Abstract
In 1883, according to the Palatine Note-Book of that year, there took place “one of the most deplorable dispersions of an old family library at Sotheby’s … when the valuable Towneley manuscripts and the remains of the noble library chiefly collected by Richard Towneley, the philosopher, were sold by his descendants”. From this sale, Chethams Library in Manchester—Britain’s oldest surviving public library—acquired a seventeenth-century notebook that had been listed in the sale catalogue as ‘A new and true theory of the sun’s motion. MS’. It is now catalogued as ‘Notebook [by William Gascoigne (1612–1644)] containing notes in English taken from the 1632 edition of Lansberge’s Tabulae Motuum Coelestium’. The notebook is 118 pages long and largely consists of a verbatim English translation of Lansberge’s ‘Novae & genuinae Motuum Coelestium Theoricae’, which was appended to the 1632 edition of Tabulae Motuum. The rear of the first page of the notebook has several attempts at a latinised version of Gascoigne’s signature, but these are dissimilar to the uniform signatures on the three known Gascoigne letters. The handwriting throughout the notebook, although similar to that of the letters, does have some important differences. Being a verbatim translation, the notebook casts no fresh light on the scribe’s astronomical ideas, but the extensive list of aphorisms written in a (possibly) more juvenile hand on the first few pages do show the dark side of the contemporary psyche. A few extracts will give the flavour (Figs. 14.1 and 14.2):
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- 1.
The Palatine note-book (Manchester, August 1883), iii, 187.
- 2.
Chethams Library, Manuscripts/1/227, Finding No. A.3.110.
- 3.
Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Holder and Strode.
- 4.
Jack Cade was an English rebel who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Henry VI in 1450. Wat Tyler led a peasants’ rebellion against Richard II in 1381.
- 5.
Daniels, C.W., and Morill, J., Charles I (Cambridge, 1988), 101.
- 6.
Adair, John, By the Sword Divided (Stroud, 1998), 22.
- 7.
Newman, P.R., The Royalist Officer Corps 1642–1660: army command as a reflexion of the social structure, The Historical Journal, xxvi (1983), 947.
- 8.
Charles Webster states that “William Gascoigne was a captain in Sir Marmaduke Langdale’s cavalry regiment”, Richard Towneley (1629–1707), the Towneley group and seventeenth-century science, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxviii (1967), 61; PR Newman says that a William Gascoigne was a “volunteer/captain” in Sir John Ramsden’s Division, The Royalist Army in Northern England, D.Phil Thesis (University of York, 1978), i, 448; W.Wheater says “In his account of the first seige of Pontefract Castle in December 1644, Drake enumerates among the gentlemen volunteers under the command of Sir John Ramsden, a Mr William Gaskon, but whether he is the same William Gascoigne I cannot say”, Gentleman’s Magazine (London, 1863), 761; Taylor states that “in all probability [he] was one of the volunteer defenders of Pontefract Castle during the first seige”, Biographia Leodiensis, 86.
- 9.
Barratt, John, The Battle for York – Marston Moor 1644 (Stroud, 2002), 42.
- 10.
Ibid., 76.
- 11.
Slingsby, Sir Henry, Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, quoted by Peter Young, Marston Moor: The Campaign & the Battle (Kineton, 1970), 216.
- 12.
Barratt,John, Op.Cit., 100.
- 13.
Young, Peter, Op.Cit., 247.
- 14.
The English Revolution III, Newsbooks 1: Oxford Royalist, v.3 (London, 1971), 1072 (Mercurius Aulicus, 6 July 1644).
- 15.
Cooke, David, The Civil War in Yorkshire: Fairfax versus Newcastle (Barnsley, 2004), 148.
- 16.
Cooke, David, Op.Cit., 145; Barratt, John, Op.Cit., 141; Young, Peter, Op.Cit., 216.
- 17.
Sherburne, Sir Edward, The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem with Annotations and an Astronomical Appendix (London, 1675), 92 (Appendix).
- 18.
Cooke, David, Op.Cit., 151.
- 19.
Newman, Peter Robert, Op.cit. (ref. 89), i, 38.
- 20.
Forbes, E.G., Murdin, L., and Willmoth, F., The correspondence of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (London, 1995), i, 897, Letter 450, Flamsteed to Molyneux, 29 May 1682.
- 21.
Forbes, E.G., Murdin, L., and Willmoth, F., The correspondence of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal (London, 1997), ii, 421, Letter 622, Flamsteed to Molyneux, 10 May 1690.
- 22.
The National Archives, Flamsteed Papers, RGO, 1/40, f.22r. Flamsteed must have obtained this story from Christopher Towneley between 1672 and 1674, since on 13 August 1672 he wrote to John Collins that Gascoigne must have died in 1642. Towneley, the source of the revised version, died in 1674.
- 23.
Hopkinson, John, A Collection of Ye Pedigrees and Descents of severall of the Gentry of the West Riding of the County of York and Elsewhere, 446 (Gascoigne of Thorp on ye Hill). A copy is held at Leeds Central Library (Phillips MS. 11948).
- 24.
The English Revolution III, Newsbooks 1: Oxford Royalist, v.3 (London, 1971), 1402–3(Mercurius Aulicus, 8 March 1644).
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Sellers, D. (2012). The Road to Civil War. In: In Search of William Gascoigne. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 390. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4097-0_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4097-0_14
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