“To Alexander Baker Esq. and Sarjeant Cloweshis Majesty’s Chirurgions.“These shall be to will and require you forthwith to make choice of such midwives as you shall think fit to inspect and search the bodies of those women that were lately brought by the sheriff of the County of Lancaster indicted for witchcraft and to report unto you whether they find about them any such marks as are pretended: wherein the said midwives are to receive instructions from Mr. Dr. Harvey his Majesty’s Physician and yourselves.“Dated at Whitehall the 29 June 1634.“H. Manchester.”
“To Alexander Baker Esq. and Sarjeant Cloweshis Majesty’s Chirurgions.
“These shall be to will and require you forthwith to make choice of such midwives as you shall think fit to inspect and search the bodies of those women that were lately brought by the sheriff of the County of Lancaster indicted for witchcraft and to report unto you whether they find about them any such marks as are pretended: wherein the said midwives are to receive instructions from Mr. Dr. Harvey his Majesty’s Physician and yourselves.
“Dated at Whitehall the 29 June 1634.
“H. Manchester.”
The prisoners, who were then at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, were brought to London upon thereceipt of the King’s order. They were examined and the following certificate was issued:—
“Surgeons Hall in Monkwell Street, London.“2 JulyA.D.1634.“We in humble obedience to your Lordship’s command have this day called unto us the Chirurgeons and midwives whose names are hereunder written who have by the directions of Mr. Dr. Harvey (in our presence and his) made diligent search and inspection on those women which were lately brought up from Lancaster and find as followeth, viz.:—“On the bodies of Jennett Hargreaves, Ffrances Dicconson and Mary Spencer nothing unnatural nor anything like a teat or mark or any sign that any such thing hath ever been.“On the body of Margaret Johnson we find two things (which) may be called teats. The first in shape like to the teat of a bitch but in our judgement nothing but the skin as it will be drawn out after the application of leeches. The second is like the nipple or teat of a woman’s breast, but of the same colour with the rest of the skin without any hollowness or issue for any blood or juice to come from thence.”
“Surgeons Hall in Monkwell Street, London.
“2 JulyA.D.1634.
“We in humble obedience to your Lordship’s command have this day called unto us the Chirurgeons and midwives whose names are hereunder written who have by the directions of Mr. Dr. Harvey (in our presence and his) made diligent search and inspection on those women which were lately brought up from Lancaster and find as followeth, viz.:—
“On the bodies of Jennett Hargreaves, Ffrances Dicconson and Mary Spencer nothing unnatural nor anything like a teat or mark or any sign that any such thing hath ever been.
“On the body of Margaret Johnson we find two things (which) may be called teats. The first in shape like to the teat of a bitch but in our judgement nothing but the skin as it will be drawn out after the application of leeches. The second is like the nipple or teat of a woman’s breast, but of the same colour with the rest of the skin without any hollowness or issue for any blood or juice to come from thence.”
The report is signed by ten midwives, by Alexander Reid, M.D., the lecturer on Anatomy at the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, whom Harvey seems to have deputed to take his place, and by six surgeons evidently chosen from amongst the most eminent of those then practising in London.
The result of this report was that four of the seven convicted witches were pardoned, an exercise of mercy “which may have been due,” says Mr. Aveling, “to the enlightened views and prompt and energetic action of Dr. Harvey.”
There is no doubt that at this time and throughout his life Harvey practised every branch of his profession. That he was primarily a physician is evident; that he was a surgeon is shown by the fact that in his will he bequeathed to Dr. Scarborough his “silver instruments of surgery,” whilst in his writings he says, “Looking back upon the office of the arteries, I have occasionally, and against all expectation, completely cured enormous sarcoceles by the simple means of dividing or tying the little artery that supplied them, and so preventing all access of nourishment or spirit to the part affected, by which it came to pass that the tumour on the verge of mortification was afterwards easily extirpated with the knife or searing iron.”No one, reading his treatise on Development, can doubt for a moment that he was well versed in the diseases of women and in such practical midwifery as the prejudices and habits of the time allowed him to become familiar. Specialism, indeed, as it is now understood in England, did not exist at this time, though there was a debased form in which men attended only to outward injuries or to internal complaints.
Harvey sometimes got into trouble with his cases, as must always happen even to the most experienced. The records of the Barber Surgeons’ Company contain the following notice under the date 17th of November, 1635. It has the marginal note, “Dr. Harvey’s ill practise”:—
“This day Wm. Kellett being called here in Court for not making presentation of one of Mr. Kinnersley’s maids that died in his charge, he said here in Court that Mr. Doctor Harvey being called to the patient did upon his view of the patient say, that by means of a boulster [poultice?] the tumour on the temporal muscle could be discussed and his opinion was that there was no fracture but the vomiting came by reason of the foulness of the stomach and to that purpose prescribed physic byBriscoe the Apothecary, so the patient died by ill practice, the fracture being neglected and the Company not called to the view.” When a person was dangerously ill of a surgical disease in London it was long the custom for the practitioner to call in those surgeons who held an official position in the Barber Surgeons’ Company. This was called “viewing” the patient. It divided the responsibility whilst it ensured that everything possible was done for the relief of the patient.
In this year too Harvey was ordered by the King to examine the body of Thomas Parr, who is said to have died at the extraordinary age of 152 years and nine months, having survived through the reigns of nine princes. He had lived frugally in Shropshire until shortly before his death, when he was brought to London by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who showed him to the King. Harvey examined the body on the 16th of November, 1635, the birthday—as he is careful to note—of Her Serene Highness Henrietta Maria, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. The notes of the autopsy came into the possession of Harvey’s nephew Michael, who presented them to Dr. Bett, and they were not printed until 1669, when they werepublished in Dr. Bett’s work “On the Source and Quality of the Blood.” The notes give a clear account of the appearances seen upon opening the body, and the very practical conclusion is drawn that as all the internal parts seemed so healthy the old man might have escaped paying the debt due to nature for some little time longer if nothing had happened to interfere with his usual habits. His death is therefore attributed to the change from the pure air of Shropshire to that of London, and to the alteration in his diet which necessarily attended his residence in the house of a great nobleman.
The mutual interest taken by the Earl of Arundel and Harvey in old Parr may have led to the friendship which existed between the two men; perhaps, too, Lord Arundel—the prince of art collectors, to whom we owe the Arundel marbles—had detected in Harvey some similar love of art which rendered him a kindred spirit. It is clear that some bond of union existed, for in the following year—1636—Lord Arundel was sent to Vienna as Ambassador Extraordinary to the Emperor Ferdinand in connection with the peace which the Protestant States of Germany had concluded in 1635. The missionleft England in April, 1636; and the Clarendon State Papers contain a letter dated from Cologne in May in which Lord Arundel speaks of a visit to the Jesuits’ new college and church, where he says “they received me with all civility,” and then adds jokingly, “I found in the College little Doctor Harvey, who means to convert them.” There are no means of knowing when or why Harvey left England, but he seems to have attached himself to the Embassy and to have visited with it the principal cities on the way to Vienna.
He used the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the leading scientific men in Germany, as he had already introduced himself to those in France on a former journey. On the 20th of May, 1636, he was at Nuremberg, where he wrote to Caspar Hofmann offering to demonstrate the circulation of the blood. He has heard, he says, that Hofmann complained of his theory, that “he impeached and condemned Nature of folly and error, and that he had imputed to her the character of a most clumsy and inefficient artificer in suffering the blood to become recrudescent, and making it return again and again to the heart in order to be reconcocted only to grow effete again in the arterial system: thus uselessly spoiling the perfectly made blood merely to find her something to do.” Tradition says that Harvey actually gave this demonstration in public, and that it proved satisfactory to every one except to Hofmann himself. The old man—then past the grand climacteric—remained unconvinced, and as he continued to urge objections Harvey at length threw down his knife and walked out of the theatre.
We are indebted to Aubrey for the following anecdote, which is probably more true than some of his other statements about Harvey, for it is in exact accordance with what we know of his habits. Aubrey says that one of the Ambassador’s gentlemen, Mr. William Hollar—the celebrated painter—told him that in this voyage “Dr. Harvey would still be making observations of strange trees and plants, earths, &c., and sometimes [he was] like to be lost. So that my Lord Ambassador would be really angry with him, for there was not only a danger of thieves, but also of wild beasts.” How real the danger was may be gauged by remembering that the party was passing through the country devastated by the Thirty Years’ War, which had still to drag out its disastrous length until it was brought to a close by the peace of Westphalia in1648—a time so productive of lawlessness that it was only two years since Wallenstein, the great Commander-in-chief of the Imperial forces, had been murdered by those who were afterwards publicly rewarded by his Imperial master.
Harvey parted company with the Embassy at Ratisbon, for in a letter dated from there he is spoken of as “Honest little Harvey whom the Earl is sending to Italy about some pictures for his Majesty.” From Ratisbon he proceeded to Rome, where the pilgrims’ book at the English College shows that he dined in the refectory on the 5th of October, 1636. Dr. Ent dined there the same night. The two travellers probably met by arrangement, for Ent was born at Sandwich, closely allied as a Cinque Port to Folkestone, Harvey’s native home. He was educated too in Cambridge—at Sidney Sussex College—and after five years at Padua he took his degree of Doctor of Physic on the 28th of April, 1636. Harvey and Ent had therefore much in common, and they remained firm friends until Harvey died. Ent’s love for Harvey led him to defend the doctrine of the circulation against the attacks of Parisanus; Harvey’s love for Ent caused him to entrust to him the essay on Development;to be printed or preserved unpublished as Ent should think most fit.
Nothing is known of Harvey’s return to England except that he was in London attending to his duties and seeing his patients at the end of the year 1636.
