by Ian Mortimer
Finally, we must welcome the first professional female painters to grace these shores. Four women are named by William Sanderson in his survey of the art scene in England at the start of our period, namely Mrs Joan Carlile, Mrs Mary Beale, Mrs Sarah Brooman and Mrs Weimes.54 The last two women keep a very low profile, but the first two are boldly breaking new ground. Pride of place is given by Sanderson to Carlile. She tends to portray her sitters standing in their very best white satin dresses in Elysian woodland scenes. After Carlile’s death in 1679, and perhaps even some years beforehand, Mary Beale becomes the unrivalled queen of British painting. Her husband, Charles Beale, is a deputy clerk in the patents office. When his job looks as if it is in jeopardy, Mary takes the upper hand and sets herself up as a professional artist, with her husband and sons as her assistants. Charging just £10 for a full-length portrait and £5 for a half-length, she quickly attracts a wealthy clientele. Sir Peter Lely comes to her studio, is impressed and invites her to see his manner of working. In 1671 her income from painting is £118; by 1677 it has reached £429. After earning such sums and always setting aside 10 per cent of her income for the poor, she begins to paint more freely and in a more original way for the rest of her days. Her younger son, Charles Beale, carries on her tradition and becomes a successful portrait painter in his own right after her death in 1699.
Libraries and Literature
Although over half the male population is literate, this does not mean that every other man owns a book. Most of those who can read do not even own a copy of the Bible – perhaps one in ten countrymen has one – and the majority of those who do have a Bible have no other book.55 For this reason, ecclesiastical libraries and country houses are important local resources. Many town churches have libraries of about fifty to one hundred books, mainly of a theological nature, and all the cathedrals have larger libraries than this. As for private collections, most gentlemen will happily allow access to respectable people wishing to consult their books, in the same way that they are happy to show off their houses. Ralph Josselin uses Lord Mandeville’s library at Kimbolton Castle, for example, and the poet Andrew Marvell uses the earl of Anglesey’s in London.56 Thus, if you live near Northfleet in Kent, your nearest significant library will be that of the physician and traveller Edward Browne, which contains 2,500 volumes. The library of Ashwellthorpe Hall, Norfolk, contains more than 1,400 volumes; that of the historian Sir Peter Leycester at Tabley Hall, Cheshire, has 1,332; and there are 340 volumes at Ashe House, Devon.57
The greatest private library in Britain at this time is that owned by Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, which extends to 30,000 volumes, many of which are kept at his mansion on Drury Lane. This collection is, sadly, broken up and auctioned off after his death in 1686. The next largest in the London area known to John Evelyn in 1689 is that of Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, who has 6,000 books at his house in Twickenham. Evelyn’s own library contains an impressive 5,000 printed volumes and 500 manuscripts. But it concerns him greatly that, after the loss of Lord Anglesey’s collection, there are no great private libraries in the London area. What’s more, most of the important manuscript collections are closed to scholars. Sir Robert Cotton’s library of about 800 medieval manuscripts is inaccessible. A similar library of 762 manuscripts collected by Dr Isaac Vossius, canon of Windsor, which Anthony Wood describes as ‘the best private library in the world’, is also tucked away, awaiting sale, after its collector’s death in 1689. The ‘Old Royal Library’ of 2,000 manuscripts collected from the time of Edward IV is locked up at St James’s Palace.58 It is indeed a lamentable situation, and one that will be properly reversed only in the next century.
The nearest thing to a public library at this time is Chetham’s Library in Manchester. Set up under the terms of the will of Humphrey Chetham, a wealthy merchant of the town, it is open ‘for the use of scholars and others well affected’ from 1655. It is small but growing steadily: in 1685 it holds 2,455 volumes, all chained to their shelves to prevent theft.59 A much larger research library is the Bodleian in Oxford. Back in 1610 its founder, Thomas Bodley, did a deal with the Stationers’ Company whereby a copy of every title published in England would be lodged there. The library’s annual growth rate is enhanced further by major donations, such as the bequest of 8,000 books by the lawyer, John Selden, in 1654. Several Oxford colleges also have good libraries: Evelyn especially mentions Magdalen College, Christ Church, University College and Balliol College.60 For this reason, if you have to undertake any serious research, Oxford should be your destination. If you are in Cambridge, Trinity College Library is your best bet.
What if you choose instead to build your own collection of books? If you buy new, prices are closely related to production costs, so the larger the book, the more expensive it is. A folio Bible (the largest size, with the best layout and largest print) may well cost you 10s; one in quarto, 7s; one in octavo (modern hardback size), 4s; and one in duodecimo (roughly modern paperback size, with the smallest print), 3s 6d.61 According to A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666 (1673), a new, two-volume, illustrated folio-sized Aesop’s Fables, printed by John Ogilby, costs £3; a first-edition quarto of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is 3s; and a first-edition octavo of Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671) will set you back 2s 6d.62 Rare books can go for far higher prices than these. In February 1688, at an auction held in London, you’ll have to bid more than £9 15s for John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plants (third edition, 1633) and more than £40 for a set of Jean Blaeu’s Le Grand Atlas, ou Cosmographie blaviane (twelve volumes, Amsterdam, 1663).63 Pricey though these are, they are a fraction of their relative cost today, so wealthy gentlemen can still build up valuable libraries of choice printed books. Two copies of the recent fourth folio edition of Shakespeare’s works (1685) sell at that same auction for 15s each.
