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Brief Lives, Vol. 1

Chapter 135: Note.
By John Aubrey
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BiographiesHistory - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)

About This Book

A collection of concise biographical sketches compiled from the author's manuscript notes, offering anecdotal portraits of a wide range of literary, scientific, political, and social figures across several generations. Entries blend remembered quotations, learned citation, personal recollection, and occasional gossip, producing uneven but vivid character sketches. Material is presented alphabetically and supplemented by antiquarian notes, a short theatrical piece, and facsimiles of manuscript drawings and plans. An introduction outlines editorial principles and reproduces the manuscript spellings and citations where appropriate, preserving the informality and immediacy of the original notes.

Sir Charles Cavendish (16..-1652?).

[593](From Mr. John Collins, mathematician:—) Sir Charles Cavendish[BV] was borne at ..., the younger brother to William, duke of Newcastle. He was a little, weake, crooked man, and nature having not adapted him for the court nor campe, he betooke himselfe to the study of the mathematiques, wherin he became a great master. His father left him a good estate, the revenue wherof he expended on bookes and on learned men.

He had collected in Italie, France, &c., with no small chardge, as many manuscript mathematicall bookes as filled a hoggeshead, which he intended to have printed; which if he had live<d> to have donne, the growth of mathematicall learning had been 30 yeares or more forwarder then 'tis. But he died of the scurvey, contracted by hard study, about 1652 (quaere), and left one Mr. ..., an attorney of Clifford's Inne, his executor, who shortly after died, and left his wife executrix, who sold this incomparable collection aforesaid by weight to the past-board makers for wast paper. ☞ A good caution for those that have good MSS. to take care to see them printed in their life-times.

He dyed ... and was buried in the vault of the family of the duke of Newcastle, at Bolsover, in the countie of <Derby>.

He is mentioned by Mersennus. Dr. John Pell (who knew him, and made him one of his XII jurymen contra Longomontanum) tells me that he writt severall things in mathematiques for his owne pleasure.

Note.

[BV] Aubrey gives in trick the coat:—'sable, 3 bucks' heads caboshed argent [Cavendish]; quartering, argent, a fess between 3 crescents gules [Ogle], a crescent on the fess point for difference,' with the motto Cavendo tutus.