This unconventional life of the 17th-century biographer puts us right inside his head
Thomas Hobbes, famous for describing life as “nasty, brutish, and short”, actually lived to be 91. Before he died, he asked his friend John Aubrey, 38 years his junior, to write an account of his life. Hobbes feared that, because of his atheism, others might distort or censor the record. Aubrey obliged after Hobbes’s death and then, after realising that he had enjoyed the project, had a smoke in his study, scribbled down the names of 50 or so other people he’d like to write about, and reinvented biography. In his Brief Lives, it became chatty, almost gossipy (the subjects had either been known to him or renowned in living memory), fixing on the telling detail and largely eschewing judgment. He recounts, for instance, how Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, would have her horses brought to a part of the house where she could peep out from a vidette and watch them mating; “and then she would act the like sport herselfe with her stallions”. Yet Aubrey goes on to praise her wit, learning and generous patronage, leaving us with the impression that she was rather splendid.
His Brief Lives were never published in his lifetime. They were, essentially, a private amusement, hence the freedom and ease of tone. He kept adding to them in between his work for the Royal Society, his antiquarian interests (he was the first person to guess that druids were more likely to be behind Stonehenge than the Ancient Romans, and managed to save the stones of Avebury from being used to repair houses in the village) and going bankrupt.
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