, being but a young Novice, scarcely writing Man, passing through Luteners-lane, a Gentlewoman standing at the door accosted me with these words, How do you Sir, I am heartily glad to see you well, how have you done a long time? … (Sir said she) pray come in and let us discourse together: but notwithstanding her bold invitation away I went, and coming to my Lodging, relating the story, Sir, said one to me, you must have a care of such Creatures, for notwithstanding their brave Garbe, they are no other then common Strumpets.”
Returning to identifiable texts, ‘Francion’ must mean the original of The most delightfull and pleasant history of Francion wherein all the vices that usually attend youth are plainly laid open by Monsieur De Moulines Sier De Parc. ; done into English by a person of honour (1661). ‘Lusty Drollery’ is most likely the collection Sportive wit the muses merriment, a new spring of lusty drollery, joviall fancies, and a la mode lamponnes, 1656. ‘The Crafty Whore’ survives: The crafty whore or, the mistery and iniquity of bawdy houses laid open, in a dialogue between two subtle bawds, wherein, as in a mirrour, our city-curtesans may see their soul-destroying art, and crafty devices, whereby they insnare and beguile youth, pourtraied to the life, by the pensell of one of their late, (but now penitent) captives, for the benefit of all, but especially the younger sort. Whereunto is added dehortations from lust drawn from the sad and lamentable consequences it produceth, 1658.
Accessions in the ‘Library’ then have to be swelled (as the author’s imagination fails him) by books of midwifery (and indeed the writer makes pregnancy feature as the almost inevitable result of any sexual congress, though Hellena does have recourse to hopping up and down post coitally, and employs a douche).
Anyway, here’s her mother Lucia getting the biological payback for all that carnal intercourse with her first lover:
“Her nine moneths being expired, she was brought to bed of a goodly Daughter, who had all the symptoms in her of the approaching Spring of a most transcendent Beautie. Lucias comfort and hopes was solely in this pretty sweet babe, for Lovit had now taken his leave of her.
So shalt thou be despis'd, faire Maid,
When by the sated lover tasted;
What first he did with teares invade,
Shall afterwards with scorne be wasted;
When all thy Virgin-springs grow dry,
When no streames shall be left, but in thine eye.”
I half recognized the stanza: it’s from Thomas Carew’s ‘Good counsell to a young Maid’:
When you the Sun-burnt Pilgrim see
fainting with thirst, hast to the springs;
Marke how at first with bended knee
He courts the crystall Nimphs, and flings
His body to the earth, where He
Prostrate adores the flowing Deitie.
But when his sweaty face is drencht
In her coole waves, when from her sweet
Bosome, his burning thirst is quencht;
Then marke how with disdainfull feet
He kicks her banks, and from the place
That thus refresht him, moves with sullen pace.
So shalt thou be despis'd, faire Maid,
When by the sated lover tasted;
What first he did with teares invade,
Shall afterwards with scorne be wasted;
When all thy Virgin-springs grow dry,
When no streames shall be left, but in thine eye.
A day off today to see the Tour of Britain riders tackle Reading Cycling Club's hill climb course at Streatley Ian Stannard is the solo breakaway rider, I trimmed out most of the intervening two minutes before the peloton came up after him. The professionals were pretty much universally making light of what is a pig of a climb. My awful little video then cuts to the finish at Newbury. As the Tour took a loop to the west, we made our best pace along the B4009, and cheered by schoolchildren along the way, got there twenty minutes before the Tour; and that's my glimpse of the sprint.
Michael Drayton finished off the 1605 version of his sonnet sequenceIdea with a set of dedicatory sonnets, ‘Certaine other Sonnets to great and worthy Personages.’ There’s one ‘To the high and mighty Prince, James king of Scots’, then one to Donne’s patroness, ‘To Lucy Countess of Bedford’; followed by ‘To the Lady Anne Harington.’, then ‘To the Lady L. S.’ The final one is the only one that has any circulation at all:
To Sir Anthony Cooke. Sonnet 64.
