addressed:
To the right honorable Sir ROBERT CICILL, Knight
Principall Secretary to Her Majesty, these.
Endorsed: 11 July, 1596. Mr Harriott to my Master.
The vigilant Secretary lost no time in acting upon Hariot’s
suggestions. On the 31st of July Sir George Trenchard and Sir Ralph
Horsey wrote to Cecil from Dorchester in reply to his instructions,
that they had seized the charts and books of the ‘India Voyage’ [to
Guiana] from one Samuel Mace and William Downe, which they would send
up to the Secretary if desired. They were desired, and accordingly sent
them by post on the 10th of August. A few days later Raleigh returned
to Plymouth with the first glorious news of the success of the English
fleet at Cadiz ; which news completely turned the heads of the people
of England one way, and those of the Queen and the hungry politicians
the other. Poor Mace, to whom Raleigh was much attached, was restored
to his confidence. To Raleigh more than to any one man this triumph
over Spain was justly due, but in the pitiful squabbles that followed
in the apportionment of the honors and the spoils Sir Walter used to
aver that his sole gain in this great national enterprise from
beginning to end was but a lame leg. He might have added that the
business had gained for him the envy, malice and all uncharitableness
of those in high places. In worldly wealth he was now comparatively
poor, and his fortunes were broken, though the Queen at times, only at
times, smiled on him.
At what precise time Hariot, who never deserted Raleigh, became
acquainted with Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, with whose honored
name, next to that of Sir Walter’s, his must ever be associated, does
not as yet appear. It is known, however, that there was an intimacy
between Raleigh and Percy as early as 1586, when Sir Walter presented
Percy with a coat of mail on his going over to Flanders, and soon after
a bedstead made of cedar from Virginia ; while the Earl about the same
time gave to Sir Walter a ‘stroe coloured velvet saddle.’ From this
time to the day of Raleigh’s triumph on the scaffold there exists
plenty of evidence of their continued intimacy.
When therefore the Earl and Raleigh were finally caged together in the
Tower for life in 1606 their friendship was of more than twenty years’
standing. From this we infer that Hariot also knew Percy almost from
the time of his joining Raleigh; but the earliest mention of his name
in connection with that of the Earl which we have met with is this of
1596, in the Earl’s pay-rolls, still preserved at Sion, and described
in the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission of Historical Manuscripts,
page 227, ‘To Mr. Herytt for a book of the Turk’s pictures, 7s.’ It
appears from the same rolls that from Michaelmas 1597 to 1610, if not
earlier and later, an annual pension of £80 (not £ 120, or £ 150, £300,
as variously stated) was paid to Hariot by the Earl. This pension was
probably continued as long as Hariot lived; and besides there are not
wanting many marks of the Earl’s liberality, friendship, and love for
his companion and pensioner, who was long known as ‘Hariot of Sion on
Thames,’ as expressed on his monument. In the Earl’s accounts for 1608
there is this entry, ‘Payment for repairing and finishing Mr Heriotts
house at Sion.’
At what time exactly Hariot took up his residence at Sion the Earl’s
new seat (purchased of James in 1604) is not known, but probably soon
after the Earl was sent to the Tower in 1606. There is preserved a
Letter from Sir William Lower addressed to Hariot at Sion dated the
3Oth of September 1607, and other letters or papers exist showing his
continued residence there until near the time of his death in 1621.
Wood and many subsequent writers to the present time have confused Sion
near Isleworth with Sion College in London. They are totally distinct.
Hariot had nothing to do with Sion College, which was not founded until
1630, nine years after his death. The error arose out of the
coincidence of Torporley’s taking chambers at Sion College on retiring
from his clerical profession, and dying there in April 1632, leaving
his mathematical books and manuscripts to the College Library. He had
been appointed by Hariot to look over, arrange, and ‘pen out the
doctrine’ of his mathematical writings. Torporley’s abstracts of
Hariot’s papers are still preserved in Sion College Library.
What the Earl of Northumberland did for Hariot is, as the world goes,
ascribed to patronage ; what Hariot did for the Earl cannot be measured
by money or houses, but may be summed up in four words, alike honorable
to both, ‘they were long friends.’ To this day the debt of gratitude
from the philosopher to the nobleman is fairly balanced by the similar
debt of the nobleman to the philosopher. Hariot’s Will, given on pages
193-203, tells the rest of the story of this noble friendship.
It is manifest, however, from many considerations that the noble Earl
took a lively and almost officious interest in the public honor and
character of his friend, for Hariot appears to have been as careless of
his own scientific reputation as his contemporary Shakspeare is said to
have been of his literary eminence.
On the other hand, Hariot’s interest in the Earl’s affairs and family
at Sion redound greatly to his credit. He was both an eminent scholar
and a remarkable teacher. Earnest students flocked to him for higher
education from all parts of the country. Besides the private scientific
and professional instruction that from the first he gave to Raleigh,
his captains and sea officers, he seems to have had under his
scientific tuition and mathematical guidance many young men who
afterwards became celebrated; among whom may be mentioned Robert
Sidney, the brother of Sir Philip, afterwards Lord Lisle of Penshurst;
Thomas Aylesburyof Windsor, afterwards Sir Thomas, the
great-grandfather of two queens of England; the late Lord Harrington;
Sir William Protheroe and Sir William Lower of South Wales; Nathaniel
Torporley of Shropshire; Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Devonshire; Captain
Keymis; Captain Whiddon, and many others. Cordial and affectionate
letters of most of these men to their venerated master are still
preserved.
At Sion were the groves of Hariot’s academy.
Yet he with Warner and Hues was constantly passing by the Thames
between Sion and the Tower, some three or four hours by oar and tide.
They were all three pensioners, or in the pay, of the Earl, though the
last two were on a very different footing from that of Hariot as to
emoluments and responsible position. They were, however, companions of
both the Earl and Sir Walter, and, if tradition is to be believed, they
were sometimes joined by Ben Jonson, Dr Burrill, Rev. Gilbert
Hawthorne, Hugh Broughton, the poet Hoskins and perhaps others.
The Earl had a large family to be educated, and there is reason to
believe that in his absence from Sion Hariot was intrusted for many
years with the confidential supervision of some of the Earl’s personal
affairs at Sion, including the education of his children. How he
identified himself with the noble family of his patron may be inferred
from these extracts from a letter to Hariot, dated July 19, 1611, of
William Lower, one of his loving disciples. Cecil had been fishing out
some new evidence of Percy’s treason from a discharged servant, and was
pressing cruelly upon the prisoner. Lower writes :
I have here [in South Wales] much otium and therefore I may cast awaye
some of it in vaine pursuites, chusing always rather to doe some thinge
worth nothing then nothing att all. How farre I had proceeded in this,
I ment now to have given you an account, but that the reporte of the
unfortunate Erles relapse into calamitie makes me beleeve that you are
enough troubled both with his misfortunes and my ladys troubles; and so
a discourse of this nature would be unseasonable. [And concludes the
letter with] But at this time this much is to much. I am sorrie to
heare of the new troubles ther, and pray for a good issue of them
especiallie for my ladys sake and her five litle ones. [The Countess of
Northumberland here referred to was the mother of Sir William Lower’s
wife, who was Penelope Perrot, daughter of Sir John Perrot, who married
Lady Dorothy Devereux, sister of Essex, and for her second husband
Henry Percy the gth Earl of Northumberland. Lower died in 1615.]
This responsible trust gave Hariot a good house and home of his own at
Sion, with independence and an observatory. He had a library in his own
house, and seems to have been the Earl’s librarian and book selector or
purchaser for the library of Sion House, as well as for the use of the
Earl in the Tower. The Earl was a great book-collector, as appears by
his payrolls. Books were carried from Sion to the Tower and back again,
probably not only for the Earl’s own use, but for Raleigh’s in his
History of the World. Many of these books, it is understood, are still
preserved at Petworth, then and subsequently one of the Earl’s seats,
but now occupied by the Earl of Leconsfield.
