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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
ALCHEMY

ALCHEMICAL POETRY
1575–1700
 For

Michael, Deborah, Lisa, and Christopher

 ALCHEMICAL POETRY
1575–1700
From Previously Unpublished Manuscripts

Edited by
ROBERT M. SCHULER

Volume 5
First published in 1995
This edition first published in 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1995 Robert M. Schuler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-63753-4 (Set)

eISBN: 978-0-203-08445-8 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-415-64189-0 (Volume 5)
eISBN: 978-0-203-07926-3 (Volume 5)

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would
welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
ALCHEMICAL POETRY
1575- 1 7 00
FROM PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED
MANUSCRIPTS

EDITED BY
ROBERT M. SCHULER

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC.

NEW YORK AND LONDON
1995
Copyright © 1995 by Robert M. Schuler
AU rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alchemical poetry, 1575-1700: from previously unpublished manuscripts I

edited by Robert M. Schuler.
p. cm. - (English Renaissance hermeticism; vol. 5) (Garland refer-
ence library of the humanities ; vol. 1087)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8240-7599-4 (alk. paper)
1. English poetry-Early modern, 1500-1700. 2. Alchemy-Poetry.
3. Didactic poetry, English. 4. French poetry-To 1500--Translations into
English. 5. Latin poetry, Medieval and modem-Translations into English.
I. Schuler, Robert M. II. Series. III. Series: English Renaissance hermeti-
cism ; 5.
PR1209.A37 1995
821' .308037-dc20 95-13704
CIP

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper

Manufactured in the United States of America
 CONTENTS
List of Illustrations viii
General Introduction xi
Introduction xv
Acknowledgments xlviii
Bibliography I

PART ONE:
ELIZABETHAN VERSIFYING ALCHEMISTS 1
Edward Cradock
I. A Treatise Touching the Philosopher's
Stone (ca. 1575) 3

Simon Forman
II. Of the Division of the Chaos (ca. 1595)
III. Compositor ad Lectorum (1597) 49

PART TWO: THREE VERSE TRANSLATIONS FROM

MIDDLE FRENCH BY WILLIAM BACKHOUSE (1644) 71

Jean de La Fontaine
IV. The Pleasant Founteine of Knowledge (1413) 79

v
 Contents

Pseudo-Jean de Meun
V. The Complaint of Nature against the Erronious
Alchymist (ca. 1500)
VI. The Alchimyst's Answere to Nature (ca. 1500) 123

PART THREE: INTERREGNUM "EPIC":

CHYMICAL MEDICINE AND SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY 201
Bassett Jones
VII. Liihochymicus (ca. 1650) 203
The Whole Woorke's Emblem 229
To the Industrious & Worthy Authour 230
The Preface 231
The First Chapter 238
The Second Chapter 253
The Third Chapter 269
The Fowerth Chapter 274
The Fift Chapter 288
The Sixt Chapter 314
The Author's Corollarie 324
An Index 327
[Appendix] 349

PART FOUR:
SIX ANONYMOUS VERSE TRANSLATIONS (ca. 1700) 413

Mary the Prophetess

VIII. Epigram from her Pmctica 420
Dionysius Zacharias
IX. The Practice of the Divine Work (1567) 429

VI
 Contents

Bernardus Trevisanus
X. The Practise of the Philosophick Stone (15th century?) 446

Aristeus Pater
XI. The Words of Father Aristeus to his Son (ca. 1600) 464

Michael Sendivogius
XII. The Philosophicall ./Enigma (ca. 1610) 480
XIII. A Dialogue of the Allchymist and Sulphur (ca. 1610) 514

PART FIVE: HERMETIC MYSTICISM AND

AUGUSTAN SATIRE 541
"Torrescissa"
XIV. Hermetick Raptures (ca. 1700) 543

INDEX 641

Vll
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate 1. Title page of Bassett Jones's Latin treatise Lapis

Chymicus (1648), with Jones's coat of arms and motto. 225

Plate 2. Jones's sketch for title page of Lithochymicus,

British Library MS Sloane 315, fo1. II. 226

Plate 3. Jones's sketch for Frontispiece for Lithochymicus,

British Library MS Sloane 315, fo1. 2v. 228

Figure 1. Diagram of hexagonal form, fo1. 13v. 239

Figure 2. Emblem, "The Sun Speaks," fo1. 17v. 244

Figure 3. Emblem of Hen, fo1. 19r. 246

Figure 4. "Mercurie speakes out of the ashes," fo1. 22r 250

Figure 5. "Elixir's Purgatorie," fo1. 25I. 254

Vlll
 List of Illustrations

Figure 6. The alchemist's furnace, f. 27r. 257

Figure 7. "The Weoman Speakes," fol. 34r. 267

Figure 8. The "hieroglyphic" from Jones's Lapis

Chymicus, p. 58. 271

Figure 9. Prometheus, the Alchemist, and the Workman,

fol. 53r. 290

Figure 10. Apollo plays the Harp as the Planets Dance,

fol. 57r. 295

Figure 11. Vulcan as painter, with Mercury, fol. 80r. 326

Figure 12. The "Cup of Bitterness," fol. 86r. 342

Figure 13. The First Eight "Specificall Operations":

(1) Limation, (2) Rasion, (3) Pulverisation, (4) Levigation,
(5) Incision, (6) Contusion, (7) Granulation,
(8) Lamination, fol. 88v. 350

ix
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The study of the nature, ongm, dissemination, and influence
of hermetic thought has been an important subject of Anglo-
American and Continental scholarship for more than thirty years.
At present, despite the recent deaths of pioneers like Frances
Yates and D. P. Walker, it continues to attract the attention
of scholars internationally and in a variety of fields: literature,
history, philosophy, religion, art history and iconography, and
the history of science and medicine. Evidence of this interest
is abundant and has taken the form of an increasing number
of scholarly articles, monographs, and collections of essays; the
organization of international conferences; and the publication of
several specialized journals devoted to this subject. However, it
is generally acknowledged that research in hermeticism suffers
from an acute lack of reliable primary texts, a deficiency which
this series is intended to alleviate with respect to the English
Renaissance and seventeenth century.
English Renaissance Hermeticism is a series of new, author-
itative editions of rare hermetic and alchemical texts which,
with few exceptions, have not been reprinted since their original
publication in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. It includes treatises written originally in English, as well
as early translations of works by Continental authorities-past
and contemporary-that were widely read and influenced En-
glish Renaissance thought and art in important ways. In addi-
tion to prose treatises, the series will include at least one volume
of previously unpublished alchemical poetry.
Authors and titles to appear in English Renaissance Her-
meticism have been selected because of their intrinsic imp or-

Xl
 General Introduction

tance and also to demonstrate the wide range of alchemical and

hermetic thought that flourished in the Renaissance, even as the
era of the "New Science" was dawning. For example, the phys-
ical transmutation of metals, explanations of the preparation of
the philosopher's stone, iatrochemistry, Paracelsian expositions,
varieties of spiritual and mystical alchemy, Rosicrucianism and
Cabalism are represented. A partial listing of authors includes
Basil Valentine, Jean d'Espagnet, Roger Bacon, Oswald Croll,
Nicholas Flamel, Robert Fludd, Eirenaeus Philalethes and Her-
mes Trismegistus. Thus the series will include works that are
among the least accessible and most important for interdisci-
plinary research, and are intended to comprise a core collection
of texts which are vital as background to the study of Renais-
sance literature, intellectual history, science, and philosophy.
Primary place in this series will be given to treatises on
hermeticism rather than hermetism. According to a scholar
recently concerned with defining varieties of Renaissance oc-
cultism, the latter narrowly designates religious and philosophi-
cal writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and their inter-
pretation throughout history. Hermeticism, more eclectic and
broader in scope, refers to an "amorphous body of notions and
attitudes deriving not merely from Hermes but also from the
mystical side of Plato and his Neoplatonic successors and from
such other esoteric systems as the numerology of Pythagoras
and the Jewish cabala." 1 It is this syncretic body of knowledge,
belief, and speculation that provides a basis for the theory and
practice of magic, astrology, and, especially, alchemy with which
most of these Renaissance writers are concerned.
Finally, volumes appearing in the English Renaissance Her-
meticism series will have several features in common: all will be
edited by scholars active in the field of hermetic studies; all will
have new, reset texts carefully transcribed and verified against
original editions (facsimile reproduction will be used only for ti-
tle pages and illustrations). Texts will be edited conservatively,
ISee Wayne Shumaker, "Literary Hermeticism: Some Test Cases," in Hermeticism
and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988),
293-94.

XlI
 General Introduction

preserving old spelling (except for ordinary normalizations) and

punctuation. All volumes will feature critical introductions and
full scholarly notes, bibliographies, and indices, and will be uni-
formly bound.

Stanton J. Linden
General Editor

xiii
 INTRODUCTION

Renaissance Alchemical Poetry in Context

I
After the scholarly work of the last half-century, from Thorndike
to Pagel and Debus, and from Rossi to Dobbs, no one can now
doubt that Renaissance alchemy-formerly dismissed as mere
pseudo-science or charlatanism-is an important element in the
histories of early modern science and medicine. That these "in-
ternalist" histories ought not to compartmentalize their subjects,
but rather examine them as both expressions of and shaping
influences on the religious, social, and political values and in-
stitutions of their time, has been the theme of interdisciplinary
and social historians like Robert Merton, Keith Thomas, Charles
Webster, and Michel Serres. And most recently, "cultural stud-
ies of science" have investigated, more reflexively still, the prac-
tices by which science is articulated and sustained within specific
cultural contexts.1 Hence we are now in a better position than
ever before to grapple with the protean subject of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-cent ury alchemy.

1Important studies by most of those mentioned here are given in the Bibliography. See
also Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978); Debus,
Chemistry, Alchemy, and the New Philosophy, 1500-1700: Studies in the History
of Science and Medicine (London, 1987); Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic
to Science (London, 1968); Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy,
ed. Josue v. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, 1982); Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs,
The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge,
1991); and Joseph Rouse, "What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?"
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 1 (1991): 1-22.

xv
 Introduction

New methodologies are also reshaping literary studies, par-

ticularly with the emergence of "cultural poetics," the variegated
new historicism, and the critical theories that inform them. Not
only is the traditional project of contextualizing canonical works
being re-thought, but previously marginalized or "non-literary"
genres (the familiar letter, the diary, topographical description,
travel narrative, "history" itself) are being read fruitfully as
manifestations of the social and political discourses that bear on
all verbal productions, whether strictly "literary" or not. Valu-
able in themselves, such genres can also reveal the impress of ide-
ology in correlative, but more nearly mainstream, literary texts
(love lyric, epic, history play, fictional narrative.)
Among traditional historians of science and literature, al-
chemical poetry-a marginalized genre if ever there was one--
received scant attention: it was neither "good science" nor "good
poetry." This neglect is not surprising, since the whole genre of
scientific poetry, of which alchemical poetry is a subdivision,
has until recently been relegated mainly to the care of bibliog-
raphers, textual scholars, and antiquarians specializing in the
curious. Some scientific poems had of course been edited and
studied, but little effort went to understanding the genre and its
traditions. Reaching from antiquity to the eighteenth century,
its major stages include ancient scientific and philosophical po-
etry (Hesiod's Works and Days and the Hesiodic Astronomy;
the Presocratics Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles; Aratus
and Nicander; Manilius, Lucretius, Virgil's Georgics, Book X
of Columella's De re rustica, Oppian), medieval scientific and
philosophical poetry (Alan of Lille, Bernardus Silvestris), ver-
nacular didactic poetry of the Middle Ages (on alchemy, as-
trology, agriculture, medicine, practical lore), Renaissance Neo-
Latin scientific poetry (Pontano, Fracastoro, Vida, Palingenius,
George Buchanan), Renaissance vernacular scientific poetry and
verse translations thereof (Guy Lefeve de la Boderie, Pontus de
Tyard, Maurice Sceve, Pierre de Ronsard; Thomas Tusser, Barn-
abe Googe, Sir John Davies, Sir John Harington, Thomas Mof-
fet, Fulke Greville, John Davies of Hereford, Phineas Fletcher),

XVI
 Introduction

and Augustan physico-theological poetry.2 Many of these au-

thors and works are now receiving the attention they deserve.
For scientific poetry (including alchemical poetry) has much to
offer, both to "cultural studies of science" and to "cultural po-
etics," not to mention traditional methodologies in the history
of science and literature, for which it provides important pri-
mary documents. Because it straddles the conventional bound-
aries between science and literature, it strikingly manifests the
pressure of these cultural practices, as well as those of philos-
ophy, religion, and politics. The study of scientific poetry can
also help to answer important general questions about sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century culture which are by no means as simple
as they might seem: what was "science"? what was "poetry"?
Furthermore, to understand the early modern world's taste for
scientific poetry is to begin to understand (rather than merely
confirm) our own world's intolerance for it.
What is true of scientific poetry in general is also true of
alchemical poetry. So, as a contribution to these inquiries, this
volume provides annotated texts of fourteen previously unpub-
lished alchemical poems, written between about 1575 and 1700,
each with an historical introduction. Although they have (gener-
ally) a common subject, these texts demonstrate the flexibility
and variety of their genre: they range in length from twelve
to nearly 3000 lines and utilize divers verse-forms, rhetorical
stances, and literary treatments. This introductory essay is no
place for a comprehensive account of the tradition of alchemical
poetry. But it can sketch the broad contours of its history and

21 have cited only representative names that might be more readily recognized. As
a practice and as a theorized genre, scientific poetry has been marginalized since the
days of Plato and Aristotle: by philosophers (for whom it was not "philosophical,"
"scientific" or "true" enough), and by literary theorists (for whom it was not "cre-
ative" or "poetic" enough). For discussions of the debate between philosophy and
poetry, and the problem of theorizing and naming this genre, see Robert M. Schuler
and John G. Fitch, "Theory and Context of the Didactic Poem: Some Classical, Me-
diaeval and Later Continuities," Florilegium 5 (1983): 1-43; Schuler, "Theory and
Criticism of the Scientific Poem in Elizabethan England," English Literary Renais-
sance 15 (1985), 3-41; and idem, Francis Bacon and Scientific Poetry (Philadelphia,
1992), esp. 1-10. In addition to other recent work on scientific poetry cited in these
studies, see Georg Roellenbleck, Das epische Lehrgedicht Italiens im jiinjzehuten und
sechzehuten lahrhundert (Munich, 1975).

XVll
 Introduction

identify its major kinds, and thus supply one of the contexts
necessary for an appreciation of these poems. Such a survey
may be particularly useful to those readers who have no clear
"generic expectations" regarding alchemical poetry. Similarly,
since these sometimes difficult poems actually embrace different
kinds of alchemy, the reader must also have some knowledge of
alchemy's main developments and theories. Before considering
their literary heritage, then, we begin by surveying these four-
teen poems from the perspective of their alchemical content.

II
The poems are printed here in the chronological order of their
composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of
them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the
development of alchemy.3 The whole history of alchemy is, of
course, far too complex to be told here. However, by viewing
these texts in relation to their alchemical subject matter and
its historical origins, we can actually recapitulate the growth of
Western alchemy, from its earliest days as a coherent body of
theory and practice in Hellenistic Alexandria to the time of its
most famous English practitioner, Sir Isaac Newton.
If not absolutely the oldest original text represented here, the
Latin verse "Epigram" of Maria the Jewess (here called "Mary
the Prophetess," text VIII) is the one with the most direct links
to the alchemy of the earliest Greek manuscripts. As the com-
mentary on this poem shows, any solution to the meaning of its
twelve enigmatic lines depends on some grasp of Maria's works
as preserved in Zosimos of Panopolis (third century A.D.) and
other Hellenistic authorities. The technology with which Maria
is associated (the bain-marie and certain kinds of stills) remained
part of chemical practice until the early eighteenth century. Her
enigmatic axioms ("nature charms, dominates, and conquers na-
ture," "one becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of
the third the fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one," etc.)
3Three are translated from French, six from Latin. While only five were originally
written in English, together they account for about half the total number of lines
(nearly 10,000) in the collection.

XVlll
 Introduction

were widely repeated and, with variations, had just as long a life
as her alchemical apparatus. 4 Furthermore, Maria's theories of
matter are fundamental to virtually all alchemical thinking: all
nature is one; body, soul, and spirit exist in metals as well as in
humans; base metal is transformed into gold by a process anal-
ogous to the conjunction of male and female; the material must
"die" and be "reborn." This little text therefore provides a use-
ful introduction to the whole tradition of Western alchemy: its
technology, its theory and terminology, and its chief metaphors.
One version of Maria's Latin poem is attributed to Arnaldus
de Villanova (1245-1313), the acknowledged author of several al-
chemical treatises and the reputed author of many others. The
Arnaldian texts, given great authority by later writers, embody
a distinct stage in the development of medieval alchemy. Before
Arnaldus, Arabic alchemists like the eighth-century Jabir ibn
Hayyan (latinized as Geber) and A vicenna (d. ca. 1036) had
formulated the sulphur-mercury theory of metallic constitution
(this is traceable ultimately to the two subterranean "exhala-
tions" from which, said Aristotle's M eteorologica, metals were
formed). Passing into the Latin West through the earliest trans-
lations and adaptations of Arabic texts (twelfth century), this
theory was restated by the great encyclopedists and scientific
figures of the high Middle Ages, Vincent of Beauvais, Roger Ba-
con, and Albertus Magnus. It is also found in Arnaldus, but
he (like his younger contemporary, Bonus of Ferrara, ca. 1330)
emphasized mercury as the main substrate of metals, while the
"philosophical sulphur" was said to lie hidden within the mer-
cury itself. Arnaldus also taught that metals grow from seeds,
like the fetus in the womb. The philosopher's stone does have
curative powers, but the main emphasis is on its transmutative
force; the whole work, it is emphasized repeatedly, takes place
in one vessel, and only one metal is necessary to begin it. 5

4Sources for the condensed history of alchemy given here are Holmyard, Read, and
Taylor; I give specific references only in the case of details not shared by these standard
surveys. Por a recent study of Maria, see Raphael Patai, "Maria the Jewess-Pounding
Mother of Alchemy," Ambix 29 (1982): 177-97.
5Por a survey of the Arabic and Latin writings leading up to Arnaldus, see Holmyard,
chaps. 5, 6. Thorndike (3:52-84) devotes a whole chapter (and Appendix 4) to

XIX
 Introduction

These Arnaldian ideas find expression in the Middle French

poem by Jean de La Fontaine, La fontaine des amoreux de sci-
ence (1413), translated in 1644 by William Backhouse (text IV).
This poem also subsumes the dozen or so aphorisms that make
up the revered Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus (legendary
Egyptian prophet, king, philosopher, and founder of alchemy),
the earliest known versions of which are in Arabic. The Emerald
Table describes a macrocosm-microcosm united and penetrated
by a universal soul or spirit, and it signals the importance of sun
and moon (variously interpreted as gold and silver, sulphur and
mercury).6 Many of these same ideas also find expression in the
famous Practica of Bernardus Trevisanus (fl.. 1375), but in the
form of an allegory about a besieged king who is mortified and
then rejuvenated. This prose tract is versified here (text X) by
an anonymous hand of the early eighteenth century.
If the works by La Fontaine and Bernardus encapsulate one
major tradition of earlier medieval Latin alchemy, several other
versified translations here, as well as one major "original" com-
pilation, represent the next major phase in the development of
alchemical theory: that associated with the Catalan philoso-
pher, mystic and missionary, Ramon Lull (d. ca. 1316), usually
called "Raymond Lully" in English. This wholly pseudonymous
tradition, which emerged around the beginning of the fifteenth
century, is remarkable for its internal consistency and the log-
ical development (deeply marked by Neo-Aristotelian scholasti-
cism) of its matter theory,7 The Lullian Theorica (134 closely
printed pages in Zetzner's Theatrum Chemicum) begins with a
commentary on Genesis that describes the original matter of
Creation as three-fold, representing three degrees of fineness.
The first gave rise to angels (which have the highest proportion
of the quintessence, the most subtle of substances); the second to
heavenly bodies (less pure, but nonetheless rarefied); the third
to sublunary terrestrial bodies (composed of the four elements
Arnaldus. The points given here are major but not the only ones associated with
him.
6See Holmyard (97-100) and Taylor (77-78) for translations and discussions.
7See Michela Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull, Warburg
Institute Surveys and Texts, 18 (London, 1989).

xx
 Introduction

via sulphur and mercury, but also containing a small amount of

the quintessence, which connects them to the higher, spiritual
world).
These theories and the relatively straightforward laboratory
procedures set out in the Lullian Pmctica were to be the sta-
ples of alchemical speculation and practice from the fifteenth to
the early seventeenth century. With some variation in empha-
sis, they underpin two long Middle French poems attributed to
Jean de Meun (texts V, VI; written ca. 1500 and translated by
William Backhouse, ca. 1644) and the later prose tract of Denis
Zacaire (text IX: first published 1567, versified ca. 1700). Ed-
ward Cradock's substantial verse compilation (text I, ca. 1575),
dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, is an especially good (i.e., rela-
tively clear) exposition of Lullian theory and practice: there is
no mysticism and very little allegorical obscurity.8 As if to in-
dicate the continuity of the alchemical tradition up to his own
day, however, Cradock cites not only Aristotle and Geber, Ar-
naldus de Villanova and Bernardus Trevisanus, Raymond Lully
and Albertus Magnus, but also his virtual contemporaries like
Zacaire. Moreover, from Zacaire he incorporates a long prose
passage that consists mainly of quotations from Arnaldus and
Lully: like most alchemists, Cradock believed that all the great
masters wrote about the same thing, regardless of seeming dif-
ferences in terminology or actual differences in culture or time.
Lullian alchemy held sway until just about the time Cradock
was writing; then came the massive influence of the Swiss-born
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim
(1493~ 1541). Paracelsus (i.e., "beyond Celsus," Celsus being
a principal medical authority of antiquity) was the name he
adopted, and with it he signaled both the belligerent egotism
that characterizes his writings and a very different emphasis in
alchemy. Metals were now seen to be composed of the tria prima
(SUlphur, mercury, and salt), though the four elements were also
accounted for; macrocosm and microcosm are still inextricably
8Cradock's definitions of technical terms (calcination, putrefaction, distillation, fer-
mentation, etc.) are particularly useful; these, combined with Bassett lones's Ap-
pendix (text VII, on which see beloW), provide a veritable lexicon of practical termi-
nology for the beginning student of alchemy.

xxi
 Introduction

linked, but Neoplatonic ideas like the doctrine of signatures are

used to elaborate the interconnectedness of the universe; most
important, the chief aim of alchemy is now the cure of diseases,
not the transmutation of metals, and the physician's is a priestly
calling.
Paracelsus redefined alchemical and medical thought for the
whole of the seventeenth century, and most of the remaining
texts in this collection manifest his authority. Even the as-
trologer and unlicensed medical practitioner Simon Forman, writ-
ing his alchemical verses in the 1590s, seems to have absorbed
some of Paracelsus' ideas, then newly available in England (see
texts II and III, especially the former). The continental Latin
poem attributed to "Pater Aristeus" (text XI, ca. 16007; trans-
lated ca. 1700) is wholly Paracelsian in conception. It, in turn,
is closely related to the two prose tracts of the Pole, Michael
Sendivogius (written ca. 1610 and versified ca. 1700; texts XII
and XIII), works that elaborate certain Paracelsian and Neopla-
tonic notions, especially the role of the air in transmitting the
"Universal Spirit," and the role of a certain "Chalybs" or load-
stone as "matrix" of this life-giving force. Sendivogius himself
was a powerful influence on later seventeenth-century alchemical
speculation, and he held a particular interest for Newton.
The only works in the collection not yet mentioned are two
original-indeed unique--compositions: the Welshman Bassett
Jones's Lithochymicus (text VII, ca. 1650) and the pseudony-
mous Hermetick Raptures, attributed to "Torrescissa" (text XIV,
ca. 1700). These long works are discussed fully in their own in-
troductions, but they need a special word here, too, because they
stand at either end of a period during which alchemy was be-
coming increasingly diverse--and increasingly assimilable by dif-
ferently motivated ideologies and systems of belief. During the
turmoil of the Interregnum, for example, Paracelsian alchemy
was a conspicuous element in the political thought of radical
(often millenarian) sectarians like the Diggers, Familists, Fifth
Monarchists, and others who literally sought to "turn the world
upside down." At the same time, among certain middle-class (of-
ten Anglican) intellectuals, traditional alchemical theories were
being reformulated in terms of the new mechanical philosophy;

xxii
 Introduction

other high-church Anglicans made easy alliances with Rosicru-

cian mysticism and iatrochemistry, but eschewed the radicalism
of the Paracelsian-inspired sects; and among moderate Puritans
who pursued "chymistry" there was a strong utilitarian and ex-
perimental strain.
With the Restoration, Paracelsian medicine (especially as
augmented by the Flemish physician and alchemist J .B. van
Helmont) achieved a striking but short-lived preeminence over
the traditionalist Royal College of Physicians (which adhered to
Galenic theory and practice), only to collapse after many of the
"chymical physicians" were wiped out by the plague of 1665,
which of course their treatments had failed to arrest. The in-
terest in alchemy-or alchemies-continued unabated, however,
and even many members of the early Royal Society took part
in utopian speculation inspired by it. Indeed, during the en-
tire half-century leading up to 1700, many of those interested in
alchemy-including Newton-held firm to the prisca sapientia
and attendant beliefs: the secrets of religion and natural philos-
ophy had been bestowed by God on a select few after the Fall;
they were lost over time, but preserved in fables and myths truly
understood only by the chosen; full recovery was possible in later
times by the study of prophecy and by scientific experimentation.
At the same time, other alchemists focused their attention more
narrowly on the prisca theologia (Hermes, Orpheus, Zoroaster,
Pythagoras, etc.) and emphasized the purely meditative or spec-
ulative side of the sacred art. They might or might not combine
physical operations with their spiritual exercises. 9
The first of our two poems from this hectic milieu is Jones's
Lithochymicus (text VII), written about 1650. I have called it an
9For the complex of subjects mentioned in the last two paragraphs, see Charles Web-
ster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (London,
1975), 282, passim; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy
(Cambridge, 1975); Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science
and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York, 1977),
esp. 2:447ff.; K. Theodore Hopper, "The Nature of the Early Royal Society," in
W.R. Owens, ed., Seventeenth-Century England: A Changing Culture, 2 vols. (Lon-
don, 1980), 2:231-40; Robert M. Schuler, "Some Spiritual Alchemies of Seventeenth-
Century England," Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (1980): 293-318; and J. Andrew
Mendelsohn, "Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649-1665," Past and Present 135
(1992): 30-78.