The following certificate appears to be the only record left of his work during the next two years. It is dated the 2nd of December, 1637:
“Having had experience of the disposition and weakness of the body of Sir Thomas Thynne, Knight (who hath been and still is our patient), we testify that we are of opinion that it will be dangerous for the health of his body to travel this winter into the country and place of his usual abode until he hath better recovered his health and strength.“Will. Harvey.”
“Having had experience of the disposition and weakness of the body of Sir Thomas Thynne, Knight (who hath been and still is our patient), we testify that we are of opinion that it will be dangerous for the health of his body to travel this winter into the country and place of his usual abode until he hath better recovered his health and strength.
“Will. Harvey.”
The life of Harvey, like that of all his contemporaries, falls naturally into two great divisions. Hitherto it had been passed in peace and learned ease, but for the future much of it was to be spent in camps amongst the alarms of war. War indeed he had seen both in the Mantuan campaign and in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and the war clouds had been gathering rapidly at home. Few, however, could have imagined that the religious excitement in Scotland, coupled with the results of Strafford’s policy in Ireland and the acts of Laud in England, would provoke in a few years an internecine struggle which was not ended even by the execution of him whom in 1640 all looked upon as the Lord’s Anointed.
Harvey, perhaps, saw what was coming less clearlythan any of those in a responsible position round the King, and it affected him less. Dr. Bethune, the senior Physician in Ordinary to the King, died in July, 1639, and Harvey was appointed in his place. The post was more valuable than the one he had held, for the College of Physicians contains a memorandum giving an account of the sums of money due to Harvey out of the King’s Exchequer. It is docketed—
“Money due out of theExchequer for my pension21 April 1642and also sincefor my pensionof £400 p. ann.”
The appointment carried with it a lodging at Whitehall and certain perquisites which are mentioned in the following order extracted by Mr. Peter Cunningham from the Letter Book of the Lord Steward’s office:
“Charles R.“Whereas we have been graciously pleased to admit Doctor Harvey into the place of Physician in Ordinary to our Royal Person, our will andpleasure is that you give order for the settling a diet of three dishes of meat a meal, with all incidents thereunto belonging, upon him the said Doctor Harvey, and the same to begin from the seventeenth day of July last past and to continue during the time that the said Doctor Harvey shall hold and enjoy the said place of Physician in Ordinary to our Royal Persen, for which this shall be your warrant.“Given at our Court of Whitehall the sixth of December 1639.“To our trusty and well beloved Councillors Sir Henry Vane and Sir Thomas Jermyn, Knights, Treasurer and Comptroller of our Household or to either of them.”
“Charles R.
“Whereas we have been graciously pleased to admit Doctor Harvey into the place of Physician in Ordinary to our Royal Person, our will andpleasure is that you give order for the settling a diet of three dishes of meat a meal, with all incidents thereunto belonging, upon him the said Doctor Harvey, and the same to begin from the seventeenth day of July last past and to continue during the time that the said Doctor Harvey shall hold and enjoy the said place of Physician in Ordinary to our Royal Persen, for which this shall be your warrant.
“Given at our Court of Whitehall the sixth of December 1639.
“To our trusty and well beloved Councillors Sir Henry Vane and Sir Thomas Jermyn, Knights, Treasurer and Comptroller of our Household or to either of them.”
In Scotland the religious riots of 1637 had culminated in the destruction of episcopacy and the formation of the Covenant, acts of rebellion which were assisted by Richelieu in revenge for Charles’s opposition to his designs upon Flanders. Preparations were at once made for war. Early in the summer of 1639 the King joined the army under the command of Harvey’s friend the Earl of Arundel, and summoned the peers of England to attend him in his progresstowards Scotland. His splendid Court, accompanied by nearly 25,000 troops, marched to Berwick. The Scotch forces, with Leslie as their leader, marched South and encamped on Dunse Law, a hill commanding the North Road. The two armies faced each other for a short time, but the King, finding that his troops sided with the Scotch and that defeat was inevitable, concluded a sudden treaty,—signed on the 18th of June, 1639, and known as the “Pacification of Berwick,”—and returned to London. The pacification was not of long duration, but it led to the summoning of that Parliament whose actions soon showed the more sagacious politicians that a civil war was imminent.
The Estates met in Edinburgh on the 2nd of June, 1640, and ordered every one to sign the Covenant under pain of civil penalties. In so doing they acted in direct defiance of the King, and they refused to adjourn at his order. They sent Commissioners to London, but Charles refused to see them, and the Estates then appealed for help to France. A Scotch army was again mustered. It crossed the Tweed and entered England on the 20th of August, 1640. Newcastle, Durham, Tynemouth, and Shields were occupied, whilst the fortresses of Edinburgh and Dumbarton again fell into the hands of the insurgents, who defeated the King’s troops at Newburn-on-Tyne.
