John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr

gruesome mix: the head of an old crow, the scaly skins of small snakes. Medea slit her lover’s father’s throat. She drained the blood of old Aeson and replaced it with her youth-giving medicine. Aeson’s hair turned black again, colour came to his cheeks, his flesh plumped up behind his skin and his wrinkles disappeared.
    Mr Potter says he will try moving blood between chickens. He is brooding on the quills or tubes that might allow the transfer from one bird to another to take place. He intends to make a little bag, perhaps from the craw of a pullet, to catch the blood when it comes down the tube, and hold it there until it can be transfused into another bird. He is wondering how it might be possible to fix the quill to the bag so it will not let the blood seep out and spoil the experiment. I have promised to help him.
    Mr Potter does many experiments. He showed me bees’ thighs under a microscope. He gave me a copper quadrant and a silver one, and showed me that the best way of making an arch is with a parabola and chain. This he demonstrated by taking the girdle from his cassock and holding it against a wall. He has a pretty square garden with the finest box-hedges I have ever seen. They are planted on a mount at the centre of the garden, and cut to look like fortifications, with high pillars of box standing out, looking very stately both summer and winter. It troubles me that a man of Mr Potter’s gifts should lie mouldering away in a place like Kilmington, where he has no one to discuss his ideas with. He is like an old carrying pail growing moss in an orchard. Mr Hobbes has often said to me that such isolation is a great setback, even to the deepest-thinking of men.
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    These are the peaks 39 in Wiltshire: Clay-hill, near Warminster; the Castle-hill at Mere, and Knoll-hill, near Kilmington, which is half in Wiltshire, and half in Somersetshire; all of them seem to have been raised (like great blisters) by earthquakes. Mr Potter takes great delight in Knoll-hill. We climbed it together today. It gives an admirable prospect every way; and from the summit you can see the Fosse Way between Cirencester and Gloucester, which is forty miles away. And you can see the Isle of Wight, Salisbury steeple, the Severn Sea, etc. It would make an admirable station for someone intending to draft a geographical description of Wiltshire or Somerset.
    . . .
    Mr Potter tells me stories 40 of his great Trinity friend Sir Henry Blount, who travelled to the Levant. Sir Henry was pretty wild when young and especially addicted to common wenches. He appears in Henry Nevill’s satirical pamphlet, The Parliament of Ladies (1647), responsible for spreading the dangerous doctrine that it is far cheaper and safer to lie with common wenches than with ladies of quality. He is gentleman pensioner to the King and was with him at the Battle of Edgehill, and afterwards in Oxford. When he returned to London, he walked into Westminster Hall with his sword by his side. The Parliamentarians all stared at him; they knew he was a Cavalier who had fought with the King. He was called before the House of Commons, where he insisted he was only doing his duty, so they acquitted him.
    . . .
    January
    The trial of the King has ended and his fate is decided. The court has decreed: ‘That the King, for the crimes contained in the charge, should be carried back to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of execution, where his head should be severed from his body.’ My kinsman Sir John Danvers has been serving on the committee that tried the King and will now be one of those that signs the death warrant.
    Mr Emanuel Decretz 41 , Serjeant Painter to the King, tells me that the bed of state erected in Westminster Abbey for the King’s father’s funeral was designed by Inigo Jones from plaster of Paris and white calico: it was very handsome and cheap, showing as well as if the caryatids which bore up the canopy had been cut from white marble. The