To reinvigorate the Church, improve royal finances, relieve the peasants, and challenge land grants, Wentworth packed his Privy Council and the Irish Parliament with loyalists like Williams, raised and trained an obedient Irish army, and had the English Navy repress piracy in Irish seas. Trade flourished, with Spain especially. With the help of William Bedell, once Wotton’s chaplain and Sarpi’s instructor, and now an Irish bishop, Wentworth improved the education of the clergy and instituted services in the Anglican style. Here he ran up against Ussher, whom he admired for his learning and character, but not for his intolerant Calvinism. Once when dining at the archbishop’s palace (Ussher lived well despite his dour religion), Wentworth chided him for its magnificence. “I shall live to want necessities,” was the reply. The Lord Deputy: “You must [then] live a long time.” The archbishop, who was twelve years Wentworth’s senior, answered with a chilling prophecy: “I shall live to close your eyes.”25 And so it would be.
Wentworth based his policy in Ireland on having what Charles never did in England or Scotland: the means of carrying it out. The Irish debt on his arrival was £76,000, the annual deficit £20,000. Wentworth moved swiftly to diminish the one and eliminate the other via subsidies granted by his packed parliament. Increasing trade raised profits on customs farming by two-thirds in three years. Wentworth tried to establish new industries, such as linen weaving, and wanted to develop a tapestry works. For this he made inquiries at Mortlake, but nothing came of it.26 While serving the Crown Wentworth did not neglect himself. Already a rich man on arrival—his goods and attendants traveled in thirty coaches—his total annual income after his purchases in the custom farms, land (some 59,000 acres), and monopolies (alum, tobacco) amounted to around £23,000.27 That added envy to other motives for bringing him down.
Wentworth went to England in 1636 to conduct business connected with his estates and, more urgently, to neutralize charges against him originating in Ireland. His speech detailing his accomplishments won over the Privy Council and Charles declared his deputy’s dealing with parliaments a pattern for his own. Wentworth doubted his inconstant master’s capacity to follow it or to sustain his post as keystone of an arch supported by royal prerogatives on one side and parliamentary privileges on the other.28 In the trappings of power, however, in which Charles excelled, Wentworth sedulously copied him. He spent some time “vandycking”—that is, glorifying himself via portraits by Van Dyck. He commissioned three such, of himself, after imperial portraits by Titian. He conducted his court with Carolinian pomp, established a personal guard, ordered and oversaw improvements in Dublin Castle (“Without offense to Mr Jones…I take myself to be a very pretty Architect”), and, as in Williams’s case, exercised royal authority in conferring knighthood. A damaging charge against him at his trial in 1641 was “[having] traitorously assumed to himself royall power.”29
Charles realized that he had no chance of success in his wars with Scotland without “the relentless, overwhelming Wentworth.” Illness prevented the savior’s immediate attendance, but when the Lord Deputy dragged himself to London in September 1639 he was confident and belligerent. He offered a loan of £20,000; other members of the Privy Council subscribed, and £200,000 was thus raised by Christmas. Believing that he could cow an English parliament as he had the Irish, Wentworth urged Charles to summon one. Reluctantly Charles agreed and, more enthusiastically, satisfied Wentworth’s wish to be an earl. That was on 12 January 1640.30
The new Earl of Strafford, now Lord Lieutenant, returned to Ireland in March 1640 and immediately raised £180,000 from its parliament to prepare an army of 9,000 men for shipment to Scotland in May. Since it had no Puritan soldiers and many Catholic officers, English Protestants reasonably inferred that it was directed against them.31 Strafford rushed back to England in April despite the advice of physicians, who thought him unfit to travel, and of mariners, who knew the sea was not safe for it. Desperately ill, he rallied to enter the Lords on 23 April, a week after parliament had convened. The Crown had opened the session by demanding immediate subsidies to meet the Scottish emergency. The Commons turned as usual to airing grievances: religion, Laud, T&P, ship money, monopolies, forest enlargements, the Privy Council, bishops, judges. On 4 May, Strafford edged it back to the king’s business with a call for eight subsidies in lieu of ship money. The Commons did not comply, and Charles dissolved it the next day after an existence of three weeks.