To look back a little. Before either Raleigh or Henry Percy was shut up
in the Tower, we find one of Hariot’s earliest and ablest mathematical
disciples, Nathaniel Torporley, a learned clergyman, writing in high
praise of him in his now rare mathematical book in Latin, entitled,’
Diclides Coelometricx,’ or Universal Gates of Astronomy, containing all
the materials for calculation of the whole art in the moderate space of
two tables, on a new general and very easy system. By Nathaniel
Torporley, of Shropshire, in his philosophical retreat, printed in
1602. The exact title is as follows:
Diclides Coelometricæ / Seu / Valvæ Astronomicæ / vniversales / Omnia
artis totius numera Psephophoretica in sat modicis / finibus duarum
Tabularum Methodo noua, generali,/ & facilima continentes./ Authore
Nathale Torporlaeo Salopiensi / in secessu Philotheoro. / Londini /
Excudebat Felix Kingston. 1602. / 4°.
In the long preface Torporley, who had entered St Mary’s Hall the year
Hariot graduated, and who during his travels abroad had served two
years as private secretary or amanuensis to Francis Vieta, the great
French Mathematician, but who had since become a disciple of the
greater English Mathematician, thus admiringly speaks of his new
master, Thomas Hariot:
Neque enim, per Authorum cunctationem & affectatam ob-scuritatem, fieri
potuit, vt in prima huius Artis promulgatione, eidem alicui &
inventionis laudem, te erudiendi mercedem deferremus; sed dimicamibus
illis, neque de minoribus præmijs quam de imperio Mathematico
certantibus; mussantibus vero alijs, & arrectis animis expectantibus,
Quis pecori imperitet, quern tot armenta sequantur; non defuit Anglæ &
suus Agonista (ornatifimum dico, et in omni eruditionis varietate
principemvirum Thomam Hariotum, homine natu ad Artes illustrandas, &,
quod illi palmariu erit præstantissimu, ad nubes philofophicas, in
quibus multa iam secula caligauit mundus, indubitata; veritatis
splendore difcutiendas) qui vetaret, tarn folidz laudis spolia ad
exteros Integra deuolui. Ille enim (etiamdum in pharetra conclufa, quæ
pupilla viuacis auicular terebraret, sagitta) ipsam totius Artiseius
metam egregia methodo collimauit; expedita vero facilitate patefactam,
inter alios amicorum, & mihi quoque tradidit; multisq vitro citroq,
iaftatis Quæstionibus, ingenia nostra in abysso huius Artis exercendi
causam præbuit.
Of Mr Torporley we shall have more to say further on, as he is
particularly mentioned in Hariot’s will. Meanwhile here is an attempt
at a translation of his peculiar Latin in the above extract:
For indeed by the delays and affected obscurity of authors, it was
impossible, that in the first promulgation of the art, we should give
the praise of invention and the credit of teaching, to the same
individual ; but while they were quarrelling & contending for no less a
prize than the empire of Mathematics, whilst others were muttering, and
waiting with excited minds to see
Who should rule the flock, whom so many herds should follow,
our own champion has not been wanting to England. I mean Thomas Hariot,
a most distinguished man, and one excelling in all branches of learning
: a man born to illustrate Science, and, what was his principal
distinction, to clear away by the splendour of undoubted truth those
philosophical clouds in which the world had been involved for so many
centuries : who did not allow the trophies of substantial praise to be
wholly carried abroad toother nations. For he (while the arrow, which
was to hit the bull’s-eye, was yet in the quiver) defined by an
admirable method the limits of all that science ; and showed it to me,
amongst others of his friends, explained in an expeditious and simple
manner ; and by proposing various problems to us, enabled us to
exercise our ingenuity in the profundities of this science.
But time and space beckon. On the 24th of March 1603, set ‘that bright
occidental Star,’ and ‘that mock Sun’ fræ the north took by succession
its place. To Raleigh the change was the setting of a great hope, for
to Queen Elizabeth he owed his fortunes, and was proud of the debt. To
Raleigh more than to any other one man, notwithstanding his many
faults, the Queen owed the brilliancy of her Court, the efficacy and
terror of her navy, the enterprise and intelligent energy of her
people, to say nothing of the adventurous spirit of colonization which
he awoke in his efforts in Western Planting. The glory of his
achievements today is the glory alike of England and English America.
