According to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, the Copernican theory and its confirmation by Galileo’s observations can help people who doubt the immortality of their souls on the evidence of their senses. “But wiser he that on reason relies ǀ Then stupid sense low-sunken into dirt.” Sense says the world is Ptolemaic and imagines nothing else; reason says the earth is a planet and explodes the physical arguments against it.
These and like phansies do so stronlgly tye
The slower mind to ancient Ptolomee
That shameful madnesse ’twere for to deny
So plain a truth as they deem that to be.148
The Copernican attack on the authority of the senses opened the way to other truths blocked by immediate sense experience. The prospect was scary: in the foreground, freedom to philosophize; in the middle ground, tolerance; and in the distance, the collapse of religion and the state.
There is no hiding from the consequences of innovation. Selden: “‘Starry Messengers’…have taught us about new stars…Once the use of the telescope has been transmitted, we ourselves perceive the very same things as these Messengers.” We must apply the same principle to “oriental doctrine, whence the whole of Christianity arose.”149 Galileo himself has shown the way by observing that the Roman liturgy hid a hint of Copernican doctrine.
For in the Ambrosian hymn for the Fourth Day, that of the creation of the luminaries, the breviary reads: “Most Holy God of Heaven ǀ Who colors the shining center [centrum] of the heavenly vault [poli] with fiery splendor, enriching it with befitting light ǀ Who on the Fourth Day fixed the flaming wheel [rotam] of the sun ǀ Governs the ways of the moon and the wide courses of the stars.” Unless centrum & polus & rota are taken here in an altogether different sense…than customary in physics, mathematics, theology, and elsewhere, a rotating sun seems to be placed in the world’s center in the public forms of the church’s liturgy.150
This was indeed the message that Galileo insinuated at the end of his hermeneutical letter to Christina, and the mixing of physics with Scripture for which Wilkins later criticized him.
Pope Urban removed the difficulties Galileo signaled by rewriting the breviary. For the phrase, “shining center of the heavenly vault,” Urban put “shining regions of the world;” and he praised God for “kindling the wheel of the sun” rather than for fixing or setting it. Urban’s revision of the Roman Breviary, published in 1631, could hardly arrest the cause for which he would soon condemn Galileo. As Selden observed, outside the Roman battle zone the Copernican theory was “flourishing well enough, and did flourish [among the Pythagoreans], and, in my opinion will flourish…[although] it turns the machinery and the system of the natural world upside down.”151
The reader ignorant of astronomy and her sister sciences will miss much in the discourse of Stuart times. “It will be unto you a great disgrace,” warned the author of a popular text on the celestial globe, “not to be cunning in these things.” If cunning, you can appreciate such complicated metaphors as the title page of Saturni ephemerides (1633) by the hagiographer of that “Angell in the pulpit,” Lancelot Andrewes.152 The title appears between two columns made up of books (Figure 26). The left-hand column is in the light under a celestial globe; the lintel above it features a rising sun and a naked lady, “Historia.” The right-hand column of books, under a terrestrial globe, is largely in shadow; its lintel has a setting sun and a woman, “Chronologia,” who regards Historia through a telescope. In explanation:
Figure 26 Intimacy of history and chronology, from Henry Isaacson’s Ephemerides saturni (1633).
The Columns both are crown’d with eyther Sphere
To show Chronology and History beare
No other Culmen then the double Art
Astronomy, Geography impart.
Here the telescope appears as a double symbol, as a stand-in for astronomy and as an instrument of investigation. “By Optick Skill pull farre History ǀ Neerer;” while History, “Ne’re so farre distant, yet Chronologie ǀ Will have a Perspicill to find her out.”153 Therefore acknowledge this truth, “The chiefe light and Eye of History is Chronology, and the very Load-star, which directeth a man out of the Sea of History, into the wished for Heaven of his Reading.” Study astronomy. You will see more clearly where the world has been, how it now spins, and where it is headed. Unless you are “so dull, stupid, or ignorant [to] understand not the singular Benefits which accrew to Mankind from Histories,” study astronomy.154
Besides being a help to history, a corrective to hubris, and an ally in political discourse, astronomical instruments and metaphors may prefigure salvation. Deep inside the Emblemes of Francis Quarles, first published in 1635 and often reprinted, Flesh and Spirit are busy with a telescope. Spirit directs it to Christ sitting on a rainbow giving Final Judgment (Figure 27).She sees Flesh’s enemy, “Grim Death, standing at the glasse’s end.” And worse:
Figure 27 Flesh and Spirit vying over a telescope, from Francis Quarles, Emblemes (1635), 180.