The King travelled to York, where he held a great Council of Peers on the 24th of September, 1640. By the advice of the Council negotiations were opened with the Scots. Eight Commissioners from their army came to Ripon, and a treaty—called the Treaty of Ripon—was entered upon, though it was not signed until nearly a year later. All that the Scots asked was conceded, and they were promised £300,000 to defray the expenses they had incurred. The armies were then disbanded, and for a time peace seemed to be restored. The King again visited Scotland, and a meeting of the Estates was held, whilst in London the Long Parliament met on the 3rd of November, 1640, and chose Lenthall their Speaker.
Harvey must have witnessed all these events, for he was in close personal attendance upon the King during the whole time. He received a warrant by Royal Sign Manual whilst the King was at York, addressed to the Comptroller of the Household and dated the 25th of September, 1640, by which the King gives £200 to Dr. William Harvey for his diet.”This was in lieu of the three dishes of meat, which in those troublous times were not easily to be obtained.
A month or two later Harvey was in London, for on the 24th of November, 1640, he obtained permission from the College of Physicians to sue the heirs of Baron Lumley in the name of the College to recover the salary of the Lumleian lecturer on surgery and anatomy. Leave was given him, but the political disturbances and Harvey’s attendance upon the King appear to have prevented him from carrying out his object. Dr. Munk says that no further mention of this suit occurs in the Annals of the College until the 31st of May, 1647, when “a letter was read from Dr. Harvey desiring the College to grant him a letter of attorney to one Thompson to sue for the anatomical stipend. It was presently generally granted, and shortly afterwards sent him under the general seal.” From a manuscript of Dr. Goodall’s, in the possession of the College, it appears that Harvey expended at least five hundred pounds in various lawsuits on this subject, which was not settled until some time after his death, and then at the expense of Sir Charles Scarborough, his successor in the chair of the Lumleian Lecturer.
The only notice of Harvey during the year 1641 isthe following entry on page 38 of the Album of Philip de Glarges, preserved amongst the manuscripts at the British Museum:
“‘Dii laboribus omnia vendunt.’“Nobilissimo juveni Medico. Phillipo de Glarges amicitiae ergo libenter scripsitGul Harveus.Anglus Med. Reg. et Anatomie professor. Londin: May 8A.D.1641.”[“‘For toil the Gods sell everything.’“This was willingly written as a mark of friendship for the noble young Doctor Philip de Glarges by William Harvey, the Englishman, Physician to the King and Professor of Anatomy.“At London 8 MayA.D.1641.”]
“‘Dii laboribus omnia vendunt.’
“Nobilissimo juveni Medico. Phillipo de Glarges amicitiae ergo libenter scripsit
Gul Harveus.
Anglus Med. Reg. et Anatomie professor. Londin: May 8A.D.1641.”
[“‘For toil the Gods sell everything.’
“This was willingly written as a mark of friendship for the noble young Doctor Philip de Glarges by William Harvey, the Englishman, Physician to the King and Professor of Anatomy.
“At London 8 MayA.D.1641.”]
Nothing appears to be known of De Glarges except that he was a wandering student of medicine, theology, and philosophy, and an ardent collector of autographs. He seems to have graduated at the Hague in 1640 when he defended a thesis upon palpitation of the heart. His collection of autographs show that he was provided with first-rate introductions, and that he was apparently a promising student. It would be difficult, says Dr.Aveling, to find a more suitable motto than the one Harvey has chosen to impress upon the mind of a young man. It is one which Harvey had always acted upon and found to be true.
Matters were soon brought to a crisis in England; only four days after Harvey wrote this motto Strafford was beheaded. On January 3, 1641-1642, the King’s desperate attempt to seize the five members precipitated his fate. It led Parliament to make preparations for the war which had now become inevitable, and Isaac Pennington, a vigorous and determined Puritan, was chosen Lord Mayor of London. Soldiers were enrolled to form an army. On the 16th of August, 1642, the King left London, and six days later his standard was raised at Nottingham. Harvey accompanied him. The newly raised troops belonging to the Parliament, as yet ignorant of the trammels of discipline, broke into the houses of suspected persons, rifled them of their contents and often sold their booty for the merest trifle. Harvey had been living in his official lodgings at Whitehall, and though he attended the King, not only with the consent, but at the desire of the Parliament, he was very rightly suspected of being a vehement Royalist. Perhaps, too, the mention of his name in Parliamenthad brought him prominently into notice, for though the proceedings of the Parliament were nominally private, every act was rigorously scrutinised and actively canvassed by the agitators and local politicians. The chief outbreak of lawlessness occurred in August, 1642, immediately after it was known that the King had unfurled his standard, and it was probably on this occasion that the mob of citizen-soldiers entered Harvey’s lodgings, stole his goods, and scattered his papers. The papers consisted of the records of a large number of dissections, or as they would now be called post-mortem examinations, of diseased bodies, with his observations on the development of insects, and a series of notes on comparative anatomy. Aubrey says: “He had made dissections of frogs, toads, and a number of animals, and had curious observations upon them.” Harvey bitterly regretted the loss of his papers which he thus laments: “Let gentle minds forgive me, if recalling the irreparable injuries I have suffered, I here give vent to a sigh. This is the cause of my sorrow:—Whilst in attendance on His Majesty the King during our late troubles, and more than civil wars, not only with the permission but by the command of the Parliament,certain rapacious hands not only stripped my house of all its furniture, but, what is a subject of far greater regret to me, my enemies abstracted from my museum the fruits of many years of toil. Whence it has come to pass that many observations, particularly on the generation of insects, have perished with detriment, I venture to say, to the republic of letters.”
