‘Galileo (Galileo) … We will not let you go! (Let him go!)’

Between 2004 and 2007 Sotheby's auctioned off the library of the Earls of Macclesfield for a total of about £21 million. The library, now dispersed, constituted the most important private collection of books in Britain relating to the history of science. In addition to the headline-grabbing ‘Macclesfield Psalter’, a previously unknown fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, were some spectacular Newtoniana (the Macclesfield Newton manuscripts had been sold to Cambridge University Library in 2000), John Greaves's annotated Copernicus and many other rare pieces.Footnote ¹ One book of particular potential interest to scholars of Galileo is the rediscovered unique copy of the earliest book-length published biography of Galileo in any language, Galilaeus Galilaeus His Life: In Five Books (1664) by Thomas Salusbury.Footnote ² While a few short notices emerged shortly after Galileo's death in 1642, it was only in the late 1650s that two competing biographical projects emerged in the republic of letters.Footnote ³ Scholars patiently if frustratedly expected the account from Galileo's last disciple and amanuensis, the Florentine mathematician Vincenzo Viviani. His grand project was never published and only a brief version was probably ever written. Ambiguously and problematically related to that of Viviani, Salusbury's work was written in England in the early 1660s, on the margins of the newly established Royal Society.

The biography has had a cursed existence: the single, incomplete copy to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 was never reprinted and has been lost since the mid-nineteenth century. Its temporary re-emergence, before now entering a private collection, presented an opportunity for this preliminary study.

The Life contains a new and provocative explanation of the trial of Galileo. It also vividly reveals the limits imposed on access to sensitive information within the hierarchies of the republic of letters. At a bibliographical level, it poses a unique set of historiographical problems concerning the nature of historical evidence and argumentation. In order to explain the book's existence, appeals have always been made to natural catastrophes, such as fire and plague. This essay seeks to show that such contingent models cannot adequately account for the copy's peculiar appearance. By supplementing previous accounts with new archival evidence and a first analysis of the book itself, I show that it is only by thinking about larger issues of biography and cultural memory, translation and geography, patronage and power, that we may begin to understand the existence of this unique object, the conditions of its production and the history of its reception. Such an extreme example may also help us reanalyse some of our assumptions about the supposed separation between print and manuscript culture, systems that tend to fuse in the following account.

Salusbury's work was part of a larger publishing venture. Mathematical Collections and Translations was published in two volumes in 1661 and 1665. Each volume was made up of two tomes (henceforth Volume I, 1 and 2; Volume II, 1 and 2). Volume I includes the first published vernacular translation of Galileo's Dialogue, the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and Castelli's Of the Mensuration of Running Waters. Volume II, 1 (1665) contains Galileo's Discourses and texts by Tartaglia and Archimedes, and exists in very few copies. The final part, Volume II, 2, which exists only in this one imperfect copy, contains three tracts: Evangelista Torricelli's Doctrine of Projects, Salusbury's own timely Experiments Statical, Hydrostatical, and Aerostatical and Galilaeus Galilaeus His Life.Footnote ⁴ It entered the library of the Earls of Macclesfield in the mid-eighteenth century, probably in 1749 when William Jones died and bequeathed his extraordinary collection to his pupil and patron George Parker, second Earl of Macclesfield. In the 1830s Drinkwater and Rigaud described it and quoted from it.Footnote ⁵ Since that date searches requested by Galileo scholars such as Antonio Favaro and Stillman Drake have repeatedly failed to locate the work and have reported a two-volume gap on the shelf.Footnote ⁶ When the ninth Earl of Macclesfield decided to sell off his library, Salusbury was found mysteriously to have returned to his correct shelf-mark.

The fullest previous investigation into the contents of this early biography of Galileo was performed in the absence of its subject. In 1967 Drake published a facsimile of the incomplete Mathematical Collections with a detailed introductory essay largely devoted to reconstructing the probable content of the lost Life and the career and identity of its compiler, Thomas Salusbury.Footnote ⁷ As the missing volume has now re-emerged after a disappearance of nearly two hundred years, the moment has come to describe its actual state and correct the various inaccuracies in Drake's account. This paper concentrates on the biography of Galileo, leaving discussions of the translation of Torricelli and Salusbury's own experimental essay to a later date. Space permits only a brief account of the content of the work. It is hoped that all these newly discovered texts will soon be re-published.

The material book and the manuscripts it contains tell us a lot about its production and early history. This material will be supplemented with a thorough reconstruction, identification and analysis of the unreferenced material used by Drake and additional archival discoveries unknown to him. First, a description of the copy of the biography. The Life of Galileo is a folio publication consisting of twenty-eight sheets, signed M–Z, Aa–Ii, L[l]–N[n]4. The Life is hand-paginated up to page 165 [Ii4r]. Ii1r has no text imposed and lacks a signature. Ii4r (page 165) is a hand-corrected proof sheet with dirty margins. Ii4v is also blank. The blank gather Kk has a handwritten signature, but is not from the same paper stock as the printed material. After this gap the printed text resumes at Ll, but its composition differs: footnotes take up two columns instead of one and signes de renvoi are now placed in brackets. Sheets Ll–Nn have the second l–n added by hand. The Life is organized into five books but ends incompletely and in mid-sentence in the second of four chapters of the final book, on what would be page 191. In lay terms, there are bits missing at the middle and the end of the book.Footnote ⁸

Placed inside the cover of Volume II is a series of five manuscripts. Two are an original and a copy of an incomplete English translation of Vittorio Siri's short biographical entry on Galileo published in 1644, probably written after the book was printed. Two are letters addressed to Salusbury containing information included in the Life of Galileo.Footnote ⁹ The final manuscript is a four-page bifolium, with each page divided into two columns of deleted notes and rough drafts of Book IV, Chapter III. The two letters have their receipt dated on them in the same hand as these notes. This hand matches that of Salusbury's autograph letters conserved in the Huntington and Bodleian Libraries.Footnote ¹⁰ Any disappointment experienced at the incomplete nature of the printed work is more than compensated for by this extraordinary collection of autograph working notes, correspondence and translations.

Thomas Birch's entry on Galileo in the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical shows that, already in 1737, William Jones's copy of the book contained the two letters and was considered to be unique. In the entry, written by Birch himself and largely based on Salusbury's biography, there is this note: ‘Almost the whole impression of this second Tome was destroyed in the Fire of London in 1666. The only copy perhaps now extant, is in the curious Library of William Jones Esq; F.R.S.’Footnote ¹¹ Within the Salusbury volume itself is a small paper slip, with this remark in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand, perhaps by Jones: ‘This 2d Volume is supposed to be the only Copy extant, the rest of the Edition having been consumed by Fire at the House of the Printers.’ This dramatic story of the prehistory of the Macclesfield Salusbury has been accepted by all its readers. The rediscovery of the book itself calls for a reassessment of the evidence concerning the book.

The history of the Life

Jones came into possession of the book and letters addressed to Salusbury before 1737. Drake imagined that the history of the book was quite straightforward: a copy was saved from the fire by the mathematician John Collins and passed directly to Jones who bequeathed it to Macclesfield. This version of the easy transition of the Collins–Jones material, especially the Newtoniana, has often been assumed, even though Jones was only eight years old when Collins died in 1683. While preparing the Commercium Epistolicum (1712) Jones claimed he had received Collins's Newtonian material in 1708. One route by which such material may have passed is from Collins to the mathematician John Pell, to his patron William Brereton, to Jones. Brereton's library was auctioned in 1697 and the catalogue contains entries not only for one 1661 Salusbury volume (presumably Volume I, 1 and 2) and one 1665 volume (Volume II, 1) but also for ‘2 Tomes, 2 Vol. [London] 1661 & 1665’.Footnote ¹² The specificity of this reference may well signal the acknowledged rarity of the nearly complete copy, though the evidence is far from conclusive.

The claim that the book was the sole exemplar to survive the flames is based on remarks made by Collins himself shortly after the Fire of London. Barely six weeks after the Great Fire he wrote to John Pell, ‘If curiosity had moved any body to call for the sheetes of Mr Salusbury's second Tome, as fast as the Printer had done with them; The coppy had <not> now beene lost.’Footnote ¹³ It is unclear whether by ‘coppy’ he means a manuscript fair copy, a set of proofs or, more generally, any copy. On 4 December 1666, writing to John Pell in Brereton, Cheshire, he said, ‘I have already put into the Box [for Lord Brereton in Cheshire] as much of the 2d Booke of Galilaeus as I can procure which I had of Leybourne for a small Desperate Debt <of about 14s> … that part of Galilaeus that is wanting was omitted by Leybourne in the gathering.’ A postscript footnote is attached to this last sentence: ‘and seemes not to be so very materiall … there are few saved and Hayes sells the first tome of the 2d part for 50s (an unconscionable rate and wisheth he had more of them he says he should not want Customers)’.Footnote ¹⁴

Before we analyse these complex comments it might be worth reflecting on the effect of the Great Fire on the London book trade. Surprisingly, there is no statistical study of the effects of the fire on the writing, printing, selling, buying and reading of books. We simply do not know to any degree of accuracy which presses, typefaces, premises, stocks, manuscripts and capital were destroyed, although abundant evidence does exist for the successful completion of such a study. In the absence of such a study, the following remarks will be necessarily anecdotal and imprecise.

Fire

On Tuesday 4 September 1666 the roof of St Paul's Cathedral collapsed, destroying the Stationers' Church of St Faith below in the crypt. The church, which contained their stock of books put there for protection, burned for a week. Contemporary estimates put the value of their loss at between £150,000 and £200,000, in addition to the loss of the Stationers' Hall at Amen Corner and their common stock.Footnote ¹⁵ Printed victims included such slow-burners as the nine-volume Critici sacri (1660), with 1,300 copies incinerated at a cost to the printers of £12,000–£13,000. Five hundred copies of William Dugdale's History of Embanking and Draining (1662) and three hundred copies of his History of St Paul's Cathedral (1658) also went up in ungrateful smoke.Footnote ¹⁶

Soon after the fire, intellectuals, collectors and members of the book trade compared notes on what had been lost, what saved. Christopher Merret's heroic rescue of selected volumes from the College of Physicians' library is one just one anecdote that might serve towards an understanding of the true impact of the Great Fire.Footnote ¹⁷ Pepys characteristically noted the economic effect for men like himself: ‘A great want thereof there will be of books, especially Latin books and foreign books: and, among others, the Polyglottes and new Bible, which … will be presently worth £40 a-piece.’Footnote ¹⁸ Even those squirrelling printers who had managed to save their typeface by burying it, and remove their books before the fire spread to the district around St. Paul's, found their businesses in serious trouble.Footnote ¹⁹ According to John Evelyn, other trades had escaped with stock intact: ‘Onely the poore booke-sellers have ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan; so many noble impressions consum'd by their trusting them to the churches, … which will be an extraordinary detriment to the whole republiq of learning.'Footnote ²⁰ Some editions were slightly more fortunate. John Wilkins apologized for the delay in publication of his bulky folio An essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language by explaining that