Vouchsafe to grace these rude unpolished rhymes,
Which but for you had slept in sable night,
And come abroad now, in these glorious times,
Can hardly brook the pureness of the light.
But sith you see their destiny is such,
That in the world their fortune they must try,
Perhaps they better shall abide the touch,
Wearing your name, their gracious livery.
Yet these mine own, I wrong not other men,
Nor traffic further then this happy clime,
Nor filch from Portes, not from Petrarch’s pen,
A fault too common in this latter time:
Divine Sir Philip, I avouch thy writ,
I am no pick-purse of another’s wit.
One of Drayton’s regular topics was his own ‘fantastic’ inventiveness, which he affects to defend so as to go on about it in a self-advertising way. Here, though, he rather oddly stakes his claim for originality (unlike others, he neither steals from Desportes nor Petrarch, he brags) by using and roundly endorsing a line from Sir Philip Sidney (‘Astrophel and Stella’, no 74). He doesn’t lift phrases from other writers!
At least one early modern writer apparently found this a strange way to profess how original you are:
Henry Parrot, Epigram 168, ‘Trahit sua quemque voluptas’ inLaquei ridiculosi: or Springes for Woodcocks (1613):
Wat wills you know how much he scorneth it,
To be a pick-purse of another’s wit:
But in a pocket, please you understand,
He hath a reaching, deep, and diving hand.
It appears to be a ‘pop’ (as we say these days) at Drayton. But the other possible reading of the epigram is that Parrot’s jest was merely that while ‘Wat’ (in this reading, just an invented epigrammatic malefactor) scorns to steal wit, ‘Wat’ is nevertheless in the literal sense an active pickpocket. This would make Parrot a secondary re-user of Sidney’s phrase about not lifting phrases.
There’s probably a Note and Query about this lofty matter, but I profess not to have read one, honestly.
Image, a detail from Adriaen van Utrecht, ‘Fishmonger's Stall’
“It signifies Marriage, open Enemies, Lawsuits, Controversies, Contracts, Warres, Bargaines, Fugitives, Thefts, &c. Because the Demands which do naturally appertain to the seventh house, require more consideration, and are more difficult to judge then of any other house, I have been forced to be more large in delivering the opinions of the Ancients, as well as of some modern Practisers…”
William Lilly’s Christian Astrology of 1647 is my text, and his instructions for an astrologer to determine important things about a proposed marriage, such as:
Who shall be Master of the two…
How they shall agree after Marriage…
Whether a Man or his Wife shall dye first, and the time when
This being 17th century England, we are soon getting to the main issue (I have expanded Lilly’s use of the common astrological signs):
“Whether she be a Maid, or Chaste, of whome the quere is.
Look if the Lord of the Ascendant [Venus] and the [Moon] be found in fixed Signs, good Planets beholding them, then say, she is a Maid, and chaste: But if in place of Fortunes there be Infortunes, say she is neither a Virgin, nor chaste; especially if [Mars] be there, and he in the house of [Venus] without Reception: Also, if [Moon] and [Sun] behold themselves and [Mars], she is no Maid; but if the Significators be in moveable Signs, Infortunes beholding them, say then she desireth a man very much, and that she refrains and restrains her concupiscence very much, and casts off her Suitors; yet it is not good to trust always to this judgment, because the nature of women is changeable.
Whether a Woman be honest to her Husband.
The Lord of the Ascendant, the [Moon] or [Venus] in fixed signs, in aspect of the Fortunes, she is chaste; these being in aspect of the Infortunes, not chaste, chiefly with [Mars]; [Sun] or [Moon] beholding [Mars], she is meretrix; [Sun] and [Moon] in no aspect, nor [Mars] with them, she is suspected a privy harlot, or rather privately wanton; but not yet come to the act.”
At this point, Lilly reminds those readers learning from him how to determine these delicate things that they will be playing with fire:
“I must charge all Sons of Art, to be sparing in delivering judgment upon these queries, rather to be silent; for as men, we may err; and so by delivering an unlucky judgment, be authors of much mischief.”
Nevertheless, he continues inexorably on, through all the permutations of temptation, resistance, inclination to frailty, extenuations of circumstance:
“Of a woman, whether she be corrupt, or hath a Lover besides her husband or Sweet-heart
Behold the Ascendant and his Lord, and the [Moon], and see if they be both in angles or fixed Signs, then say the Maid is a Virgin, and they lye of her, or what is reported is false: if the Lord of the Ascendant and [Moon] be in fixed Signs, and the angles be moveable Signs, she was tempted, but gave no credit or admittance to the Tempter. If the [Moon] be joined to [Saturn] [Jupiter] [Mars] [Sun] corporally by aspect, so that there is between them but five degrees or less, she is tempted of some one who hath the effigies of that Planet to whom she is joined; but if the [Moon] be joined to [Venus] or [Mercury], she is tempted by some woman for a man, but she makes no reckoning of the old or young Bawds words: but laughs her to scorn …
If then the [Moon] be with [the dragon’s tail], she hath formerly offended, and is still guilty, nor will she amend hereafter
The [Moon] in the last face of [Gemini], the woman seems to be corrupt, if the Ascendant be a moveable Sign, or common, or if the Lord of the Ascendant or [Moon] be in moveable or common Signs she is no Virgin; the Lord of the Ascendant combust in a moveable or common Sign, the woman hath been tempted and made a harlot by violence, or she was unwillingly drawn to lewdness.”
The astrologer’s client might want to know just where the actual or contemplated lover is: Lilly gives the rules that determine his actual distance:
“If [Mars] be with the Lord of the seventh, or with [Moon], or in one Sign in [conjunction], or with [the dragon’s tail], the woman hath a Sweet-heart in contract, not far from her house; and if they be in one degree, then he is in the house, and one of the familiars of the man that asks the question.”
He even seems to produce the signs in the sky that indicate if the woman is actually lesbian in her inclinations:
“The Lord of the seventh joined to [Venus] with Reception, with or without any aspect, or else by a [trine] or [sextile], or[square] without Reception, the Woman cares not for men, but hath friendship with women.”
And the final outcome of all this celestially vexed mating:
“Whether the Child conceived is the Son of him who is reputed is Father
Behold the Lord of the Ascendant and the [Moon], who signifie the Interrogant; then observe the Sign of the eleventh and his Lrd, these signifie the issue in Conception; if these Significators behold one another by [trine] or [sextile], with Reception or not, the Conception is legitimate
But if none of these things be, but that [Saturn] [Mars] or [Venus] behold the fifth house, or Lord thereof, there may be just suspicion that the Child is conceived in adultery, and the Mother was stuprated.”
The double standard is in its perfect form here. Lilly just cannot imagine an astrologer being consulted by a woman client about her prospective partner’s chastity. Women having so many more potential faults than men, the system seems set up to find and confirm them.
‘Christian astrology modestly treated'? The man had a nerve. Lilly thought, of course, that his art let him interpret the purposes of the largest elements in God’s creation (which always had meaning in relation to His prime creation, man): the whole sky was a divinely ordained system of influences. Lilly will always claim that his astrological predictions or readings do not entail any necessity, that repentance, or self-restraint, or resistance are always possible to the free human will. But once you read him in the full flow of confident exposition, he looks like the willing prisoner of his own system, seduced by its intricacies into describing an astral predetermination. A latently Calvinist God lurks behind all this, and maybe that’s what made Lilly think he was expounding something ‘Christian’ - rather than the arbitrary and prejudiced gim-crack assembled from all sorts of traditions, which you could charge with being mechanistic if it wasn’t so susceptible to delivering what suited the operator’s own opinions.
