Henry Vaughan

Some notes on Henry Vaughan (& brother)

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

VAUGHAN, Henry (1621-95), born at Newton-upon-Usk, Breconshire, the eldest son of a Welsh gentleman, Thomas Vaughan of Tretower, and his wife Denise. Henry's twin brother Thomas (below) became a controversial 'natural magician'. Probably in 1628 a third brother William was born. Henry and Thomas were brought up bilingual in Welsh and English, tutored by Matthew Herbert, a noted schoolmaster at Llangattock. By May 1638 Thomas was at Jesus College, Oxford, and Henry almost certainly accompanied him, though his residence is not recorded. Around 1640 Henry probably went to London to study law, though it is not known which Inn admitted him. He may have come within the orbit of the literary set of which Jonson had been the leader. He returned to Breconshire, probably at the outbreak of the Civil War, and after a spell as clerk to Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, chief justice of the sessions, he saw military service on the Royalist side. About 1646 he married Catherine Wise. They had a son, Thomas, and three daughters. His wooing of Catherine is apparently recalled in the poem 'Upon the Priory Grove' printed in Poems with the tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646), his first collection. His second, Olor Iscanus (The Swan Of Usk), has a dedication bearing the date 1647, but was not published until 1651. The poems in these two volumes are almost wholly secular, including fashionable love verses and translations from *Ovid, Ausonius, *Boethius, and the Polish Jesuit Latin poet Casimir Sarbiewski (1594-1640). There is little in them that anticipates the great religious poetry of Vaughan's next volume, Silex Scintillans (Flashing Flint, 1650). The poems suggest that a profound spiritual experience, connected with the death of his brother William in 1648 and the defeat of the Royalist cause, accounted for the despair and renewal which inspired the composition of Silex. Further devotional works followed: The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652) and Flores Solitudinis (1654), which consists of three pious prose trnslations and a life of St Paulinus of Nola. In 1655 appeared the second edition of Silex Scintillans, with a second part added, and also a translation of the Hermetical Physick of Henry Nollius. A translation of The Chymists Key by the same author followed in 1657. Vaughan's first wife having died, he married her younger sister Elizabeth, probably in 1655. They had a son, Henry, and three daughters. According to a letter he sent to *Aubrey in 1673 he had by that date been practising physic 'for many years with good success'. There is no record of a medical degree. His brother Thomas died in 1666, and in 1678 Thalia Rediviva, containing poems by both twins, was published. His later life was marred by litigious feuds between his first and second families.

Vaughan's religious poetry is uneven, but its best moments, like the start of 'The World' ('I saw Eternity the other night'), have a quality which is wholly distinctive, and which has prevailed with critics to class him as a 'mystic': his lyrics ('The bird', 'The Water-Fall', 'The Timber') show a sense of man's unity with and God's love of creaturely life, and he believed (with his brother) that nature would be resurrected at the end of time, and that even stones had feeling. He was seized with the idea of childish innocence, and the child's recollections of prenatal glory. He writes, in 'The Retreat', of his own 'Angel infancy', when he would pause on clouds and flowers and see in them 'Some shadows of eternity'. He acknowledged, in the preface to the second part of Silex Scintillans, his great debt to G. *Herbert, 'whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts (of whom I am the least)'. Vaughan's fascination with hermeticism, and particularly with the idea of sympathetic bonds uniting microcosm and macrocosm, is clear in his poems, many of which share ideas and even phrases with his brother Thomas's treatises. On the title pages of Olor Iscanus and Silex Scintillans Vaughan calls himself a 'Silurist', presumably because his native Brecon was anciently inhabited by the British tribe of Silures.

Works, ed. L. C. Martin (2nd ed. 1957); Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (1976); F. E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (1947; corrected repr. 1971); S. Davies, Henry Vaughan (1995). The Vaughan Society was founded in 1994 and its journal, Scintilla, is edited by Anne *Cluysenaar.



 VAUGHAN, Thomas (1621-66), twin brother of Henry *Vaughan, whose entry gives details of his background. Thomas, an ordained Anglican minister, was evicted from his living at Llansantffraed in 1650 for misconduct ('for being a common drunkard, a common swearer . . . a whoremaster'). He was a disciple of Cornelius *Agrippa, published various treatises on alchemy, magic, and mysticism, including Anima Magica Abscondita; or A Discourse on the Universall Spirit of Nature (1650) and  Magia Adamica; or The Antiquity of Magic (1650); Aula Lucis, or The House of Light (1652); and a preface to a *Rosicrucian work, The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R. C., Commonly, of the Rosie Cross (1652). Most of his works were published under the pseudonym of 'Eugenius Philalethes' ('Good Truth-loving Man'). He engaged in a furious controversy with the Platonist Henry *More who had attacked his Anthroposophia (1650) as nonsense. After the Restoration, Thomas enjoyed the patronage of Sir Robert Moray, first president of the Royal Society. Moray and Vaughan accompanied the Court to Oxford to flee the plague in 1665, and Vaughan died at Albury, according to A. *Wood, of mercury poisoning. He was satirized by S. *Butler in his 'Character of a Hermetic Philosopher' (published posthumously) and is said to have suggested some aspects of Ralpho in *Hudibras: Swift in A Tale of a Tub described him as a writer of the greatest gibberish 'ever published in any language'. Works, ed. A. Rudrum with J. Drake-Brockman (1984).

Metaphysical religious poetry