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ABSTRACT
Oliver Style, the son of a Kentish baronet, was working in Smyrna, Turkey, when in 1688 the port city was devastated by an earthquake. Thousands were killed. Style survived (though apparently seriously injured), returned to England, and wrote a descriptive, deeply personal ‘Advice to a painter’ poem about the event. Over the years until his death in 1703 he composed more than twenty other poems, which reflect on his life and inevitable death, and, with considerable bitterness, survey the folly, cruelty and suffering of mankind. This body of work, scarcely studied, survives in a single contemporary manuscript held in Leeds University Library. The essay discusses Style’s life and family background, describes the manuscript, appraises the poems in some detail, and places Style’s description of the Smyrna earthquake in the context of contemporary prose accounts. It concludes with an annotated edition of his 139-line earthquake poem.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Sonia Anderson for the invaluable information acknowledged in a number of footnotes; to Dail Whiting, Wateringbury, Kent, for providing me with the references in nn. 4 and 19; to Dr Diana Dethloff for the revised dating of the portrait by Lely noted in n. 25; to Professor Richard Maber for alerting me to Jean Hesnault’s Oeuvres diverses; and to Professor Paul Hammond for his encouragement and advice.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In new style, 10 July 1688, the date for the event usually given in modern reference works. I use old style dates throughout this essay.
2 The author of the poems in the Leeds manuscript is identified by no more than the initials ‘OS’. I am indebted, for his identity and his occupation in Smyrna, to correspondence with the late Sonia P. Anderson, to whose memory this essay is dedicated. Her book, An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667-1678, provides vividly detailed information about many aspects of the life of the English colony in Smyrna in the period immediately before Style’s arrival there.
3 Referenced in Anderson, English Consul, p. 79, n. 51, as Trumbull Add. MS 95.
4 The inscription is transcribed in John Thorpe, Registrum Roffense, pp. 800-01. For a photograph of the tomb, see <historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1320027>.
5 Wateringbury parish registers for the period in question have not survived.
6 Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, vol. I, pp. 298 and 307.
7 Accession number 6846-dl. The library’s online guide to the manuscript (acquired by donation in 1987) goes into impressive detail about the nature of Thomas Style’s travels.
8 As recorded on his gravestone in the chancel of Wateringbury church, transcribed in Thorpe, Registrum Roffense, p. 799.
9 Anderson, English Consul in Turkey, pp. 68-69.
10 Ibid., p. 75.
11 Information provided privately by Sonia Anderson (people of the same name listed in the index to her English Consul in Turkey belong to other branches of the Barnardiston family). For Sir Thomas’s family, see Thomas Wotton, English Baronetage, vol. 3, pt 2, p. 400.
12 See Grassby, ‘Social Mobility and Business Enterprise in Seventeenth-Century England’, pp. 356-57.
13 Grassby, ‘Social Mobility’, pp. 364-65.
14 The punctuation of quotations from Style’s poem on the earthquake follows that of my edition, below. I have similarly modernised the on-line punctuation of other quotations from the manuscript.
15 Anderson, English Consul in Turkey, p. 87. For their association with Style, see the document referenced in n. 3 above.
16 As recorded on the same gravestone as that for her son Thomas (n. 8 above).
17 Thorpe, Registrum Roffense, p. 799.
18 National Archives, PROB/11/468/14, f. 112r. The lines in question have, however, been crossed through, Thomas Carter having died in July 1702, four months before his father-in-law.
19 Parish registers of St George, Abergele, North East Wales Archives (Flintshire Record Office), MF/670.
20 See <https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/7176>. The volume was purchased through Quaritch in August 1963, having been Lot 222 in Christie’s sale of 24 July 1963.
21 Venn and Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 1, I, p. 120.
22 Pasted to the book’s front cover is a label in a later hand, repeating ‘John Boys – His book’ and adding, ‘This must be a descendant of Sir John Boys’ (presumably the Royalist commander of that name).
23 Thomas Dalison is one of those named on Style’s tomb as responsible for its erection, the others being Style’s sisters Elizabeth Carter and Ann Marriot, and his step-sister Margaret Style. Coincidentally there is a transcription of the wording on Style’s tomb on f. 22v of Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 13, a bound notebook of English and Latin prose and poetry associated with George Charlton, who was Vicar of Wateringbury, 1729-34. Among its contents are a short poem entitled ‘On My Dalyson’s great sword’ (f. 38r) and a record of the death of a member of the Boys family (f. 48v).