I see a Brimstone Sea of boyling Fire
And Fiends, with knotted whips of flaming Wyre
Tort’ring poore sools, that gnash their teeth, in vaine
And gnaw their flame-tormented tongues, for paine.
Flesh tells Spirit to cheer up and offers her a prism in which she can see the world in rainbow colors. But Spirit is not one of the Foolosophers who challenged the reality of things seen through Galileo’s glass. She sticks to her telescope as the instrument of truth; the rainbow that counts is Christ’s judgment seat. “Foresight of future torment is the way ǀ To baulk those ills which present joyes bewray.”155
6
Medicine and Melancholy
Dr Williams
The road of life that Maurice Williams raced down sure-footedly began in London and led through Oxford to the service of the most powerful men in Britain. Born like Charles I with the century, he matriculated at St John’s, Oxford, in 1616, the year in which Galileo campaigned for Copernicus, De Dominis fled to England, and John Bankes began practice in London. Three years later, possessed of a bachelor’s degree, Williams became a fellow of Oriel, and, after another three years, a Master of Arts. He gained sufficient recognition to contribute a few Latin verses to Oxford’s book of condolences on the death of the irreplaceable pacific King James, “the nurse of peace…now Mars alone blazes in the Heavens.” Heaven in fact had been “unfeeling and harmful;” witness Buckingham’s war of pique against Spain and the ongoing hostilities that had driven the new king’s sister into exile.1 The world was crammed with danger. Nonetheless, Williams found the courage to leave Oxford for Padua. Three years later, in 1628, he returned to England as a medical doctor and to Oriel as a Fellow.
In Italy, Williams had ventured beyond Galileo’s old university to visit the great cities of Tuscany and the Papal States, Florence, Pisa, Bologna, and Rome. He contemplated the “crooked” towers in Pisa and Bologna—not as backdrops for falling bodies, since the myth of Galileo and the Leaning Tower had not been invented yet—but rather as puzzles in mechanical stability. What kept them from being falling bodies? Williams worked out that their figures contained the vertical through their centers of gravity, “otherwise they or anie other bodie would fall.” In Rome he inquired into the inundations of the Tiber, their extent and causes, and questioned how they depended on ocean tides. Later he included these among many other questions about the physical world in a manuscript now in the British Library. In this unexploited work, he ordered his questions under the nineteen inquiries into gravity and levity posed by Bacon as exemplars of proper scientific investigation.2 Williams had made a close study of the Novum organum (1620) soon after its publication. He gave his copy, unfortunately not annotated, to the library of St John’s.3
In 1628, the year in which Williams returned from Italy, Harvey published his controversial theory of the circulation of the blood, which, as Hobbes remarked, reworked physiology in the image of Copernican and Galilean astronomy.4 Williams defended
Harvey’s heart-centered microcosm against traditionalists who rejected it out of hand, Cartesians who wanted to modify it, and Italians who claimed it for Sarpi. But it did not suit Williams’s Baconian style to endorse Harvey without reservation. “I like al progresses in learning which the received placits of others have too much hindered…Give mee an emancipated spirit and judgment, not tied to the professor of one chair. Let me examine things in the balance of my own reason, and of experience joine issue with it.” Should this prayer be answered, and reason join harmoniously with experience, a cautious philosopher might allow himself to reach a conclusion, though not establish an article of faith. “We can assure ourselves of nothing but appearances.” To go further would admit a vicious circle. We would become “advocates in our own cause, in making ourselves judges of nature above others: The sphere of our activitie cannot bound others: except a natural Storie could be soe grounded as to have the gift of Infallibilitie.”5
This formulation comes from a course of lectures Williams gave at the Royal College of Physicians, probably in 1648, during his stint as Anatomy Reader there. Their empirical approach almost certainly dates from his first acquaintance with Bacon’s writings and the epistemology he encountered at the Paduan school of medicine. He ends his qualified defense of Harvey with an assertion and metaphor worthy of, and perhaps taken from, Galileo. “If I have judged of anie thing not visible here in the booke of nature, it was by natural induction and necessarie inference. Yet therein I have done as painters doe in perspective, who not being able to represent on a plaine al the divers faces of a solid body, choose one of the principal to set to the light, and shadow the rest. And it was because my weaknesse could do no otherwise.”6
In 1633, after a few years of successful practice in London, the learned and diligent Williams became a protégé of the risk-prone ministers Laud, promoted that year to Archbishop of Canterbury, and Wentworth, appointed the previous year as Lord Deputy of Ireland.7 Laud’s tenure as President of Saint John’s coincided with the future doctor’s undergraduate years there; “he was bred some years under mee [Laud wrote Wentworth]; And I know him to be a very good Schollar, soe I promise you shall fynd him a very honest, and a good natured man.” He will doctor you or, if you prefer, help you to doctor yourself; he is not doctrinaire. One of Williams’s authoritative colleagues, Sir Simon Baskerville, a royal physician, also recommended him. Wentworth needed good medical advice, for he had chronic gout and his health was a matter of state. “I doubt not that [Williams] will give your Lordship every contentment. He hath given me thankes, as if he found himself better in your Lordship’s acceptation, because he came recommended by me, and I assure myself that he will make all good that I have said in his behalf.”8
Wentworth apparently suffered from the “knotted and stony [type of gout that] refuseth medical helps.” Laud delved deep into his small stock of humor to tease Wentworth about it. “I shall wish the gout may continue in your knee [so the Archbishop] till you be better minded to honour Jesus with it.” The unbending Lord Deputy refused to genuflect. Earlier Laud had suggested a remedy of the sort for which Wentworth, although then only a year or two in office, had already made himself notorious. “Use your Power in both Houses, make an Act of [the Irish] Parliament against [gout].”9 Almost from the start of his regime in Ireland, Wentworth was never well for long; treating his insomnia, migraine, fatigue, and gout gave Doctor Williams ongoing employment.
Wentworth trusted his physician with more than doctoring. He had Williams elected to the Irish Parliament as its member for Asheaton, county Limerick.10 The good doctor pursued a good policy. He asked Wentworth to commission him to hunt out usurpers of lands intended to support hospitals and lazar houses, to recover the lands, and to return them to their intended use—in return for a lease on them, at half value for sixty years, to cover expenses.11 It is no sin to help oneself while helping others. Williams also helped John Bramhall, another of Laud’s protégés who came over with Wentworth in 1633, and, coincidentally, a good friend of Sir John Bankes. A fervent Arminian soon to be consecrated Bishop of Derry, Bramhall took strong measures to rescue the Protestant Church in Ireland from its poverty and to combat resurgent Catholicism directed by priests who had swarmed into the country during James’s wooing of Spain.12 Bramhall was effective. In three or four years he increased the income of the Crown by over £30,000, tried to impose the Thirty-Nine Articles on the Church of Ireland, and drove two Scottish ministers with 140 followers to New England.13
For his miscellaneous service, Wentworth knighted Williams. The elevation surprised Laud, for whom doctoring and politicking were not enough for knighting. Wentworth explained that Williams received the honor not for serving in Ireland but for wooing in England, “for our women say here, ‘a wife will be sooner gotten if she may be made a lady.’” The lucky lady, Jane Mawhood, was a relation of a fellow physician, Sir Matthew Lister, formerly doctor to Queen Anna and then to Henrietta Maria. The connection proved important. When Wentworth had no further need of him, Williams would enter the queen’s service.14 Laud had already introduced him at court “to kiss the King’s Hand, and more kindness than that, he desired not of me.”15 Williams could make his own way through an open door. We learn further from Laud’s heavy humor that Williams inclined toward modern medicine. “As for the distemper you talk of that marriage may prove, and neither Galen nor Hippocrates able to cure…’tis not impossible that your Dr Williams…may be able to do that in a Paracelsian way.”16 Perhaps Laud had Jonson’s alchemist in mind, “a rare physician…ǀ An excellent Paracelsian!”17