Strafford then tried to raise money from Spain. No luck. The queen and Secretary Windebank appealed to Rome. Urban replied that he would be happy to help a Catholic King of England. Bankes harried sheriffs behind in collecting ship money and prepared, on Charles’s orders, the Commissions of Array that required the nobles of the land and their servants to attend the king at their expense. The Privy Council discussed debasing the currency. With £20,000 in hand, a promise of another £20,000 a year from the bishops, and the loan begun in the Privy Council that reached £250,000 on 15 May, Charles went to war against Scotland in June.32
On the day of the dissolution of the “Short Parliament,” Charles called a meeting of the Privy Council’s Committee for Scottish Affairs, at which Strafford gave some oracular advice: “You have an Army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom.” The ambiguity of “here” and “this kingdom” when taken out of context would be fatal to the earl.33 Instead Charles fielded another ragtag army, again met with defeat, and again summoned his Lord Lieutenant, who, once more, was detained by illness. Williams accompanied him to England and saw at first hand the diseases racking the kingdom. He was in attendance when his patient, imprisoned in the Tower, prepared to fight for his life before the Lords. Strafford’s condition was so desperate that Williams consulted Mayerne.34 Bankes too tried to help as an ex officio member of the committee to examine Strafford.35 But neither medicine nor the law could save their friend.
Williams returned to Ireland before his patron’s execution and did not see what many rushed to witness (Figure 28).36 He could not bear it. He was one of the few who shared the feeling of Strafford’s confidential agent George Radcliffe: “I lost in his death…such a friend as never man within the compass of my knowledge had.” How could such a friend, so great a man, so loyal, effective, and generous a public servant despite his rough ways and driving ambition, come to such an end? Williams’s reaction to the execution opens room to speculate about his religion. One of his doctor friends wrote of him: “Because of his lofty mind he would not ascribe [Strafford’s] miserable, sorrowful, and pernicious fate to God.” Evidently Williams was no Calvinist.37 A stronger clue to his religiosity might lie in the final lines of his poem on the death of King James. “He is always to be honoured as the director [caput] of the world, the priest and the altar.”38 This suggests the Arminianism of Laud and Bramhall. Although he had been Wentworth’s man in the Irish Parliament and had engaged in the same enterprise as Bramhall, who fell (although not to his death) along with Strafford, Williams succeeded in avoiding the fates of his patrons and colleagues.39 In this he resembled Bankes.
Figure 28 Wenceslaus Hollar, The Execution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1641).
One of Williams’s colleagues was Hugh Cressy, a fellow of Merton, who served as Wentworth’s chaplain. Cressy could neither stand nor understand the challenge of “ignorant Presbyterians” to the monarchy. The threat that they and their anti-episcopal fellow Puritans and Calvinists mounted was the more terrifying because not of their making; they merely capitalized on a “fateful concatenation of a world of dispositions and circumstances…so strange that no humane prudence could have seen or suspected them.” The root cause seemed clear enough, however: King Charles had tolerated a religion that allowed people to think for themselves. The only possible cure was a firm dogma interpreted by authorized theologians. Cressy fled to the Continent, submitted to Rome, and joined the Benedictines.40 Thus did Strafford’s associates distribute themselves according to character and opportunity, Ogilby to literature, Williams to
medicine, and Cressy to monasticism.
The Lord Chancellor
Williams knew that a good doctor cannot be a strict Calvinist. If he believed, as a Turk or a Stoic, that God had decreed everything, he would be a charlatan to claim to cure disease or extend life. Fatalistic patients, who conceive that because God has decided when each person dies they need not take care of their health, commit a sin worse than quackery, for they “seeme to tempt God to a miracle for their preservation.” A good doctor recognizes that God’s decrees are conditional: we cannot have more days than God numbered, but, through poor diet, intemperance, and bad medicine, we may well have fewer.41 A good way to cut down the allotted span of life is to follow Bacon’s advice for prolonging it.