Other works were delayed and transformed by the flames. Sprat's History of the Royal Society includes a section on the fire, the Great Plague and the Second Anglo-Dutch War called ‘The occasion of the hindrance of the publishing this history’.Footnote ²² Milton's Paradise Lost was perhaps similarly delayed.Footnote ²³

The fire also seems to have altered the book trade, driving many printers and booksellers out of business and favouring those few whose stock had been kept outside the destruction zone. For authors, publication became more difficult and new security rules on the safeguarding of ‘copy’ had to be learnt:

wrote Collins, referring to the fate of Salusbury.Footnote ²⁴ Some authors had to rewrite works from memory or notes, the fair copy having been destroyed along with whatever had been printed.Footnote ²⁵

The lesson of keeping offsite back-ups had been learnt the hard way from the example of the loss of Salusbury's ‘copy’ in the fire. But in this case what exactly had been destroyed and what had been saved from the fire? Volume II, 1 claims it was published in 1665 and it now exists in only nine copies. Title pages to individual sections range from 1663 to 1665. Volume II, 2 has the overall date 1664. The Life of Galileo and Salusbury's translation of An Epitome of so much of the doctrine of projects as may be applyed to Gunnery also bear the publishing date 1664; the other piece in this volume, Experiments Statical, Hydrostatical, and Aerostatical, has no title page. This might lead us to believe that the sections in Volume II, 2 were printed before or at the same time as those of Volume II, 1. But if the Life had been completely printed before the fire, it seems unlikely that the single saved copy would be in such an incomplete state, made up of revises, hand-corrected proofs and blanks. The most likely scenario is that Volume II, 1 had already been completed late in 1665 and that some copies had been sent out to bookshops, while others remained in Leybourn's stock, awaiting Volume II, 2 to complete the tome. In October 1665 Oldenburg wrote to Boyle,

Collins's remark that ‘Hayes sells the first tome of the 2d part for 50s’ makes sense only if some unsold stock of Volume II, 1 had survived. Volume II, 2, in the meantime, was still in the process of printing, revision and perhaps even writing. The initial report from Collins to Pell of 13 October claiming that Salusbury's ‘copy’ had been lost would imply that he thought no trace, either manuscript or print, of Volume II, 2 had survived. But between October and December Leybourn discovered that ‘there are few saved’. A catalogue published by Thomas Rooke in 1667 makes it clear that many had initially overestimated the destruction of stock in the fire:

Collins managed to buy as much of Volume II as he could, but stressed that the copy, as assembled by the printer, was incomplete. He gives us one further clue as to what he assumed the nature of the missing sections to be: a note mentions the omitted section, which ‘seemes not to be so very materiall, that Argument being since handled by Toricellus’.Footnote ²⁸ Drake argued that this could only refer to a defective copy of Volume II, 1, where a section from the Two New Sciences concerning the motion of projectiles is discussed. This section is intact in the Macclesfield copy. The gap actually occurs in Volume II, 2, Book III, Chapter III, ‘His Inventions’, beginning in a section, numbered 3, on optical inventions. The text resumes in an unnamed Section 5 which describes ‘Discoveries in the Sun’, ‘Discoveries in Mars’, ‘Discoveries in Jupiter’. It seems possible that Collins was referring to another problem posed by Galileo but solved by Torricelli: the cycloid. Salusbury's discussion of the problem of the cycloid takes place on page 151, which is just before the first textual lacuna. Moreover, one of the letters included in the Macclesfield copy includes the assertion, ‘I have lately read a little tractate of a Florentine Academico,Footnote ²⁹ who asserts the probleme of the Cycloides to have bene Galileo's, though the solution thereof was afterwards made by Torricelli.'Footnote ³⁰ Collins might have been signalling his knowledge of this controversy and assuming that Salusbury would have said more about it in the missing section. This detail proves not only that the Macclesfield copy was Collins's copy, but also that at least one of the letters addressed to Salusbury and used by him in the composition of the book was either with it or associated with it immediately after the Great Fire.

How are we to understand the peculiar state of the book? The copy must have been pieced together from early printed sheets held offsite at the house of a compositor, a proofreader or the author himself. The inclusion of the working notes and private letters in the Macclesfield copy make this last option a possibility, though they may have joined the copy at a later stage since they are not explicitly mentioned by Collins.

The text is generally in a good state with few compositorial errors until sheet Hh. Then sheet Ii seems to be a proof printed on only one side. Sheet Kk is missing and supplied with thicker, higher-quality paper. If the evidence of watermarks is in any way reliable this paper dates from around 1686.Footnote ³¹ We may assume, then, that the copy remained unbound for perhaps twenty years until hope for the recovery of the missing gathers or of a manuscript copy to complete it was finally lost. The text resumes after the hiatus of Kk but the composition is different. One plausible explanation for the gap and change in compositorial style is that two presses were used simultaneously for the printing. Indeed in a letter to his patron Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon, dated 14 July 1664, Salusbury apologized for his lack of correspondence: ‘I told your Lordship … that I had two Presses going, being surpriszed into a promise of publishing some thing within a certaine time, which the Printer importuning me to performe, I was constrained to entryal a Cessation of Epistolar Correspondency for this Vacation.’ Six months later the surprise had turned to weariness:

It is impossible to know whether Salusbury did in fact ever finish his books. The Macclesfield copy offers us a rare glimpse of a work very much in progress, but this may be deceptive. Completed stock may have been waiting in warehouses to be published. There seems no reason to doubt that the Great Fire of London did destroy all but one copy of the Life, but this is really only half the story. Were the book to have been printed and the single copy to have been complete, this would have been sufficient to allow for a reprint. It seems that the case of Salusbury's second tome was closer to that of Wilkins's Essay. But in Wilkins's case, as in Dugdale's, the destruction of printed and unprinted text was merely an annoying inconvenience. Both those works were eventually rewritten. The fire itself must be viewed as only a contingent, not a necessary, cause of the existence of the sole and incomplete Macclesfield copy. In order to explain why it exists as it does, we also have to look elsewhere.

The death of the author

In June 1665 Pepys noted the arrival of the plague. By the end of the year Oldenburg had remarked to Boyle that it had become difficult to print books, ‘many Printers being carried away, among the rest, by this sad Contagion’.Footnote ³³ An estimated eighty printers died of the plague in 1665. The total number of deaths in London is estimated at around seventy thousand.Footnote ³⁴ The Act Books of the London Bishops' Commissary Court record for 10 November 1665 the death of one ‘Thomas Salisbury of Islington bourne out of wedlock … de Stepney in Count. Middlesex’, though there is little to link Salusbury with Stepney.Footnote ³⁵ During the period from 29 June 1663 to 5 April 1665 Salusbury replaced Jervais Jaques as writer of London newsletters to Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon. From 27 April this task reverted wordlessly to Jaques. Salusbury's last letter contains an ominous reference to ‘the Death of my Sister-Birkenhead, Cousin Cropley, & others, which had put our House into mourning and disorder’.Footnote ³⁶ Whether or not Salusbury survived the plague, he was definitely dead by the next summer. On 9 August 1666 a commission was granted to Salusbury's wife ‘Susan Salusbury relative of Thomas Salusbury late of the parish of Highgate in the parish of Islington in the County of Middlesex deceased to administer the goods rights and credits of the said deceased’.Footnote ³⁷ On the same day a document was registered, drawn up on 30 July, consisting of ‘An Inventory of all & singuler the goods Chattells and personall estate of Thomas Salisbury late of the parishe of Islington in the Countie of Middlesex gent deceased.’Footnote ³⁸ We shall return to the contents of the inventory because they offer us some further clues about Salusbury's life. The date of Salusbury's death can thus be fixed to the period between April 1665 and July 1666 and probably occurred in the few months before his widow was granted the commission of administration. This approximate date of death is confirmed by another letter from Collins dated 2 August 1666, which refers to ‘Mr Salusburie, whilst living’.Footnote ³⁹

We do not know whether Salusbury's death merely interrupted the printing of the Life or prevented its completion. There is some internal evidence for a date for the text's composition. Two books printed in 1664 are mentioned in the text: Boyle's History of Colours, published in March 1664, and Power's Experimental Philosophy, written mainly in 1661, but also published in 1664. Further internal evidence for this dating is available by tracing the transformations Salusbury wrought on information sent by his Italian-based correspondents. Sir John Finch's letter to Salusbury, dated 17 April 1664, contains anti-Catholic misinformation: ‘Many of his [Galileo's] Workes were unfortunately lost through his Wife's devotion; who sollicited by her Confessor gave him leave to peruse her husbands M.S. of which he tore and tooke away as many as he said were not fitt to be allowed.'Footnote ⁴⁰ Salusbury's autograph draught notes rework this comment and in the printed version this is further expanded.Footnote ⁴¹ I have found no other source for this information. Galileo never married and Finch must have heard some rumour concerning the role of his famous daughter Maria Celeste, who died in 1634, in safeguarding her father's archive. This section, at least, of the Life must have been written no earlier than late spring 1664. Further internal evidence suggests that Salusbury was still writing the biography in 1665: he refers to the current date as ‘28 years since he [Galileo] lost his Eyes’. The earliest date for Galileo's blindness suggested by Salusbury's possible sources is 1637.

In Volume I, printed in 1661, Salusbury laid out a book-by-book description of the Galilean biography, which was reused for Volume II. The actual book and chapter descriptions in the Macclesfield copy bear witness to some last-minute reorganization of the material. Book IV, Chapter II was initially supposed to contain a section called ‘His Will and Death’. The printed version changed this to ‘His Death, etc.’ and explains ‘I am sorry, I cannot give an account of his Will and Testament, though I was promised a Copy of it: of which being prevented, it will not be expedient here to mention the occasion.’Footnote ⁴² This passage immediately precedes the section on Galileo's supposed wife, which we have dated to the spring of 1664. Book IV, Chapter V was supposed to contain a description made up of nine sections relating to the Dialogo, but various social pressures meanwhile forced this potentially valuable analysis of the history of Copernicanism as understood by a late seventeenth-century Englishman into yet another (now lost) supplementary volume:

Blaming printers was a common enough trope in early modern authorship: Salusbury himself had already used it in the introduction to Volume I. But the claim that they had taken more than two years to print what they had promised to do in one would seem to explain the discrepancy between the publishing date of 1664 on the title page and the evidence supplied in the later books that the work was still being written in 1665.

All the evidence points towards the date of composition of the text being late 1664 or 1665. If the text were still being composed in 1665, it seems likely that the Macclesfield copy's mutilated state could be explained at least as easily by the death of the author during its composition as by the Fire interrupting the printing of the text many months after its completion.

But why was a work advertised in 1661 still not finished in 1665? In order fully to understand the peculiar state of the Macclesfield copy we have to look not just to the fire and the plague but to the social and political orders of information-gathering and exchange in Restoration London and baroque Europe.

Galileo's afterlife

To start with the most obvious issue: how did Thomas Salusbury attempt to gain access to biographical data for his Life of Galileo? Were these attempts successful, and if not, why not? Twenty years after Galileo's death in 1642 issues of the correct interpretation and rightful possession of his memory were still vitally alive. Towards the end of his life Galileo himself attempted to publish a Latin Works but the project failed. Galileo's ‘last disciple’, Vincenzo Viviani, then started collecting Galilaean material for a scholarly edition, but this project, too, was indefinitely postponed, and part of the material was turned over to a Bolognese printer, Carlo Manolessi.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the mid-1650s Manolessi decided to print a unified complete works of Galileo without the banned Dialogo.Footnote ⁴⁵ Manolessi's previous publications included works of Jesuit spirituality, mathematics and literature. But on 21 July 1644 he had been condemned, along with a bookseller and a binder, to three years' imprisonment and three tugs of the strappado for selling copies of Ferrante Pallavicino's recently published Heavenly Divorce (1643) and other anti-papal and anti-ecclesiastical works. His motive for undertaking the Galileo edition is far from clear.Footnote ⁴⁶

Manolessi's Works turned out to be a curiously complicated edition. Galileo's publications were so deeply rooted in pamphlet-war culture that they made no sense as stand-alone pieces, so Manolessi (like other editors after him) had to reproduce jagged synchronic fragments to situate the author meaningfully. One obvious way to make the Works resonate was to offer a diachronic subject-based narrative as the stitching to hold the gatherings of the book together. Another was to extend the notion of publication to Galileo's correspondence. This was a common enough phenomenon at the time. It is estimated that by 1627 in Italy alone up to forty thousand letters had been printed.Footnote ⁴⁷ These two projects, the biography and the correspondence, both failed. Viviani in fact compiled a Racconto Istorico in 1654, a brief and relatively uncontroversial account of Galileo's life, based in part on Vittorio Siri's notice published in 1644.Footnote ⁴⁸ The manuscript now exists in only two autograph copies and was not printed until 1717.Footnote ⁴⁹ That Viviani continued to think about, if not actually produce, a full biography is attested by the fact that a year later he continued to assemble examples of contemporary biographies: Micanzio's Sarpi, and Gassendi's recent Copernicus, Brahe, Peurbach and Regiomontanus. He also annotated the contemporary Life written by Gherardini in 1655.Footnote ⁵⁰ Viviani's project was at least as ambitious as Gassendi's famous biography of Peiresc. He began to reassemble Galileo's scattered correspondence, reactivating his epistolary network and replicating his subject's friendships and ethics. Extensive archival research gradually began to restore the idealized Galilaean opus. This was to be part of a bilingual Latin–Italian Complete Works in folio that would silence Galileo's detractors once and for all. It was still a work in progress in the mid-1670s.Footnote ⁵¹

Part of the problem of Viviani's project was perfectionism; part was the ongoing, secret and delicate negotiation between Leopoldo de' Medici in Florence and the Inquisition over the status of Galileo's banned works. In this charged atmosphere competing projects were not made especially welcome. One such project was launched from Hamburg in the early 1660s by the Italian-educated Martin Vogel (Fogelius), who also picked up Galileo autographs on his travels to Rome in an attempt to write a group biography of the Linceans, but ended up losing his papers in Florence and abandoning the project.Footnote ⁵² Viviani's delays in abandoning the biography stockpiled cultural and archival capital in Florence whilst demanding that potential networks in Germany, France and England display absolute allegiance to this ghostly monopoly. English correspondents interested in Galileo's heritage, for example, found Viviani to be the sole source of information. Robert Southwell, future president of the Royal Society, promised to translate Viviani's biography of Galileo into Latin for an English audience.Footnote ⁵³ Southwell had previously signed his name in Viviani's Album Amicorum and inserted there the names of the correct London contacts for Viviani and the Accademia del Cimento in natural-philosophical correspondence.Footnote ⁵⁴ Two of his recommendations seem obvious: Robert Boyle and Henry Oldenburg. The other name, the Bodleian librarian Thomas Barlow, might seem a surprising choice, but it was to Barlow's institution that Viviani sent a portrait of Galileo in 1661 which still hangs in the library.Footnote ⁵⁵ This channel of influence from Florence to Oxford was probably viewed as an unrepeatable opening for Salusbury, who not only thanked Barlow in the introduction to the Mathematical Collections for his help but also referred to him as his ‘Reverend friend’ in a letter to his patron Huntingdon.Footnote ⁵⁶ Barlow was even suspected by Collins of being the true author of the Life of Galileo, who claimed in a note that ‘the life for the most part was wrote by Mr Barrett [sic] an Oxford Scholar out of a Letter procured from Viviani in Italy’.Footnote ⁵⁷

In order to understand why Salusbury was ultimately refused access to the documentation he requested for his biography, we need to find out more about his own background. One autobiographical paragraph from the Life, from a section on the need for child prodigies' fathers to be lenient, is particularly revealing:

While matriculation records attest to several Thomas Salusburies, these are probably homonyms. The autobiographical reference to the ‘Profits of Negotiation’ is more fruitful. The inventory of Salusbury's belongings at death includes, among the usual dirty linen and silver plate, some quite unexpected objects: ‘one Indian Bow and Arrowes and 5 Indian pictures without frames’ worth ten shillings. More precious objects include ‘A library of bookes consisting of Italian French & Mathematicall that were for the deceaseds owne study’, valued at twenty pounds. Hints at a regular income are gleaned from a reference to ten pounds due from arrears for land in Leicestershire, possibly a gift from his patron Huntingdon, and thirty pounds owed from the Life Guards, perhaps indicating another post-Restoration employment. He was also owed two large debts, one for ‘Bookes in the hands of Printers & book sellers’, the other ‘oweing at the East India’, both for two hundred pounds. This East India Company connection revealed a previously unknown brother of Thomas, one Ambrose Salusbury, who became a factor for the East India Company in 1657. Ambrose was sacked for attempting to break the company's trade monopoly by setting up business on his own and died in India in 1676.Footnote ⁵⁹

While Salusbury had a certain amount of capital, at least on paper, he does not figure in any erudite correspondence of the period apart from that here reproduced. Despite the value of his Mathematical Collections, there is no trace of him in the papers of the Royal Society. He seems to have been socially excluded from certain sectors of the republic of letters. Drake suggested he may have been illegitimate. He may have even invented his name and identity: his pre-1660 past is certainly difficult to reconstruct, his relationship with the Medici court impossible to recover.

Salusbury was probably largely unaware of the competitive struggle for the production and possession of the Galilaean aura when he first announced his venture. By the time he died it had become clear that Viviani was not yet ready to hand over his materials, and, as Finch pointed out, for Salusbury

In a sense, Salusbury's biography was ultimately meant as a goad to Viviani:

Viviani famously turned his house façade into a semi-public monument to his master. Negotiations over Galileo's tomb continued into the next century.Footnote ⁶²Reputazione was not just forged in carefully codified strategies of self-presentation by living actors but was also fiercely contested after death in a complex network of patronage and scholarship. What led Salusbury to believe he might turn these conflicts to his advantage?

The birth of the author

Stillman Drake convincingly demonstrated Salusbury's authorship of two translations published in 1660. We can probably now add the broadsheet A Letter to His Excellency the Lord General Monck. By T.S., published in London, with the false imprint of 1659, but actually to be dated from internal evidence to April or May 1660. On 6 June 1660 ‘Gallilaeus Gallilaeus his mathematical works, translated into English by Thomas Salisbury ϕιλομαθης’ was entered in the Register of Stationers Company by Henry Twyford and Henry Marsh. The initial description of the Mathematical Works project makes no mention of a biography but is centred on Galileo in a way that might seem surprising, given the final contents of the published Mathematical Collections, which are actually based on the theme of hydraulics. Cesare Maffioli has demonstrated that water management, both theoretical and practical, was the central concern for the application and development of Galilean science in Italy in the two decades after Galileo's death.Footnote ⁶³ Salusbury's anthology reveals not only an acute awareness of this Italian context but a desire to translate these concerns to England. Galileo's Dialogo, which originated as a work on tides, not on astronomical Copernicanism, still made sense in the 1660s as a contribution to hydraulics. Restoration natural philosophers were keen to claim that theoretical advances in these sciences would be directly applicable to the interests of trade and empire. In the context of the Second Anglo-Dutch War claims by virtuosi for possession of correct and demonstrable understanding of ship design, for example, became more urgent. Salusbury channels this overflowing science of waters from hydrostatics to navigation into a new discipline for one version of his projected third volume of the Collections:

It is important to remember the deep debts incurred by the Royal Society to contemporary Continental natural-philosophical authors and their translators.

Salusbury's attempts to gain access to the Galileana via English contacts in Italy quickly floundered. In April or May 1663 Sir John Finch sent some material to Dr William Stokeham, who had graduated from Padua in 1661, but Salusbury seems never to have received it. Stokeham's own letter to Salusbury contains very little information:

This is the sum total of Salusbury's extant biographical data from his network of informants.

A second letter, from John Finch, was even more explicitly discouraging:

Within the Life Salusbury refers to ‘several Letters expressly writ to me concerning GALILAEUS from Padova, Florence, Pisa, &c.’,Footnote ⁶⁷ but quotes none directly. His main sources seem to be two brief printed accounts: ‘that Smooth-Tongu'd Courtier, Janus Niciis [sic] in his well-known Pinacotheca Imaginum Illustrium',Footnote ⁶⁸ whom he calls ‘a Creature and Dependent upon our Hero's most Mortal Enemies the Barbarini’,Footnote ⁶⁹ and Vittorio Siri's account. He also mentions an as yet unidentified English dean who claimed to have met Galileo.Footnote ⁷⁰ Salusbury makes occasional direct reference to a breach in contract with his sources: ‘I cannot give an account of his Will and Testament, though I was promised a Copy of it: of which being prevented, it will not be expedient here to mention the occasion.’Footnote ⁷¹ More often there is a sense of lack of control: ‘the variety of Answers to those Letters I writ to Italy on purpose to learn the truth herein being such, that I think it very hard to determine of the matter at this distance’.Footnote ⁷² Salusbury, like Manolessi, wanted to consult Viviani's archive of correspondence, but was refused access. ‘There are’, he says,

