Thomas Allen

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Thomas Allen (1542–1632) was an English mathematician, astrologer, and antiquary, long resident at Gloucester Hall in Oxford, whose mastery of abstruse learning earned him, in the eyes of his neighbours, the reputation of a magician. He left almost nothing in print; what survives of him is a career of teaching and collecting, and a legend that grew up around the career while he was still alive. He lived nearly ninety years, spanning the reigns of five Tudor and Stuart sovereigns, and died in his rooms at Gloucester Hall on 30 September 1632 — by which date the chests of medieval parchment he had spent a lifetime gathering were already the most valuable thing about him.

A private scholar’s life

He was born in Staffordshire — by the usual account at Uttoxeter, late in 1542 — and went up to Oxford to Trinity College, where he took his degrees and held a fellowship. The expected shape of such a life ran toward office: a college headship, a benefice, a chair, eventually perhaps a bishopric of the kind that a fellow of his standing might be steered toward. Allen declined the shape. In 1571 he resigned his fellowship and removed to Gloucester Hall, a modest and somewhat irregular foundation on the western edge of the city, and there he stayed for the remaining sixty years of his life as a private scholar without institutional rank. The choice is the first thing about him that wants explaining, and two explanations are usually offered together. Gloucester Hall imposed no stringent religious conformity, which suited a man whose sympathies leaned, quietly and without open profession, toward the old Catholic faith in a kingdom that had made conformity to the new church a test of loyalty. And the Hall stood on the site of a former Benedictine house: the medieval monks of that order had been mathematicians and astronomers, and their libraries — or the memory of them — drew a collector who measured learning by the manuscript.

What Allen built at Gloucester Hall was a school without a charter. He gathered around him a circle of pupils and patrons drawn to mathematics, astronomy, and astrology at a moment when those subjects were not yet cleanly separated from what an outsider would call magic. He taught privately, corresponded widely, lent his books, and acquired in his own day a reputation as the finest geometer and astrologer in England — a reputation that rested almost entirely on what passed by word of mouth and by tutorial, since he printed scarcely a page. The contrast with his great contemporary John Dee, the period’s most famous student of the occult sciences, is instructive: where Dee published the Monas Hieroglyphica and the Mathematicall Praeface, lectured across Europe, and pressed his learning into the service of crown and navy, Allen withdrew into a working scholar’s privacy and let the work speak through the men he formed and the texts he saved.

The patronage world

Allen moved in the orbit of the great Elizabethan patrons of natural philosophy. He was associated with the household of Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland — the so-called “Wizard Earl,” whose support for mathematicians and astronomers earned the cluster of scholars around him their collective name. That cluster had at its center the Earl’s stipendiary mathematicians — Thomas Harriot, Robert Hues, and Walter Warner, the three men contemporaries called his “magi,” with Nathaniel Torporley a fourth in the same orbit — and it overlapped with the circle that gathered at Syon House and, after 1605, around Northumberland and Sir Walter Raleigh during their long confinement in the Tower of London. Allen knew this world from its edge rather than its payroll: he visited, he counted Harriot and Dee among his acquaintances, and the popular memory that loosely numbers him among the Earl’s “magi” registers the company he kept more than any salaried place he held.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester — the most powerful courtier of the early reign and a man with a settled appetite for the predictive sciences — is reported to have valued Allen’s counsel and to have employed him for the casting of nativities. Whether that counsel was ever astrological in the strict technical sense, the drawing and judging of a birth-chart, is harder to fix than the anecdotes suggest; the line between a trusted learned adviser and a court astrologer was thin, and Allen’s contemporaries did not trouble to draw it. The detail belongs with a wider truth about the age: the casting of figures for the great was ordinary work for a mathematician, the same arithmetic of position and time that produced an ephemeris or predicted an eclipse, and the men who did it for Leicester or for the crown — Dee, later Simon Forman and William Lilly — were not a separate caste of sorcerers but the period’s working diviners and computers.

The conjurer in the village

The reputation as a conjurer is the part of Allen that the sources dwell on, and it is worth reading carefully. The chief witness is the antiquary John Aubrey, whose Brief Lives — set down decades after Allen’s death and not printed in full until Andrew Clark’s edition of 1898 — preserves the anecdotes that fixed the legend. Aubrey reports that the country people took the scholar’s clocks and instruments for the apparatus of a necromancer, and that servants who heard his automata strike fled in fear of the spirits they imagined he kept. The most repeated of the stories places Allen as a guest at Holme Lacy, the Herefordshire seat of Sir John Scudamore: a servant who found his ticking pocket-watch took the thing for the Devil — for a familiar spirit that Allen carried about him — and pitched it into the moat to be rid of it. The shape of the tale is constant. A machine does what a machine does; an unlettered witness, lacking the category “clockwork,” reaches for the only category that fits a thing that moves and speaks of itself, which is the category of the spirit.