Bacon advocated an annual condensation of the vital spirits for a fortnight at the end of May with strong opiates as cleansers. That opiates condense spirits, and that the condensation is beneficial, followed from physiological theories that Williams condemned as dreamy speculation: “this nobleman’s opiates lulled him asleep.” Among the condensing drugs Bacon recommended were poppy juice, “a kind of herb called ‘coffee’,” and tobacco, “the use [of which] has immensely increased in our time.” Thus Bacon. Williams: tobacco is dangerous, opiates more so. The philosopher: “the Turks find opium, even in large quantities, innocent and cordial.” The doctor: it gives them the indulgent idea of a paradise of “feast[ing] in pleasant grenes with wine and women.” Opiates can help in violent diseases, but not in preserving health, and they can kill.42
Bacon was no prude. He recommended a “seasonable use of sexual intercourse, lest the spirits grow too full,” and if this therapy should go awry, an emaciating diet against venereal diseases. A spare diet is good for the aged too, whether they are diseased or not, and should be followed every two years to procure renewal of the elderly body, “like the casting of skins of serpents.” To which the philosopher added that frequent purging was more likely to procure longevity than exercise, and that his remedies were safe and effective. “It would scarce be believed with how much care and choice they have been examined.”43 Williams:
[your prescriptions] savor too much of that magistralitie which in others you condemn…[It] is to assume to your selfe the empire in nature and physike, authoritatively to have that required which you never yet experienced; nay, to introduce it against the continued experience of others; which makes against your selfe in the practises of reason you require in others.44
Several of Bacon’s absurdities concerned the Irish. They are long-lived, he said, because they had a habit of standing naked before their fires, “and rubbing and as it were pickling themselves with old salt butter.” Or because they wore clothes rubbed with saffron. Bacon deduced from these practices that anointing the skin with oil, “either of olives or sweet almonds,” is the best means of prolonging life. The Irish had perfected this ancient after-bath remedy by skipping the bath, on the ground that oil excludes the cold in winter and retains the spirits in summer. Williams knew something about the Irish and about perspiration. It is silly, he wrote, to block the body’s natural means of removing waste. “Shal I make my selfe sicke because I have a physician nere”?45
The philosopher: never take a cold drink on an empty stomach. “[T]he first draught at supper of wine, beer, or whatever drink a man uses [should] be taken hot.” The doctor: “Tepide water inclines men to vomit.” The point is not that drink taken before dinner should be warm, but that it be wine. Wine in moderation is a good thing, according to Williams, for women as well as men. The jury is out on artificially cold beverages, however. Some Jews died in Sicily from cooling their drink in snow; but a Japanese embassy entertained by Pope Paul V in 1615 grew healthy and fat on ices. In his judicious way, Williams condemned very cold drinks and simultaneously gave effective methods for chilling wine and water.46
He added a good laugh at doctors who taught that the proper volumes of the bodily humors—blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile—are as 18:6:2:1, numbers for which this much can be said, 18 = 2(1+2+6) and 27 = 18 + (1+2+6). (In Greek numerology, 18 and 27 have powerful properties.) Still, mathematics is meaningless in medicine. People differ from one another, and an individual requires different things from time to time. Take frogs, for example. Williams advised that they were suitable food only for fools “whose ful feeding and wanton stomacks crave unusual things.” And yet, when he inadvertently ate some when traveling in France, they did him no harm.47 And if they had, the remedy would have been neither harsh nor mathematical if it was Williams’s usual medicine for “a mellencholy humor in the stomacke that hart burnes”—namely “[a] good store of smale beer and a good quantitie of salett oyle.” This recipe is of particular interest, as it comes from notes on medical recipes that Inigo Jones inscribed in the flyleaves of his copy of Palladio’s Architectura.48 It appears that Williams knew Jones and that they probably had friends in common. One possible mutual friend, like them in royal employment, was Cleyn, who may thus have known Williams before he painted him.