King James let no man down so far as he did Raleigh. Perhaps it was
because there was no one left of Elizabeth’s Court who could fall so
far.
On three trumped up charges which never were, and never could be
sustained with due form of law, Raleigh was with small delay thrown
into the Tower. Several other noblemen and less eminent persons were
sent there also. The Asiatic plague was raging in the City. A moral
pestilence of equal virulence at the same time infested the Court. The
State prisoners must be tried openly, though already secretly
condemned. The Judges of his ‘dread Majesty’ dared not venture to the
Tower as usual for the trials, forgetting apparently that its precincts
were just as unhealthy for the great prisoners of State as for them,
who were liable any day on the miffs of majesty to change places.
So it was determined that the’ traitors’ should be carted down to
Winchester for trial. A cold wet November seven-days’ journey through
mud and slush was the miserable dodge to carry out this scheme of
darkness which neither Coke nor Popham would have dared to perpetrate
in the broad light of London. It was, as all the world knows, a mock
trial. The prisoners Raleigh, Cobham, Gray, and Markham were condemned
and sentenced to death as traitors, and Raleigh, for the grim sport of
the royal Nimrod, was made to witness a mock execution of his
fellow-convicts, but being in due course all respited by a warrant
which the Governorof Winchester Castle had carried three days in his
pocket, were carted back to the Tower, where, not pardoned, their
sentences not commuted, but simply deferred, they were tortured with a
living death hanging over them, like the sword of Damocles depending on
royal caprice.
Here Raleigh dragged out his long imprisonment, and (as tersely & truly
expressed by his son) was, after thirteen years, beheaded for opposing
the very thing he was condemned and sentenced for favouring. The whole
story is a bundle of inconsistencies, like that of Henry Percy, the 9th
Earl of Northumberland, committed to the Tower in 1606, and his fifteen
years’ imprisonment. The stories of these two celebrated men are
inseparably connected with that of Hariot. But it is not our purpose to
trace either Raleigh’s or Percy’s progress through these long and
dreary years any further than is necessary to illustrate the life of
Hariot, who was the light of the outer world to them both. Incarcerated
and watched as they were, Hariot was the ears, the eyes, and the hands
of these two noble captives.
The depth and variety of Hariot’s intellectual and scientific
resources, his honesty of purpose, his fidelity of character, his
eminent scholarship, his unswerving integrity, and his command of
tongue, rendered him alike invulnerable to politicians and to royal
minions. He was with Raleigh at Winchester and in the Tower, off and
on, as required, from 1604 to 1618, except during the last voyage to
Guiana. He was at the same time a pensioner, a companion, and
confidential factotum of his old friend the Earl of Northumberland both
in the Tower and at Sion for fifteen years. Watched as these two
prisoners were, ensnared, entrapped, and entangled for new evidence
against them, it was necessary for Hariot to pursue a delicate and
cautious course, to eschew politics, statecraft and treason, and to
devote himself to pure science (almost the only pure commodity that was
then a safeguard) metaphysics, natural philosophy, mathematics,
history, and literature. He was their jackal, their book of reference,
their guide, their teacher, and their friend.
Raleigh found himself in December 1603, lodged in the Tower, innocent,
as is now generally admitted, of the charges against him, but legally
attainted of high treason. All his worldly effects therefore escheated
to the Crown. The King out of pure cowardice (for he dared not carry
out the sentence of the Court) waived the horrid parts of the
sentence—too horrid even to be quoted here—and commuted it to execution
by the block. He also waived the immediate forfeitureof property
acquired under Elizabeth’s reign, and even allowed Raleigh to complete
the entail of certain estates to his wife and son.
The Governor of the Tower and his Lieutenant were at first officially
kind and friendly, extending many privileges to win his confidence. If
there had been any treason in Sir Walter they would most certainly have
wormed it out of him, for his eyes at first were not fully open. He
still believed in the honour and fidelity of his mock friends at Court.
When no more satisfactory evidence of his guilt could be smuggled out
of him, or his companions, in support of the unjust verdict, they
began, in 1605, to abridge his privileges and darken his lights. At
first his friends and visitors were cut down to a fixed number. There
is a list among the Burleigh papers in the British Museum by which it
appears that Lady Raleigh, her maid, and her son might visit Sir
Walter. For this they took a house on Tower Hill near the old
fortress, where they lived six years, or as long as this privilege
lasted.
Then Sir Walter was to be allowed two men servants and a boy, who were
to remain within the Tower. Besides these he was permitted to see on
occasion, Mr Hawthorne, a clergyman ; Dr Turner, his physician } Mr
Johns, his surgeon ; Mr Sherbery, his solicitor ; his bailiff at
Sherburne ; and his old friend, Thomas Hariot, with no official
designation.
It needs no ears under the walls of the Tower to tell us what were the
duties of this learned and trusted friend, who had been Sir Walter’s
confidential factor for a quarter of a century in all his most
important enterprises. Hariot, it will be perceived, was the only one
named, in this house-list, without an assigned profession. Fortunately
there is still preserved a ‘hoggeshead of papers’ in Hariot’s
handwriting, ill-assorted and hitherto unsifted, which partially reveal
the secrets of this prison-house, and show Hariot here, there, and
everywhere, mixed up with all the studies, toils, experiments, books,
and literary ventures of our honored traitor.
So passed, with tantalizing uncertainty, the year 1605, with many fears
for the future and some hopes; but 1606 brought into the Tower Sir
Walter’s old friend Henry Percy, another ‘traitor.’ With him, at first,
there was considerable liberality on the part of the officials (all
paid for), and both Raleigh and Percy had each a garden to cultivate
and walk in, and a still-room or laboratory in which to study and
perform their ‘magic.’ Hariot was the master of both in these occult
sciences. The ‘furnace’ and the ‘still’ were at first Raleigh’s chief
amusement and study. Assaying and transfusing metals, distilling
simples and compounds, concocting medicines, and testing antidotes,
with exercises in chemistry and alchemy, were the studies of both
Raleigh and the Earl. But soon the policy of the Court changed. The
prisoners had less liberty and saw less of each other, and so the
stills were pulled down, and the gardens given up. Raleigh was more
closely watched, and entrapped. Then there was fencing and defencing,
for nothing could stand against the King’s persistent rancor, and
Cecil’s dissimulation. From time to time Sir Walter’s titles, his
offices, his Elizabethan monopolies and his appointments were all taken
from him. All his emoluments were wanted for hungry favourites ; and
finally the Sherburne estate which he had been permitted to entail on
his son went by no higher law than the king’s, ‘I mon hae it for Carr.’
During all these anxious months Hariot was Sir Walter’s close-mouthed
and trusted Mercury, a silent messenger who floated frequently by the
tide on the Thames between the Tower and his residence at Sion, a
pensioner of, and one of Percy’s staff of wise men, but really
Raleigh’s strong right hand. He adroitly and faithfully served two
masters, preserving his own independence and self reliance, and not
losing the confidence of either.
From the trial at Winchester to the final transfer of Sherburne, a
period of some five years, every step against Raleigh was taken through
the high Courts of Justice. That the cannie monarch was capable of all
this moral wrong and legal crookedness need not surprise any one who
has investigated his antecedents and proclivities, but that he on
coming to England should have developed that masterly power of warping
great minds and bending the English Courts of Justice to his purposes,
and even crunching its strong old oaken Bench and Bar into his own
royal privy pocket, does surprise one. The secret of this unenglish
strength, however, has been attributed partly to his Bur-leigh help.