Charles left Nottingham on the 13th of September, so that it was probably early in this month that Harvey took the opportunity of riding over to Derby to see Percival Willoughby, who had been admitted an extra-licentiate at the College of Physicians on the 20th of February, 1640-1641. Willoughby says: “There came to my house at Derby, my honoured good friend Dr. Harvey. We were talking of several infirmities incident to the womb. He added to my knowledge an infirmity which he had seen in women, and he gave it the name of a honey-comb [epithelioma] which he said would cause flooding in women.”
A few weeks later Harvey was actually under fire at Edgehill. The battle took place on the 23rd of October, 1642. All the morning was spent in collecting the King’s troops from their scattered quarters, and it was not until one o’clock that the royal army descended the steep hill leading to the wide plain in which stand the village of Radway and the little town of Kineton. Harvey took charge of the two Princes, boys of 12 and 10 years old, who afterwards became Charles II. and James II., and in the course of the morning he probably walked along the brow of the hill from the inn at Sunrising to the Royalist headquarters which were placed about a mile further east. Weary with waiting he and the boys betook themselves to the wide ditch at the very edge of the hill, and to while away the time Harvey took a book out of his pocket and read. “But,” says Aubrey, “he had not read very long before the bullet from a great gun grazed the ground near him, which made him remove his station.” As soon as the battle had really begun, Harvey, we may be sure, was alive and interested, his book was pocketed and he devoted himself at once to assist the wounded. The very nature of the wounds would give additional zest to the work for, unless he was present at the battle of Newburn-on-Tyne, this must have been his first opportunity of treating gunshot wounds. Anthony Wood in his account of Adrian Scrope shows that Harvey was no impassive spectator of the fight, for he says: “This most valiant person,who was son of Sir Jervais Scrope, did most loyally attend his Majesty at the fight of Edgehill, where receiving several wounds he was stripped and left among the dead, as a dead person there, but brought off by his son and recovered by the immortal Dr. Will. Harvey, who was there but withdrawn under a hedge with the Prince and Duke while the battle was at its height. ’Tis reported that this Adrian Scrope received 19 wounds in one battle in defence of his Majesty’s cause, but whether in that fight at Edgehill I cannot justly say. Sure I am that he was made Knight of the Bath at the Coronation of King Charles II., An. 1661.”
The battle was undecided, and Harvey, like the other personal attendants upon the King, must for a while have felt the keenest anxiety for the safety of his master. The King remained for a time at the top of the hill, but when the battle began in earnest he could not be restrained from mixing with the troops, sharing their danger and adjuring them to show mercy to such of the enemy as fell into their hands. Perhaps too Harvey saw one of the most picturesque acts of the battle. The Royal Standard, carried by Sir Edmund Verney at the beginning ofthe fight, had waved over the King’s Red Regiment—the Royal Foot Guards. Verney slain, and the Guards broken, it passed to the Parliamentary army, and was committed to the charge of the secretary of the Earl of Essex, the Commander-in-chief. Captain Smith, a Catholic officer in the King’s Life Guards, hearing of the loss, picked up from the field the orange scarf which marked a Parliamentarian and threw it over his shoulders. Accompanied by some of his troop, similarly attired, he slipped through the ranks of the enemy, found the secretary holding the standard, and telling him that so great a prize was not fitly bestowed in the hands of a penman, snatched it from him. Then, protected by the scarf, he made his way once more through the hostile force and laid his trophy at the feet of the King, who knighted him upon the spot.
The battle over, Charles pushed on towards London. Banbury surrendered on the 27th of October, and on the 29th he entered Oxford in triumph. Harvey attended the King to Oxford where he was at once received as apersona grata. His position in London, his attachment to the King, and his fame as a scientific man, must have combined to render his entrance to the most exclusive CommonRooms a matter of ease. In Oxford he very soon settled down to his accustomed pursuits, unmindful of the clatter of arms and of the constant marching and countermarching around him, for the city remained the base of operations until its surrender in July, 1646. Aubrey says that he first saw Harvey at Oxford “in 1642, after the Edgehill fight, but [I] was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our College [Trinity] to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation.” Two years later Bathurst was killed in defending Faringdon, but he was a distinguished Fellow of his College, and it was doubtless, with the aid and by the advice of such a friend, that Harvey was incorporated Doctor of Physic at Oxford on the 7th of December, 1642.