24 Reproduced with the kind permission of Special Collections and Galleries, Leeds University Library.
25 ‘Mr Doll’ is very likely the contemporary engraver Walter Dolle, for whom see the ODNB article by Antony Griffiths, although the dates ‘fl. 1662-1674’ given there need revising, as ESTC records him contributing portraits to several later publications, up to The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (London, 1688). ESTC is not alone, however, in erroneously referring to him as William Dolle. A head and shoulders painting of a young man by Peter Lely, said to be of Oliver Style, was auctioned by Christie’s in a sale at Wateringbury Place on 1 June 1978 (Lot 339), but the portrait in question has now been dated to the 1650s and so may possibly be of Style’s father, Sir Thomas Style.
26 For a list of the poems in MS Lt 10, see <Search the Brotherton Collection Manuscript Verse Index - Library | University of Leeds>.
27 For example, a different hand inserts a missing word ‘might’ on f. 7r, and corrects ‘design’d’ to ‘will find’ on f. 40v (the scribe having here accidentally anticipated the final word of the following line).
28 It is printed as an anonymous poem, in modernised spelling, in Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. by Paul Hammond, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 297-98.
29 Oeuvres diverses (Paris, 1670), p. 237. I am indebted for this reference to Professor Richard Maber.
30 See his Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1680), pp. 50-51 (‘From Seneca, Troades, Act II, Chorus’), reprinted in Restoration Literature, ed. Hammond, pp. 380-81. Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’, of course, also envisages all material things being driven back after death into the nothingness from which they emerged.
31 But his inclusion in his father’s will, in which he is bequeathed property, money, and specified contents of the latter’s house in Wateringbury (National Archives, PROB/11/468/14, ff. 111v-12r), suggests his father may have been providing some financial assistance.
32 As an authority on the general subject of unhappy marriage Style refers in passing to ‘Witkins’ (f. 15v), presumably the playwright George Wilkins, author of The Miseries of Inforst Marriage (London, 1607, reprinted in 1611, 1629, and 1637). The play is based on the story of Walter Calverley, as also dramatised in the anonymous A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608).
33 Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time, vol. 1 (London, 1624), p. 353. Lady Belasyse features in several of the obscene poems printed in Court Satires of the Restoration, ed. by John Harold Wilson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976).
34 Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons, 1690-1715, 5 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2002), V, pp. 114-16.
35 Respectively ff. 13r-v, 30r-v, 35r-v, 33r-v, and 19r-21r.
36 The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. by James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 188.
37 For a survey, see Mary Tom Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems, 1633-1856: An Annotated Finding List (University of Texas, 1949).
38 Cf. Osborne, ibid., p. 10, making a general point: ‘The poet scarcely ever held consistently to the Advice-to-a-Painter pattern. After monotonously urging the painter to ‘pencil’, ‘draw’, ‘paint’, ‘limn’, ‘show’, he inserted passages of straight description or narrative. Usually he came back to his painter again and again in the poem.’
39 As with Samuel Barnardiston (n. 11 above), I am indebted to Sonia Anderson for information about Henry Stephens.
40 Printed in Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire Preserved at Easthampstead Park, Berkshire, vols 1-2, Papers of Sir William Trumbull (London: HMSO, 1924), I, pt 1, pp. 312-14. The writer is indexed as William Farrington in Anderson, English Consul in Turkey.
41 ‘Richard Pierce’, according to information kindly provided by Sonia Anderson. In what follows: ‘Spasso’ (Italian), ‘amusement, ‘entertainment’; ‘scrivan’, a clerk, ‘esp. a clerk employed by a merchant or trader’ (OED).
42 Papers of Sir William Trumbull (n. 40 above), I, pt 1, pp. 296-98.
43 Matching, coincidentally, the number generally cited in modern reference works. According to Sonia Anderson, writing about a slightly earlier period, ‘it is impossible to give accurate figures for the population in 1667, but a fair estimate might be upwards of eighty thousand’ (Anderson, English Consul in Turkey, p. 3).
44 I am grateful for the permission kindly granted by Special Collections and Galleries, Leeds University Library. A digital facsimile of the complete manuscript is available through the subscription service Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds <https://www.literarymanuscriptsleeds.amdigital.co.uk>.
45 But the paragraphing frequently matches scribal line indents, which occur at ll. 1, 15, 33, 34, 60, 74, 82, 90, 94, 102, 110, 114, 130, 136..