These projected volumes never appeared. The fundamental problem was one of securing reliable sources of information when writing at a distance: Salusbury requested the reader's patience in considering ‘the many difficulties I must needs have encountred in being the first that hath writ the Life of a person that lived at such a distance, and dyed under a Cloud, and that above twenty years ago’. In addition to general issues of power and distance, there were more delicate problems: ‘I have found some uncivill persons to have writ Letters from those parts on purpose to abuse him, and mislead me.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The idea that Salusbury's project had been intentionally hijacked is intriguing. The systems that made the republic of letters so powerful and flexible also allowed for its own subversion. False identities could be created, false information circulated. Credit and trust relied on their own existence to survive. But there is another more specific problem in Salusbury's case. Thomas Salusbury treated the memory of Galileo in much the same way as the East India Company treated India, as a passive natural resource fit for appropriation and exploitation. In both cases this supposition of passivity was misguided. Ambrose Salusbury, along with several other factors, broke loose from the monopoly that employed him and supplemented the vast structures of the East India Company with a personal mini-empire. Stokeham and Finch, in Florence, found themselves more obliged to the needs of the Medici than to those of a little-known writer in Highgate. The absolutist court that had made Galileo was involved in its own complex negotiations of rehabilitation with Rome. From their point of view Salusbury's project could only jeopardize this diplomacy. Salusbury and the East India Company both lacked the authority to discipline their supposed subjects at a distance. The subjects responded to local opportunities and failed, or refused, merely to act as representatives.

‘This career of my ambitiouse Penne’

Salusbury's story is not one of total failure. Even when his information is thin, his interpretation of it is usually interesting. A case in point is his account of the trial, which is startling in its originality. As Maurice Finocchiaro has recently shown in his exhaustive treatment of the historiography of the trial, even in Salusbury's introduction to Volume I, 1 a new explanation was presented: ‘Salusbury was the first one to formulate publicly the thesis that the root cause of the trial was Pope Urban's personal anger about being caricatured by the character of Simplicio.’Footnote ⁷⁵

The account in the Life of Galileo goes much further, adding an intriguing political backdrop to this explanation based on the corruption of absolute power:

How was Salusbury, unlike all other historians of the trial, able to construct this intriguing narrative in which the context of Tuscan–Papal relations in the Thirty Years War might have some bearing? As far as I know, no historian has ever proposed such a motivation for the trial and such a thesis deserves further research. Salusbury's access to unpublished information seems to be in general limited, but his notion of the relationship between power and information may be reconstructed from his supplementary careers during the composition of the Life.

Salusbury had two main patrons: Henry Pierrepont, Marquis of Dorchester and Theophilus Hastings, seventh Earl of Huntingdon. Dorchester was a patron of Thomas Hobbes and Lawrence Rooke, a dedicatee of Francis Line, SJ, a friend and patient of Charles Scarburgh, an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a bibliophile. Dorchester House in Highgate (destroyed in 1688) boasted a botanical garden and library where Christopher Wren, Thomas Clarke and Robert Boyle conducted physiological experiments in the late 1650s.Footnote ⁷⁷ Salusbury's correspondence is usually addressed from Highgate and he might even have lived in Dorchester House. His debt to Dorchester is apparent in his biography of Galileo, where he compares Galileo's Arcetri to his patron's residence. Highgate ‘seems to have been designed by Nature as a recesse for Contemplative and Scientifick Spirits’.Footnote ⁷⁸

In 1664 Salusbury informed Huntingdon about his employment by Dorchester. He was engaged in

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the dedicatee of Evelyn's translation of Naudé's Instructions concerning erecting of a library (London, 1661) saw Salusbury at work and wondered whether he might be available for a similar job at his own residence, the infamous ‘Dunkirk’ House he was then building. Dorchester's library was donated at his death in 1680 to the Royal College of Physicians to replace the losses suffered in the Great Fire. It contains several (unannotated) volumes of first edition Galileo, including the Dialogo, the Discorsi and Manolessi's 1656 Opere. It also contains Salusbury's dated 1664 vellum catalogue, the Bibliotheca Marchionis Dorcestriae.Footnote ⁸⁰

This library work interfered with Salusbury's other jobs, which included the writing of newsletters from London to Leicestershire for the Earl of Huntingdon. It is not clear whether he was ever paid for this work as there is no record of him in the household accounts of the Hastings family for this period.Footnote ⁸¹ Salusbury seems to have initiated the correspondence with the thirteen-year-old earl and received little encouragement to continue: ‘I present your Lordship with an humble Tender of my Penne & Intelligence upon all the Eminent Occurencies of the Court and Parliament; as also of Forraygne Princes & States.’Footnote ⁸² The young earl's initial lack of interest in the proposal did not deter him: ‘Leaving it for Common Devotions and Cooler Zeales to wait th'Authority of a Command to activate them, mine shall keepe the Post-pace, though not as yet honored with your Warrant, till your Lordships Commande shall put a stop to this Career of my ambitiouse Penne.'Footnote ⁸³ The diligence of the author of the Secretary soon paid off, though it is unclear whether cash ever exchanged hands: a ‘Paquet’ was received after the second letter, a book of poems by Theophilus's grandfather after the fourth.Footnote ⁸⁴

What Salusbury had to offer Huntingdon in his patronage-driven information rituals was not only news of court gossip but breaking international news.Footnote ⁸⁵ Some of this, such as Marlborough's attempt to take Bombay, the Tangier campaign and attempts to convert Charles II, were fairly common currency. Salusbury even says that his reports should be supplemented with the ‘News-Books’.Footnote ⁸⁶ But the Italian connections that underpinned the attempt to compile the Galileo biography were also deployed in the creation of news, sources that included both letters and persons.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nor was Salusbury a passive recipient of news. He also actively solicited requests from unnamed correspondents.Footnote ⁸⁸ The privileged nature of this information fed directly into his conception of politics as the conflict of personalities and affections, whether the context for these dynamics be the courts of Restoration London or Barberini Rome. One of the roles of the author, whether of political news or scientific biographies, was to reinforce the boundaries between insiders and outsiders by offering glimpses through the fence. The relationship between manuscript culture and court culture was imagined to be isomorphic. The same kind of culture was thought to exist in Rome, where handwritten anti-papal satire circulated in avvisi.Footnote ⁸⁹