Aubrey records the stories as stories — as the awe of the unlettered before a man who could calculate eclipses — rather than as a confession of practice. Allen himself is nowhere shown claiming the powers attributed to him; he is shown owning instruments, glasses, and books, and being misread. The judgment that the period’s own observers reached is the one the anecdotes were told to illustrate: in those years, as the phrase ran, astrologer, mathematician, and conjurer were accounted the same thing. What the record establishes is not that Allen worked magic, but that mathematical skill, in late-Tudor England, was itself read as something close to it — that the boundary between calculation and conjuring lay in the eye of the watcher, and that a man whose competence ran visibly beyond explanation acquired, half in admiration and half in unease, the name of a worker of wonders.

That misreading was not idiosyncratic to one Staffordshire scholar. It is the characteristic predicament of Renaissance learned magic in its English setting, where the same apparatus — the instruments, the glasses, the great calculations, the books in unreadable hands — drew the same charge against John Dee, who petitioned the crown to be cleared of the slander that he was a conjuror and caller of spirits, and against the magus tradition that runs back through Cornelius Agrippa and forward into the seventeenth-century systems of ceremonial magic. Allen’s distinction is that he is the cleanest case: a man who, on every surviving account, only ever did arithmetic, and was credited with sorcery anyway.

The collector and the Digby manuscripts

His most durable legacy was material. Allen was among the great manuscript collectors of his age, assembling medieval texts in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology that might otherwise have been lost in the dispersal of the monastic libraries after the Dissolution. When the religious houses were suppressed and their books scattered, sold, used to wrap groceries, or burned, a handful of antiquaries went quietly through the wreckage and bought what they could read the value of; Allen was among the most discerning of them. His shelves held, among much else, several volumes of Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan whose own reputation as a wonder-worker shadowed Allen’s so exactly that contemporaries linked the two — the medieval friar and the Tudor scholar both filed under the same legend of forbidden knowledge. To gather Bacon’s manuscripts was, in the popular mind, almost to inherit his powers.

The collection’s fate is the part of Allen’s story with the longest reach. The bulk of it passed at his death to his pupil and admirer Sir Kenelm Digby, who had entered Gloucester Hall as a young man and studied under Allen — Digby, the future privateer, diplomat, and founding fellow of the Royal Society, son of one of the executed Gunpowder plotters, a more flamboyant figure than his quiet tutor by every measure. Digby in turn gave the manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, presenting the great gift in 1634, with the persuasion of Archbishop William Laud, in some two hundred and thirty-seven calf-bound volumes. They remain there as the Digby manuscripts, among the Bodleian’s treasures — a body of medieval science and learning that carries Digby’s name on the catalog and Allen’s judgment in the contents, the residue of one collector’s eye preserved under the name of his more famous pupil. Allen himself published little and theorized less; his importance lies in what he preserved and whom he taught.

The record and the scholarship

Allen wrote no great book, which has made his afterlife a matter of what others wrote about him. Four witnesses carry nearly the whole of it. The first is John Aubrey, whose Brief Lives supplies the conjurer anecdotes and the human portrait; the standard text is Andrew Clark’s edition, ‘Brief Lives’… set down by John Aubrey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), long in the public domain. The second is Anthony à Wood, whose Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) records the funeral and the Oxford honors from sources close to living memory: Allen was buried in the chapel of Trinity College on the day after his death, and an oration in his praise was delivered by William Burton before the Vice-Chancellor and the heads of the colleges and halls. The third witness is the documentary trail of the manuscripts themselves, cataloged and described in the Bodleian’s account of the Digby manuscripts collection, which fixes the provenance from Allen through Digby to the library.

The fourth and most searching modern treatment is Michael Foster’s study, Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism in Post-Reformation Oxford (Oxoniensia XLVI, 1981, pp. 99–128), which reconstructs Allen’s life from the archival record and reads his settlement at Gloucester Hall as the deliberate choice of a recusant-sympathizing scholar for a place that left his conscience alone. Foster’s work places Allen firmly within the documented world of late-Tudor Oxford rather than the legend, and corrects the looser nineteenth- century notices — including the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and the brief life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that succeeded it. For the wider intellectual setting in which a mathematician’s nativity-casting was unremarkable, the documented history of the Western astrological tradition supplies the technical canon Allen worked in; for the magus figure against whom he is most often read, the life of John Dee supplies the fuller and better- documented parallel. The later seventeenth-century antiquary and astrologer Elias Ashmole, himself a collector of exactly Allen’s kind, gathered and preserved much of the English material that lets the period’s astrological practice be reconstructed at all.

The figure that comes down through Aubrey and the later antiquaries is a particular Elizabethan type: the learned man whose competence outran his neighbours’ understanding, and who was credited, half in admiration and half in unease, with powers he is never shown claiming for himself. He died in 1632, by then an old man of nearly ninety, and the University that had never given him an office buried him with an academic’s full honors — the orations, the assembled heads of houses, the chapel of his old college — burying with him, as it happened, the last living memory of why a watch in a moat had once looked like the Devil.

→ Related: Kenelm Digby · Simon Forman · Divination · John Dee · Astrology · Magic · Necromancy · Renaissance Magic · Roger Bacon · William Lilly · Elias Ashmole