XXlll
 Introduction

alchemical "epic," partly because of its length (over 2900 lines)

and ambitious scope, but also because Jones himself would have
been alive to the ancient use of that generic term to indicate any
long, serious poem (in classical times, written in hexameters),
whether narrative or philosophical. Jones's work, though diffi-
cult at first reading, is a fascinating compound of the "ancient
theology," Paracelsian and Rosicrucian iatrochemistry, Neopla-
tonic magic, Christian mysticism, and practical alchemical pro-
cedure (it concludes with a prose Appendix of technical terms
and illustrations of apparatus). Jones's alchemy is thus both
practical (especially in its curative function) and spiritual, and
it has much in common with that practiced by contemporaries
like Thomas Vaughan and Elias Ashmole. Its chief physical man-
ifestation is the drawing down of solar influences by making the
philosopher's stone and achieving the purification of matter in
"philosophical gold."
As Jones points out in his last of six chapters, however,
the medicinal application of this physical product leads, through
contemplation, beyond "this our stone's / Force unto higher ob-
jects," specifically to the mystical contemplation of the Trinity,
the Incarnation, the divine spark within humans, and thus their
union with God through love. Jones expresses these ineffable
mysteries chiefly by appropriating certain classical and biblical
materials-e.g., the Neoplatonic "two-fold Venus," Diotima's fa-
ble of love from the Symposium, and the "comma Johanneum"
which Jones sees as articulating the correspondences between
various earthly and heavenly trinities. The congruences be-
tween these and other archetypes (e.g., Prometheus' fire/World
Soul/ "divine spark" /logos; the philosopher's stone/Zerubbabel's
stone/Christ, etc.) provide Jones with subjeCts for contem-
plation that seem ultimately to be the purpose of his alchemy
and of his poem: Lithochymicus functions as an extended em-
blem whose many complex parts are, in Jones's mind at least,
wholly integrated. His alchemy is a striking example of mid-
seventeenth-century eclecticism.
H ermetick Raptures (text XIV), probably composed shortly
after 1700, provides an appropriate conclusion to the volume, in
that its second and longest part (562 lines) is a satirical review

XXIV
 Introduction

of the entire preceding half-century, including the very tradition

within which Jones was writing. Thomas Vaughan, for exam-
ple, is pilloried in his own name, and a host of other alchemi-
cal writers, sectarians, and political figures from this turbulent
period are savaged in an Augustan mock-heroic that at times
indulges in downright abuse. At the same time, Hermetick Rap-
tures presents a positive view of a purely meditative and spiri-
tual alchemy, and it culminates in the veritable apotheosis of the
first- person speaker, in a kind of hermetic heaven presided over
by Hermes Trismegistus himself. In this part of the poem we are
reminded of the gnostic and Christian mysticism that attended
alchemy from its earliest times.lO
Copsidered from the point of view of their alchemical con-
tent, then, these fourteen texts offer a condensed; retrospective
history of Western alchemy up to the eighteenth century.

III
The second perspective from which these texts need to be seen
is that of the history of alchemical poetry: how do they relate
to earlier poems in the genre, and by what verbal strategies do
they embody their subject? While I have already referred to
alchemical poetry as a "tradition," I do not mean that there
is an unbroken line of influence or imitation, from the earliest
Hellenistic versifiers to those writing in English at the turn of
the eighteenth century. Rather, alchemical verse has appeared
in a variety of cultural contexts, and its forms were often deter-
mined as much by current literary conventions (whether those
of scientific poetry or of other genres) as by antecedent poems
on the same subject. Nevertheless, a close study of the corpus
of alchemical poetry would reveal a noticeable continuity of mo-
tifs, verse-forms, and structural elements. A few of these, at
least, can be touched on in the brief historical survey that fol-
lows. I will then discuss the motivations behind the writing of
alchemical poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
10See H.J. Sheppard, "Gnosticism in Alchemy," Ambix 6 (1958): 86-109; idem, "The
Redemption Theme in Hellenistic Alchemy," Ambix 7 (1959): 42-46; and Patai, "Mary
the Jewess," 180 and sources cited.

xxv
 Introduction

The earliest known alchemical poems come from Alexandria

of the seventh century. Altogether, four poems in Byzantine
Greek are known; each is attributed to a separate author, but
all are probably the work of one Heliodoros, who was for the
most part paraphrasing in verse the prose treatises attributed
to Stephanos of Alexandria (fl. ca. 610-41). The large number
of extant manuscripts in European libraries suggests that these
poems were well used by later alchemists, though they did not
make their way to Western Europe until the sixteenth century.
Particularly important is Heliodoros' adaptation of Stephanos'
rhetorical devices: prayers, invocations, exclamations, moraliza-
tions, and allegorizations of various processes. Expressed in He-
Iiodoros' rough iambics, these became stock features of much
later alchemical literature, whether in verse or prose. 11 The
earliest English citation of Heliodoros I have found is in the
Lythotheoricos (1621, fol. 24r) of the Paracelsian spiritual al-
chemist John Thornborough, bishop of Worcester. Later in the
seventeenth century the Dutch physician, professor of Greek, and
alchemist Jacob Toll (d. 1696) contemplated an edition of these
verse texts, but it was never completed.l 2
Few Arabic alchemical poems are known, but one extant
collection is associated with the very earliest Islamic alchemical
text to be translated into Latin (1144), whence the beginning of
European alchemy is traditionally dated. These verse texts are
attributed to the Umayyad prince Khalid ibn Yazid (d. ca. 704);
he was supposedly taught the secrets of alchemy by a Christian
scholar of Alexandria, one Marianos (Morienus), himself the dis-
ciple of the above-mentioned Stephanos. Khalid is said by a later
Muslim biographer to have written several poems, the greatest
being his "Paradise of Wisdom," in some 2315 verses. But this

11 For texts and discussion, see C.A. Browne, "Rhetorical and Religious Aspects of
Greek Alchemy," Ambix 2 (1946): 129-37, continued in Ambix 3 (1948): 15-25; and
idem, "The Poem of the Philosopher Theophrastos upon the Sacred Art: A Metrical
Translation with Comments on the History of Alchemy," Scientific Monthly, Sept.,
1920, 193-214. For Stephanos, see F. Sherwood Taylor, "The Alchemical Works of
Stephanus of Alexandria," Ambix 1 (1937): 116-39.
12Ferguson, 2:459; the texts, with French translations, can be found in Pierre Eugene
Marcellin Berthelot, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. (Paris, 1888).
Toll, incidentally, is lampooned in Hermetzck Raptures, line 575.

XXVI
 Introduction

text does not survive, and the provenance of those that do is

still under scrutiny.l3
The abundance of Latin alchemical poems from the Middle
Ages provides a stark contrast to these few Arabic texts. While
only those from the British Isles have been systematically cat-
alogued, they can be taken as indicative of the larger number
that one would no doubt find in continental libraries. Only one
poem is as early as the twelfth century, and none is recorded
from the thirteenth. But D.W. Singer lists eleven verse texts
in fourteenth-century manuscripts (most also reappear in later
copies), and thirty-six others date from the fifteenth century,
many of which survive in multiple copies. In all, then, at least
forty-eight Latin alchemical poems survive from the British Isles
in the period before 1500. 14
If we turn to English vernacular poetry of the late Middle
Ages, we find that alchemy was the most popular subject for
those who wrote versified scientific treatises. In fact, of the sur-
viving scientific poems in Middle English, more were written
on alchemy than on all other scientific subjects combined. Al-
together, fifty-three such poems have been identified, and the
surprisingly large number of manuscripts in which some of them
are found suggests a wide dissemination and large readership.1 5
The two most important-and longest-Middle English texts,
George Ripley's Compound of Alchemy (1471) and Thomas Nor-
13See Holmyard, 63-66; and Lee Stravenhagen, "The Original Text of the Latin
Morienus," Ambix 17 (1970): 1-12.
14For a list of these and vernacular poems to that year, see Singer's Catalogue, 2:511-
85. For some fourteen (usually brief) Latin verse texts of European provenance, see
W.J. Wilson, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in the U.S.
and Canada, Osiris 6 (1939): 1-837; in another publication, Wilson edits a fifteenth-
century MS containing a Latin poem of 108 lines, sixteen Italian sonnets (thirteenth-
century origin), and 299 lines of Catalan: "An Alchemical Manuscript by Arnaldus
de Bruxella," Osiris 2 (1936): 220-405. A few continental alchemical verses are also
given in Lynn Thorndike, "Unde Versus," Traditio 11 (1955): 163-93, which deals
with the medieval habit of including passages of verse (usually summary mnemonics)
in all kinds of scientific prose treatises (a good alchemical example is Arnaldus de
Villanova's Rosarium Philosophorum).
15See Rossell Hope Robbins, "Alchemical Texts in Middle English Verse: Corrigenda
and Addenda," Ambix 13 (1966): 62-73; and Robert M. Schuler English Magical and
Scientific Poems to 1700: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1979), where these
and most of the other English alchemical poems mentioned below can be found.

xxvii
 Introduction

ton's Ordinal of Alchemy (1477), survive m 24 and 31 copies

respectively. 16
Norton's poem of seven "chapters" in 3102 lines (one of the
few Middle English verse texts on alchemy to have received a
scholarly edition) is mainly a didactic treatise on making the
philosopher's stone, though it has a few bits of narrative and di-
alogue. The rough couplets of the Ordinal established its author
as a European authority for more than 200 years after his death.
The prolific German alchemist Michael Maier published a Latin
prose translation at Frankfurt, 1618; a German verse transla-
tion appeared in 1625. Maier's version was reprinted in 1677-78
and 1702.1 7 The first English edition was in Elias Ashmole's
Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), where he complained
that English masters of the sacred art were honored more abroad
than they were in their own land.
Ripley's Compound, in over 2200 lines of rhyme-royal stan-
zas, is also an instructional treatise, divided into twelve "gates,"
each named for a major alchemical process (calcination, solution,
separation, etc.). It has the distinction of being the first English
alchemical work (whether in prose or verse) to be published,
though not until about a hundred years after its composition.1 8
Later editions of Ripley, by Ashmole and then by George Starkey
(1668), attest to its importance, even for post-Paracelsian stu-
dents of the subject.
16Ripley was an Augustinian canon at Bridlington, Yorkshire; Norton, who probably
studied under Ripley, was a native of Bristol said to have been a member of Edward
IV's privy chamber. See John Reidy, ed., Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy,
EETS 272 (London, 1975), xi-xii; and Robbins, "Alchemical Texts," 65. Two anony-
mous poems. "On Preparing the Philosopher's Stone" and "Verses on the Elixir,"
exist in 23 and 33 MSS, respectively (Robbins, 62). The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
and Confessw Amantis, two of the most frequently copied Middle English poems,
were also thought to contain alchemical secrets; Chaucer's poem and selections from
Gower's were published in Elias Ashmole's Theatrum, on which more below. The
Canon's Yeoman's Tale had an alchemical life of its own; see Robert M. Schuler,
"The Renaissance Chaucer as Alchemist," Viator 15 (1984): 305-33.
17 Reidy, xxvii-xxviii.
18 The Compound of Alchymy (London: By Thomas Orwin for Ralph Rabbards,
1591). The only other English alchemical work published before 1600 was a transla-
tion of Roger Bacon's prose tract, Speculum Alchemiae, as The Mirror of Alchimy
(London: For Richard Olive, 1597); see Stanton J. Linden's recent edition (New York,
1992).

XXVlll
 Introduction

Given the lateness of the Renaissance in England and the

strong Middle English tradition of alchemical poetry, it is not
surprising that there should be a good deal of vernacular al-
chemical poetry written in the sixteenth century, and that it
should reflect the native tradition in manner (didactic exposi-
tion sometimes combined with allegory, composed in couplets
or rhyme-royal stanzas) and content (Lullian alchemy, of which
Ripley in particular provides a major compendium). While there
are many anonymous texts from this period, a number of al-
chemical poets have been identified, and some have been stud-
ied and edited. The most notable are the Benedictine monk
then Puritan preacher William Blomfild, whose dream-vision of
eighty-eight rhyme-royal stanzas (dated 1557) exists in sixteen
complete and ten partial manuscripts; Blomfild's contemporary,
the itinerant Kentishman Thomas Charnock, who composed a
substantial poem, as well as a prose tract for Queen Elizabeth in
which he promised to produce gold or lose his head; the Queen's
mathematician and astrologer, John Dee; Edward Kelley, Dee's
associate and medium for angelic communication; the antiquar-
ian, herald, and editor of Chaucer, Francis Thynne; Humphrey
Locke, whose petition in quatrains to Lord Burghley (sometime
before 1590) surveys the whole alchemical process and introduces
a long treatise in both prose and verse; Samuel Norton, some-
time Sheriff of Somerset who claimed to be the great-grandson
of Thomas Norton; and Edward Nowell, a Staffordshire iron-
monger who composed or collected some thirty separate poems,
amounting to over 2700 lines in a variety of verse-forms. Among
the anonymous Elizabethan texts, one worth mentioning is a
verse paraphrase of Lully's Theorica.l 9

19In addition to the relevant entries in Schuler, Bibliography, see also note 36 below
on Charnock, and David Carlson, "The Writings and Manuscript Collection of the
Elizabethan Alchemist, Antiquary, and Herald, Francis Thynne," Huntington Library
Quarterly 52 (1989): 203-72. Nowell's collection exists in two MSS: Bodleian Ashmole
1445 and British Library Sloane 2567. The Lully text also has two exemplars, Ashmole
1480 and Wellcome Institute MS 519; the latter MS also contains an early copy of
William B1omfild's popular poem, and internal evidence suggests that Blomfild was
the versifier (Raymond Lully is the central figure in Blomfild's dream-vision; both his
poem and the Lully text have 88 stanzas in the same verse-form; and both attack
the Tudor mathematician Hugh Oldcastle as a false alchemist-in the context of the

xxix
 Introduction

The seventeenth century witnessed a remarkable increase

in the publication of all kinds of English alchemical material,
especially during the Civil War and Interregnum. With re-
gard to verse, one work stands out: Elias Ashmole's Theatrum
Chemicum Britannicum (1652), which has already been men-
tioned in relation to Norton and Ripley. This large octavo
volume, meant to rival the other compendious "theatres" like
Zetzner's Theatrum Chemicum (first ed. Ursel, 1602; 4 vols.),
contains 436 pages of alchemical poetry, plus fifty pages of com-
mentary. Of the fifty-three Middle English alchemical poems
now known to survive, Ashmole prints twenty-three, omitting
only three of any length or real consequence. 20 He does perhaps
a little less well with regard to sixteenth-century verse, though he
includes works by Blomfild, Charnock, Dee, Kelley and Thomas
Robinson, as well as some anonymous pieces. Ashmole probably
knew most of the others that have been identified in recent times,
given that many of them are found among his manuscripts (he
continued to collect such material even after his anthology was
published).
Ashmole's Theatrum includes few poems from his own cen-
tury. The latest entry is probably "The Magistery" (1633), by
the country gentleman William Backhouse, who "adopted" Ash-
mole as his alchemical "son" in 1651 (see the Introduction to Part
Two). Ashmole certainly knew of Backhouse's translations (ca.
1644) of the three Middle French poems discussed above, but
since he had settled on the "design of Collecting All (or as many
as I could meete with) of our own English Hermetique Philoso-
phers, and to make them publique," he would have excluded these
long works because of their linguistic origin.21

Lullian paraphrase, a purely gratuitous addition).

20They are "The Argument of Morien and Merlin" (Ashmole prints only vv. 77-94
and 100-114 of its 370 lines); "The Working of the Phylozophers stone" (169 lines);
and "The Marrow or Pithe of Alkymy," by William Bollose (19 stanzas of rhyme-
royal, in six MSS). Some of these may date from after 1500, but only the first has
been published (by F. Sherwood Taylor, Chymia 1 [1948]: 23-35). Other unprinted
Middle English texts range in length from four to twenty-one lines.
21 Theatrum, sig. B2v; he does include, nevertheless, at least one verse translation: a
selection from John Lydgate's rendering of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secreto-
rum (pp. 397-403).

xxx
 Introduction

The most notable English alchemical poem to be published

after Ashmole's 1652 collection is George Starkey's Marrow of
Alchemy (in two parts, 1654 and 1655), which fills over 130 oc-
tavo pages. Both Dutch and German translations were made of
this work by 1685 (Ferguson, 2:475). One ought to mention, too,
Samuel Pordage's massive Mundorum Explicatio (1661); while
not strictly or wholly alchemical, this 332-page "sacred poem"
is a compendium of Behmenist magical millenarianism and thus
reflects, indirectly at least, the influence of Paracelsian alchem-
ical mysticism. 22 Other substantial seventeenth-century poems,
written both before and after Ashmole's publication, have re-
mained in manuscript until now. Bassett Jones's Lithochymicus
was probably being composed just when Ashmole was assem-
bling the manuscripts for his anthology. The six verse transla-
tions in Part Four of this volume and Hermetick Raptures (all
dating from about 1700) were written after Ashmole's death
(1692). The present collection, then, complements Ashmole's
in several ways.23
The latter part of this brief survey has naturally focused on
English writers, but it should at least be mentioned that during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alchemical poetry also
flourished on the continent. Indeed, it received the attention of
at least some poets rather better known than most of those who
took up the subject in England. The European tradition is rich
in both Neo-Latin and vernacular compositions.
The most influential example of the former is the Chrysopoeia
(Venice, 1515) of Giovanni Aurelio Augurello, the Italian classi-
cist who had previously written odes and epistles after the man-
ner of Horace. Dedicated to Pope Leo X, Augurello's elegant
work (in three books and taking up nearly 50 pages in Zetzner's
Theatrum Chemicum) professes to reveal all the secrets of the

22See the discussion in Paul Arno Trout, "Magic and the Millennium: A Study of the
Millenary Motifs in the Occult Milieu of Puritan England, 1640-1660" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of British Columbia, 1974), 233-47.
23Altogether, about 70 English alchemical poems (including verse translations) were
written between 1500 and 1700; see Schuler, Bibliogmphy. Of the fourteen printed
here two (VII, XIV) were undoubtedly intended for publication, while two others (II,
III) were almost certainly meant for the press.

xxxi
 Introduction

art. Often reprinted, it was also translated into French prose

and verse by 1550. 24 Other notable Neo-Latin poems are Mar-
tin Copus' Mercurius Triumphans fj Hebdomas Eclogarum Her-
meticarum (1600), dedicated to the occultist monarch, Rudolph
II of Bohemia; an untitled poem by the Paracelsian Johannes
Pratensis (published 1597); and the epigrammatic verses found
in the alchemical emblem books of Lambspringk (De Lapide
Philosophico Libellus, 1599), Michael Maier (Atalanta Fugiens,
1618), Daniel Stolcius (Viridarium Chymicum Figuris Cupro
inc isis adornatum, et Poeticis picturis iliustratum, 1624), and
others.25
Vernacular poems exist in all the European languages, but
France, where poets of some ability were attracted to the genre,
will serve as an example. While many treated the subject,
alchemy appears to have been a major preoccupation of three:
Beroalde de Verville, Christolfe de Gamon, and Clovis Hesteau
de Nuysement. While maintaining an interest in the native tra-
dition of alchemical verse-the major documents of which are
the Middle French poems translated in Part Two, below, along
with the Roman de La rose of Jean de Meun-these writers were
also impressed by the literary treatment alchemy had received
at the hands of Augurello. Their poetry reflects both influences,
though not to the taste of at least one modern critic. 26
The fourteen poems collected here are not, then, the rare
species one might initially think them, but manifestations of a

24Ferguson, 1:56; several other Neo-Latin verse texts, including another long poem
by Augurello, appear in Zetzner.
25For Pratensis, see Schuler, Francis Bacon and Scientific Poetry, 49n; the others
are discussed in Read and described in Ferguson. Recently available is The Hermetic
Garden of Daniel Stolcius, trans. Patricia Tahil (Edinburgh, 1980); and for a review
of a major 1980 study of the alchemical Bildgedicht (emblem-poem), see Ambix 28
(1981): 111-112.
26 Albert Marie Schmidt, La poesie scientifique en Prance au seizieme siecie (Paris,
n.d. [1938]), 320 et passim. See the substantial collection of de Nuysement, Les
visions hermetiques et autre poemes alchimiques, ed. Sylvain Matton (Paris, 1974);
there is a seventeenth-century English prose translation of de Nuysement's Poeme
philosophique (1620) in British Library MS Sloane 690. See also Anth%gie de la
poesie hermetique, ed. Claude d'Yge (Paris, 1976). It is worth noting that the Italian
hermeticist Ludovico Lazzarelli, who wrote a Neo-Latin poem on silkworms, also
composed a vernacular sonnet on alchemy (Thorndike 5:534).

XXXll
 Introduction

long-standing and widespread tradition. Several of our versifiers

were obviously aware of their predecessors. William Backhouse
(texts IV, V, VI) and the anonymous writer of texts VIII and
XI were actually translating Latin or French poems into English
verse; others, like Edward Cradock (1) and Bassett Jones (VII),
cite earlier poems (in these cases, Latin ones). What might
seem curious, though, is that no fewer than four texts (IX, X,
XII, XIII) are verse translations (by the same unknown hand)
of prose originals. 27 This practice is not, of course, unique. He-
liodoros' seventh-century versification of Stephanos of Alexan-
dria and the TUdor versified paraphrase of Lully's prose Theor-
ica have already been mentioned, and in ancient times Aratus of
Soli (3rd c. B.C.) had versified Eudoxus' astronomical treatise,
while Lucretius poeticized Epicurus. The apparent oddity does,
however, raise the larger question, "why verse alchemical texts
in the first place?" To answer this question fully, one would have
to go first to the history of ancient scientific poetry and thence
to the history of verse-prose relations in scientific discourse, trac-
ing it from those Presocratics (Parmenides, Empedocles) whose
"natural" vehicle for scientific theorizing and philosophic spec-
ulation was the hexameter line, to Restoration England, where
the modern notion that prose is the "natural" medium of sci-
ence began to emerge. 28 It is possible here, however, to offer
some immediate reasons for the versification of alchemy during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time when prose
texts were also abundant. One can discern a number of motiva-
tions, ranging from the pragmatic to the philosophical; these, in
turn, often have a direct bearing on the selection of poetic form
and treatment, as seen in the poems collected here.

27The translation habits of this Augustan man of letters are discussed in the Intro-
duction to Part Four.
28For some suggestive thoughts on this larger question, see Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey
Kittay, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis, 1987), xi-xii,
197, et passim; see also Schuler and Fitch, "Theory and Context of the Didactic
poem."

XXXlll
 Introduction

IV
Perhaps the most obvious reason for employing verse-form has
to do with the practical realities of transcribing texts. Alchemy
was a subject for which the accuracy of textual transmission was
crucial. Thomas Norton, for example, urged "That no Man, for
better ne for worse, / Chaunge my writing for drede of Gods
curse." Ashmole's note on this passage expresses the anxiety of
an editor seeking an uncorrupted text, inveighs against negligent
or wilful scribes, and cites Chaucer's similar complaint "against
Adam his Scrivener." Ashmole adds, "But as in other Aries and
Sciences the fault is scarce pardonable, so chiefly in Hermetique
learning, where the Injury may prove irreparable." He concludes
by quoting another couplet from Norton: "And chaunging of
some one Sillable, / May make this Boke unprofitable." 29 Verse-
form at least lessened the likelihood of accidental scribal error.
The mnemonic effect of meter and rhyme, and the structural
form of couplets or stanzas made the copying of texts easier and
less open to unintentional corruption than did the unbroken lines
of prose. These benefits were particularly important for material
circulating mainly in manuscript, where successive transcriptions
were likely to compound errors; but since compositors were also
liable to err, the same advantages applied to the medium of print.
Another practical feature of verse is its capacity for conceal-
ing information in devices like acrostics and anagrams. Ashmole
explains, for example, how "From the first word of [Thomas Nor-
ton's] Proeme, and the Initiall letters of the six following Chap-
ters (discovered by Acromonosyllabiques and Sillabique Acros-
tiques) we may collect the Authors Name and place of Resi-
dence." This practice was perhaps even more common than Ash-
mole thought. He failed to notice it, for example, in a sixteenth-

29 Theatrum, 438-39; see also Michael Sendivogius, A New Light of Alchymie (1674),
who laments that "those times are past when Fidelity amongst Friends flourished,
and this Art was communicated by word of mouth; but now it is not obtained but
by [studying accurately transcribed texts and] the Inspiration of the most high God"
(77-79).

XXXIV
 Introduction

century poem in his collection, "Bloomefields Blossoms"; had he

done so, he would have found (three times, in a simple acros-
tic of initial letters) the correct name of the author, over which
he puzzles in his annotations. 30 Another case is found in Ed-
ward Nowell's "signature poem" which spells out "his dwelling
and Profession," at the end of his large collection of alchemical
verse. As well as concealing such information, simple acrostics
could, of course, ensure that no lines were omitted-as long as
the scribe or reader knew the key.31
A final pragmatic reason for composing alchemical treatises
in verse was the didactic benefit of verse-form for memorization.
For the mnemonic value of rhyme and meter went far beyond
the verse line in transcription, and there is ample evidence that
readers in the early modern period had well trained and well
exercised memories. Even Sir Philip Sidney, who was no great
friend of didactic poetry, cites the virtue of "ryme or measured
verse" in "knitting up of the memory":
The fitnes it hath for memory is notably proved by all delivery
of Arts: wherein for the most part, from Grammer to Logick,
Mathematick, Phisick, and the rest, the rules chiefly necessary
to be borne away are compiled in verses. So that, verse being
in it self sweete and orderly and beeing best for memory, the
onely handle of knowledge, it must be in jest that any man
can speake against it. 32
The frequent exhortations in alchemical verse to heed the exact
words of the text are signals that certain passages ought to be
memorized. In the unpublished verse paraphrase of Lully's mas-
sive Theorica (composed in rhyme-royal stanzas), we are told,
"Th[is] chapter . .. loke thowe well perpende / And comytt it
to memory, even to the ende." A little later, the versifier says,

30 Theatrum, 437, 478; he finally chooses a kinsman of the actual author, who is
identified in Robert M. Schuler, "William Blomfild, Elizabethan Alchemist," Ambix
20 (1973): 75-87.
31For Nowell, see MS Ashmole 1445, item VI, pp. 116-17. Acrostic and anagrammatic
poetry also had sacred and magical associations (see below).
32 Apologie faT Poetrie, in G. Gregory Smith, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1904), 1: 183; for this passage in context, see Schuler, "Theory and Criticism
of the Scientific Poem," 7-12.

xxxv
 Introduction

"Loke throwe owte this chapter & locke it in memory, / For in

it standethe no smaule propertie of increasmente"; and again,
"The devisyon of the 4 elementes [a subject previously discussed
at length] kepe well in thy memory."33
As well as these practical advantages, verse had a second
benefit-particularly within the patronage system of the Eliz-
abethan court-which we might call social. For Elizabethan
courtiers, the writing of love poetry, or of works in other "official
genres" sanctioned by the throne, could be a means of defining
one's public role, and even of qualifying for a position at court.3 4
Similarly, though their poems lacked the advantage of a univer-
sally recognized genre code which was also a socio-political code,
alchemists seeking patronage often resorted to verse when ded-
icating or composing their works, apparently in the belief that
verse-form added a dignity and grace that would facilitate ac-
ceptance of their subject and themselves, especially among the
powerful. Humphrey Locke, for instance, addresses William Ce-
cil, Lord Burghley in a 204-line poem that expresses his patriotic
loyalty, requests Cecil's help against his enemies, and summa-
rizes the alchemical theories of the long treatise (itself in both
prose and verse) that follows. 35 The Oxford theologian Edward
Cradock (text I, below; ca. 1575) goes one better by casting his
entire tract in couplets, though it has a separate verse dedication
and "blessing" addressed to the Queen. And when, a few years
earlier (in 1565), Thomas Charnock was composing his treatise
for the Queen and had begun writing his epistle in prose, he soon
lapsed into verse. 36 These examples suggest that even if alchem-
ical poetry lacked the instant recognition and acceptance of the
love sonnet or patriotic poem, at least some alchemists seeking

33 "Raymonde Lulie in his Theoricke," Wellcome Institute MS 519, fols. 31v, 32r, 33r.
34See Daniel Javitch, "The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry," Genre 15 (1982):
225-38; idem, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, 1978); and
Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1986), esp. 13-22.
35Locke's work survives in two MSS: British Library Sloane 299 (fols. 20r-52rr)
and Ashmole 1490 (fols. 294r-331 v, copied in 1590 by Simon Forman; see Black's
Catalogue, 1166--67).
36See Allan Pritchard, "Thomas Charnock's Book Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth,"
Ambix 26 (1979): 56-73; Charnock had already written his long verse "Breviary of
Natural! Philosophy" (1557).

XXXVl
 Introduction

patronage thought that verse-form gave their treatises a cachet.

Simon Forman (texts II, III), always alert to opportunities for
advancement, may well have been of this mind.
A third reason for writing alchemical texts in verse might
be termed "literary," in so far as certain genres and verse-forms
could be appropriated by the alchemical versifier to achieve var-
ious effects. The alchemical sonnet, Bildgedicht (emblem-poem),
and epigram (see also text VIII) have already been mentioned.
To these could be added the autobiographical narrative of the
search for the stone (see the first part of text IX), the verse di-
alogue (typically between master and student, as in text XIII),
the alchemical testament (text XI), the riddle, song, allegorical
dream-vision (texts X, XI, XII), verse epistle, and of course the
recipe and didactic verse treatise (texts I, II, III).37 In their al-
chemical incarnations, these "genres" were not, of course, rigidly
defined, but they are readily identifiable, and signs of influence
and imitation abound. Occasionally alchemical writers deliber-
ately imitated major poets. All three poems in Part Two, for
example, adopt the verse-form, allegorical personifications, and
even some specific alchemical arguments from the Roman de La
rose; two of them even claim to have been written by Jean de
Meun.
Many of our poems also combine and modify older forms. A
striking example is Bassett Jones's "epic" (text VII): it has an
"autobiographical" (though third-person) narrative framework;
it incorporates dialogue, but one that is humorously colloquial
and realistic rather than formal and rhetorical; and it includes
allegorized mythology, a dream-vision, and didactic passages (for
combinations of other generic elements, see texts IX, XII, XIII).
In the early eighteenth century, "Torrescissa" adapted to his
purpose the mainstream literary forms of epic and Augustan
mock-epic, both of which co-exist in his Hermetick Raptures

37Although the latter can be seen as merely a versified prose treatise, its practitioners
often deploy recurring rhetorical, metaphorical, and structural devices that are, in
effect, generic conventions. Moreover, within all these sub-genres one can also find
certain stock alchemical images (e.g., the peacock's tail, red lion, green lion), recurring
motifs (e.g., the spring topos, as signalling the best time to begin the alchemical work),
and alchemical aphorisms or proverbs traceable to the earliest known texts.

xxxvii
 Introduction

(text XIV). Alchemical poets who adapted or appropriated es-

tablished genres or generic features could thus enhance the ap-
peal and deepen the imaginative resonance of their compositions.
They could also align themselves~for a variety of reasons~with
particular literary traditions and their attendant cultural values.
For example, alchemical allegories of a dying King and his pos-
sible successors (text X), or of a just Prince who attempts with-
out ambition to extend his rule but is driven into hiding by an
Emperor (text IX), are obviously open to a variety of political
applications. That these two particular narratives (redolent of
feudal romance) originated on the continent in the fourteenth
and sixteenth centuries respectively, but were versified in early
eighteenth-century England, suggests at least the possibility of
an ideological component in the translator's attraction to them.
The final and probably most important reason for writing
about alchemy in verse lies in the age-old associations between
poetry, magic, and the sacred. In the Renaissance these prim-
itive connections, which are like those between incantation and
craft-rituals, received a new impetus from Neoplatonic theories
of both poetry and music. Herein lies what we might call the
"philosophical" motivation behind sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century alchemical poetry. Even in the Middle Ages, the re-
puted author of the Psalms, King David, was compared to the
magician-bard Orpheus. Nor did it go unnoticed that of these
quintessentially sacred poems at least one (10) is in acrostic form,
and that another (119) is structured as a kind of anagram, in
that each of its twenty-two stanzas is set off by a letter of the
Hebrew alphabet.3 8 By the late fifteenth century, Marsilio Fi-
cino had formally synthesized these and other magical-poetical-
sacred elements into a full-scale system. With his predominantly
medical orientation and his preoccupation with drawing the spir-
itus mundi into the body, Ficino suggested that in addition to
proper food and drink, one could benefit from favorable sensa-

38See James Hastings, ed., Dictionary of the Bible, rev. ed. Frederick C. Grant and
H.H. Rowley (New York, 1963),815 and S.v. "Acrostic"; and A Dictionary of Biblical
Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, 1992), 184,
555. For the French magician-poets in this connection, see Dudley Wilson, ed., French
Renaissance Scientific Poetry (London, 1974), 4, 152n.

XXXVlll
 Introduction

tions borne on the air, the chief of which was sound, in the form
of appropriate verse and music. 39
Pythagorean musical elements can be found even in the prag-
matic alchemical poem of Thomas Norton (1477), while in Re-
naissance figures like Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, and
Michael Maier, alchemy and Ficinian musical magic are fully
amalgamated. Khunrath, for instance, has a suggestive illus-
tration of a laboratory which is also an oratory; the English al-
chemist Fludd wrote at length about universal harmonies; and
Maier composed musical scores to accompany his alchemical po-
ems or "songs."40 Other elements of poetry, the similitudes and
imagery that make it the preeminent vehicle of the imagination,
were seen by Neoplatonists and Paracelsians like Oswald Croll
as the means of discovering the structure of the universe itself;
for it was similitudes, analogies, and sympathies that connected
things in the macrocosm with those in the microcosm, man.41
Many of the poems in this collection were probably inspired-
in some cases, perhaps unconsciously-by notions like these, but
Bassett Jones certainly promoted them deliberately. Not only
does his long poem often allude directly to poetry, rhetoric,
metaphor and allegory, but Jones also conflates the "Harper"
sun-god (Apollo) with King David, celebrates music's restorative
powers, and even conceives of himself as a magus-hard-alchemist
in the line of Merlin. Moreover, his favorite Platonic figure is
Diotima, and it was she who pointed out that while all creative
writers produce and arrange language to express human emo-
tion in words, only the poet expresses himself musically, and his
music is the very essence of his art.42

39See D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Lon-
don, 1958), 3-72. His discussion is usefully summarized in Owen Hannaway, The
Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore, 1975), 11-
13.
40Por music and alchemy, see Read, chap. 4 and appendix.
41 Por Croll (and for Andreas Libavius' rejection of his system by rejecting metaphor
and rhetoric), see Hannaway, 106-107, 109, 113, et passim. A detailed survey of the
analogous mind-set is Brian Vickers, "Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Oc-
cult.Symbolism, 1580-1680," in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance,
ed. Vickers (Cambridge, 1984), 95-163.
42See Lithochymicus, Introduction, and 4.46n, 5.268n, 6.351; and Dudley, French

xxxix
 Introduction

Elias Ashmole's Theatrum, both in its texts and its editorial

matter, is a monument to the vitality of these "philosophical"
rationales for alchemical poetry. While preparing his collection
of alchemical verse texts for publication, Ashmole was already
envisioning a companion volume of English alchemical treatises
in prose. The latter never appeared, but his Theatrum's Pro-
legomena explains in detail why he turned his energies first to
the verse collection, and it offers a comprehensive explanation
of alchemical poetry as "philosophically" motivated. He begins
by asserting that historically verse preceded prose, being older
even than Orpheus, whose allegory of the Golden Fleece shows
him to be "the first of all the Grecians that brought the Chemick
Learning ... out of /Egypt." Second, while poetry is esteemed by
all cultures, it is especially to be venerated in England because
one Rasis Cestrensis, the contemporary (or perhaps even the
master) of Merlin, wrote the oldest known alchemical verse text
in Latin. But if its antiquity, universal sanction and admiration
were not enough to commend alchemical poetry, he adds,
yet I suppose the Effects thereof, (which so affect and delight
the Eare, rejoyce the Heart, satis£le the JUdgement, and in-
dulge the Hearers) justly may: In regard Poesy has a Life,
a Pulse, and such a secret Energy, as leaves in the Minde, a
far deeper Impression, then what runs in the slow and even-
lesse [sic] Numbers of Prose: whereby it won so much upon the
World, That in Rude Times, and even amongst Barbarous Na-
tions, when other sorts of Learning stood excluded, there was
nothing more in Estimation. And for that we call Rythme; the
Custome of diverse of our Saxon and Norman Poets, shewes
the Opinion they had thereof; whilst the Latine (notwith-
standing its Excellency) could not sufficiently delight their
Eares, unless their Verses (in that Language) were form'd
with an Harmonicall Cadence, and brought into Rythme: Nor
did the Ancients wrap up their Chiefest Mysteries, any where
else, then in the Parabolical & Allusive parts of Poetry, as
the most Sacred, and Venerable in their Esteeme, and the se-
curest from Prophane and Vulgar Wits.... And therefore their
Wisdome and Policy was, First to £lnde out a way to Teach,

Renaissance Scientific Poetry, 2.

xl
 Introduction

and then an Art (which was this) to Conceale. In a word,

to prefer Prose before Poetry, is no other, or better, then to
let a Rough-hewen-Clowne, take the Wall of a Rich-dad-Lady
of Honour: or to Hang a Presence Chamber with Tarpalin,
instead of Tapestry.
And for these Reasons, and out of these Respects, the Po-
eticall (as I conceiv'd) deserved the Precedency.43
Here (in words deliberately redolent of Francis Bacon's Sapientia
Veterum) alchemical poetry-both in its verse-form and in the
allegorical or parabolical guise it often wears-is closely aligned
with the prism sapientia itself (the myth of the Golden Fleece is
a salient example).44 However great a disparity we might sense
between this exalted description and the often homely rhymes
that fill Ashmole's hundreds of pages, we have to take him at his
word in order to understand why he would have gone to so much
trouble in collecting and collating manuscripts, and in providing
the painstakingly documented annotations in his commentary. 45
In light of his remarks, we can also see why, when Ashmole was
"adopted" as the "son" of the alchemist William Backhouse,

43Theatrum, sig. B3r-v. In one of his annotations, Ashmole compares verses left by
alchemic a! masters to their children and says they live longer than any real "sons"
adopted into hermetic mysteries (441).
One Middle English alchemical poet in Ashmole's anthology seems to be apologizing
for using verse:
And Son though thys Writing be made in Ryme,
Yet take thow thereat noe greate disdaine.
But the second two lines of his quatrain have a twist that shows such "disdaine"
would be utter foolishness:
Till thow hast proved my words in deede and in thought,
I watt it well it schalbe set at nought.
(Pater Sapientia, in Theatrum, 196, 209).
44For the ancient tradition of reading myth and epic as compendia of all kinds of
knowledge (including scientific) and of seeing the Muses as patronesses of philoso-
phy and scientific learning, see Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neopla-
tonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley, 1986);
Schuler and Fitch, "Theory and Context of the Didactic Poem"; A.M. Cinquemani,
"Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis
in Seventeenth-Century England," PMLA 85 (1970): 1041-49; and Ernst R. Curtius,
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen
Series 36 (New York, 1953), 230-31.
45For his work on the Theatrum, see C.H. Josten, ed. Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), 5
vols. (Oxford, 1966), 1:81-90, 3:600, et passim.

xli
 Introduction

he himself composed an ecstatic ode rich in hermetic puns and

allusions to celebrate the event (see Introduction to Part Two).
With a recognition of the history and generic conventions of
alchemical poetry, and with a sympathetic appreciation of the
various impulses, practical and social, literary and philosophi-
cal, behind the writing of such poems in the Renaissance, the
modern reader can better understand why they continued to be
of interest to serious-minded persons well into the eighteenth
century. Undeniably, however, even the most well informed and
sympathetic reader is liable to balk at the initial obscurity of
some of the texts in this collection. I conclude, therefore, with
exhortation and encouragement.

v
Some power over the notorious obscurity of alchemy is gained by
perceiving that at least two ironies attend it. First is the histor-
ical process by which those attempting to preserve alchemy's se-
crets bedeviled themselves and their followers. They did so most
obviously by making simple errors in transcription and transla-
tion. More important, they often failed to take into account se-
mantic changes, by which the original things or qualities signified
by a word or term were simply lost through ignorance or cultural
transference. To Alexandrian alchemists, for example, "gold"
meant bronze or any metal alloy that was gold-colored. Egyp-
tian craftsmen themselves had no precise word in their language
for gold but instead used the equivalent of "yellow metal." Hence
when their recipes were eventually translated by the Arabs, who
thought this "yellow metal" was indeed gold, they became, in
effect, nonsense. 46 So much for the vaunted "continuity" of al-
chemical learning, from Hermes to Newton. And yet, so strong
was the belief in this continuity that alchemists through the cen-
turies forged meanings where there were none. 47

46See Maurice P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (London,

1962), esp. 52-57.
47Furthermore, the traditional way of glossing obscure or difficult passages-a method
which not even modern editors can escape-is ignotum per aeque ignotum: citing
correlative excerpts from other texts which are seldom more absolute in their meaning

xlii
 Introduction

A second irony resides in the fact that much alchemical writ-

ing deliberately obfuscates: according to Ashmole, poetry (es-
pecially allegorical poetry) conceals knowledge from the uniniti-
ated. Ostensibly written by and for the adepti, it hides its mean-
ing in a "closed language." Often, however, the very vehicles of
this obfuscation-metaphor, symbol, allegory--contribute pow-
erfully to the imaginative and emotional richness of alchemy
and as a result generate new meanings, both among the adepti
and among those of us on the "outside." Paradoxically, then, it
can be argued that alchemy's obscurity-whether fortuitous or
deliberate-is one of its strengths. Perhaps this should not, in
the end, surprise us. D.P. Walker notes, for instance, that for Re-
naissance syncretists the abstractions, myths, and other poetic
representations of Plato had, "like St. Paul and the Neoplaton-
ists, enough of that obscurity which is essential to any group of
texts that is to be the basis of a long, flexible and richly vari-
ous tradition."48 Western alchemy-which could itself assimilate
(among other things) Neoplatonism and Pauline Christianity-
likewise is possessed of an obscurity that yields richness. Surely
this paradox is what fascinated men as different as Newton and
Jung, not to mention visual artists, writers of fiction, and scores
of poets from Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Vaughan and Mar-
vell, to Yeats, Stevens, and Galway Kinnell.
Even the brief historical sketch given above has shown that
when it appropriates culturally specific philosophical, religious,
and political ideas-or when it is assimilated by culturally spe-
cific philosophical, religious, or political systems-alchemy can
engender a wide range of "meanings." 49 In our period, the case of
Ashmole is again instructive. His annotations-citing, e.g., the
Corpus Hermeticum, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola to gloss
the pious but practical Lullian alchemy of Norton or Ripley-
show that he read these medieval alchemists as containing the
same wisdom found in the Gnostic Pimander and the prisci the-
than the passage they are meant to elucidate.
48 The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1972), 11.
49See in particular, Mendelsohn, "Alchemy and Politics" and, for religious applica-
tions in several different cultures, Schuler, "Spiritual Alchemies," 293n.

xliii
 Introduction

ologi (many of whom were also considered prisci magi). Not

that the various streams of popular and learned hermeticism had
nothing in common: rather, that Ashmole and others, by syn-
thesizing these various streams and fusing them with personal
beliefs and ideologies, could find congruities and meanings which
were not "really" there, could create new alchemies. When these
new alchemies were articulated as alchemical poems, their sheer
verbal "meanings" were further enriched and their effects ren-
dered more powerful, whether those effects are purely didactic,
imaginative, hortatory, satirical, inspirational, or ecstatic.
Recent studies of scientific discourse have amply shown that
Francis Bacon's ideal of a "transparent" language of science has
hardly been realized: even the blandest scientific prose is impli-
cated, often without acknowledgment or recognition, in rhetoric
and ideology. 50 Despite our increasing awareness of the instabil-
ity of all language, however, no one would advocate a nihilistic
reversion to alchemy's obscurities. But by reading poems like
those printed here on their own terms, and yet with an eye to
the cultural forces that inform then, we can appreciate some of
the richness they had-and sometimes still have. It is time to
recognize, in other words, that alchemical poetry has more than
a merely antiquarian interest.
If we need encouragement, we can take it, mutatis mutandis,
from Arthur Dee (son of John), who scribbled this note at the
head of "Benjamin Lock's Picklock to Riply his Castle":
In my well wishing, to the diligent searchers of the secretes
of this misticall Science, I advise the Reader not to contemne
this or the like Treatises in that they are written in homely
English; for many Englishmen, as they have had this art, so
they wrote also in English, some by name as Norton, Ba-
con, Riply, Charnock, Bloomfield; & some not desirous their
names should be knowne, have lett their writings pass under
Anonimus. But most of these [are] penned, in so absurde a
style, & such confusion (perhaps on purpose), some in coarse

50See, e.g., Charles Whitney, Froncis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, 1986), esp.
ch 5; Richard W.F. Kroll, The Material World: Literate Culture in the Restoration
and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991), passim; and Rouse, "What Are
Cultural Studies of Science?"

xliv
 Introduction

prose, other in such hoblyng verse, as yt would try the readers

patience, and may indeede prima fronte seeme rather worthy
to be rejected then respected.
Yet have I, after long study and formerly perusing of ap-
proved Authors, not neglected to reade divers of them over &
over againe, & never lost my labour, but that I found some
pointes in them notably conducing & directing an Artist, in
sundry dangerous & secret passages of the worke. Therefore,
whoever meeteth with this Booke & the lyke, after he be first
grounded from Raymund, Riply, Turba [Philosophorumj, &
[John] Dastyn, let him not spare his labour to read it with
a serious observation, & he may gather fruit from it beyond
expectation. 51

Editorial Procedure
Unlike other texts in the English Renaissance Hermeticism Se-
ries, the fourteen poems printed here are edited from previously
unpublished manuscripts; moreover, they span a period of about
125 years, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth cen-
tury. Therefore, the distinctive features and provenances of each
manuscript present different kinds of editorial challenges. These
and my attempts to meet them are set out in the textual intro-
ductions provided for each poem (or group of poems from the
same manuscript). Similarly, the Textual Notes record cruxes,
emendations, and (for those texts existing in more than one
manuscript) variant readings. The following comments on ed-
itorial procedure apply to all the texts.
In transcribing the manuscripts, I have silently incorporated
all scribal corrections, marginal or interlinear, that represent the
writer's latest intention. When cancelled words or lines reveal
something interesting about composition or meaning, they are
noted in the commentaries. Original spelling is preserved except
that, in keeping with the format of the Series, i, j, u and v have
been normalized to conform with modern practice (the same
applies to passages quoted from early printed texts). Scribal

51Copied by Ashmole in MS Ashmole 1507, fo!' 158r, from a manuscript he had

borrOWed from Sir Thomas Browne (see fo!. 181r).

xlv
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 The end being now so certain and so near, the bright courage of
the man returned; there was no shrinking with the closing scene so
close at hand. He was not brought back to the Tower after his
condemnation, and he passed his last night upon earth in the Gate
House at Westminster, close to which the scaffold stood in Old
Palace Yard. He had a last parting that evening with his devoted
wife, his “dear Bess,” but neither dared to speak of their only
remaining son—that would have been too bitter a pang for them to
bear. Sir Walter’s last words to his wife were full of hope and
courage: “It is well, dear Bess,” he said, referring to Lady Raleigh
having been promised his body next day, the only mercy allowed her
by the Council, “that thou mayest dispose of that dead which thou
hadst not always the disposing of when alive.” Then she left him.
During the long hours of that last night, he composed those beautiful
lines which will last as long as the language in which they are written:

“Even such is time! who takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust:
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.
But from that earth, that grave, that dust,
The Lord shall raise me up I trust.”

Raleigh wrote these lines in a Bible which he had brought with him
from the Tower.
Carlyle has summed up Raleigh’s life and death in the following
pregnant lines, in his “Historical Sketches”:—
“On the morning of the 29th of October 1618 in Palace Yard, a cold morning,
equivalent to our 8th of November, behold Sir Walter Raleigh, a tall gray-
headed man of sixty-five gone. He has been in far countries, seen the El
Dorado, penetrated into the fabulous dragon-realms of the West, hanged
Spaniards in Ireland, rifled Spaniards in Orinoco—for forty years in quest a
most busy man; has appeared in many characters; this is his last appearance
on any stage. Probably as brave a soul as lives in England;—he has come here
to die by the headman’s axe. What crime? Alas, he has been unfortunate:
become an eyesore to the Spanish, and did not discover El Dorado mine. Since
 Winchester, when John Gibb came galloping (with a reprieve), he has been lain
thirteen years in the Tower; the travails of that strong heart have been many.
Poor Raleigh, toiling, travelling always: in Court drawing-rooms, on the hot
shore of Guiana, with gold and promotions in his fancy, with suicide, death, and
despair in clear sight of him; toiling till his brain is broken (his own expression)
and his heart is broken: here stands he at last; after many travails it has come
to this with him.”

Sir Walter Raleigh died a martyr to the cause of a Greater Britain;

his life thrown as a sop to the Spanish Cerberus by the most
debased and ignoble of our kings. Raleigh’s faults were undoubtedly
many, but his great qualities, his superb courage, his devotion to his
country, his faith in the future greatness of England, were infinitely
greater, and outweighed a thousand times all his failings. The onus
of the guilt of his death—a judicial murder if ever there was one—
must be borne by the base councillors who truckled to the King, and
by the King himself who, Judas-like, sold Raleigh to Spain.
Some less interesting State prisoners occupied the Tower towards
the close of the inglorious reign of James Stuart. Among these were
Gervase, Lord Clifford, imprisoned for threatening the Lord Keeper in
1617. Clifford committed suicide in the Tower in the following year.
About the same time, Sir Thomas Luke, one of the Secretaries of
State, and his daughter, were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge
of insulting Lady Exeter, whom they accused of incest and witchcraft,
but, whether the charges were true or false, they were soon
liberated. James’s court seems to have combined all the vices, for
Lord and Lady Suffolk were also prisoners in the fortress about the
same time, accused of bribery and corruption.
To the Tower also were sent the two great lawyers—Lord
Chancellor Bacon, and Sir Edward Coke—the former for having
received bribes, the latter for the part he had taken in supporting the
privileges of the House of Commons. Here, also, two noble lords, the
Earl of Arundel and Lord Spencer, were in durance, owing to a
quarrel between them in the House of Lords, when Arundel had
insulted Spencer by telling him that at no distant time back his
ancestors had been engaged in tending sheep, to which Lord
Spencer responded: “When my ancestors were keeping sheep,
yours were plotting treason.” The dispute seems scarcely of
sufficient importance to have sent both disputants to the Tower.
In 1622 the Earl of Oxford and Robert Philip, together with some
members of Parliament, were sent to the fortress for objecting too
publicly to the suggested marriage of the Prince of Wales, afterwards
Charles I., with a Spanish princess; and the Earl of Bristol was also
in the Tower for matters connected with the same projected alliance.
It was not always safe to have an opinion of one’s own under James
the First.
The last State prisoner of mark to be sent to the Tower in James’s
reign was Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, who had been found
guilty of receiving bribes in his official capacity as Lord High
Treasurer.
 CHAPTER XIII
CHARLES I. AND THE COMMONWEALTH

With the close of the reign of James I. the Tower ceased to be a

royal residence—the Stuart kings, in fact, never passing more than a
night or two in the old fortress prior to their coronation, after which
they only visited it on very rare occasions. James himself only
occupied the Tower-Palace on the eve of opening his first
Parliament; and as the plague had broken out in the city at the time
of Charles the First’s coronation, that king did not even stay the
previous night in the building, nor does he appear ever to have
visited the fortress during the whole of his stormy reign of four and
twenty years.
A very remarkable man occupied a prison in the Tower early in
Charles’s reign. This was Sir John Eliot, “fiery Eliot” Carlyle calls him.
He was first of that noble band of patriots who defied Charles’s
tyranny, and had been sent to the Tower in the winter of 1624–25 for
censuring Buckingham during Charles’s second Parliament, but he
remained there only a short time. In the March of 1628, however,
Eliot, with a batch of independent members of the House of
Commons—amongst whom were Denzil Holles, Selden, Valentine,
Coryton, and Heyman—was again imprisoned in the Tower. Eliot had
boldly declared that the “King’s judges, Privy Council, Judges and
learned Council had conspired to trample under their feet the
liberties of the subjects of the realm, and the liberties of the House.”
Denzil Holles and Valentine were the two members who had kept the
Speaker in his chair by main force; the others were committed to
prison for using language reflecting on the King and his Ministers.
For the following three months these members of Parliament were
kept in close confinement in the fortress, books and all writing
materials being strictly kept from them. In May, Sir John Eliot was
taken to Westminster, where an inquiry was held but no judgment
given. After his return to the Tower, however, Eliot was allowed to
write letters, and was also given “the liberty of the Tower,” and
permitted to see a few friends. In the month of October Eliot and the
others were taken to the chambers of the Lord Chief-Justice, and
thence to the Marshalsea Prison, a change which he jokingly
described as having “left their Palace in London for country quarters
at Southwark.” Then they were tried, and Eliot, being judged the
most culpable, was fined two thousand pounds, and ordered to be
imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure. As for the fine,
Eliot remarked that he “possessed two cloaks, two suits of clothes,
two pairs of boots, and a few books, and if they could pick two
thousand pounds out of that, much good might it do them.” The
fearless member never quitted the Tower again, for a galloping
consumption carried him off two years after he had written the above
lines. There can be no doubt that this consumption was not a little
owing to the harsh treatment he endured. In 1630 he wrote to his
friend Knightley, alluding to rumours of his being released. “Have no
confidence in such reports; sand was the best material on which they
rested, and the many fancies of the multitude; unless they pointed at
that kind of libertie, ‘libertie of mynde.’ But other libertie I know not,
having so little interest in her masters that I expect no service from
her.” His prison was frequently changed, and many restraints were
put upon him, for, on the 26th of December, he writes to his old
friend, the famous John Hampden, that his lodgings have been
moved. “I am now,” he says, “where candle-light may be suffered,
but scarce fire. None but my servants, hardly my sonne, may have
admittance to me; my friends I must desire for their own sake to
forbear coming to the Tower.” Poor Eliot was dying fast in the year
1632, but his last letter to Hampden, dated the 22nd of March, is full
of his old brave spirit, and the gentle humour that distinguished this
great and good man. The letter concludes thus: “Great is the
authority of princes, but greater much is theirs who both command
our persons and our will. What the success of their Government will
be must be referred to Him that is master of their power.” The doctor
had informed the authorities that any fresh air and exercise would
help Eliot to live, but all the air they gave him was a “smoky room,”
and all the exercise, a few steps on the platform of a wall. On the
27th of November Eliot died, “not without a suspicion of foul play,”
wrote Ludlow some years afterwards.

The Byward Tower

Eliot’s staunch friends, Pym and Hampden, moved in the House
for a committee “to examine after what manner Sir John Eliot came
to his death, his usage in the Tower, and to view the rooms and
place where he was imprisoned and where he died, and to report the
same to the House,” a motion which shows how matters had
changed for the better since the days of Elizabeth, none of whose
Parliaments would have dared thus to question the treatment of
State prisoners.
The blame of his untimely death—for he was but forty-two—rests
upon those who let him die by inches in his prison as much as if they
had beheaded him on Tower Hill. John Eliot died a martyr in the
cause of constitutional liberty as opposed to monarchical autocracy.
Eliot’s son petitioned the King to be allowed to remove his father’s
body to their old Cornish home at St Germains, but the vindictive and
narrow-minded monarch, who would not even forgive Eliot after
death had intervened, refused the prayer, writing at the foot of the
petition, “Lett Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the
parish where he died.” No stone marks the spot where he is buried,
and his dust mingles with that of the illustrious dead in St Peter’s
Chapel in the Tower, but his name will be remembered as long as
liberty is loved in his native land.
We now come to a period of quite another sort.
In Carlyle’s “Historical Sketches,” John Felton, the assassin of
Buckingham, is thus described:—“Short, swart figure, of military
taciturnity, of Rhadamanthian energy and gravity.... Passing along
Tower Hill one of these August days (in 1628) Lieutenant Felton sees
a sheath-knife on a stall there, value thirteen pence, of short, broad
blade, sharp trowel point.” We know the use Felton made of that
Tower Hill knife on his visit to Portsmouth, where Buckingham was
then about to set sail for his second expedition to La Rochelle; how
he stabbed the gay Duke to the heart, exclaiming, as he struck him:
“God have mercy on thy soul!” how he was promptly arrested,
brought to London and imprisoned in the Tower.
The reason, or reasons, for Felton killing Buckingham have never
been made clear. He appears to have been a soured religious
fanatic, but the crime was doubtless owing to some fancied injustice
regarding his promotion in the army; and it has been thought that it
was merely an act of private vengeance, rather than one of political
significance. But after his arrest a paper was found fastened in
Felton’s hat, with the following writing upon it:—“That man is
cowardly, base, and deserveth not the name of a gentleman or
soldier, that is not willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his God,
King, and his countrie. Lett no man commend me for doing of it, but
rather discommend themselves as the cause of it, for if God hath not
taken away our hearts for our sins, he would not have gone so long
unpunished.—Jno. Felton.” A sentiment which goes to show that
Felton assassinated Buckingham with the fanatical idea of benefiting
his country.
 So hated was Buckingham by the people, that Felton passed into
the Tower amid blessings and prayers. He was placed in the prison
lately occupied by Sir John Eliot in the Bloody Tower, and before his
death made two requests—one, that he might be permitted to take
the Holy Communion, and the other that he might be executed with a
halter round his neck, ashes on his head, and sackcloth round his
loins. On being threatened with the rack in order to induce him to
give the names of his accomplices, Felton said to Lord Dorset that,
in the first place, he would not believe that it was the King’s wish that
he should be tortured, it being illegal; and, secondly, that if he were
racked, he would name Dorset, and none but him—a capital answer.
When he was asked why sentence of death should not be passed
upon him, he answered: “I am sorry both that I have shed the blood
of a man who is the image of God, and taken away the life of so near
a subject of the King.” As a last favour, he begged that his right hand
might be struck off before he was hanged. He suffered at Tyburn,
and his body was gibbeted in chains at Portsmouth. “His dead body,”
writes Evelyn, “is carried down to Portsmouth, hangs high there. I
hear it creak in the wind.” An eye-witness describes Felton as
showing much courage and calm during his trial and at his death,
and Philip, Earl of Exeter, who attended the execution, declared that
he had never seen such valour and piety, “more temperately mixed,”
as in Felton’s demeanour. This is surely one of the strangest
mysteries in our history.
Prisoners still continued to come to the Tower, and in 1631,
Mervin, Lord Audley, was executed on Tower Hill for a crime not of a
political nature. Six years later a very distinguished ecclesiastic,
John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was imprisoned for four years
within the Tower walls. Williams, who was a Privy Councillor, had
repeated some remarks made by the King, in which His Majesty had
advocated greater leniency in the treatment of the Puritans, and was
accused of revealing Charles’s private conversation, and being an
enemy of Laud’s was very hardly dealt with in consequence. He was
deposed from his bishopric, fined £10,000, and imprisoned in the
Tower, where he caused some surprise, if not scandal, by not
attending the church services in the fortress. However, after his
release, Williams was reconciled to the King, and in 1641 became
Archbishop of York. He had been successively Dean of Salisbury
and Dean of Westminster, and had succeeded Bacon as Lord
Chancellor in 1621, just before he had been appointed to the See of
Lincoln. Williams certainly belonged to the Church Militant, and
during the Civil War defended Conway Castle most gallantly for the
royal cause. At the end of December 1641, he was back again in the
Tower, with ten other Bishops who had protested that, owing to their
being kept out of the House of Lords by the violence of the mob, all
Acts passed during their absence were illegal. The Peers arrested
the protesting Bishops on a charge of high treason; and on a very
cold and snowy December night they were all sent to the Tower,
where they remained until the May of 1642.
Lord Loudon, who had been sent by the Scottish Covenanters to
Charles, had a narrow escape of leaving his head on Tower Hill in
1639. According to Clarendon, a letter was discovered of a
treasonable nature, signed by Loudon, addressed to Louis XIII. of
France, and Charles ordered Sir William Balfour, by virtue of a
warrant signed by the royal hand, to have the Scottish lord executed
the following morning. In this terrible dilemma Loudon bethought him
of his friend, the Marquis of Hamilton, and gave the Lieutenant a
message for that nobleman. Now it was one of the privileges of the
Lieutenant of the Tower that he could at any time, or in any place,
claim an audience with the sovereign. Hamilton persuaded Balfour to
go with him to Charles, but on arriving at Whitehall, they found that
the King had already retired for the night. Balfour, however, taking
advantage of his privilege, entered the room with Hamilton, and
together they besought Charles to re-consider his decision, pointing
out to him that Loudon was protected by his quality as Ambassador
from the Scotch. The King, as was his wont, was obdurate. “No,” he
said; “the warrant must be obeyed.” At length the Marquis, having
begged in vain, left the chamber, saying, “Well, then, if your Majesty
be so determined, I’ll go and get ready to ride post for Scotland to-
morrow morning, for I am sure before night the whole city will be in
an uproar, and they’ll come and pull your Majesty out of your palace.
I’ll get as far as I can, and declare to my countrymen that I had no
hand in it.” On hearing this, Charles called for the warrant and
destroyed it. Loudon was soon afterwards released (Oldnixon’s
“History of the Stuarts”).
Now comes the story of the last days of one of Charles’s most
noted counsellors—last days that, as in the case of many before
him, were passed within the grim precincts of the Tower, and were
the prelude to execution. On the 11th of November 1640, the Earl of
Strafford was at Whitehall laying before Charles a scheme for
accusing the heads of the parliamentary party of holding a
treasonable correspondence with the Scotch army, then encamped
in the North of England. Whilst he was with the King the news
reached him that Pym at that very moment was impeaching him in
the House of Commons on the charge of high treason. Strafford at
once made his way to the House, but was not allowed to speak, and
shortly afterwards heard his committal made out for the Tower. At the
same time Archbishop Laud was arrested at Lambeth Palace, and
carried off to the great State prison. “As I went to my barge,” Laud
writes in his diary, “hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there and
prayed for my safety and return to my home.” But neither he nor
Strafford were ever to return to their homes. Perhaps Strafford’s life
might have been saved had it not been for the King’s action, for
when it became known that Charles had plotted with the hope of
inducing the Scottish army to march on London, seize the Tower and
liberate Strafford, the great Earl was practically doomed. The city
rose as one man, a huge mob surging round the Houses of
Parliament and the Palace of Whitehall, shouting “Justice.”
For fifteen days Strafford faced his accusers and judges at
Westminster Hall, his defence being a splendid piece of oratory. He
proved that on the ground of high treason his judgment would not
count, and his judges were compelled to introduce an Act of
Attainder in order to convict him; but for the next six months he was
kept in the Tower, uncertain as to his ultimate fate until the 12th of
May 1641, when the Bill of Attainder was passed by the Lords.[3]
Charles had sworn to Strafford that not a single hair of his head
should be injured; but on the Earl writing to him and offering his life
as the only means of healing the troubles of the country, the King
yielded, and deserting his minister, gave his assent to the execution,
and signed the warrant.
On the following morning Strafford was led out to die. There is no
more dramatic episode in the great struggle between Charles and
his people than that when Strafford, amidst his guards, passed
beneath the gateway of the Bloody Tower, where, from an upper
window, his old friend, Archbishop Laud, gave him his blessing. The
Archbishop, overcome, sank back fainting into the arms of his
attendants. “I hope,” he is reported to have said, “by God’s
assistance and through mine own innocency that when I come to my
own execution, I shall shew the world how much more sensible I am
to my Lord Strafford’s loss than I am to my own.”
Knowing how bitterly Strafford was hated by the people, the
Lieutenant of the Tower invited him to drive to Tower Hill in his
coach, fearing he might be torn to pieces if he went on foot.
Strafford, however, declined the offer, saying, “No, Mr Lieutenant, I
dare look death in the face, and I trust the people too.” With the Earl
were the Archbishop of Armagh (Ussher), Lord Cleveland, and his
brother, Sir George Wentworth. On reaching the scaffold Strafford
made a short speech, followed by a long prayer, and giving his final
messages for his wife and children to his brother, said: “One stroke
more will make my wife husbandless, my dear children fatherless,
my poor servants masterless, and will separate me from my dear
brother and all my friends; but let God be to you and to them all in
all.” He then removed his doublet, and said, “I thank God that I am
no more afraid of death, but as cheerfully put off my doublet at this
time as ever I did when I went to bed.” Then placing a white cap
upon his head, and thrusting his long hair beneath it, he knelt down
at the block, the Archbishop also kneeling on one side and a
clergyman upon the other, the Archbishop clasping Strafford’s hands
in both his own. After they had left him Strafford gave the sign for the
executioner to strike by thrusting out both his hands, and at one
blow, “the wisest head in England,” as John Evelyn, who was
present, says, “was severed from his body.” On that night London
blazed with bonfires, and the people rejoiced as if in celebration of
some great victory.
 The great Earl’s mistake was in serving and trusting such a king
as Charles. Later on it transpired that Charles had a plan of
removing Strafford from the Tower by throwing a hundred men into
the fortress, thus relieving the Earl, and keeping possession of the
Tower as a check upon the city. In pursuance of this plan, on the 2nd
May 1641, Captain Billingsby with a force of one hundred men
presented himself at the gates of the Tower, but Sir William Balfour
refused to admit them, and the King’s scheme for taking the fortress
fell to the ground.