For the next year or two Harvey lived quietly at Oxford, making dissections and carrying on his professional work amongst the courtiers who thronged the town. It appears too from the following report that Dr. Edmund Smith was living with him in Oxford. The memorial consists of a letter from Richard Cave to Prince Rupert, concerning the healthof his brother, Prince Maurice. It is preserved among the Rupert Correspondence in the British Museum, and it runs—
“May it please your Highness.“This last night arrived here at Milton, Dr. Harvey and Doctor Smyth and this morning they were with the other two Doctors having seen and spoken with his Highness your brother intreateth me to write as followeth.“That his sickness is the ordinary raging disease of the army, a slow fever with great dejection of strength and since last Friday he hath talked idly and slept not but very unquietly, yet the last night he began to sleep of himself and took his rest so quietly that this present morning when Doctor Harvey came to him he knew him and welcomed Doctor Smith respectively and upon Doctor Harvey’s expression of his Majesty’s sorrow for and great care of him he showed an humble, thankful sense thereof. Doctor Harvey asking his highness how he did, he answered that he was very weak, and he seemed to be very glad to hear of and from your Highness as was delivered by Doctor Harvey.“Now the Doctors having conferred and computedthe time have good hopes of his recovery yet by reason that the disease is very dangerous and fraudulent they dare not yet give credit to this alteration. And concluding the disease to be venomous they resolved to give very little physic only a regular diet and cordial antidotes. The Doctors present their most humble service to your Highness and subscribe themselves“Sir,“Your Highness’ most humble servants,“Will. Harvey“Robert Vilvain“Edmund Smith“Tho. King.“Milton,Oct. 17th, 1643.”
“May it please your Highness.
“This last night arrived here at Milton, Dr. Harvey and Doctor Smyth and this morning they were with the other two Doctors having seen and spoken with his Highness your brother intreateth me to write as followeth.
“That his sickness is the ordinary raging disease of the army, a slow fever with great dejection of strength and since last Friday he hath talked idly and slept not but very unquietly, yet the last night he began to sleep of himself and took his rest so quietly that this present morning when Doctor Harvey came to him he knew him and welcomed Doctor Smith respectively and upon Doctor Harvey’s expression of his Majesty’s sorrow for and great care of him he showed an humble, thankful sense thereof. Doctor Harvey asking his highness how he did, he answered that he was very weak, and he seemed to be very glad to hear of and from your Highness as was delivered by Doctor Harvey.
“Now the Doctors having conferred and computedthe time have good hopes of his recovery yet by reason that the disease is very dangerous and fraudulent they dare not yet give credit to this alteration. And concluding the disease to be venomous they resolved to give very little physic only a regular diet and cordial antidotes. The Doctors present their most humble service to your Highness and subscribe themselves
“Sir,“Your Highness’ most humble servants,“Will. Harvey“Robert Vilvain“Edmund Smith“Tho. King.
“Milton,Oct. 17th, 1643.”
Dr. Aveling, from whose “Memorials of Harvey” this letter is copied, says “the treatment by ‘very little phisick’ and ‘only a regular diet’ seems to have been successful, for Cave, writing soon afterwards to Prince Rupert, says: “Maurice is not able yet to write letters, but hath this day taken physic and so intends to bid his physicians farewell.”
In this year, 1643, Harvey received his last payment as physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The Journals contain no record of his retirement fromoffice in the hospital, but the ledgers, which have been kept with great accuracy and minuteness ever since the granting of the Charter in 1547, show the entry standing in its usual place, but for the last time. “Item to Doctor Harvey, Physician, xxxiii li. vi s. viii d.” Harvey was resident in Oxford at the time of his retirement, and the absence of any allusion to so important an event in the history of the hospital must be ascribed in part to the confusion of the times. The Journals of the House of Commons, however, contain a significant note: “Feb. 12, an. 1643-1644. A motion this day made for Dr. Micklethwayte to be recommended to the Wardens and Masters of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, to be physician in the place of Dr. Harvey, who hath withdrawn himself from his charge and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament.” (Sir) John Micklethwaite was as a matter of fact appointed Physician in reversion to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, May 26, 1648, and he succeeded to the post of full physician May 13, 1653. He was one of the physicians in ordinary to Charles II., and died in 1682.
Harvey’s presence in Oxford, and his method of working by experiment and by logical deduction from observation, must have been singularly agreeable tothat band of experimental philosophers who in a few years were destined to found the Royal Society. Harvey’s leaven worked successfully in the brains of such men as Scarborough, Highmore, Willis, and Wren, and in due season the pupils brought forth fruit worthy of their master.