The rise and fall of the court favourite was central to Salusbury's analysis of both the Caroline court and the trial of Galileo. Indeed, it was projected onto Galileo himself as the only way to make sense of his life: ‘The Wise GALILAEUS’, he says, ‘knew a Court to be that Syren that would smile on Adventures, till it ruined them’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The City of London famously offered a new alternative space for political commentary, the coffee house, which bred dissent dangerous to the new political settlement of the restored monarchy.Footnote ⁹¹ These systems generated news rather than merely reporting it and the problem of the reliability of journalistic information at times resembled problems natural philosophers faced when performing experiments: ‘Theise things are Arcana and the truth of them only Guest at: for which different reportes, for want of Demonstrations take the Probable Confermations alledged by each side.’Footnote ⁹²

One classic response in the seventeenth century to the problem of conflicting sources was to appeal to the social standing of the speaker as a guarantee of authenticity.Footnote ⁹³ But for Salusbury the nature of nobility is part of the problem, not an answer to it. Much of his correspondence with Huntingdon attempted to educate the youth into European notions of nobility. The same concerns, indeed the same phrases, appear in the Life of Galileo. One of his main printed sources for the Life is the Pinacotheca imaginum illustrium, which claimed that Galileo was illegitimate.Footnote ⁹⁴ But this (false) charge provided an example of just the sort of ‘arcana’ whose true content was impossible to divine: even ‘the truly Noble Sir John Finch Dr of Physick, Brother to Sir Heneage, Solicitor General to his Sacred majesty of Great Britain’,Footnote ⁹⁵ who lived in Florence, was unable to produce the fact of legitimacy. Finch wrote to Salusbury that

In the printed biography, perhaps supplemented by other correspondence now lost, this uncertainty is taken as a lack of positive proof:

Salusbury's own lack of legitimacy and nobility excluded him from the Florentine court of information. The emerging professional writer was still caught between coterie publication and Grub Street. Salusbury's solution to this problem was ingenious. He claimed to be in the process of translating the biography of John of Salisbury, ‘Author of the famous Policraticon, or Treatise of the Vanities of the Court’, as part of his own genealogical self-legitimation. He also included in the Life an extraordinary forty-two-page section written, he claimed, ‘to comply with the Commands of an Honourable Lord, my Friend, to whose satisfaction I am obliged to contribute all I may’.Footnote ⁹⁸ It was called ‘A Digression touching BASTARDY, occasioned by the precedent Aspersion’,Footnote ⁹⁹ wherein he brings together a scholarly analysis of comparative historical bastardy to legitimate his own scholarship. This, we are to understand, is only a prologue to

Whether Thomas himself was an illegitimate Salusbury, as Drake questioned, is of less importance than the role the idea of illegitimacy has to play in his writing and patronage strategies.

Salusbury's afterlife

In 1667, with Salusbury dead and Leybourn busy surveying the ruined city, Tome One of the Mathematical Collections was reissued by George Sawbridge, whose shop and stock on Clerkenwell Green seem to have escaped the fire. The book was heavily advertised in almanacs and other books.

The elusive volume containing the Life of Galileo elicited a small amount of interest. Vogel, who had previously attempted to compile his own Galilean biography, somehow heard about it and contacted Henry Oldenburg in order to get hold of a copy, not realizing quite how rare it was. Oldenburg himself knew of the Viviani project and helped spread rumours of its imminent publication.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Like Salusbury, Vogel had been denied access to the material by Viviani but assumed that Salusbury's project had been more successful than his own.Footnote ¹⁰² Oldenburg managed to procure a description of the work but it is unclear whether this was based on Collins's, Pell's, Brereton's or his own reading. He summed it up as ‘pretty fair, with some digressions into commonplaces’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Vogel misunderstood Oldenburg's answer and thought that it confirmed Viviani's contribution to Salusbury's project.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Once it was explained that no copies of the Salusbury Life were available, Vogel offered to pay for a manuscript copy of the whole work to be made, but Oldenburg seems never to have replied to these repeated requests.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The only other mention of a possible reprint of the work came shortly after. In 1675 Edward Sherburne published The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem: with Annotations and an Astronomical Appendix. The entry for Galileo once again mentions Viviani's project, this time claiming it had been published.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The entry for John Collins claimed that it was only due to the lack of sufficient encouragement from others like him, the ‘Mersennus Anglicanus’, that ‘the second Tome of Galilaeus in English doth, and is like to remain, unprinted’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

With the rediscovery of the unique copy we now know why the book was never reprinted. First, its gaping lacunae at the middle and the end, the destruction of the fair copy and the death of the author meant it would never be complete. Second, the continued expectation that the publication of Viviani's superior biography was imminent in any case rendered it redundant. Last, its uniqueness was recognized immediately, but despite sporadic murmurings of curiosity in the republic of letters and the world of later scholarship it entered a library that was the exact antithesis of its author's ideal. The humiliation of political elites barring access to archival sources in the production of the Life was uncannily perpetuated by the Earls of Macclesfield, who repeatedly, especially in the twentieth century, made their collection all but inaccessible.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ ‘Such kinds of Collections,’ noted Salusbury,