The true maner of the execution of thomas earle of

strafford Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland vpon Tower hill the 12th of May 1641

A. Doctor Vsher Lord Primate of Ireland

B. the Sherifes of London
C. the Earle of Strafford
D. his kindred and Friends
Execution of the Earl of Strafford, May 12th. 1641.
The first beginnings of a Tower regiment, according to Mr J. H.
Round, was the appointment of two hundred men as Tower Guards
in 1640. In November of the same year Charles promised to remove
this garrison, but he did not do so until the city offered to lend him
£25,000, on the condition that these troops should be taken away, as
well as the ordnance from the White Tower, which was a perpetual
menace to the safety of the city. Aersen, the Dutch Ambassador,
writing to his Government about this time, says, “le dessein semble
aller sur le tour.” Still the King would not withdraw the soldiers or the
cannon, and then the House of Lords expostulated with him, but
Charles excused his breach of faith by saying that his object was
merely to insure the safety of the stores and ammunition in the
fortress.
After his plot to seize the Tower had been made public, the train
bands belonging to the Tower Hamlets occupied and garrisoned the
fortress. These train bands, as well as those of Southwark and
Westminster, were distinct from the city train bands. On the 3rd of
January 1642, the King made another attempt to garrison the Tower
with his own troops, which also proved a failure. On this occasion Sir
John Byron entered the fortress with a detachment of gunners and
disarmed the men of the Tower Hamlets, but the city train bands
came to the rescue, and Byron, with his gunners, had to beat a
retreat. When, in 1642, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John
Conyers, resigned his charge, the Parliament conferred the
Lieutenancy upon the Lord Mayor of London. Later, in 1647, when
the city had taken the side of the Parliament against the King, Fairfax
was appointed Constable; the Constables had succeeded each other
according to the chances which brought the King or the Parliament
to the top, thus Lord Cottrington had been replaced by Sir William
Balfour, and he in his turn had given room to Sir Thomas Lumsford,
a “soldier of fortune,” writes Ludlow of him in his “Memoirs,” “fit for
any wicked design.” Lumsford, so uncomplimentarily referred to by
Ludlow, was supposed to be willing to act according to the King’s
good pleasure, and succeeded in making himself so unpopular with
the Londoners, that they petitioned the House of Lords to beg the
King to place the custody of the Tower in other hands, the Lord
Mayor saying he could not undertake to prevent the apprentices from
rising were Lumsford allowed to remain in office; so Charles
unwillingly gave the keys of the fortress to the care of Sir John
Byron. Byron, in his turn, was succeeded by Sir John Conyers, who
had distinguished himself in the Scottish wars and had been
Governor of Berwick; and after Conyers followed Lord Mayor
Pennington,[4] “in order,” as Clarendon writes, “that the citizens might
see that they were trusted to hold their own reins and had a
jurisdiction committed to them which had always checked their own.”
From 1643 to 1647 the Tower remained in the hands of the
Parliament. In the latter year the army obtained the mastery, and Sir
Thomas Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief, became its Constable,
under him being Colonel Tichbourne as Lieutenant of the fortress.
Shortly after the King’s execution, however, Fairfax resigned his post
of Constable, none other than Cromwell, himself, stepping into the
vacant place.
But we must return to Archbishop Laud, who for four years was a
prisoner in the Bloody Tower in the prison chamber over the gateway
of that gloomy building.
In his diary, the Archbishop has left a minute account of a
domiciliary visit paid him by William Prynne in 1643. The
Archbishop’s trial being determined on by the House of Lords,
Prynne was commissioned by the Peers to obtain Laud’s private
papers. “Mr Prynne,” writes the Archbishop, “came into the Tower
with other searchers as soon as the gates were open. Other men
went to other prisoners; he made haste to my lodging, commanded
the warder to open my doors, left two musketeer centinels below,
that no man might go in or out, and one at the stairhead. With three
others, which had their muskets already cocked, he came into my
chamber, and found me in bed, as my servants were in theirs. I
presently thought on my blessed Saviour when Judas led in the
swords and staves about him.”—This surely is rather a bold
comparison for an Archbishop to make?—“Mr Prynne, seeing me
safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them; and by that time my
two servants came running in half ready. I demanded the sight of his
warrant; he shewed it to me, and therein was expressed that he
should search my pockets. The warrant came from the close
committee, and the hands that were to it were these: E. Manchester,
W. Saye and Seale, Wharton, H. Vane, Gilbert Gerard, and John
Pym. Did they remember when they gave their warrant how odious it
was to Parliament, and some of themselves, to have the pockets of
men searched? When my pockets had been sufficiently ransacked, I
rose and got my clothes about me, and so, half ready, with my gown
about my shoulders, he held me in the search till half-past nine of the
clock in the morning. He took from me twenty and one bundles of
papers which I had prepared for my defence; two Letters which
came to me from his gracious Majesty, about Chartham and my
other benefices; the Scottish service books or diary, containing all
the occurrences of my life, and my book of private devotions, both
which last were written through with my own hand. Nor could I get
him to leave this last, but he must needs see what passed between
God and me, a thing, I think, scarce offered to any Christian. The last
place that he rifled was my trunk, which stood by my bedside. In that
he found nothing, but about forty pounds in money, for my necessary
expenses, which he meddled not with, and a bundle of some gloves.
This bundle he was so careful to open, so that he caused each glove
to be looked into. Upon this I tendered him one pair of gloves, which
he refusing, I told him he might take them, and fear no bribe, for he
had already done me all the mischief he could, and I asked no favour
of him, so he thanked me, took the gloves, bound up my papers, left
two centinels at my door, and went his way.”—(From “Troubles and
Trials of Archbishop Laud.”)
Prynne, whose ears Laud had been the means of cutting off some
half-dozen years before, must have enjoyed this visit to his old foe.
On the 10th of March 1643, the Archbishop was brought to his trial in
Westminster Hall, but amongst all the charges brought against him
none could be considered as proving him guilty of high treason.
Serjeant Wild was obliged to admit this, but said that when all the
Archbishop’s transgressions of the law were put together they made
“many grand treasons.” To this Laud’s counsel made answer, “I
crave you mercy, good Mr Serjeant, I never understood before this
that two hundred couple of black rabbits made a black horse.”—(In
Archbishop Tennison’s MSS. in Lambeth Library. Quoted by Bayley.)
Laud’s trial lasted for twenty days, the chief accusation brought
against him being that he had “attempted to subvert religion and the
fundamental laws of the realm.” The outcome of the trial was that
Laud was beheaded on Tower Hill on 10th of January 1644. Laud
was a strange compound of bigotry and intolerance, of courage and
of devotion to what he considered to be the true Church, and of
which he seemed to regard himself as a kind of Anglican Pope. His
life and character are enigmas to those who study them, and his
death became him far better than his life had done.

WILLIAM LAUD
Aerts Bisschop van Cantelbury, binnen London
Onthalft den 10 January, Anno 1645
Arnt Pieters Excudit

Carlyle, in a delightful passage in his posthumously published

“Historical Studies,” writes: “Future ages, if they do not, as is likelier,
totally forget ‘W. Cant,’ will range him under the category of
Incredibilities. Not again in the dead strata which lie under men’s
feet, will such a fossil be dug up. This wonderful wonder of wonders,
were it not even this, a zealous Chief Priest, at once persecutor and
martyr, who has no discernible religion of his own?” “No one,” said
Laud, when told of the day on which he was to die, “no one can be
more ready to send me out of life than I am to go.” Indeed, no one
could have left life in a calmer or more tranquil manner than did the
Archbishop. It must be a great support to have a sublime opinion of
oneself, and if ever man had a sublime opinion of himself it was
Laud. The comparison he made in his diary, and which I have
already quoted, between his Saviour and himself—between Prynne-
Judas and Laud-Christ—proves the ineffable self-conceit of the
prelate.
The fact that he himself was notoriously indifferent, if not callous,
to the sufferings of others, has destroyed all the sympathy that might
have been felt for this strange character in his fall and tribulations.
For a mere difference of opinion Laud would order ears to be lopped
off, noses slit, and brows and cheeks to be branded with red-hot
iron. His best and most enduring monument is the addition he made
to St John’s College at Oxford, of which he was at one time the
president, and in whose chapel his remains were re-interred, after
resting for a time in the Church of All Hallows, Barking, and in the
library of which his spectre is said to be seen occasionally gliding on
moonlight nights, between the old bookshelves.
After the month of August 1642, when Charles had unfurled his
standard at Nottingham, the Tower, although nominally still in the
King’s possession, was in reality held by the Parliament; and its
prisoners were those who were opposed to the representatives of
the people. Among these was Sir Ralph Hopton, who had protested
against a violent address made by the Parliament against Charles,
Sir Ralph having declared that his fellow-members “seemed to
ground an opinion of the King’s apostacy upon less evidence than
would serve to hang a fellow for stealing a horse.” This remark
brought him to the Tower, where he was soon joined by another
member of Parliament, Trelawney (or Trelauney), who had informed
the House of Commons that they could not legally appoint a guard of
troops for themselves without the King’s assent, under pain of high
treason (Clarendon).
Sir Ralph, afterwards Lord Hopton of Stratton, distinguished
himself later in the war in the West of England, where he had much
success, and with the help of Sir Beville Grenville, gained a signal
victory over the Parliamentarians at Stamford Hill, near Stratton, in
Cornwall. Fairfax, however, ultimately proved too strong for him, and
finally Hopton left England, dying at Bruges in 1652.
Besides these, Sir Thomas Bedingfield and Sir James Gardner
were committed to the Tower by the House of Lords, “for refusing to
be of the counsel of the Attorney-General,” whilst the Earl of Bristol
and Judge Mallet followed them to the fortress, “merely for having
seen the Kentish petition.” This petition was drawn up by the
principal inhabitants of that county, praying, “that the militia might not
otherwise be exercised in that county than the known law permitted,
and that the Book of Common Prayer, established by law, might be
observed.” Lord Bristol soon obtained his liberty, but Mallet was kept
a prisoner for two years on the charge of being “a fomentor and
protector of malignant factions against the Parliament” (Clarendon).
In the same year, Sir Richard Gurney, Lord Mayor of London, was
sent to the Tower on the charge of having caused the King’s
proclamation against the militia, and for suppressing petitions to
Parliament, to be published in the city. Sir Richard was dismissed
from his mayoralty, and imprisoned during the pleasure of the
House. Another Lord Mayor, loyal to the cause of the King, Sir
Abraham Reynoldson, was, six years later, also a prisoner in the
Tower; but his incarceration lasted only two months, whilst Gurney, it
seems, remained for several years in the fortress. The Parliament
meted out heavy punishment for “opinions,” Lord Montagu of
Boughton, the Earl of Berkshire, and some Norfolk squires, being
likewise sent to the Tower on a charge of favouring the King’s side,
and of being hostile to the Parliament. In 1643 Justice Berkeley was
imprisoned by order of the Lords on a charge of high treason, and
also a Mr Montagu, a “messenger” from the French Court to the
King.
 At this time whole batches of Cavaliers began to be frequently
brought to the Tower. Of these, Sir William Moreton, who was
captured at the fall of Sudeley Castle, of which he was the governor,
remained a prisoner until the Restoration, when he was made a
judge. Another was Daniel O’Neale, who had greatly distinguished
himself on the royal side in the Scottish war, and later in England. He
was committed to the Tower on the invariable charge of high treason,
but, like Lord Nithsdale, about half-a-century later, he managed to
break his prison in female attire, and succeeded in reaching Holland,
whence he returned to serve under Rupert as a lieutenant-colonel in
the Prince’s cavalry. According to Clarendon, O’Neale became a
celebrated adept in court intrigue in the time of Charles II.
In this year (1643), Sir John Conyers was in command of the
fortress, having received the charge from the Parliament in the hope
that he would be gained over to that side. On being asked to take the
command of the Parliamentary army, Conyers, however, declined,
his refusal causing so much annoyance to the leaders of that party
that he thought it more prudent to resign his charge of the Tower,
being, as Clarendon puts it, too conscientious, “to keep His Majesty’s
only fort which he could not apply to his services.” His place, as has
already been said, was given to Sir Isaac Pennington, Lord Mayor of
London.
In 1644, Sir John Hotham, and his son, Captain Hotham, who had
been imprisoned in the Tower in the preceding summer on the
charge of intending to surrender the town of Hull to the King, were
both beheaded on Tower Hill. Hotham may be described as the
Bazaine of the Parliament. The town of Hull was the greatest
magazine of arms and ammunition in England. Charles had in vain
summoned Hotham, who was the Governor for the Parliament, to
surrender the town, and on his refusal had declared him a traitor.
There is little doubt that both Hotham and his son were Royalists at
heart, and both were convicted of having entered into a
correspondence with the King’s party in order to come to terms for
the surrender of the town and arsenal to the Royalist forces.
Another governor—Sir Alexander Carew, who held Plymouth for
the Parliament—was beheaded in the same month as the Hothams
for a like “intention.” Carew is said to have been decapitated with the
same axe with which Strafford was killed, and it was reported that at
the time of Strafford’s trial, Carew had said that sooner than not vote
for the Earl’s death, he would be ready to be the next man to suffer
on the same scaffold, and with the same axe: a wish which was
literally fulfilled. (Dugdale’s “Short View of the Late Troubles.”)
By one of those strange vagaries of fortune which are the
characteristic of the history of this period, and in which the Tower
played its accustomed part of imprisonment, George Monk, the
future Duke of Albemarle, and one of the makers of our history, was
imprisoned in the Tower for three years after his capture by Fairfax at
the siege of Nantwich. He was a colonel at the time, and only
regained his freedom by consenting to take the command of the
Parliamentary forces sent to Ireland (Ludlow’s Memoirs).
Two of Monk’s fellow-prisoners, Lord Macquire and Colonel
MacMahon, who had both been fighting on the Royalist side in
Ireland, made a desperate attempt to escape from the Tower in this
same year (1644). They succeeded in sawing through their prison
door and lowered themselves by a rope, which they had been
enabled to find through directions written on a slip of paper that had
been placed in a loaf of bread, sent to them by some of their friends.
They got down into the moat, across which they swam, but were
taken on the other side and hanged at Tyburn in February 1645,
although Macquire pleaded that, as an Irish peer, he had the right of
dying by the axe and not by the halter. For allowing the escape of
these officers from their prison chamber the Lieutenant of the Tower
was fined heavily.
That splendid cavalier, “Old Loyalty,” as he was proudly called,
John Paulett, Marquis of Worcester, who had defended Baring
House so long and so well, came a prisoner into the Tower in this
same year, accompanied by Sir Robert Peake, who had aided him in
the defence of his home, and who had also been taken prisoner after
the storming of the place. They were followed by Sir John
Strangways, who had been taken at the siege of Cardiff. In 1647 Sir
John Maynard, Serjeant Glynn, the Recorder of London, and the
Lord Mayor, Sir John Gayre, with some of his aldermen and sheriffs,