Thomas Vaughan

“ It is always better to explain than to refute an error; and the nature of the Luciferian tradition of Thomas Vaughan is pretty clearly shown by the fact that it is not corroborated in a single particular by any of the new facts about him that have come to light since this probable date of its composition. [36] The fabricator put Thomas Vaughan's birth-place in Monmouth instead of Brecon, because he had never seen Dr. Grosart's Fuller Worthies Edition of Henry Vaughan. He makes no mention of any of the facts contained in Sloane MS. 1741, because that MS. was still unknown. ”

“ Miss Vaughan quotes from Allibone's History of English Literature. Allibone only repeats Anthony à Wood's account.
[25] Robert Vaughan belonged to quite a different branch from the Vaughans of Newton: and, as Sl. MS. 1741 shows, the father of Henry and Thomas Vaughan did not die until 1658.
[26] Miss Vaughan gives an elaborate account of the Rosicrucians and of their famous manifestoes, which I have no room to reproduce.
[27] Miss Vaughan states that Thomas Vaughan signed "not Eugenius Philalethes, but Eirenaeus Philalethes" (p. 114) . ”

“ The traditional accounts of Thomas Vaughan, says Miss Vaughan, contain serious errors. The dates of his birth and of his death, and the pseudonym under which he wrote are all incorrectly stated [24] (p. 110) . He was born in Monmouth in 1612, being two years the elder of his brother Henry. The two boys were brought up at Oxford, after [xlii] their father's death, by their uncle, Robert Vaughan the antiquary, [25] and entered at Jesus College (p. 114) . ”

“ English poet and mystic, was born of an ancient Welsh family at Newton St Briget near Scethrog by Usk, Brecknockshire, on the 17th of April 1622. His grandfather, Thomas Vaughan, was the son of Charles Vaughan of Tretower Castle, and had acquired the farm of Newton by marriage. ”

“ If much be confusion which concerns Thomas Vaughan, all is chaos in respect of Eirenæus Philalethes. He would appear to have emigrated to America at a comparatively early period. The Amsterdam original edition of his Experimenta de Præparatione Mercurii Sophici, which was issued by Daniel Elzevir in 1668, describes that work as ex manuscripto philosophi Americani, alias Æyrenæi Philalethes, natu Angli, habitatione Cosmopolitæ. ”

“ Her Memoirs are partly a [xl] biography, partly an account of this cult. [23] Miss Vaughan claims to be a great-grand-daughter of Thomas Vaughan's. She declares him to have been a Luciferian, Grand-master of the Rosicrucian order, and the founder of modern Freemasonry; and gives [xli] an exhaustive account of his career on the authority of family archives. The following paragraphs contain the substance of her narrative, the "legend of Philalethes," as it was told to Miss Vaughan by her father and her uncle, who were intimate friends of Albert Pike. ”

“ In fact he cannot be shown to have outlived Thomas Vaughan, for there is no proof that the adept who showed the philosopher's stone to Helvetius on December 27th, 1666, [40] was the same as he who showed it to George Starkey many years before. I will briefly enumerate a few other links which connect Eirenaeus Philalethes with Thomas Vaughan. A German translation of the Introitus Apertus, published at Hamburg under the title of Abyssus Alchemiae (1704) , is said on the title-page to be "von T. de Vagan." ”

“ The position of authority and influence occupied by Miss Vaughan in what she terms high Masonry is to be explained, as she modestly informs us, not by her personal qualities, but by a traditional secret concerning her family, which is known only to the Elect Magi. Miss Vaughan and her paternal uncle are the last descendants of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, whom she terms a Rosicrucian, and identifies with Eirenæus Philalethes, author of “The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King.” ”

“ What has been said fairly well exhausted the available information on Thomas Vaughan until a few years ago, when Mr. A. E. Waite discovered in Sloane MS. 1741 a valuable manuscript of his, containing amongst other things a number of autobiographical memoranda. He printed some extracts from this in the preface to an edition of some of The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan (Redway, 1888) , and has been kind enough to furnish me with a reference to the MS. itself, which I have carefully examined. ”

“ He was succeeded as head of it by Caesar Cremonini (1604-1617) , Michael Maier (1617-1622) , Valentin Andreae (1622-1654) , and Thomas Vaughan (1654-1678) . [26] When Thomas Vaughan first came to London in 1636, Valentin Andreae was Summus Magister of the Fraternity, and amongst its leading members were Robert Fludd and Amos Komenski, or Comenius (pp. 129-148) . Robert Fludd initiated Thomas Vaughan into the lower degrees of the [xliii] Golden Cross (p. 148) , and sent him to Andreae at Calw, near Stuttgart, with a letter in which he prophesied for him a miraculous future (p. 163) . ”

“ And it is all discordant with the little that we do happen to know of Thomas Vaughan from other sources. The whole thing is, in fact, a pretty obvious romance of very modern fabrication. It appears to have been compiled from such information as to the alchemical and mystical writers of the seventeenth century as was within the reach of Albert Pike and the brothers Vaughan about the year 1870. ”

“ The documents in Masonic hands are presumably, like the Valetta talisman, now out of Miss Vaughan's reach. A communication signed Q. V. in Light for May 16, 1896, denies, on Dr. Westcott's authority, that his rituals have anything to do with Nick Stone, or that Miss Vaughan ever saw them. Dr. Westcott is the head of the modern Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. This body does not even pretend to be the Fraternity of R. C. Finally, there is (i) Thomas Vaughan's original pact with Lucifer, now, according to Miss Vaughan, in holy hands, and to be destroyed on the day she takes the veil. ”

“ This event is vouched for, not only by a written statement of Henry Vaughan (p. 114) , but also by the existence in a masonic triangle at Valetta of a magical talisman into which, when properly evoked, the spirit of Philalethes enters and records his glorious end for the edification of the Luciferians present [33] (p. 243) .
I fear that I have taken Miss Vaughan with undue seriousness. Her account of Thomas Vaughan is not only unsupported by direct evidence, [34] but much of it [xlviii] is of a character which we should not be justified in accepting, even were direct evidence forthcoming. ”

“ Lucy Greenleafe and her sister Catharine are quite obscure. One of them may have been the niece who was living with Thomas Vaughan when news came from the country in 1658 of his father's death (MS. Sloane, 1741, f. 89 (b) ) . Of the second family, Henry became Rector of Penderin in 1684, and vacated the living, probably through death, in 1713. A tablet to his memory hung during [xxii] the present century in the church at Penderin, but when the church was restored the tablets were taken down and buried under the tiles of the chancel. ”

“ The Isis and the prouder Thames. Thomas Vaughan was buried at Albury, near Oxford.
Noble Murray. Thomas Vaughan's patron, himself a poet and alchemist, Sir Robert Murray, Secretary of State for Scotland. His poems have been collected by the Hunterian Club. [352]
FRAGMENTS AND TRANSLATIONS.
The larger number of the verses in this section are translated quotations scattered through Vaughan's prose-pamphlets. Dr. Grosart identified some of the originals; I have added a few others; but the larger number remain obscure and are hardly worth spending much labour upon. ”

“ What Wood says is that he has seen a translation of Maier's tract, dedicated to Elias Ashmole by [N. L.] / [T. S.] H. S., and that Ashmole has forgotten whose the initials are. He does not suggest that this translation is by a Thomas Vaughan. (Ath. Oxon., iii. 724.)
[28] This episode has previously done duty in the Vingt Ans Après (vol. iii., ch. 8-10) , of Alexandre Dumas, in which Mordaunt acts as the executioner of Charles. There is a Latin poem amongst Vaughan's remains in Thalia Rediviva entitled Epitaphium Gulielmi Laud Episcopi Cantuariensis, full of sorrow for the archbishop's death. ”

“ Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls “incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.” ”

“ The poem on The King Disguised, for instance, goes back to 1646. At the end of the volume, with a separate title-page (cf. Bibliography) , come the Verse Remains of the poet's brother, Thomas Vaughan. This is the rarest of Vaughan's collections of poems. The copy once in Mr. Corser's collection, and now in the British Museum, was believed to be unique. It was used both by Lyte and Dr. Grosart. But Miss Morgan has come across two other copies, one in Mr. Locker-Lampson's library at Rowfant, the other in that of Mr. Joseph, at Brecon.
P. 163. The Epistle-Dedicatory. ”

“ Matthew Herbert was Rector of Llangattock, and apparently acted as tutor to the young Vaughans. He is mentioned in the lines Ad Posteros (p. 51) . Thomas Vaughan also has two sets of Latin verses to him (Grosart, II., 349) , and dedicated to him his Man-Mouse taken in a Trap (1650) . On July 19, 1655, he petitioned for the discharge of the sequestration on his rectory, which had been sequestered for the delinquency of the Earl of Worcester (Cal. Proc. Ctee. for Compositions, p. 1713) . He died in 1660. ”