Although he pontificated about many things, Bacon was content to leave “particular topics” for others to examine. To assist them he supplied a model set of questions concerning that capital subject of natural philosophy, gravity, and levity. Williams set himself to fill in this template. The task probably occupied him for several years before he wrote out his answers in the clean copy preserved in the British Library. Bacon would not have liked the answers. They followed an authority Bacon did not prize: Galileo.
Williams’s approach mingled independence, optimism, and caution. He begins his investigation of falling bodies, in which he was able to quote from Galileo’s last work on the subject, published in 1638, with an unexpected prayer: “Give me an emancipated spirit, and judgement, not tied to the profession of one chaire, nor in vassallage to a sect. Let me examine things in the ballance of my reason.” And a promise: “If my reason and experiment of the thing joine…Ile conclude I have satisfied my selfe so I suspend my assent noe longer.”49 Williams was jealous of his assent and withheld it in the grand speculation in which Galileo so fully and fatefully committed his. He acknowledged that tradition gave good reasons for supposing the earth to be at the center of the universe and the sun to circle around it; and that Galileo gave good reasons for supposing the opposite. Not only did he prove that Venus revolves around the sun; he also argued persuasively that Scripture does not rule out the Copernican model. “[But] be it one, bee it t’other that is true (as I thinke neither is reallie) tis al one to mee, soe the apparent motions be exactly calculated by either hypothesis.”50
Williams hesitated because neither system explained how the planets stay in their orbits. He accepted that exact observation of the course of comets had exploded the ancient system of crystalline shells, which made no sense anyway. The mechanical structure it required would need constant oiling “to supple and grease the axle tree, least by the swift motions al be set on fire.”51 As for the epicycles and eccentrics that expedited calculations in both the old and the new systems, “how they subsist in nature is very questionable.” Judging no theory satisfactory, Williams began with common sense, took specific gravity as his guide, and provisionally placed the earth at the hub of the universe. What then supports the planets?
That question returned Williams to the nature of heavy and light. Rarity and tenuity, which are specific-gravity translations of “light,” extend to the stars. There is no limit to levity: recent over-exact estimates made the relative density of space and water 1 to 1,553,304,682. Perhaps interesting, certainly useless. Williams preferred gravity and such practical problems as the separation or mixing of wine and water and the retardation of moving objects by resisting media. He approved Galileo’s experiments with falling, floating, and projected bodies, motion in a vacuum, beating of pendulums, and flights of artillery shells. He knew Galileo’s Dialogue, from which he excerpted some philosophy and the information that an object falling freely under Galileo’s rule for an hour would traverse 17,
280 miles.52 Williams once had the opportunity to ask the son of Solomon the Galilean question, which of two lead weights, one ten times the other, would fall more swiftly? King Charles replied unhesitatingly, as if he had designed the universe or had studied in Padua, that they would fall together.53
We are no further with the question, what holds the planets up? Following Bacon’s method, Williams collected phenomena that might be relevant. His up-to-date examples included the Jesuit Niccolò Cabeo’s feat of suspending a magnetized needle between two lodestones for as long as it took to recite four verses in hexameters. Electricity might also be at work, for, as Cabeo and another Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, had shown, emanations from electrified objects can overcome gravity. Are these the forces that balance the gravity of the planets? They might well be made strong enough in the vast interplanetary spaces if, as Cabeo surmised, here on earth magnetism was once mighty enough to suspend Mohammed’s coffin.54
Williams withheld judgment about the Copernican system and the circulation of the blood because both pictures lacked essential details. Copernicus did not have the physics needed to run the planets and Harvey could not exhibit the connections between the arteries and the veins needed to return blood to the heart from the extremities. Since Williams believed that future discoveries would advance astronomy and anatomy, he did not doubt that skeptical doctors in the future would be able to assent where he had had to hesitate. In time we will know if the purpose of drawing air into the lungs is to warm or cool the body; whether any creatures can live without respiration; and whether, as some Aristotelians held, goats breathe through their ears.55
The Ghost of Galileo Page 24
