and proclaim himself at war with his people. This was accordingly done in the course of the ensuing summer. But the Parliament did not yet abandon a seeming care of the royal person, and Harvey informs us himself, that he now attended the king, not only with the consent, but by the desire, of the parliament. The battle of Edge-hill, which followed, and in which the sun of fortune shone with a partial and fitful gleam upon the royal arms, is especially interesting to us from our Harvey having been present, though he still took no part in the affair, and seems indeed to have felt very little solicitude either about its progress or its issue, if the account of Aubrey may be credited. “When King Charles,” says Aubrey, “by reason of the tumults, left London, he (Harvey) attended him, and was at the fight of Edge-hill with him; and during the fight the Prince and Duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pockett a booke and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground neare him, which made him remove his station.”[17] The act of reading a book pending an important battle, the result of which was greatly to influence his master’s fortunes, certainly shows a wonderful degree of coolness and a remarkable indifference to everything like military matters. Harvey’s own candid character, and the confidence so obviously reposed in him when he was intrusted with the care of the Prince and the Duke of York, forbid us to interpret the behaviour into any lukewarmness or indifference as to the issue; but Harvey, throughout his whole career, was a most peaceful man: he never had the least taste for literary controversy, and can scarcely be said to have replied to any of those who opposed his views; and in his indifference about the fight of Edge-hill he only further shows us that he was not
“Of those who build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun,
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks.”
With his fine understanding and freedom from party and sectarian views of every kind, he probably saw that an appeal to arms was not the way for political right to be elicited, or for a sovereign to settle matters with his subjects. Harvey had certainly no turn for politics,[18] and when we refer to Aubrey we find that the fight of Edge-hill was hardly ended before our anatomist had crept back into his shell, and become absorbed in the subjects that formed the proper business of his life. “I first saw him (Harvey) at Oxford, 1642, after Edge-hill fight,” says our authority, “but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trin.) to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened dayly to see the progress and way of generation.” The zealous political partisan would have found no leisure for researches like these in such stirring times as marked the outbreak of the civil war in England; the politician had then other than pullets’ eggs to hatch.
The king’s physician, not to speak of the author of a new doctrine of the motions of the heart and blood, was sure to find favour in the eyes of the high church dignitaries of Oxford; and we accordingly find that, besides being everywhere handsomely received and entertained, Harvey had the honorary degree of Doctor of Physic conferred on him. Oxford, indeed, when the king and court were driven from the metropolis, which was now wholly in the hands of the popular party, became the head-quarters of the royal army and principal residence of the king for several years. And here Harvey seems to have quietly settled himself down and again turned his attention to his favorite subjects. Nor was the honorary distinction of doctor of physic from the university, which has been mentioned, the only mark of favour he received. Sir Nathaniel Brent, Warden of Merton College, yielding to his natural bias, forsook Oxford when it was garrisoned by the king, and began to take a somewhat active part in the proceedings of the popular party; he came forward in especial as a witness against Archbishop Laud, on the trial of that dignitary. Merton College being thus left without a head, upon the suggestion, as it is said, of the learned antiquary and mathematician, John Greaves, and in virtue of a letter of the king, Harvey was elected warden some time in the course of 1645. This appointment was doubtless merited by Harvey for his constant and faithful service to Charles; but it may also have been bestowed in some measure as a retort upon the Parliament, which, the year before, had entertained a motion for the supercession of Harvey in his office of physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. [19] Harvey, however, did not long enjoy his new office or its emoluments; for Oxford having surrendered to the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax the following year, Harvey, of course, resigned his charge, and immediately afterwards betook himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late royalist head.[20]
From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his reasons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. He probably felt anxious for repose; at sixty-eight, which was Harvey’s age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable covering than the open sky—prospects which a continuance of the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the literary arena; and he now probably resolved himself to follow the advice he had once given to his young friend Charles Scarborough, “to leave off gunning,”[21] and dedicate himself wholly to more congenial pursuits. And then Charles had long made it apparent, even to the most ardent of his adherents, that no faith was to be put in his promise, no trust to be reposed in his royal word. The wise old man, verging on the age of threescore years and ten, doubtless saw that it was better for him to retire from a responsible office, now become most irksome and thankless, and seek privacy and leisure for the remainder of his days. These Harvey found awaiting him in the houses of his affectionate brothers—now in the house of Eliab, in the City, or at Roehampton, and then in the house of Daniel, in the ‘suburban’ village of Lambeth, or at Combe near Croydon in Surrey, in each of which Harvey had his own apartments. The Harveys appear to have been united from first to last in the closest bonds of brotherly love,[22] and to have had a common interest in many of their undertakings; and Eliab, as we shall see, employed the small capital, which his brother William must have accumulated before the civil wars broke out, to such purpose, that the doctor actually died a rich man. With his brothers, then, retreating now to the “leads” of the house in the heart of the metropolis, now to the “caves” of the one at Combe, did Harvey continue to pass his days—but not in idleness; for the work on Generation, with the subject of which we saw him busied at Oxford several years before, must have found him in ample occupation. Nor was the love of ease so great in William Harvey, even at the advanced age of seventy-one, if we may credit some of the accounts, as to hinder him from again visiting the Continent, and making his way as far as Italy, a journey in which it is said he was attended by his friend the accomplished scholar and gentleman, Dr. Ent.[23]
In the beginning of 1651 appeared the second of Harvey’s great works, that, namely, On Animal Generation.[24] In this publication we have abundant proof of our author’s unabated industry and devotion to physiological science; and in the long and admirable letter to P. M. Slegel, of Hamburg, written shortly after the appearance of the work, we have pleasing evidence of the integrity of Harvey’s faculties at the advanced age of seventy-three.
The year after the publication of the work on Generation, i.e. 1652, when Harvey was looked up to by common consent as the most distinguished anatomist and physician of his age, the College of Physicians came to the resolution of placing his statue in their hall then occupying a site at Amen-corner; and measures being immediately taken in conformity with this purpose, it was carried into effect by the end of the year, when the statue, with the following complimentary inscription on the pedestal, was displayed:
GULIELMO HARVEIO
Viro monumentis suis immortali
Hoc insuper Collegium Medicorum Londinense
posuit.
Qui enim Sanguini motum