In selecting what to read, obviously you will maximise you choice if you visit right at the end of our period. The number of new books (including pamphlets) published in England every decade increases by 300 per cent over the course of the century. In Scotland that figure is an even more impressive 800 per cent, as shown in the table below.
Number of books published in Britain, 1610–9964
As a result, a total of more than 120,000 titles have been printed in England and more than 4,400 in Scotland from medieval times to the start of the year 1700: as many books are published in the British Isles during the forty years of the Restoration period as were printed in the previous two centuries. And these figures do not include books in English published in foreign countries. You can add titles from such regions as the Low Countries (where 746 English books and pamphlets appear between 1610 and 1699), France (702), Germany (25), Switzerland (8), Italy (8) and America (925).
PROSE WORKS
When it comes to what to read, most seventeenth-century people opt for divinity. The afore mentioned Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England, which covers the period from October 1666 to December 1672, extends to seventy-nine pages, twenty-two of which are devoted to religious titles. The next-largest categories are history, ten pages; and law and public Acts, nine and a half pages; followed by medicine, six pages; and poetry and plays, six pages. Architecture, music, gardening, science and recipe books – each of these barely fills up a page of titles. As for fiction, there is no such category. So many aspects of modern life are recognisable in Restoration times, yet in our reading habits we are almost opposites. The seventeenth-century predilection for divinity accounts for more than a quarter of all new books published. In the modern world, fiction similarly accounts for more than a quarter of all new titles published. But they don’t read much fiction, and we don’t read much divinity.65
Having said this, fiction is beginning to rear its head in the seventeenth century. In 1678 John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a Dream … is published. Ten
years later, Aphra Behn brings out Oroonoko, the story of a fictional prince protesting against slavery in Spanish America. Both of these are definitely novels and both have a strong moral current; if you want to begin to read through the corpus of English fiction from its earliest days, they are a good place to begin. However, you need to remember that Bunyan and Behn would be quite upset if you were to refer to their books as ‘novels’, for at this time the word denotes a short romance. And in that sense there are other contenders for the title of the earliest English novel. For example, Tudor, a Prince of Wales: an historical novel and Capello and Bianca: a novel both appear in 1677. Earlier still are the ‘cast adrift’ stories of exploration, which read like modern science-fiction works. One is The Isle of Pines (1668) by Henry Neville: a survival story of a single man marooned on a deserted tropical island with an abundance of food and four young, attractive women, by whom he sires four separate tribes. An even earlier piece of imaginative fiction is The Blazing World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish: a very strange story of a girl who, having been shipwrecked on the way to the North Pole, enters a ‘Blazing World’, marries its emperor and discovers his subjects are all men in the form of bears, foxes, geese, worms, fish, flies, magpies and ants, and helps him conquer the rest of the real world when she returns. If you then add novels translated from the French, there are even more from which to choose. In December 1660, when Pepys sits up reading in bed with his wife, he ploughs through Thomas Fuller’s Church History of Britain while she reads Artamène, or the Grand Cyrus, a novel published in the 1650s by the Frenchwoman Madeleine de Scudéry. You might presume that her choice is a light, quick romp, compared to her husband’s worthy tome. In fact, Artamène extends to two million words in ten volumes and is the longest ‘novel’ ever published, however you define the word.66
Pepys’s choice of reading in December 1660 draws attention to the fact that people read a great deal of history at this time. Indeed, if you know anything about the great historical works of the past, you will be impressed by the roll call of famous titles. The first two volumes of Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation in England appear in 1679 and 1681. Lord Clarendon writes The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England in these years (although it will not actually be published until 1702–4). Perhaps most important of all, Sir William Dugdale’s massive achievements, Monasticon Anglicanum (three volumes, 1655–73) and The Baronage of England (three volumes, 1675–6), are produced: these break new ground in terms of attention to detail and providing access to the source materials, as well as building a national picture of the history of monasteries and the major families. Other historians use Dugdale’s great reference books as frameworks and produce national- and local-history works of a similarly high level of research. Personally, I am most inspired by Joshua Barnes’s magisterial History of that Most Victorious Monarch Edward III (1688), a huge undertaking of more than 900 folio pages, which will not be superseded as the best work on that monarch until the twenty-first century. As for Thomas Fuller, whose Church History is Pepys’s choice of bedtime reading, he also writes The History of the Worthies of England (1662), a biographical account of the most eminent gentlemen of each county and thus an early biographical dictionary, which sets the pattern for many other reference works. While the Restoration is well known as the period of the Scientific Revolution, it is sometimes forgotten that it also sees huge advances in history writing.
When it comes to philosophy, the fuse is lit when Thomas Hobbes publishes his Leviathan in 1651. In 1666 Parliament blames the book for being the cause of atheism and blasphemy, which, it argues, have led to the recent twin disasters of plague and the Great Fire. Several bishops in the House of Lords propose that the seventy-eight-year-old Hobbes himself be burnt alive as a heretic. In 1683, four years after his death, the book and his other works are indeed publicly consigned to the flames.
Why does Leviathan cause such an extreme reaction? It introduces the intelligentsia to the idea of the social contract – the agreement between individual members of a society that underpins all political life. Hobbes returns to first principles, asking why does society exist. He imagines mankind to have originally been in ‘a state of nature’ when ‘the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. He argues that in this state, men have rights – including the right to kill each other – but that they might give up these rights to live together in peace. For example, men in a certain community might agree to protect each other so that they may defend their communities against potential attackers. This is the basis of the social contract, and it provides the foundation for government. Hobbes recognises only three possible forms of rule – monarchy, aristocracy and democracy – and declares that monarchy is the most desirable of them all. But he insists that the basis of the monarch’s power lies in the social contract and not in divine power. Therefore religion has no place in government. He thus undermines the ancient concept of the divine authority of kings – and that is why he lands himself in hot water (and his books on hot coals). That is also why it is the most important book published in England between the King James Bible in 1611 and Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687.
Hobbes’s original thinking is taken up by other philosophers, most notably John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Building on Hobbes’s idea that the rule of the monarch is dependent on the social contract, Locke argues in his Two Treatises of Government (1689) that the king cannot have absolute power over his subjects because his authority rests on his undertaking to protect the life and liberty of his people. Thus, if the king does not serve his people in a way commensurate with their collective interests, they should remove him from power. It goes without saying that this is political dynamite but, curiously, people at the time don’t quite appreciate how significant it is. Perhaps that is just as well. Algernon Sidney produces some similar arguments against absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings in his book Discourses Concerning Government (1683). Like Hobbes before him, he argues that the right to govern is vested in a government by the people and that, without their consent, a king has no mandate to rule. The book is unambiguous on such issues – and it is too much for the king. Charles II has the man arrested and tried for treason. Judge Jeffreys steps well beyond the limit of his authority in order to bring in a guilty verdict. Sidney is beheaded on 7 December 1683. In his speech from the scaffold he declares that ‘we live in an age that makes truth pass for treason’ and asserts that he stands by what he has written. He thus becomes a true martyr for liberty.
POETRY
For the most part, ‘literature’ at this period means poetry. As Monsieur Misson puts it:
The English have a mighty value for their poetry. If they believe that their language is the finest in the whole world, though spoken nowhere but in their own island, they have proportionably a much higher idea of their verses: they never read or repeat them but with the most singular tone in the world. When they happen in reading to go out of prose into verse, you would swear you no longer heard the same person: his tone of voice becomes soft and tender; he is charmed, he dies away with rapture.67
Well put, I say, and true. But who are the writers who can charm and soften the heart of an Englishman?
It seems that, in all ages, three-quarters of the poetry sold is by dead poets, three-quarters of what is sold by living writers is by the leading two or three poets of the day, and three-quarters of the rest is bought by the poets’ family and friends. In listing the leading English writers for an Italian audience, Magalotti mentions Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton and Shakespeare – all of whom are deceased.68 The Catalogue of all the Books Printed reinforces this dominance of the dead: it includes volumes of poetry published in 1666–72 by Aesop, Virgil, Horace and Ovid and by ten dead English poets. Laying aside those whose books are published anonymously, just nine living poets have new books out in the six years in question – Abraham Cowley, Sir John Denham, Henry King, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, John Dryden, Edward Howard, Edmond Wal
ler and Robert Wild. And Margaret Cavendish is generally thought by contemporaries to be one of the worst poets of all time. Mrs Evelyn thinks she should not be allowed out of the house, let alone published.
In deciding what to read, your choice may be influenced by the fact that in 1668 Charles II takes the bold step of appointing a poet laureate – the first time such a role has officially been conferred in Britain. The first incumbent of the post, John Dryden, is an accomplished writer of both poetry and plays. But he rather unwisely follows his royal master towards the Church of Rome and, having converted to Catholicism, has to forgo the poet laureateship on the accession of William and Mary in 1689. His successor in the role is his Protestant rival, Thomas Shadwell, whose work Dryden has repeatedly attacked for its inanity. Shadwell dies in 1692, whereupon Nahum Tate is appointed to the laureateship. Again, Tate is unlikely to trouble anyone writing a list of ‘Restoration books you should read before you die’. I don’t mean the man any disrespect – you have to take your hat off to anyone who attempts a 1,400-line verse translation of Girolamo Fracastoro’s Latin poem on the subject of syphilis, in heroic couplets – but the poet laureateship is hardly a good pointer to the best literature of the 1690s.