Harvey’s connection with the University of Oxford was destined soon to become both intimate and honourable, though it was unfortunately only of short duration. In 1645 he was elected Warden of Merton College, in succession to Sir Nathaniel Brent. The present Warden of Merton, the Hon. G. C. Brodrick, says that on the 27th of Jan., 1645, letters were received from the King, then lodged at Christ Church, reciting that Sir Nathaniel Brent had absented himself for nearly three years, had adhered to the rebels, and had accepted the office of Judge Marshal in their ranks, to which might have been added that he had actually signed the Covenant, for he gradually became more and more Presbyterian in his views though he was originally a friend of Laud. We learn from the articles afterwards exhibited against [Sir] John Greaves, then a Fellow of the College, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and the senior Linacre lecturer upon anatomy, that he was the person whodrew up the petition against the Warden, and “inveigled some unwary young men to subscribe to it.” The King’s letters accordingly pronounce the deposition of Brent, and direct the seven senior Fellows to present three persons as eligible to be his successor, out of whom the King would choose one. The Royal mandate was obeyed, but there were some irregularities in the consequent election, against which Peter Turner protested and resigned his Fellowship on his protest being overruled by Lord Hertford, who had succeeded the Earl of Pembroke as Chancellor of the University in October, 1645. However, five out of the seven seniors, including the Sub-Warden, placed Harvey first on their lists, and the King lost no time in nominating him. He was solemnly admitted Warden according to ancient custom, on the 9th of April, and two days later, on April 11th, he addressed the Fellows in a short speech which is still preserved. The extract from the College register runs:—“Dominus Custos, Convocatis in Altâ Gaul Sociis, haec verba ad illos fecit. Forsitan decessores Custodiam Collegii ambiisse, ut exinde sese locupletarent, se vere longe alio animo nimirum ut College lucro et emolumento potius foret: simulque socios, ut concordiam amicitiamque inter se colerentsedule solliciteque hortatus est.” [The Warden spoke thus to the Fellows assembled in the Great Hall. He said that it was likely enough that some of his forerunners had sought the Wardenship to enrich themselves, but that for his own part he undertook its duties with far other motives, wishing as he did to increase the wealth and prosperity of the College. At the same time he appealed earnestly and anxiously to the Fellows to cherish amongst themselves an harmonious friendship.] The speech was thought at the time to be somewhat “Pharisaical,” but there seems to be no doubt that Harvey was really expressing his feelings. There had always been a close bond between Merton and the medical profession from the days when John of Gaddesden, one of the earliest Englishmen to write a complete treatise on medicine, was a Fellow, and it was peculiarly fitting that Harvey should have been elected head of the College. He was a rich man, childless, without expensive habits, and so devoted to the pursuit of science that there is but little doubt that if he had retained his position he would have become one of the greatest benefactors of the College. As it was, the College during Harvey’s year of office presented more the appearance of a Court than of a seat of learning. From 1643 to 1646, when the Queen wasin Oxford, she lodged in Merton College, occupying the Warden’s House, and living in the room still known as “the Queen’s room,” with the drawing-room adjoining it. Anthony Wood says that during her occupation “there were divers marriages, christenings, and burials carefully registered in a private register by Mr. John Gurgany, one of the chaplains of Merton College; but about the time of the surrender of Oxford the said register, among other books, was stolen by the soldiers out of his window in his chamber joining to the church door.” Many officers too were quartered in Merton, and the College was so full on the 1st of August, 1645, that the annual meeting had to be held in the library, as neither the Hall nor the Warden’s lodgings were available for the purpose.
The year 1645-1646, during which Harvey held the office of Warden of Merton, was long a memorable one in the annals of Oxford. The City was invested by Fairfax for fifteen days from May 22nd, whilst the King was at Droitwich. On June 14th the Royal cause was ruined at Naseby, and on November 27th the College was called upon to lay in a supply of provisions against another siege. On December 28th the King ordered a special form of prayer to be used in the chapel on Wednesdays and Fridays “duringthese bad times.” On March 24th the College gave a bond for £94 on account of provisions which it had no money to buy. At three in the morning of April 27th the King, disguised as a servant, with his beard and hair closely trimmed, passed over Magdalen bridge in apparent attendance upon Ashburnham and Hudson, and we cannot but believe that Harvey was one of the little band who closed the gates of the city with heavy hearts as his Majesty rode off to begin his wearisome captivity. On May 11, 1646, Oxford was summoned by Fairfax, and on June 24th it was surrendered on very honourable terms, the garrison marching out over Shotover 3,000 strong. The Duke of York fell into the hands of the Parliament; but Rupert, Maurice, and the greater part of the noblemen and gentlemen attendant upon the Court had left Oxford the day before its surrender. Mr. Brodrick says that “Harvey must now have retired from the Wardenship and Brent must have resumed office, though no minute of either event is preserved in the College Register.” We find, however, that in September, 1648, Brent rendered accounts, as Warden, for the four years from 1642 to 1646.
Anthony Wood describes in language which has often been quoted, the utter confusion inwhich the past three years had left the University—the colleges impoverished, lectures almost abandoned, many of the students dispersed and others quite demoralised—“in a word, scarce the face of an University left, all things being out of order and disturbed.” This account is confirmed by a striking entry in the College Register, under the date October 19, 1646, where it is stated that by the Divine goodness the Civil War had at last been stayed, and the Warden [Brent] with most of the Fellows had returned, but that as there were no Bachelors, hardly any scholars and few Masters, it was decided to elect but one Bursar and one Dean. It is also added that as the Hall still lay “situ et ruinis squalida” the College meeting was held in the Warden’s lodgings.