“ It seems likely that he fought on the king’s side in the Welsh campaign of 1645, and was present at the battle of Rowton Heath. In 1646 appeared Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished, by Henry Vaughan, Gent. The poems in this volume are chiefly addressed to “Amoret,” and the last is on Priory Grove, the home of the “matchless Orinda,” Mrs Katharine Philips. A second volume of secular verse, Olor Iscanus, which takes its name from the opening verses addressed to the Isca (Usk) , was published by a friend, probably Thomas Vaughan, without the author’s consent, in 1651. ”

“ A more pertinent objection is perhaps that Eirenaeus Philalethes appears to have been in possession of the grand secret when he wrote the Introitus Apertus in 1645, whereas Thomas Vaughan was still seeking it in 1658. ”

“ Charles Walbeoffe was a man of considerable importance in Brecknockshire. His name occurs several times in State papers of the period. A petition of his concerning a ward is dated October 12, 1640. (Cal. S. P. Dom., Car. I., 470, 113) . He was High Sheriff in 1648 (Harl. MS. 2,289, f. 174) , and a fragment of a warrant signed by him on April 17 of that year to Thomas Vaughan, treasurer of the county, for the monthly assessment, is in Harl. MS. 6,831, f. 13. As we might perhaps gather from Vaughan's poem, he does not seem to have taken an active part in the Civil War. ”

“ VAUGHAN, Sir THOMAS (d. 1483) , soldier, was probably youngest illegitimate son of Sir Roger Vaughan of Tretower, son of Sir Roger Vaughan (d. 1415) , by an illegitimate daughter of Prior Coch (the redheaded) of the monastery of Abergavenny (Meyrick in Dwnn's Heraldic Visitation of Wales, i. 42; Jones, Brecknockshire, iii. 506; Nichols, Grants of Edward V, p. xv; but cf. Poems of Lewis Glyn Cothi, ed. Jones, p. 44) . ”

“ He died 2nd June, 1598." Perhaps Newton passed in some way from David Morgan David Howel to his wife's family, and so to Thomas Vaughan, who married Denise Gwillims. Theophilus Jones (ii. 538) records that at a later date other Williams's, [xxv] also apparently connected with Llanhamlach, were succeeded by other Vaughans at Scethrog, hard by Newton. His account is that David Williams, youngest brother of Sir Thomas Williams of Eltham, married a daughter of John Walbeoffe of Llanhamlach (cf. pedigree in vol. ii., p. 189, note) , and bought Scethrog. ”

“ Firth suggests that he may be J [ohn] W [illiams] , son of Sir Henry Williams of Gwernevet, Brecon, who matriculated at Brasenose in 1642. I have thought that he might be Vaughan's cousin, the second John Walbeoffe (cf. p. 189, note) , who is mentioned in Thomas Vaughan's diary (cf. Biographical Note, vol. ii., p. xxxviii) , but there is no proof that Walbeoffe was an Oxford man. Perhaps he is the friend James to whom a poem in Olor Iscanus is addressed (p. 70) .
P. 178. To his Learned Friend and loyal Fellow-prisoner, Thomas Powel of Cant [reff] , Doctor of Divinity.
On Dr. Powell, cf. ”

“ But she ascribes to him the Anthroposophia Theomagica and other writings which are signed, though she does not mention it, Eugenius Philalethes (p. 211) . She quotes from Anthony à Wood the assertion, which he does not make, that the English translations of the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis (1652) and of Maier's Themis Aurea (1656) both bear the name of Eugenius, and were by another Thomas Vaughan! The manuscripts of both are, she says, signed Eirenaeus (p. 163) . ”

“ Vaughan married Alianor or Eleanor, daughter and coheiress of Sir Thomas Arundel of Betchworth, Surrey, and widow of Sir Thomas Browne, under-treasurer of the household to Henry VI. By her he had a daughter Anne, married to Sir John Wogan, and a son Henry, whose son, Sir Thomas, taking the name of Parry [q. v.] ”

“ Aula Lucis (1652) ; Euphrates (1655) ; Nollius' Chymist's Key (1657) ; A Brief Natural History (1669) ; [Wood ascribes this to another writer, as it was not in the list furnished him by Henry Vaughan] .—Henry More's pamphlets against Vaughan are the Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica and Anima Magica Abscondita (1650) , issued under the name of Alazonomastix Philalethes and The Second Lash of Alazonomastix (1651) .
[19] Walker falls into the curious confusion of supposing that there were two Thomas Vaughans, one rector of Llansantffread, the other of Newton St. ”