We will not go far wrong in placing Williams among the enlightened physicians who made use of the London Pharmacopoeia of 1618, which included the chemical drugs of Paracelsus. Issued by the Royal College of Physicians at the urging of James’s primary physician Théodore de Mayerne, it contained a wealth of materials that might have helped King James. Still drinking to excess in “quality, quantity, frequency, time, and order,” the divine monarch “laugh[ed] at medicine” but not at his gout. How then cure it? Not by walking in the dew, as suggested by Laud, or by the new chemical therapies, which lacked the cachet of tried-and-false ones. Mayerne fell back on the old recipe of scrapings from an unburied human skull mixed with white wine and taken at the full moon. His prescription of medicines and cosmetics for Henrietta Maria, compounded of puppy dogs, worms, and bats, further demonstrates his unusual flexibility.18
Since gout continues to plague the human race, specification of another of Mayerne’s remedies may be a public service. Vomiting and purging are the key. Take a little mercurius dulcis (calomel, still employed in homeopathic medicine) or, better, a concoction of cassis, turpentine, and rhubarb followed by a dose of vitriolated tartar and a broth of stinging nettles. Better yet, regular consumption of pills made of Spanish liquors, the stones of mollusks, and the powder of human bones “of the same parts as those that are affected” will keep the disease at bay. If you do not take your pills and continue to ache, you should not dose yourself with opiates. Consult a doctor. “Otherwise a Medicine is as a Sword in the hand of a Mad man.”19 Remember what the Italians say: “I was well, I would be better, I took Physic and died.”20
Williams returned to Ireland in the summer of 1638 with his new wife and 500 ounces of silver plate. Wentworth reported the event in the misogynist mode introduced by the jolly archbishop. “We shall see what Course he follows, be it Galen, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, or a Dozen of the Doctors more,” but if she behaved like others Wentworth knew, “she would become ‘the shame of Physicians’…too hard for them all.” “The more fits she hath,” returned the man of God, “the less fit she shall be for him.”21 We assume that Lady Williams fit well into the diverting company that Wentworth had brought over from England, which included the implausible, magnificent, singular John Ogilby.
Ogilby had come from somewhere (he did not know where) in Scotland, the son of an improvident father. By selling pins he earned enough by the age of 11
or 12 to buy a lottery ticket. He won, extracted his father from debtors’ prison, and apprenticed himself to a dancing master. He soon bought out his time and set up for himself. After landing badly from a high-flying pirouette when showing off in an anti-masque at Buckingham’s house, he gave up performing in favor of teaching privileged children like Wentworth’s. The Lord Deputy, who was fond of plays and masques, assigned Ogilby the charge of arranging for them; which he did so well that Wentworth suggested that he set up a theater in Dublin. Its start stuttered when Archbishop Ussher shut it down in 1636 during Wentworth’s absence in London; but it reopened at the deputy’s return and ran with moderate success until 1640, with James Shirley as resident playwright. Irish rebels soon accomplished what the Irish Archbishop could not and, in 1641, burnt it to the ground. Ogilby fled to England, suffered shipwreck, and limped, destitute, to Cambridge, where Shirley and other friends helped him to study Latin. Soon he thought he knew enough to publish his own translation of Virgil (1649).22 He went on to Aesop and to collaboration with Francis Cleyn.
The Doctor’s Masters
The Lord Deputy
Wentworth accomplished wonders in Ireland. On his arrival in 1633, he had faced a population split into irreconcilable groups, of which the dispossessed native Catholics and large Protestant landowners presented the gravest problems. The most rapacious “New English” land grabbers had not spared holdings intended for the support of their own ministers, churches, and government. Wentworth clawed back land and income, acquired custom farms, subdued pirates, and bullied settlers.23 His efforts to convert natives into good English agriculturists, allow them justice in court, and give them access to education did not agree with the ideas of economy and charity entertained by the New English. They charged Wentworth with going native, nurturing Catholicism, and acting the tyrant. To counter the influence of his enemies at court, Wentworth relied principally on Laud and Bankes. He also had the backing of Arundel until he reprimanded the earl for searching for faulty deeds, trying to throw ancient owners out of their estates, and violating the “promised and princely protection and grace of his Majesty.”24
The Ghost of Galileo Page 23