Of the few students whom we know that the influence of Harvey’s name attracted to Oxford that of Charles Scarborough, the first English editor of Euclid, is the most noted. Ejected from his fellowship at Caius College, Cambridge, on account of his Royalist tendencies, he immediately withdrew to Oxford, entered himself at Merton College, obtained the friendship of Harvey and rendered him considerable assistance in the preparation of his work on the development of animals. He was created a Doctor of Physic on June 23, 1646,by virtue of letters from the Chancellor of the University, and in these letters he is described as a Master of Arts of Cambridge of seven years’ standing and upwards, who was spoiled of his library in the beginning of the Civil War, and afterwards for his conscience deprived of his fellowship. His letters testimonial are under the hand of Dr. William Harvey, who says that he is well learned in Physic, Philosophy, and Mathematics.
The surrender of Oxford in 1645 marks the period of Harvey’s severance from the Court and of his practical retirement from public life. He was now 68; a martyr to gout, childless, and suffering under a series of heavy bereavements, he can have had but little heart to re-enter upon an active professional life in London. His twin brothers Matthew and Michael died in 1643. John, his second brother, died in 1645. His wife who was alive in this year, must have died shortly afterwards, or she would probably have accompanied him to Oxford. Such a series of shocks would act prejudicially upon his affectionate nature, and would still further unfit him to pursue the harassing cares of his profession. His mind, always philosophical and reflective rather than empirical, was now allowed to follow its bent tothe uttermost, and his time was employed in putting into shape his treatise upon Development.
Harvey returned to London after the surrender of Oxford, and one of his first thoughts was to send to Charles Scarborough, who had continued with the Royal army, the message—“Prithee leave off thy gunning and stay here. I will bring thee into practice.” And well he kept his word, for on the 8th of October, 1649, Dr. Scarborough was elected by the Company of Barber Surgeons of London reader of the anatomical lectures. “He was the first,” says Wood, “that introduced geometrical and mechanical speculations into Anatomy, and applied them in all his learned conversation, as more particularly in his famous lectures upon the muscles of the human body for sixteen or seventeen years together in the public theatre at Surgeons’ Hall, which were read by him with infinite applause and admiration of all sorts of learned men in the great City. Afterwards he became a most learned and incomparable anatomist, a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1650, principal physician to King Charles II. (from whom he received the honour of knighthood, August 15, 1669), and to His Royal Highness James, his brother, while Duke of York and when King, Physician to theTower of London, and afterwards to King William III.” His friendship with Harvey, commenced at Oxford, continued unabated to the end of his patron’s life; and when on July 28, 1656, Harvey presented to the College of Physicians the title-deeds of his paternal estate in Kent and resigned his Lumleian lectureship, the office was transferred to Charles Scarborough. In his will, too, Harvey makes affectionate mention of his friend, and bequeaths to him his surgical instruments and his velvet gown, so that literally as well as metaphorically Harvey’s mantle fell upon Sir Charles Scarborough, and he nobly sustained the charge, great as it was.
The bond of friendship which had always marked the members of the Harvey family now comes into striking relief. The eldest brother, whose goods had been destroyed at Whitehall and scattered at Oxford, was a welcome guest for the rest of his life in the houses of his younger brothers. He appears to have lived chiefly at Cockaine House, which was probably situated in Broad Street, for it afterwards became the Excise Office. It was the town house of his brother Eliab, who also lived either at Roehampton or at Rolls Park. But sometimes Harvey spent a part of his time with Daniel in the suburban village of Lambeth,or at Combe, near Croydon in Surrey. Some curious details of his habits at this time have been handed down.
Aubrey says: “He was much and often troubled with the gout, and his way of cure was thus: He would sit with his legs bare, though it were frost, on the leads of Cockaine House, put them into a pail of water till he was almost dead with cold, then betake himself to his stove, and so ’twas gone.” “A method of treatment,” says Heberden, “which I neither recommend nor propose to others for imitation, although Harvey lived to his eightieth year, and died not so much from disease as from old age.” The first coffee-house was opened in London about the year 1652 by Bowman (a coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey merchant, who put him upon it), but Harvey was wont to drink coffee, which he and his brother Eliab did before coffee-houses were in fashion in London. In his will he makes a special reservation of his “coffy-pot;” his niece, Mary West, and her daughter are to have all his plate except this precious utensil, which, with the residue of his fortune, he evidently desired should descend to his brother Eliab, as a memorial doubtless of the pleasure he had often enjoyed over its contents, for coffee was not yet a common drink. Another coffee-house in Londonwas opened just after the Restoration. It was kept by an old sergeant of Monk’s army.
Among some papers at the College of Physicians relating to Harvey, which were collected by Dr. Macmichael, is one in the handwriting of Dr. Heberden, which runs as follows:—