This is a book about an extraordinary man and his work. John Ogilby, who was born in 1600 and died in 1676, is best known as the maker of Europe’s first road-atlas, a volume of strip-maps of the roads of England and Wales on the scale of one inch to one mile, that was published in 1675. But this was only the concluding chapter in a lifetime of startling variety and changes of fortune. Here Ogilby’s life is put before us, thoroughly readably and with a wealth of references to primary and secondary sources; where these fail – and much of Ogilby’s early life left little trace in surviving records – it is made clear what are assumptions, or even guesses, on the part of the author.
The book is in two parts. The first, the longer, is a straightforward account of a life that was anything but straightforward. It is divided into nine chapters, the nine lives of the book’s title. Ogilby’s father, an Edinburgh tailor, moved to London in 1606, three years after the royal court. However, unsuccessful, he found himself in a debtor’s prison from which he was released in 1612 by his son John, who had won a substantial lottery prize. With this prize John also apprenticed himself to a dancing master, and it was as a dancer that he started to make his way in the world, but a broken leg when he was eighteen enforced a change of career and in the few references we have to him in the next fifteen years he appears as a soldier in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War. It was now that he started to enjoy the patronage of the increasingly great, first Ralph Hopton and then Thomas Wentworth, who in 1634 was sent to govern Ireland as lord deputy; Ogilby, appointed his master of the revels in Ireland, opened a theatre in Dublin. Despite his association with Wentworth, Ogilby survived the Civil War and the Commonwealth with aplomb. Embarking on a literary career, he produced translations, in large deluxe volumes, of Vergil, Aesop’s fables and, having learnt Greek, The Iliad. He also discovered that he was related to the earl of Airlie, thereby acquiring a coat of arms and even more respectable connections that stood him in good stead after the Restoration in 1660. The entire printed stock, as well as the manuscript, of an epic poem he had composed with Charles i as its hero was lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and Ogilby then turned from poetry to geography. A book on China was followed by a plan for a five-volume account, with maps, of the four continents and Great Britain. It was in the form of the road-atlas, Britannia, that the volume on Britain eventually appeared in 1675.
The second part of the present book is devoted entirely to Britannia, an account of its odder features and of the background to its publication. It was never intended as a handbook for travellers; the volume’s size and cost meant that the libraries of gentlemen, of statesmen and of royalty would be its natural home. Ereira sees it in the context of the 1672 treaty of Dover that allied France and Britain in war on the Dutch; in secret clauses it was agreed that Charles ii would become a Roman Catholic with the possible backing of a French invasion. Thus landing-places were all-important, and thirteen of the fourteen main roads shown from London led to a harbour. Sheffield, already important for its cutlery but of no military significance, was omitted, as was Liverpool, gateway to Ireland but a stronghold of nonconformity. Yet two roads led to Holywell in Flintshire, a traditional site of Catholic pilgrimage. The title page, with its elaborate landscape, omitted eight details when it was first engraved and passed before the Surveyor of the Imprimerie, who would have banned anything seditious; these details were added before printing and Ereira explains them as conveying hidden messages of royal aspiration.
At the very least we see that there is more in Ogilby’s Britannia than meets the eye and Ereira brilliantly opens the way to further critical analysis. It was the extraordinary culmination of an extraordinary life.