When Raleigh found the cords thus tightening round him, he offered
sundry concessions and services for life and liberty. He would carry
out his schemes for enriching the king and the kingdom by conquering
and exploring Guiana; he would accept exile in Holland; or emigrate to
Virginia, and help to build up a new English empire in the West; but
all in vain. It was feared that his unexpired and dormant patent might
interfere with the King’s own Virginia charter. So Raleigh and Hariot
worked on, but relieved the tedium by ever changing study. Every year
or two, as long as he could command through himself or friends the
resources, Raleigh sent privately a reconnoitring and intelligence ship
to Guiana, to keep that pet enterprise alive. In this delicate matter
Hariot was Sir Walter’s geographer and assayer, while Hariot’s old
college friend, Keymis, was his factor or shipping agent.
Then come Raleigh’s Essays and smaller writing with his hopeful
correspondence with the Queen and Prince Henry. Lady Raleigh’s
privileges, after six years, ceased in 1611; probably about the time
that Cecil was for some unaccountable reason prospecting actively for
new evidence against both Sir Walter and Percy. The years 1610 and 1611
were anxious times for them both; but they were bright days for Hariot,
with his invention of the telescope and his discoveries. Whether in the
Tower, administering new scientific delicacies and delights to the
prisoners; or at Sion, unlocking the secrets of the starry firmament by
night, in his observatory; or floating between Sion and the Tower by
day on the broad bosom of the Thames, prying into the optical secrets
of lenses, and inventing his perspective trunks by which he could bring
distant objects near, Hariot in foggy England of the north was working
out almost the same brilliant series of discoveries that Galileo was
making in Italy. To this day, with our undated and indefinite material,
even with the new and much more precise evidence now for the first time
herewith produced, it is difficult to decide which of them first
invented the telescope, or first by actual observation with that
marvellous instrument confirmed the truth of the Copernican System by
revealing the spots on the Sun, the orbit of Mars, the horns of Venus,
the satellites of Jupiter, the mountains in the Moon, the elliptical
orbits of comets, _etc._ It is manifest, however, that they were both
working in the same groove and at the same time.
Hariot was undoubtedly as great a mathematician and astronomer as
Galileo. In 1607 at Ilfracombe and in South Wales, he had taken by hand
and Jacob’s staff, the old patriarchal method, valuable observations of
the comet of that year, and compared notes with his astronomical pupil
William Lower, and afterwards with Kepler. This comet, now known as
Halley’s, ought perhaps to have been named Hariot’s, for it confirmed
his notions that the motions of the planets were not perfect circles
and afforded probably the germ of his reasoning out the elliptical
orbits of comets, especially afterhis friend and correspondent [see
infra, pages 178-180] Kepler’s book _de Motibus Stella Atartis_ came
out in 1609, and he had invented and improved his telescope or
perspective ‘truncke’ or cylinder in 1609-10.
It is not positively stated that Hariot held direct correspondence with
Galileo in 1609 and 1610 or even later, but the evidence is strong that
he was promptly kept informedof what was going on in Italy in
astronomical and mathematical discovery, as well as in Germany and
elsewhere. That he was using a ‘perspective truncke’ or telescope as
early as the winter of 1609-10, and that his ‘servaunte’ Christopher
Tooke (or as Lower in 1611 familiarly called him’ Kitt’) made lenses
for him and fitted them into his ‘trunckcs’ for sale by himself, is
known. From this circumstance,and from the fact that he disposed of
many ‘trunckes’ by his will, and left a considerable stock of them to
Tooke, it is manifest that he manufactured and traded in telescopes
from 1609 to 1621. With his invention of the telescope then it required
no correspondence with Galileo to induce him to rake the heavens and
sweep our planetary system for new astronomical discoveries. To an
astronomer of his activity and mathematical acumen these discoveries
followed as a matter of course. Like Galileo he may have borrowed from
the Dutch (or quite as likely they of him) the idea that by a
combination of lenses it was possible to bring distant objects near,
but that he worked out the idea independently of Galileo admits hardly
of a doubt. But he seems to have been less ambitious than Galileo to
claim priority in either the invention or the discoveries that
immediately followed. In this connection the following hitherto
unpublished letter will be read with interest: