Arbor vitae

A page from the apothecary and gardener John Parkinson’s beautifully illustrated Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed vp (1629).

This shows ‘The Tree of Life’, arbor vitae (figure item 2). Parkinson does not make any great fuss about the naming of this plant: “the French that first brought it, called it Arbor vitae, with what reason or upon what ground I know not: but ever since it hath continued under the title of the tree of Life”. It came, he says, from “that part of America which the French doe inhabit, about the river of Canada, which is at the back of Virginia Northward, and as it seemeth, first brought by them from thence into Europe, in the time of Francis the first French King, where it hath so plentifully encreased, and so largely been distributed, that now few gardens of respect, either in France, Germany, the Lowe-Countries, or England, are without it.”

Parkinson is in many places brusque or dismissive about the traditionally imputed medicinal virtues of a plant. Often, he simply insists on the aesthetic quality of the flower as its real virtue (“the chief or only use thereof is, to be an ornament for the gardens of the curious lovers of these delights”, he says of the fritillary). In this case, however, he thinks that the tree of life has potential: he says that the leaves can be chewed prior to breakfast to treat shortness of the breath, and might work as an expectorant, then says: “Other properties I have not heard that it hath; but doubtlesse, the hot resinous smell and taste it hath, both while it is fresh, and after it hath been long kept dry, doth evidently declare his tenuity of parts, a digesting and cleansing quality it is possessed with, which if any industrious would make trial, he should find the effects”

I thought I would pursue this ‘Tree of Life’ candidate, mainly because Milton’s God is so teasing about the biblical Tree of Life in Book XI of Paradise Lost. (It seems to have been regularly taken to be the case that God was speaking ironically about Adam eating the fruit of the Tree of Life and so living forever.)

Abraham Cowley in ‘The Garden: To J Evelyn, Esquire’ affects to believe that the arbor vitae really is a reduced derivative of the Tree of Life which grew in Paradise:

“The Tree of Life, when it in Eden stood,
Did its immortal Head to Heaven rear;
It lasted a tall Cedar till the Flood;
Now a small thorny Shrub it does appear;
Nor will it thrive too everywhere …”

(But of course, it thrives in John Evelyn’s garden.)

Henry Arthington in his Principal Points of holy profession (1607) ‘The First Point. In Creating all things for our use, and us for his glory’ seems to have regarded ‘The Tree of Life’ as the panacea God put in the Garden of Eden to keep Adam and Eve from dying:

“And, for mans meat, God did provide,
All fruitful trees (save only one)
With every Herb that beareth seed,
For man all times to feed upon.

…. And that man might live in this state,
And never die (unless he would)
The tree of life, thereon to eat,
God planted in that sacred mould …”

R. Fletcher, in the verses, ‘Degenerate Love and Choyce’ from his Ex otio Negotium (1656), explains that God, as well as all the stuff about having it guarded by cherubims with fiery swords, actually hid the Tree of Life after the fall:

“As though when he fell mortal, God had hid
The Tree of Life in earth, which he forbid.”

Robert Herrick, in his fulsome ‘TO THE KING, To cure the Evil’ refers to the notion of a quest to find once more the Tree of Life: but announces that he has discovered it in Charles I touching for the King’s Evil:

“To find that Tree of Life, whose Fruits did feed,
And Leaves did heal, all sick of human seed:
To find Bethesda , and an Angel there,
Stirring the waters, I am come; and here,
At last, I find, (after my much to doe)
The Tree, Bethesda, and the Angel too:
And all in Your Blest Hand …”

Cowley (again) compliments a botanist called ‘Dr Scarborough’ on his identification of all plants: ‘Death’ and ‘Disease’ fear that Scarborough will soon identify the Tree of Life itself, and oust them:

“From creeping Moss to soaring Cedar thou
Dost all the powers and several Portions know,
Which Father-Sun, Mother-Earth below
On their green Infants here bestow.
Can’st all those Magic Virtues from them draw,
That keep Disease, and Death in awe.
Who whilst thy wondrous skill in Plants they see,
Fear lest the Tree of Life should be found out by Thee.”

Unsurprisingly, Du Bartas had a lot to say about the trees of Eden (du Bartas had a lot to say about everything). Unlike the apparently naïve view taken by Arthington, Du Bartas seems to have regarded the Tree of Life not so much as a panacea to keep the un-fallen inhabitants of Eden in perfect health, but as a kind of political air-freshener, that would have prevented any dissent among the burgeoning population of a continued, un-fallen paradise:

“Now of the Trees wherewith th’immortal Power
Adorn’d the quarters of that blisful Bower,
All serv’d the mouth, save two sustain’d the mind:
All serv’d for food, save two for seals assign’d.

God gave the first, for honourable style,
The tree of Life : true name; (alas the while!)
Not for th’effect it had, but should have kept,
If Man from duty never had mis-stept.
For, as the air of those fresh dales and hills
Preserved him from Epidemic ills,
This fruit had ever-calm’d all insurrections,
All civil quarrels of the cross complexions;
Had barr’d the passage of twice-childish age,
And ever-more excluded all the rage
Of painful griefs, whose swift-slow posting-pace
At first or last our dying life doth chase.”

For writers with any kind of Catholic sympathy, the Tree of Life was inescapably connected with Christ and his mother. Notice in Ralph Knevet’s poem, ‘The Conception’, how the furor hortensis Marvell’s Mower inveighed against is here a positive, the miraculous act of grafting of the divine onto the human root stock:

“The glorious sun forgets his birth,
And couples with the humble earth,
Her womb impregnates with warm showers,
Producing fruits and flowers:

This an unequal match may seem:
Then what was that? when Jesse’s stem,
Was overshadow’d from above,
Courted by divine love:

Here Immortality vouchsaf’d
On mortal stock to bee ingraff’d,
And Jesse's root produc’d a rod,
Even Jesus, our great God.

Th’Egyptian Gods in Gardens grew,
False were their Gods: But ours is true,
From Heaven, transplanted to the bed,
Of a pure Maidenhead.

This is a plant which never dyes,
A med’cine for all maladies,
A Tree of life, whose fruit is bliss,
(Lord) let me taste of this.”

Or there is Robert Southwell writing about the B.V.M., ‘Her Spousals’:

“Wife did she live, yet virgin did she die,
Untaught of man, yet mother of a son,
To save her self and child from fatal lie,
To end the web whereof the thread was spun
In marriage knots to Joseph she was tide
Unwonted works with wonted wiles to hide,

God lent his Paradise to Joseph’s care
Wherein he was to plant the tree of life,

His son of Joseph’s child the title bare …”

Unsurprisingly, this was too mariolatrous for most 17^th century English verse writers, and Phineas Fletcher in The Locusts, or the Appolyonists, produces a variant in which ‘The Tree of Life’, indignantly referred to here by the devils, is the Gospels, flourishing in England, and (in a neat reversal of the importing of arbor vitae from America, the gospel ‘tree of life’ is now transported back to America, formerly securely part of Satan’s kingdom:

“That little swimming Isle above the rest,
Spight of our spight, and all our plots, remains
And grows in happiness …

… There God hath fram’d another Paradise,
Fat Olives dropping peace, victorious palm,
Nor in the midst, but every where doth rise
That hated tree of life, whose precious balms
Cure every sinful wound: give light to th’eyes,
Unlock the ear, recover fainting qualms.
There richly grows what makes a people blest;
A garden planted by himself and drest:
Where he himself doth walk, where he himself doth rest.

… Nor can th’old world content ambitious Light,
Virginia our soil, our seat, and throne,
(To which so long possession gives us right,
As long as hells) Virginia’s self is gone:
That stormy Ile which th’Ile of Devils hight,
Peopled with faith, truth, grace, religion.”

“I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee’, wrote Donne about sex in ‘Elegie VII’. Just how transgressive the idea was can be gathered from the existence of such works as Sebastian Franck’s The forbidden fruit· or A treatise of the tree of knowledge of good & evil of which Adam at first, & as yet all mankind doe eat death … Lastly, here is shewed what is the tree of life, contrary to the wisdom, righteousness, and knowledge of all mankind (translated into English in 1640). (The two trees here are diabolic and divine knowledge, and we have to heed “The Testimony of the Scripture, how we ought to evacuate the Seed of the Serpent his counsel & word, and so vomit up the Fruit of the forbidden Tree, and purge the same away as deadly poison by the Fruit of the Tree of Life.”)

Finally, I was pleased to find in THE Cure of Old Age, AND Preservation of Youth. By ROGER BACON …ALSO A Physical Account OF THE Tree of Life, BY EDW. MADEIRA ARRAIS. (1683) an account of an Indian who lived to be more than 335 by virtue of eating fruits floating down the Ganges from the lost earthly paradise, fruits infused with enough of the virtue of the tree of life as to give him extreme longevity:

“For Corroboration whereof there comes very opportunely the History of that Indian, most famous among our Portuguese, who lived above three hundred and thirty five years, as do testify Patres Conimbricenses, our Iohannes de Barros, who may rather be styled the Lusitanian Livy, and our Didacus de Couto a famous Portugal Historian. Several of our Portuguese at their Return from the East-Indies assured me they saw him alive. Nunius à Cunna, when he govern’d India, found him there, and afterwards when Don John de Castro presided Viceroy Anno Domini 1547 he was then alive. And all the Kings of those Parts, before they were subject to the Kingdom of Portugal, and our Governors and Viceroys afterwards, appointed an Allowance for the Maintenance of this wonderful Man.

His Teeth fell several times, others e’re long coming in their room; His Beard, when it was grown all white, as his Age reflourished, grew black again. Some ascribe the Cause of this to certain Fruits, which he found in Ganges, and eat: For at certain Times after Inundations, rowing up and down Ganges in a Boat, he sought these Fruits, which, as they affirm, are brought with the Waters from Earthly Paradise, from whence this River (as is believed) derives its Original.”

Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaphs

The stillborn daughter of Walter and Deborah Dunch, from the monument described in my prior post.

A Bunch of Dunches: Little Wittenham Church

Out on a walk, a chance visit to the Church at Little Wittenham, near Dorchester, and a discovery there of a beautiful array of early modern tombs and inscriptions. All seem to be connected to the Dunch family, who must have had an ancestor who was hard of hearing, or outright deaf. The man who makes the money was William Dunch, auditor to the mint for three Tudor monarchs:

"Here lyeth buryed William Dunche esquire Auditor of the myntes to our late soveraigne lordes king henrie the eight, and kinge edwarde the sixte and esquire sworne extraordinarie for the bodye of our sovereigne ladie Elizabeth, he married Marie Barnes they had yssue between them two sonnes Edmonde the Eldest, and Walter the younger, which William deceased the [ } daie of [ ] in the yeare of our Lorde God [ ]"

The Dunches all lived in a manor house just yards from the church; it is odd that no-one got round to adding the dates.

Mary Barnes gets commemorated in a long set of verses in that thumping early Tudor verse form, poulter’s measure on a separate plaque. Again, there’s no set of dates, and the brass plaque seems to have a later and less capable inscriber add her name as an afterthought in an extra piece of metal. Maybe this plaque was moved when the main alabasters for Walter Dunch and his wife were installed:

"The touch stone of our life, is death, as I decerne

For by the present passing hence, the former life we lerne

And so through worlds reaport, they live that lie full lowe

The grave can claime nomore of right, then flesh & blud ye know

The people steies the same behinde, for causes good

By which devise the honest name is knowne and understode

Then lo this widow here a farington by birth

Must have the praise that she hath donne, whilst she was on earth

Her sober maners milde, and upright dealing just

In minde of man shall shrined be, though barns be turned to dust

By marriage barns she hight, by life a matron calld

And so among the gravest sort in seat she shalbe stalld

Well likd of poore and rich, her works so virtuous were

That much good will & neighbours love therefore hence did she beare

Of right theis verses sure, she claimes, I say nomore

And you that reades them, after must, for she is goon before

The heavens doo holde her ghost, the earth accompt must make

Of everything it hath receavd, when god shall reconing take

when lo the wormes shall yelde her bodie whole againe,

and she with us and we with her, in endless joy remaine."

The full effigies of Walter Dunch and his wife form my main image here. He died in 1594 aged 42, there is no date given for Deborah Pilkington, his wife, but there they both are, looking like uncomfortable passengers in a wagon lit or cross-channel ferry. Walter is in full plate armour, and I was struck by how realistically the sculptor has rendered the movement away from the body of this most unyielding of forms of outerwear, as he lies down, unable to sleep. Deborah is in high Elizabethan fashion, with ruff, shaved-back hairline, ‘wirey coronet’ and hood. The obelisks are in viviparan (Purbeck) marble (what did they think about that intricate matrix of what just had to be snail shells?).

In front of the tomb, the usual line up of children. I was interested in the way that the earliest monument, the brass plaque to William Dunch the early modern auditor, his children are presented as smaller than him, but simultaneously as adults: his boys have moustaches and beards.

On the floor in front of the chest tomb, an early modern woman writer has her say in one of the few poetic forms then allowed to women:

"In memory of her lovinge husband William Winchcombe, sonne and heire to Francis Winchcombe esquire of Buckleberry who died the 38^th yeare of his age on the 29^th of July 1614, Mary the eldest daughter of Edmund Dunch bestowed this monument

I lovd thee living and lament thee dead

But what in measure cannot be exprest

Yet love and sorrowe both will needes be read

Even in this marble (Deare) they do theire best

And tis for others too I put this stone

To me thy tombe shalbe my heart alone

Twise eighteene yeares he viewed heavens day

Sixteen he spent in happy wedlocks bonds

The Graces, Muses, and the Fates did lay

Untimely on his webb theire hastening hands

Of heire his house, of all there hopes his friends

Of progenie his wife bereft he ends."

Maths was not her strongest subject, but she was excellent at English.

Those nut-cracking early moderns: Edmund Gayton on nuts

The 17th century physician and failed wit Edmund Gayton, in his The art of longevity, or, A diaeteticall instition (1659), talking about nuts.

First, the almond, variously medicinal, aphrodisiac, and cosmetic in its uses:

Almonds; the sweet are temperate, the bitter
Better, and for Physical uses fitter:
Their moderate heat and oyly juice
Doth lenifie the throat, yet they refuse
To pass the stomack, unless sugar'd well;
Then urine and obstructions they expel,
And sperm augment: unskinn’d they nourish worse,
Their coats, like bran, a passage for them force.
Skinn’d they are stiptick, and perform good task,
When order’d against bloody Flix and Lask.
The bitter, hot and dry, are wholsomer,
Dissolve gross humours, cleanse the ureter,
Expectorate and sweep the clogged lungs,
And mundifie the Spleen, and Liver dungs.
Their oyl for many uses serve, get grace
For keeping terse the Ladyes skins and face:

In Physick more successful; so we shall
Not give our Almonds only unto * Pal.

‘Pal’ I think for Pol, the parrot, as in ‘An Almond for a Parrot’, a by word for something the recipient adores. Nuts, Gayton goes on to tell us, are in general too dry – if you are of the wrong humour, they will make your head ache, and cause dizziness. (This is a bit of a surprise, for by the doctrine of signatures, nuts were often considered good for the brain.) But Gayton insists:

Nuts are dry whorsons, though the Tree complain,
Shee’s thwack’d and bang’d by every Country-Swain;
'Tis not without a Fault, by Virgil’s leave,
Who did the Nut an innocent fruit conceive.
For simply of themselves they do great harm,
Are most obstructive, and in stomacks warm
And cholerick ingender fumes, and make
The pate virtiginous, and deadly ake.

But the nut can be improved by being infused in sherry, and for a moment Gayton’s verses faintly recall Milton’s wonderful sonnet of wise Epicureanism, ‘Lawrence of Virtuous Father Vertuous Son’:

Infus’d in Sack, their mended quality’s
Approv’d, who wo’nt in Walnuts sacrifice
An afternoon to Bacchus, if it rain,
And moistned skies offend the studious brain?

Next, some kind of internal cleanse made of nuts, figs, rue and salt pounded together in a mortar (Gayton uses the old verb, ‘contund’):

But Nuts, two Figs, and twenty leaves of Rue,
And Salt contunded, (give the Devil his due,
He is a Nutter too) will expel poyson;
Nay, taken fasting keeps off all that’s noysom.

We have all heard about the ‘nut-cracking’ groundlings of the Shakespearean theatre: here, Gayton explains which nuts were eaten, plebeian ones as he sees it, the hazelnut and filbert, and also tells us that this cracking went on between the acts, and only spoiled the hearing of the entr’acte music:

In Hazel-nut, or Filberd, cold and dry
Of temper, doth a windy moysture lye,
Which yeilds but little nourishment, so tough,
It will not passe the stomack soon enough,
But lies like bullet, or small shot of lead,
Yet upon these the vulgar sort do feed.
And at the Play houses, betwixt the Acts,
The Musick Room is drown’d with these Nut-cracks…

I will leave him on the excellence of walnuts, in themselves, and as an oil for the scalp, finally as a sweet:

Walnuts, or Royal Nuts, or Nuts of Jove,
(Here’s name enough to get a noble love)
Are the best sort of Nuts, and newly pluck’d
Delight the taste, but little juyce is suck’d

From its dry kernel, which doth slow descend,
And by its hard concoction doth offend.
Made in oyl like Almonds, they make smooth
The hands and face, like chisel to a booth
Or board, they plane the scurfie head, and scales,
And save the labour of our itching nails.
The green and tender Nut, like Sucket made,
And boyl’d in Sugar (tis Confectioners trade)
Is most delightful and confortative,
And antidoticall: then eat, and live.

Gayton was a ‘physician and hack writer’ (ODNB). I quite enjoyed his mock sermon, Walk knaves, walk (1659), in which a vamper of waxed boots, got into a puritan pulpit, recommends his product to the congregation. Wit revived: or, a new and excellent way of divertisement, digested into most ingenious questions and answers. By Asdryasdust Tossoffacan (1655-6) never lives up to that pseudonym. The ODNB entry quotes Anthony Wood on Gayton’s writings for bread: Gayton ‘lived … in London in a sharking condition, and wrote trite things merely to get bread to sustain him and his wife’. At his death Dr Fell condemns his University’s former beadle as “such an ill husband, and so improvident, that he had but one farthing in his pocket when he died”.

Image, Georg Flegel (b. 1566, Olomouc, d. 1638, Frankfurt am Main), ‘Dessert Still Life’, from the Web Gallery of Art.

Donne quoted in the coffee-house

The Author of The women’s petition against coffee representing to publick consideration the grand inconveniencies accruing to their sex from the excessive use of that drying, enfeebling liquor: presented to the right honorable the keepers of the liberty of Venus by a well-willer (1674) is almost certainly the same as the author of the sequel pamphlet from the same year, The Mens answer to the womens petition against coffee vindicating their own performances and the virtues of that liquor from the undeserved aspersions lately cast upon them by their scandalous pamphlet.

This is well written knockabout stuff, five minutes of amusement for a coffee house goer. The women’s petition is a complaint of male sexual failings since men took to coffee drinking:

“to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become mere Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us…

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunuch[ed] our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

For the continual sipping of this pitiful drink is enough to bewitch Men of two and twenty, and tie up the Codpiece-point without a Charm. It renders them that use it as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hag over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiff but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears: They pretend 'twill keep them Waking, but we find by scurvy Experience, they sleep quietly enough after it.”

At the high point of the comedy occurs a misquotation from Donne – it was probably made from memory, and if the author checked afterwards, he might have kicked himself, as the original words even more apposite:

“can any Woman of Sense or Spirit endure with Patience, that when priviledg’d by Legal Ceremonies, she approaches the Nuptial Bed, expecting a Man that with Sprightly Embraces, should Answer the Vigour of her Flames, she on the contrary should only meet A Bedful of Bones, and hug a meager useless Corpse rendered as sapless as a Kixe, and dryer than a Pumice-Stone, by the perpetual Fumes of Tobacco, and bewitching effects of this most pernitious COFFEE, whereby Nature is Enfeebled, the Off-spring of our Mighty Ancestors Dwindled into a Succession of Apes and Pigmies: and

---The Age of Man
Now Cramp’t into an Inch, that was a Span.”

The tag derives from AN ANATOMIE OF THE WORLD The first Anniversary, when Donne laments the shortness of human life in this decayed world, and then makes a rapid transition to our diminished stature:

Old Grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow:
And for our children we reserve to morrow.
So short is life, that every peasant strives,
In a torn house, or field, to have three lives.
And as in lasting, so in length is man,
Contracted to an inch, who was a span

As I say, Donne’s original words would have gone better in the bawdy context. One can see that the author remembered that Donne was talking about longevity (who could forget those resonant first couple of lines in the quotation?), but forgot about the shift to our diminished ‘length’.

The pamphlet author, working at speed, gives an amusing enough account of the working relationship between coffee and alcohol, with the male clientele alternating between coffee house and ale house:

“Some of our Sots pretend tippling of this boiled Soot cures them of being Drunk; but we have reason rather to conclude it makes them so, because we find them not able to stand after it: 'Tis at best but a kind of Earthing a Fox to hunt him more eagerly afterward: A rare method of good-husbandry, to enable a man to be drunk three times a day! Just such a Remedy for Drunkenness, as the Popes allowing of Stews, is a means to prevent Fornication: The Coffee-house being in truth, only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing soup preparative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill’d themselves with a morning draught of more Ale than a Brewers horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain, where they are sure to meet enough lazy pragmatical Companions, that resort here to prattle of News, that they neither understand, nor are concerned in; and after an hours impertinent Chat, begin to consider a Bottle of Claret would do excellent well before Dinner; whereupon to the Bush they all march together, till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves sober; where three or four dishes a piece, and smoking, makes their throats as dry as Mount Aetna enflam’d with Brimstone; so that they must away to the next Red Lattice to quench them with a dozen or two of Ale, which at last growing nauseous, one of them begins to extol the blood of the Grape, what rare Langoon, and Racy Canary may be had at the Miter: Sayst thou so? cries another, Let's then go and replenish there· with our Earthen Vessels: So once more they troop to the Sack-shop till they are drunker than before; and then by a retrograde motion, stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee.”

The Mens answer to the womens petition, which I imagine the writer had ready for the very next week, voices the male response, which protests against the immoderate demands of the women, representing men knocking themselves out to give the women of England pleasure:

“Have we not condescended to all the methods of Debauchery? Invented more postures than Aretine ever dreamed of? Been Pimps to out own Wives, and Courted Gallants even with the hazard of our Estates, to do us the Civility of making us not only Contented, but most obliged Cuckolds…

That our Island is a Paradise for Women, is verified by the brisk Activity of our Men, who with an equal Contempt scorn Italian Padlocks, and defy French Dildo’s, knowing that a small Doze of Natures Quintessence, satisfies better in a Female Limbeck, than the largest Potion infused by Art.”

“Tis not this incomparable settle Brain that shortens Natures Standard”, the pamphlet exclaims, and even offers the argument is that coffee houses keep men in sexual top form: “Every coffee house has a Tawdry Woman, a wanton daughter, or a Buxom Maid.”

And anyway, it says, the long hours men take at the coffee shop are just another sexual opportunity for women: “The news we chat of there, you will not think it Impertinent, when you consider the fair opportunities you have thereby, of entertaining an obliging friend in our absence, and how many of us have you dubb’d knights of the Bull-Feather, whilst we have sate innocently sipping the Devils holy-water.”

From the earliest, quasi-medical, or traveler’s reports of coffee in the 1650’s, by 1662 there is an exuberance of coffee house titles, some of them very racy. The Maidens complaint against coffee, 1663, is a playlet. I will leave with the pungent sentiments of ‘Dorothy’ about men who drink too much coffee:

“Before I’le fling my self away upon any such dry whorson as drinks Coffee, I’le wrap my Maiden-head in my smock, and fling it into the Ocean to be bugger’d to death by young Lobsters.”

My illustration is from Coffee-house jests 1686.

'Astrologi peritissimi': Lilly's tomb, Walton-on-Thames

Over this Easter Saturday to Walton-on-Thames, and the Church of St Mary there, to see where the old fox William Lilly went finally to earth. Thanks to his friend Elias Ashmole, Lilly far outlasted the old accusations of spirit-calling, and got interred in the chancel of the church. The slab is worn, and cracked. I could make out:


'NI [illeg.] EREPETUR URNA / GUILLIMI LILLI / ASTROLOGI PERITISSIMI / QUI FATIS CESSIT / V[illeg.] IULII ANNO CHRISTI IULIANO / MDCLXXXI / HOC ILLI POSUIT AMORIS MONUMENTUM / ELIAS ASHMOLE / ARMIGER'.


The excellent parish guide offers a translation perhaps from days when the slab was better preserved: 'Let not the urn of William Lilly, a most learned astronomer, be destroyed by oblivion, who yielded to destiny on the 9th of June, in the Julian year of Christ, 1681. Elias Ashmole, Knight, placed over him this monument of love'. Perhaps 'most expert astrologer' would be a better translation of 'astrologi peritissimi', the version of 'hoc illi posuit' also seems expansive. But the general sense seems right; I like Ashmole specifying that this is a death dated under the Julian calendar. Though portrait engravings usually have the astrologer with his astrolabe and birth chart, there is no specifically astrological imagery on the tombstone. But that doesn't surprise me, it would have been a bit of a shock to see an astrological motif in the chancel of a church. The 'urna' may just be conventional words, or perhaps there once was a corresponding wall-mounted urn.


My other image is one of the Selwyn brasses. The full set have been lifted from the floor and reset out of harm's way on the wall. He was John Selwyn, keeper of her Majesty's park of Oteland (Oaklands, in Surrey). He died in 1587: his wife Susan and their 11 children are also depicted, and the proud note that all the children were 'lyving at his death', this as something quite remarkable.


But the main picture is the greatest moment of his career, the thing that he was remembered by: apparently, during a royal hunting party, Selwyn leapt off his horse onto a stag, kept his seat on the terrified and doomed animal, steered it round, then gave it the coup de grace right in front of the Queen.


The brass hinges out, to reveal another version of the same scene, almost identical but less confidently incised: Selwyn has lost his hat in this other version. The story was collected in 1773, way after living memory, the the aged sexton involved was probably transmitting a true story, even though it might have been extrapolated from the brass and its inscription: there was probably a local tradition.


I dare say that the present Elizabeth would respond quite well to some adept fellow finishing off a stag with such aplomb right in front of her, but obviously it would get a bad press these tender-hearted days (when you can adopt a red deer stag in Richmond Park for £50 a year, or £500 for life). Those stags in Richmond Park are impressively sized animals: Selwyn obviously took a big risk. Queen Victoria apparently approved an even gorier version of the same incident for the Ascot Gold Cup, the Queen's Vase of 1847.


http://www.waltonparish.org.uk/St_Marys.html

Falling out with Genethlialogia

One for my fellow blogger at Wynken de Worde – a rather interesting set of highly personal marginal annotations in one of the EEBO copies of John Gadbury’s Genethlialogia, or, The doctrine of nativities [1658]. My images consist of the title page, with Gadbury’s face rudely scrawled over, and an abusive line inserted below the picture, “His father a Knave, mother a whore & himself the most malicious Taylor and Botcher ever breathed. A bold impudent Scorpionist”, and a composite image I put together of other marginalia in the text.

I confess that I am blogging before finishing the research on this – the copy of Parker’s Familiar to All book about Lilly is out on loan from Reading University library, so I am not sure if Parker mentions this particular attack. And the other thing I want to see is a specimen on William Lilly’s handwriting, for, even though some of the annotations refer to ‘Lilly’ as if Lilly were a third party, I am fairly sure that the annotations are by him. (A trip to the Bodleian is in order: this EEBO text is the Bodley copy, perhaps via Ashmole. Plenty of Lilly manuscript material to check against, draft almanacs etc.)

Here’s my transcript of the remarks written on pages 262-3:

“The Rascall was a meer poor Taylor, till Lilly taught him Astrology 1654

G a meer Atheist hee then thrust a minister at London wall out of his pulpitt, and prated there beeing drunk as hee hath oft reported [himself?]

Hee wrought 4 yeares to Lilly, made him new cloths, & mended his old – his mother had 2: husbands alive when hee viz the author was was born, and also many personall servants, as Mullenay the farmer whom shee undid, shee lived somtymes at Walton near Windsor, wher shee rann away 40[?]. In debt to the poor people thereabouts, Gadburys father never lived wth her aboue 2 or 3 yeares, hee a most absurd […] fellow

A poor sneaking Taylor, never any workman, lived in Strand Lane in a Bawdy house All the generation of the Gadburies most litigious Knave & hated of their neighbours – this John the author was apprentice to one Nichols a poor taylor in Oxford, and was putt out by the parish – els hee must have been of no Trade, in 1646. hee became covenant(?) servant to John Thorn a woamans taylor over against the Talbot in the Strand: and when Thorn was constable at his feast, sang ballads to his guests.”

In ‘To the Reader’, against Gadbury’s 1654 tribute to his mentor: ‘When I first of all adventured upon this Task, I made my intention known unto my truly-honoured Friend, Mr. William Lilly, who, upon the hearing thereof, very nobly, and like a true and faithful Propagator of art and Learning, gave me many encouragements to perfect the thing I intended’, the defacer of the book has written, “& yet, see how this Villain requited Lilly in 1659 and 1660 – in writing 6 or 7 Libelling pamphlets against him.”

The commendatory epistle in the 1654 text of Gadbury’s work, by Lilly himself gets two comments: ‘An impudent rogue – Lilly gave him Directions in the whole.’ The print signature, ‘William Lilly, Student in Astrology’ is carefully overwritten into illegibility.

Pages 256 (‘Graceless Gadbury his nativity most absurdly set and fals (?) by himselfe’) and 257 (‘as bad as can bee witness his severall pamphlets against Lilly, who was his maker, hee is a monster of Ingratitude’) are marked. The annotator was looking through for passages of generalisation that can be laid, as astrologically determined bad qualities, to Gadbury in particular. The p.257 marginal comment is made against ‘the Native should be of Inclination and Manners harsh enough’ in Gadbury’s text.

On page 98, appended to a note of Gadbury’s own acknowledgment of Thomas May as author of some astrological verses: ‘These Verses have I borrowed from the works of that worthy Poet, Mr Tho May’ the annotator puts in, “tis very true, and all the whole book from Lilly, Origanus-Argol, and Sconer, nothing is this pimping fooles but the Tautology.”

At p. 130, sighting the unwary remark, ‘who ever hath Mars and Venus in their Nativities’, the annotator pounces: “Noddy Gadbury, hath not every Native Mars and Venus in their Nativity – oh memorable Coxcomb, oh precious Nonsense”

Other annotations I have spotted in the EEBO copy include, “‘here ♂ is entering Combustion’ – Aly, hee is separating”. “‘A large Reporter of his own acts; slights, derides and contemns all things in comparison of Victory’ – J Gadbury his Conditions exactly” (p.68). “‘Ex venter matri’ Good Latin Jack Gadbury, taylors fustian” (p119). “ ‘Scorpio … the most Pestilent Sign of the Twelve’ – Gadbury’s ascendant” (p.154). “This lying Rascal understands not the word of Greek or Latin” (p.169), and on p.170, by a passage on friendship, “such a Saucy Jack the Author is Jack Gadbury taylor”

As I say, despite the references to ‘Lilly’ as a third party, I am fairly convinced that the annotator must be Lilly himself. The title page gives the first clues, when the author’s name ‘John Gadbury’ has ‘Taylor, and monster of ingratitude’ added to it. In Lilly’s History of his Life and Times’ (1822 edition, page 86), occurs virtually the same phrasing: ‘that monster of ingratitude my quondam taylor, John Gadbury’. Gadbury’s chosen self-honorific, ‘philomathatikos’ (in Greek) is written over on the title page – one can see in one of Lilly’s print attacks on Gadbury that he was irritated by ‘the terrible Rattle in Heathen Greek that commonly attends his name’ (A just reward for unreasonable service, 1675).

Lilly was entirely accustomed to writing about himself in the third person: he does this throughout his pose as ‘Bentivolio Philo-Huff-Lash’ in A just reward for unreasonable service (1675), with its monstrous fib, “I never (to my knowledge) saw Mr Lilly in my life’. Lilly posed as a neutral party to defend himself, and attack Gadbury. The obsessions with his antagonist were very personal: of no distinguished birth himself, Lilly never let go of Gadbury having been his personal tailor, and ‘Bentivolio Philo-Huff-Lash’ just happens to be able to produce two tailor’s bills and receipts exchanged between Gadbury and Lilly. Or one could compare the marginal comment, cited above, “G a meer Atheist hee then thrust a minister at London wall out of his pulpitt, and prated there beeing drunk as hee hath oft reported [himself?]” with “At least when he took upon him to be a Tub-preacher, and held forth at London wall, taking for his Text --- And Jeptha was the son of a concubine (somewhat Analogous to his own concerns)”, on p.22 of Philo-Huff-Lash, A just reward for unreasonable service, or, An answer to John Gadbury's late hectorisme for Scorpio.

Or, again, p.32 of the same book “of his doubtful birth … his wretched breeding, of his honourable Titles at Oxford, when Prentice with Nichols the Taylor there, as sawcy Jack … of his being a Club … with Thorn the Taylor at Strand-Bridge” can be compared with the discreditable biographical facts angrily written on page 263.

Charges of ingratitude, and of tautology, are common to the printed pamphlets and the annotations. And in the end, only William Lilly could be as petty, obsessive, only he could be as bothered to be angry. It has to be him, venting his spleen, only he had sufficient spite for these extensive, anonymous snipings.

Why did they quarrel so? Lilly thought he had given Gadbury a start, and then had been turned against. For Gadbury, the younger man, was quicker to adapt – he moved towards royalism before Lilly, who had continued to foresee great things for Richard Cromwell. Gadbury genuinely wanted to establish astrology on evidential lines, and derided Lilly for mixing the art or science with the prophecies of Mother Shipton – Lilly was, in the end, very much attached to the visionary or oracular aspect of prophecy. It was professional rivalry too: Gadbury really did try to knock out Lilly permanently, dragging up all his anti-monarchical pronouncements to brand him a traitor at the Restoration. In return, Lilly, who rather clearly enjoyed these scraps, was happy to abuse Gadbury as a ‘scorpionist’, and Gadbury came off worst in their print exchange about those born with Scorpio in the ascendant.

Finally, one has to think that both men had been too rattled to desist from squabbling. As Lilly was reduced to saying for his 1660 almanac, ‘The many turnings and windings, frequent and sudden Revolutions, Alterations and Changes in the government of England An 1659 what man or Angel could predict’. Recent events had just been too confounding, both men had multiple embarrassments piled up – Lilly kept getting politics wildly wrong, while Gadbury was unlucky with any assurances he gave about the plague not returning. The unnerving knowledge of their own record of failure surely prompted the diversionary attack on a fellow prognosticator, not so much to discredit that rival in the minds of readers, as to distract from ignominious self-awareness.

Two adverts, 1651 and 1653

Fabulous printed ephemera off EEBO: two hand bills prepared for London astrologers in the mid 17th century. The earlier advert is for a woman astrologer across the Thames in Southwark, the 'Gentleman lately come to Town, Student in Astrology and Physick' was in Shoe Lane. He professes (as the woman apparently did not) medical astrology, and he is also more attuned to astrological advice being sought by clients in relation to money matters. The anonymous woman astrologer offers the usual range of astrological practice: nativities calculated, the success of voyages, whether those who have travelled far away are still alive or not, courtship, the location of stolen goods and absconded servants.


She is markedly more defensive about her art. It was quite normal for an astrologer to term themselves a 'mathematitian', as she does here, and a lot of mathematics as we would understand it went into the tables that computed the positions of the planets in a birth chart. But the indented paragraph expands:

ALL these things, with many other of consequence, which are here omitted, shall be performed by the lawfull Acts of the Mathematicks, which are not repugnant against the Divine Word, or the Lawes of the Kingdome; If any man shall make any doubt of the lawfulness thereof, or shall be inclined to think that these things above said, are performed by unlawfull meanes: If they please, for their better satisfaction therein, they may read the Quadripartit of Ptolomy, and the Comment of Dr. Carden thereupon, Dr. Melanston his preface in the works of Schomer, Dr. Fran. Junctinus. Cyprian, Leovitius, Lucas, Gauricus, Pontinus Haly, Guido, Bonatus, and D. Lucius, Belantius, in which is given full satisfaction, so that by these Authors, any man may be more fully satisfied in the Premises.

Either her sex explains the defensive note, or her male rival two years later operated when there was a greater acceptance of astrology. But both practitioners conceal their identities, and leave potential clients to 'inquire for the professor' at the given address.

Who was she? George Thomason (I think) has annotated both handbills with the same kind of hostile comment: the 'Gentleman lately come to Town, Student in Astrology and Physick (a Whelp of Lillie)' and, in her case 'written by on( ) of Lillies Whelps'. In his unfinished autobiography, William Lilly mentions both Sarah Skelhorn and Ellen Evans as involved in magical-astrological practices. Sarah Skelhorn was 'Speculatrix to Arthur Gauntlet': she could see angels in a crystal ball, in fact, she saw them everywhere - "Sarah told me oft, the angels would for some years follow her, and appear to her in every room of the house, until she was weary of them'. Ellen Evans was the daughter of Arise Evans, the drunken Welshman who initially taught Lilly astrology: she would call the Queen of the Fairies to appear in her crystal 'O Micol, O tu Micol, regina pigmeorum veni'. Ellen Evans would have been well placed to move on to the arguably less dubious practice of 'mathematics', as fashions in divination changed.

Lilly himself had been lured back into London after his spell of depression in Horsham when, on a visit back to town, one Will Poole showed him just such a hand bill in the Mitre Tavern, 'set forth by a master of Arts in Cambridge, intimating his abilities for resolving all manner of questions'. And Lilly was not slow on the uptake: 'perceiving there was money to be got in London...'

The interesting career of Lady Theodosia Ivy

After a spell as governor of Madras on behalf of the East India Company (he succeeded the city’s founder, Francis Day, in 1644), Sir Thomas Ivy returned home to England a conspicuously wealthy man. Traveling to meet him, his first wife died on her short journey, and so Sir Thomas’s misfortunes began. After a short spell as a widower, he was “persuaded to address my self to one Mrs. Garret, a Widow, and Daughter of Mr. Stepkins, who was represented unto me to be as beautiful in mind as in person; And though her Husband had left her nothing, yet was I not deterr’d by this to forbear my suit…”

Overcome by desire, Ivy settled a lavish thousand a year jointure on Theodosia Garret. She set about emptying his pockets: “I am confident, (and tis proved by sufficient Witnesses in Chancery) that in eighteen months after our Marriage, she had spent for her Accommodations above £3000 whereof £600 was in Apparel only, £500 in ready money.”

Financially at breaking point, unable to appear in the streets of London for fear of arrest by creditors, Ivy tried to get his wife to join him at estates he owned down in Wiltshire, at Malmesbury. A good bureaucrat, he was able to produce copies of the letters he sent her when he published an account of his ghastly matrimonial misadventures in his desperate last throw, Alimony Arraign'd, OR THE REMONSTRANCE AND HUMBLE APPEAL OF THOMAS IVIE Esq From the High Court of CHANCERY, To His HIGHNES the LORD PROTECTOR of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, &c. WHEREIN Are set forth the unheard-of Practices and Villanies of Lewd and Defamed Women, in Order to separate Man and Wife (1654).

He probably transcribed his version of the letters, because Theodosia seems to have produced her own, discreditable, version of some of his correspondence with her: ruthlessly exploitative, and without any scruple, she seems to have fabricated evidence throughout her career.

Poor Sir Thomas gives a plaintive account of the slights and humiliations he endured, and represents himself as always trying to reestablish the marriage. He probably was besotted with the beautiful Theodosia: one of her major abettors, her aunt “Mrs. Williamson called Mr. Ivie Clown, and Fool; and advised Mrs. Ivie not to go with him into the Country … And that he was an ugly fellow”.

Theodosia set out to annihilate him in the Church court: a maid, Jane Gilbert, was bullied to declare herself pregnant by her master (the maid seems to have refused to play along, and then died mysteriously). She claimed that Sir Thomas had transmitted venereal disease to her (he submits to Cromwell certificates from several doctors declaring him free of any such disease). He had deserted her (this was his effort to escape arrest by going to his Wiltshire estates), denied her maintenance, and she feared his violence. Sir Thomas takes a while to come round to the last point, but eventually spells out a main allegation:

“much fear she pretended (for had it been more than a Pretence, all had been accomplished, and my life lost) lest she should participate of the Sins and Punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah: And as for her body she durst not trust that with me lest (at any time being Morose and Cholerick) I should injure her by Blows; or if kind, I should infect her with unclean diseases … Mrs. Williamson reported that Mr. Ivie had bugger’d his Wife.”

Sir Thomas delivers (to Oliver Cromwell, imagine!) his pained denial of this charge:

“I never had within my breast the least inclination or desire to so vile & abominable a thing; neither did I ever attempt to persuade her by fair Words and Inticements, or to move her by threats, or ever used the least force or struggling with her to compass any such Base or Heathenish Design.”

Meanwhile Theodosia and her cabal are living a very high life in London, and what may be taken to be her next 'easy marks' feature, with their lives also thrown into turmoil:

“immediately after our marriage, she held correspondency with Sir William Killegrew’s Son, under the name of Ornaldo, called her self Callis ….she admitted both Sir William Killigrew and his Son her Corrivals; and that young Killigrew threatened to kill his Father, and her Husband also … Sir William Killigrew chid Mrs. Williamson for suffering his Son to be so familiar with Mrs. Ivie”.

However rackety, Theodosia routed her husband in court, confident enough to laugh at him: “When the Day came, and the Counsel began to speak, my hopes were quickly commanded to vanish, and the Counsel to hold their Peace; for they suddenly declared, ‘That they would not hear the Merits of the Cause. With much pressing, Mr. Lisle read the Petition; And though they took evident notice of it, yet would they not return any Answer to it; or so much as demand of my Wife, (who stood there laughing in their Presence) whether she would return to me, or no…” He was ordered to pay her alimony of £300 a year. It is this that pushed him to his final desperate appeal direct to Cromwell.

Ivy makes a good case for himself in print: that he is still upset that the court failed to ask Theodosia if she was willing to return to her husband shows the amount of humiliation he was willing to bear.

Theodosia went to take refuge at the house of friends, Sir William Salkhill and his wife, in St Martin’s Lane, where she was very soon diddling the family about debts to Sir William she had accrued, and her rent for living there. I cannot at the moment trace Sir Thomas much further. He does not feature much in the printed account of Lady Ivy’s next big adventure. He seems to have been alive, and still falling out with his separated wife, in 1671. But I assume Cromwell did nothing to rescue him, despite Sir Thomas trying to provoke the Lord Protector to protect him with the reflection that alimony was a papist notion: “Alimony is a Thing not known at the Common or Civil Law, but indulged, and brought in by the Pope and his Canons, and very much put in Use by the late High Commission and Prerogative Court of Canterbury.” Theodosia did not (and of course could not) remarry while Sir Thomas was alive.

I would strongly surmise that Lady Ivy would have been very much in the mind of the author of the witless comedy, Lady Alimony, or, The alimony lady an excellent, pleasant, new comedy, duly authorized, daily acted and frequently followed (1659). Perhaps the deficiencies of that play may be explained by the notion that, while it features a parade of women seeking (and getting) alimony on the basis of various male deficiencies, there is no central ‘Lady Alimony’ – was a personal lampoon excised from the text? ‘Witless’ is over severe: as the fashionable ladies get their undeserved alimony, their bad example spreads to a countrywoman, Christabel, who has misheard ‘alimony’ as ‘ale-money’, and is determined to claim her share of that from her husband. In the play, a Duke comes to the rescue, and overturns the court decisions, facing the women with a theatrical choice between nunneries and returning to their inadequate spouses.

Lady Ivy carried on as she always had: the account of her final big adventure opens by describing her as “THE late Lady Ivy, so many Years famous for Wit, Beauty, and Cunning in Law above any…” The two edited texts of Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer which I have looked at make no connection between her and the Widow Blackacre, but she looks likely to me. It seems as though Sir Thomas Ivy had taken leases on land on the south bank of the Thames. Lady Ivy’s attention turned to property, and she seems to have managed to bamboozle her way to a landholdings in the area.

In 1684, Lady Ivy tried her greatest legal coup: using forged title deeds, she attempted to take ownership of a large built-up area of Wapping and Shadwell, lands considered to belong to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s. The case was heard by Justice George Jeffreys, who as ever conducted both the trial, and the cross-examinations.

The deeds by which Lady Ivy sought to prove her right of ownership came rather miraculously into her possession (or, that was her story) when they were found in ‘an old bag of writings’ in 1675. The account of how the deeds were forged is fascinating: Lady Ivy herself specialized in the rather lady-like business of painting the elaborate initial letters. Her main forger was one Duffett, who had previously forged for her letters purportedly written by the wretched Sir Thomas. Lady Ivy had discovered that saffron put in the ink would make it look old. The documents were rubbed on dirty windows, exposed to light rain, dried harshly in direct sunlight, or in front of an open fire, and carried around in pockets, all to age them convincingly.

Lady Ivy was aiming to add to her unjustly acquired portfolio on the south bank a built up area of land larger than the City of London itself. Her claim to ownership was based ultimately on a chain of ownership stemming from a deed which purportedly came from the reign of Mary Tudor.

Poor historical research let her and her cohorts down. The forged deed described marsh lands equipped with a mill, and this mill having an overshot wheel. Judge Jeffreys interrogates locals with memories stretching back to when mills stood on that land, and ‘Grindy’ – for that appears to be his real name - a local miller, to prove this wildly unfeasible:

Grindy “I keep part of a Tide-mill my self, and have done so this Forty Years, and I know the Water must rise at least Ten, Twelve, or Fourteen Foot higher than it needs in a Tide-mill. For we take in our Water as the Tide comes in, and we have a pair of Gates that are hung with Hinges at the Top, which open as the Tide comes in, but the Water as it goeth out, shuts it again, and that keeps the Water to stand three or four Hours in some Mills, and then we have only Gutts that belong to the Wheel, and then we draw up the Gates the Water goes out. We have no Water that comes above the Shaft, which is half the Heighth of the Wheel, which is Sixteen Foot high. To talk of an Over-shot-mill the Water must rise so high as to go over the whole Marsh.

Lord Chief Justice And must drown all the Town and Country too.”

The forged document was proved by George Bradbury to have the wrong styling for the twin monarchs:

Mr Bradbury If your Lordship please to look upon them, the Stile of the King and Queen in both run thus. The one is, This Indenture made the thirteenth day of November, in the Second and Third Years of the Reigns of our Soveraign Lord and Lady Philip and Mary, by the Grace of God King and Queen of England, Spain, France, both Cicilies, Ierusalem, and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Arch Dukes of Austria, Dukes of Burgundy, Millain and Brabant, Counties of Hasburg, Flanders and Tyroll. The other is, This Indenture made the 22th day of December in the same Year. Now in November and December 2 and 3 of Philip and Mary it was impossible for any man in the World to draw a Deed in this Form that those two Writings are ---

Mr. Att. Gen. Is that your Demonstration?

L. C. J. Pray let him go on, methinks it is very ingenious.

Mr. Bradbury. My Lord, I had the hint from my Lord Coke in his first Institutes, not as to this particular Stile, for I know he is mistaken there, but for the detecting of Forgeries in general.

L. C. J. It is very well, pray go on.

Mr. Bradbury. My Lord, at that time King Philip and Queen Mary were among other Stiles, stiled King and Queen of Naples, Princes of Spain and Sicily; they never were called King and Queen of Spain and both the Cicilies then.

(Mr Bradbury tries to repeat the same point a little later, but Judge Jeffreys snaps his head off: “Lord, Sir, you must be cackling too; we told you, your Objection was very ingenious, but that must not make you troublesome, you cannot lay an Egg, but you must be cackling over it.”)

The final error, compounding all the widow Duffett’s account of her late husband’s forgeries: “The document is also found to be dated Livery and Seisin was Endorsed on the back of that Deed the 20th of Nov. in the 5th and 6th year of Philip and Mary, and 'tis notoriously known that Queen Mary died the Seventeenth of that Month, and that Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed the same day.”

The account of this trial, thought at the time – and with some justice – to show Judge Jeffreys at his finest, delivers all this in vivid court dialogue: The famous tryal in B.R. between Thomas Neale, Esq. and the late Lady Theadosia Ivy the 4th of June, 1684, before the Right Honourable the late Lord Jeffreys, lord chief justice of England, for part of Shadwell in the county of Middlesex ... together with a pamphlet heretofore writ ... by Sir Thomas Ivy 1696.

The 1684 case was, unsurprisingly, found against Lady Ivy, and the documents shown to be forged were detained: “a Motion was made by the Plaintiffs Counsel, that several Deeds produced by the Defendant, that were detected of Forgery, might be left in Court in order to have them pursued, and convicted of the Forgery. The Court upon debate of the Matter; and the Plaintiffs Counsel declaring they would prosecute an Information of Forgery, the Deeds of the 13th of November, and the 22th of December, 2 and 3 Phil. and Mar. were ordered to be left with the Clerk of the Crown till further Order.”

Sir Thomas humiliated himself in print (but his account of his catastrophic marriage is mentioned in neither Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage nor Road to Divorce). Lady Ivy may have inspired both the comedy of ‘Lady Alimony’ and Widow Blackacre. If I cannot prove these things, I have at least a very modest OED antedating: the OED gives the word from 1655, Ivy’s work, Alimony Arraign’d is 1654.

My image is the 1696 chart of the land Lady Ivy so audaciously tried to establish as hers.