Meet the Experts: “Not one Planet in his Detriment”

Taking as its starting point Peter Lely's double portrait of Sir Frescheville Holles and Sir Robert Holmes from about 1672, this talk reveals the untold story of how the Restoration captain Sir Frescheville Holles served as a test-case for the period’s astrologers, and how this informed representations of Holles among both English mariners and writers and artists on land.

The correlation between Holles’s exceptionally promising nativity and his naval career was used by the professional astrologer John Gadbury and his own lieutenant Jeremy Roch to try to put astrology on an equal footing with the new science, exemplified by the Royal Society. However, this meant that the realities of his disappointing career – losing first his arm and then his life – likewise attracted the attention of astrology’s sceptics.

This talk will focus on the widespread poetry which worked to construct an image of Holles as a man of promise, and also on Roch’s journal, held at the National Maritime Museum, which retells the story of his naval career through the framework of early modern astrology. Together, these reveal new ways in which the naval action, poetry, and intellectual inquiry of the 17th century could be bound together by writers at sea and on land.

About the speaker

Jack Avery is a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, who specialises in early modern literature and manuscripts. He has published on 17th-century newsprint and satire, Dutch readers of parliamentary news, and Isaac Newton’s manuscripts. He is currently working on a complete edition of the letters of the biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey.