Sir Oliver Style, his Verse, and the Smyrna Earthquake of 1688

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Earthquakes
• Turkey
• 17th century
• Style
• Oliver
• 3rd Baronet, c. 1656-1703

On 30 June 1688 a violent earthquake and fire devastated the port of Smyrna in western Turkey (the present-day Izmir), killing thousands of people.¹ One survivor was Oliver Style (c. 1656-1703), an amateur poet of some accomplishment. On returning to England he wrote a detailed poem about the catastrophe, describing the experience and mourning named friends who had been killed. The poem, along with all his other known verse, survives in a manuscript volume in Leeds University Library’s Brotherton Collection, as described below.

Family Background and Early Travels

Style, from Wateringbury in Kent, was at the time an established member of the sizeable English community in Smyrna, working like many others as a factor, i.e. a mercantile agent buying and selling mainly on behalf of others, but very likely also on his own account.² He is included, as sole partner in his own firm, in a list of thirty-one leading factors in Smyrna drawn up in 1688 for the then ambassador in Constantinople, Sir William Trumbull.³ According to the poem, the earthquake ‘in a moment’ put an end to ‘ten years labour’.

The circumstances of Style’s arrival in the Levant, and of his earlier life, are unclear. He was a younger son of Sir Thomas Style, 2nd Bt (1624-1702), the fourth and last of those (from his father’s first marriage, to Elizabeth Armine) who survived infancy. According to the Latin inscription on his impressive tomb in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, Wateringbury, erected by his surviving sisters and other close relatives, he died on 12 February 1703 at the age of forty-six, having held the unlooked-for title of 3rd Baronet for less than three months.⁴ His outspoken poem ‘A satyr against marriage’, which probably dates from the 1690s (when he had younger half-siblings resulting from his father’s second marriage), makes clear his attitude to his birthright and indeed the line of succession:

No, Ile ne’re wed nor be a womans slave,

Not tho’ I lose whate’re my birthright gave.

Be a glasse coach the younger brothers share

While in galowshoes I goe take the air.

More then succession I my quiet prise,

Which to secure I’le shun all marriage tyes. (f. 14r)

In consequence he left neither a wife nor children, the title passing to his half-brother, another Thomas. On the basis of the age given on his tomb, Style’s year of birth may be reckoned as c. 1656.⁵

His father Sir Thomas Style, although educated at Oxford, entered three of his above-mentioned four sons at Lincoln’s Inn, for a potential legal education. Thomas (‘heir apparent of Sir Thomas Style’) and Michael (‘3rd son’), were admitted on the same day, 30 January 1667, to be followed by Oliver (‘4th son’) on 12 May 1670.⁶ The latter’s likely age of fourteen, though decidedly young, was not unprecedented at the time. Neither Thomas nor Oliver, however, continued long with the law. Thomas, born c. 1650, set off on 4 July 1669 on ‘A Voyage through the Low Countrys, Germany, Italy, and France’, as he entitled a detailed, 312-page manuscript account of his travels, now in the library of the University of Virginia.⁷ He did not return until 1671, in which year he married Mary Langham, but the union was short-lived as he died on 30 August 1672.⁸

Oliver Style, too, travelled abroad when young – and went further afield – as he reveals in another poem from the 1690s, ‘Reflections on Mr Dolls drawing my picture’. Looking back over his life, he laments ironically a youth spent in this way, in contrast to the sycophancy that he makes out he should conventionally have been practising (e.g. ‘A wiser man would of a mad young lord | Swear he were brave and valiant as the sword’, f. 31v):

Fool that he was to spend his youthfull times

Learning the language of so many climes,

Veiwing those sands w[h]ere troubled Nilus flows

Or the large plains through which Euphrates goes

Or marking customs which that people knows.

Could not the Rhine, the Tagus and the Poe

Run murmuring on, but he their course must know,

Study their arts, their government and way

By which strong crowds their weaker lords obey? (ff. 31v-32r)

This period of travel, emulating his older brother, may have been fitted in between the two contrasting halves of the seven or eight-year apprenticeship that was necessary before setting up in business in Smyrna.⁹ The common practice was to spend half this training in London, learning all aspects of the import/export trade, and the second half in the Levant itself. Style’s interest in a mercantile career of this kind may have been stimulated by contact with the influential Langham family into which Thomas had married; several members had long-lasting ties with the city and/or the Levant Company, among them Thomas’s wife’s cousin Joseph Langham, himself a Smyrna factor.¹⁰ Equally, an entrée may have been provided by the Barnardiston family of Kedington, Suffolk, who also had close Smyrna connections. Oliver Style’s maternal aunt, Anne Armine, had married Sir Thomas Barnardiston, 1st Bt, and two of their sons, Samuel and Nathaniel, were in partnership in Smyrna in the 1670s and 1680s.¹¹

It was, however, common practice for members of the aristocracy and landed gentry without limitless funds to encourage their younger sons into business, and the export and colonial trades, particularly in cloth, were popular choices.¹² The costs involved in an apprenticeship were nevertheless considerable, and there is evidence that London masters active in the Levant trade were able to charge as much as £500–£800 in the 1680s and 1690s. Entry fees and then the cost of setting up in business were also considerable.¹³ Given that Style was about thirty-two when the earthquake struck Smyrna in 1688, and thus about twenty-two at the start of the ‘ten years labour’ that it brought to an end, it is evident that the period in question must have encompassed the conclusion of his apprenticeship, and that he may have been his own master for no more than two-thirds of this time. He represents his financial loss as total (‘And me all pensive sitting on the shore | Whilst greedy flames my buried wealth devour’, ll. 124-25),¹⁴ which, if the case, very likely meant that he returned to England not only a ruined man but still in debt to his father. The ‘principals’ in London for whom he had mainly acted as agent were William and John Pouldon, who, to quote Sonia Anderson, ‘had prospered as factor-principals in Smyrna in the 1660s and 1670s and subsequently as London merchants’.¹⁵ Style (‘My hope’s defeated, expectation cross’d’, l. 126) must have been optimistic about emulating their success.

According to the inscription on Style’s tomb, he returned to England at his parent’s command (‘Reversus in Angliam parentis jussu’), but, in contrast, his poem on the earthquake ends with him and others setting sail in the immediate aftermath:

With this poor cargo and auspicious gales

T’wards Italy wee bend our swelling sails,

While crowds of people darken all the strand,

Like me in search of a more faithfull land. (ll. 136-39)

Back in Wateringbury one of his first duties must have been to visit the village church, as he describes in his poem ‘On the sight of the tombs of my dear mother and brothers in Watringbury church, who dy’d while I was in Asia’. The opening lines make clear that this was his first visit since the deaths in question:

Not that my tears did not in Asia flow,

There I once paid what wee to Nature owe.

But by heaven blest with a safe return,

Let me once more o’re your dear ashes mourn, (f. 17r)

and the phrases ‘while I was in Asia’ (in the title) and ‘a safe return’ suggest a sense of finality – that this is now after the earthquake, and that he has finished with Asia. Seeing that his mother, Elizabeth Armine, had died on 10 December 1679,¹⁶ it would appear that Style had lived continuously in Smyrna since his first arrival. He pays her now a lengthy tribute, heaping praise on the care and attention she bestowed on his upbringing.

The most striking part of the poem is the next, addressed to the ‘pale ashes’ of his dead brothers; it is also the hardest to make sense of. One of the brothers is certainly Michael, commemorated by a gravestone in the chancel: ‘Here lyeth the body of Michael Style, Barister of Lincoln’s Inn, third son of Sir Thomas Style, baronet, who dyed the 10th day of December, 1681.’¹⁷ From what follows it is clear that both the brothers in question (assuming no more than two) were grown men, ruling out any of the half-brothers resulting from Sir Thomas’s second marriage in 1682 to Margaret Twisden; for example, when praising their virtues, ‘From haughty pride and pineing envy free, | Good to the poor and strangly kind to me’ (f. 18r). What is totally unexpected is that Style records that the brothers were murdered: ‘Not by your own you fell, but others guilt; | By barb’rous hands your blood was basely spilt’ (f. 18r). The opening words, in effect ‘not by your own guilt’, possibly mean that the attack described in the next line was unprovoked.

A partial clue as to what happened is perhaps provided by the word ‘barb’rous’. The only candidate for Michael’s companion is William, Sir Thomas Style’s second son (born c. 1652), the one who was not entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He does, however, feature in his father’s November 1701 will, which includes a provision that the testator’s son-in-law, Thomas Carter, should be recompensed ‘for the board and tabling of William Style for so many years as he was with him, after the usual rates given for the tabling of one person in Wales’.¹⁸ In 1678 Thomas Carter, from Denbighshire in north Wales, had married Elizabeth Style, a daughter of Sir Thomas, the couple then setting up home in Kinmel, near Abergele. It is possible that William, who was perhaps in need of long-term care, had been taken in by his sister and her husband, and one conjecture might be that Michael was visiting him there when they were set upon by the assailants whom Style describes as ‘barb’rous’, a term that at the time was commonly applied to the Welsh and their language. Alternatively the two brothers may have set out together from Kent on a visit to the Carters.

William, however, did not die alongside Michael, wherever the latter’s death occurred. He lived on until November 1698, his death in Wales recorded in the parish registers of St George, Abergele, as ‘Gulielmus Style. Generosus’, i.e. gentleman.¹⁹ If he was badly injured in the attack that apparently killed his brother, that might have been one reason why long-term care was necessary, and his father may have thought it best not to move him south. The title that Oliver Style gave to his poem about visiting Wateringbury church suggests that he was not told the whole truth concerning what had happened while he was abroad, and that he was in addition misled into thinking that William was buried in the church alongside Michael.

The Manuscript of Style’s Poems

Following an address to the reader, the inscription on the front of Oliver Style’s tomb attests to his distinction both in England and in Smyrna; notes in passing that he survived the earthquake (‘qua movente terra Divina Providentia feliciter evasit’); and asserts that while in Smyrna it was his many virtues, rather than flattery or bribery, that won him the friendship and love of all merchants. Greater space is then devoted to his life after returning home. To paraphrase: disdaining the glory of the world and the pleasures of the court, he dedicated himself wholly to a private life, in this seclusion contemplating the nature and works of God. He subsequently applied his mind to human learning, in which he would have made scarcely believable advances. History already mourns his death, philosophy and the muses lament. What more is there to say? With his death, eloquence itself simultaneously perished.

The volume of poems that appears to be all that survives of Style’s literary endeavours hardly lives up to such hyperbole, but is not negligible. Now catalogued as Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 10, the book, in a rather worn calf binding, contains twenty-seven poems in (almost certainly) two hands, one of them very likely Style’s own.²⁰ On the front pastedown, in pencil, is ‘OS 11 July 98’, an inscription presumably (given the abbreviated name) by Style himself, inserted after the book was bound. Below is the armorial bookplate of Osmond Beauvoir (headmaster of the King’s School, Canterbury, 1750-82),²¹ who had married Ann, the sister of the John Boys who records his name on the facing flyleaf: ‘John Boys his book, given him by his mother, August 11, 1733’. John Boys was Oliver Style’s great-nephew, the grandson of his sister Susan (d. 1688) and her husband Thomas Dalison, Boys’s mother being their daughter Elizabeth.²² Confirming the pride in his achievements expressed on his tomb, it is evident from this careful transmission of the book that the family wished Style’s poetry to be preserved.²³

On the verso of the same flyleaf, and the recto of the next, are two very different portraits (possibly copies) of, undoubtedly, Oliver Style himself (Figure 1).²⁴ The first, on an oval piece of paper affixed to the centre of the page, is a small, faded pencil drawing of a gentleman in a full wig (three-quarter face) against a black background. The second is a very striking half-length pencil drawing of a turbaned man wearing Eastern clothes, his facial features apparently resembling those of the first portrait. Again the figure is set against an oval black background, but in this case within a rectangle, with rather inexpert decoration and infilling executed in ink. It differs also in that the sheet of paper it occupies has clearly been cut down to fit the size of the other pages in the book, the pins used to fasten it in place still visible. It is possible, and perhaps likely, that one of these depictions is that described in the poem ‘Reflections on Mr Dolls drawing my picture’, which begins (strongly suggesting that Style may have been injured by the earthquake):

Figure 1. Portraits of Oliver Style at the front of Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 10.

Doll hath dealt kindly by my batter’d face,

Added new spirits and a lively grace.

With his proceedings I must own I’me charm’d,

Too just, so paid to make a man deform’d,

Unlike th’ill natur’d world that won’t afford

For all ones worth to give one, one good word, (f. 31r)

although the lines that follow make clear that the portrait in question very likely dates from the mid-1690s, which may rule out the one in Eastern clothes:

Betwixt the two Ile take a middle way,

And vertues temple’s in that road they say.

There down I’le sit, and while truth holds the glasse

I’le add new colours to Dolls lying face.

The face you see, as young as it appears,

Speaking in bounds, has weather’d forty years.²⁵

Brotherton Collection MS Lt 10 contains twenty-seven poems attributable to Style, ranging from religious and philosophical reflection to social satire, from praise of William III and Mary II to autobiographical narrative. They also include five translations from Horace and versions of three Old Testament passages.²⁶ Eighteen of the poems are in the same trained literary hand, clearly the result of a planned campaign of copying (ff. 1-42). All of these begin on a new recto page, and each is signed off with a near-identical ink flourish. Occasional small corrections in a different, plain hand suggest that the main scribe may have been a professional, brought in by Style to transcribe his poems in a uniform manner, the work then subject to later checking.²⁷ Three poems in very similar but not identical and less restrained handwriting occupy ff. 44, 46, and 48-49 (for example, the forms of some capital letters differ), but it is possible that the same scribe was concerned, brought back at a later date.

On f. 43r is a poem in a quite different hand, fluent but less formal, and much less disciplined in terms of writing area. The same hand is responsible for five further poems occupying ff. 50-53, 55-57. This may possibly be Style’s own writing, especially as the hand in question adds a final couplet to the poem transcribed on f. 46r-v, overwriting the scribe’s ink flourish.

Another, less practised hand has filled the blank space at the foot of f. 7v (following Style’s poem ‘Vice triumphant’) with some lines of prose: ‘It is only the beauty of the mind, & the never fadeing charms of vertue, that can lay hold of us for ever; faces as well as the years have their seasons, and a winter will come.’ Apart from the final five words (which are an abbreviated paraphrase), this is a quotation from p. 114 of The Excellent Woman Described by her True Character and their Opposites (London, 1692, repr. 1695), an English translation, by ‘T. D.’, of Jacques Du Bosc, L’Honneste femme. The writer in this case may be a later, possibly female owner of the book.

One interpretation of the lack of uniformity after f. 42, which includes the presence of three blank leaves (ff. 45, 47, 54), is that the stint of copying on ff. 1-42 represents the sum of the poems that Style had by then written. The inclusion of a poem extravagantly praising William III for concluding peace with France, and so probably written in 1697 (ff. 36r-38r), dates this batch of copying to the late 1690s; perhaps to 1698, noted above as the possible year of the book’s binding. After f. 51 the physical structure of the book as it has survived becomes harder to discern (evidence of regular sewing disappears), and there are nineteen surviving blank leaves after the final foliated leaf (f. 57; the foliation is modern). Several stubs towards the end indicate where leaves have apparently been cut out. It is possible that Style decided to have the book bound following the writing of ff. 1-42, but, expecting to add further poems, ensured that a good number of blank leaves were included. The sequence of copying following f. 42 is uncertain, but it may be that the scribe responsible for ff. 44, 46, and 48-49 executed his commission first (having been asked, for whatever reason, not to write on ff. 43, 45, and 47 of what may now have been a bound volume), and the hand that is very likely Style’s then took over, at some point deciding to go back and make use of f. 43r.

Oliver Style’s Poems (1)

If the above interpretation is correct, the poems copied after f. 42 very likely represent later compositions, written in Style’s remaining few years before he died in February 1703. Several share a preoccupation with suffering and death, and it seems clear that he is unwell. The three items copied in a scribal hand include versions of two biblical passages: Psalm 137 (f. 44r-v), in which the Israelites, in their extremity, lament their exile in Babylon, and Job 3 (f. 46r-v), in which the speaker wishes he had never been born. The longer poem on ff. 48r-49v, headed ‘A serious meditation’, is explicitly occasioned by thoughts of death. Given that it can strike even when in the best of health,

How vain’s his hope who thinks to keep the feild

When years and sicknesse summon him to yeild,

But when pale greife with fresh supplys appears,

Assists the foe and joynes its strength to years,

What human courage can their force control?

Earth take thy due, kind heav’n receive my soul. (f. 48r)

The third line suggests that Style may be suffering from a recent bereavement (possibly the death of his brother William) as well as his own ill health. His response is to hope that tearful repentance allied to God’s love will ensure him a place in heaven, and he proceeds to ask forgiveness for sexual sins, for slander (‘Words the worst engine malice ever found’, f. 48v), for misappropriation of other’s goods, for neglecting to feed the poor, for having unwittingly offended his father, and for frequent blaspheming. These separate appeals frequently end with a version of the formula ‘pardon them and me’, so as to include others who have wronged him, as in the passage relating to his father, where friction between them is made explicit:

And if

T’a fathers laws I have rebellious grown,

’Fore heaven I speake it, ’tis to me unknown.

But if I did unknowingly offend,

Or if my father has been too unkind,

Mistakeing sicknesse for a froward mind,

Oh! let my prayers and tears attonement be,

And heav’n in mercy pardon him and me. (f. 49r)

The six poems in what is possibly Style’s own hand are more miscellaneous in nature, but death and suffering are never far away, and so likely reflect his own mental state. Thus the untitled ‘Thrice happy they when life uneasie grew’ (f. 50r) regrets that Christianity forbids suicide, enviously citing Lucretia, Cleopatra, Brutus, and Cato as examples of those who were able to take that route. If it were allowed to Christians, ‘How short a care I’de put to lifes disease | Quitting a world that does no longer please’. Also untitled, ‘Twas night and weary nature seem’d to sleep’ (ff. 51r-53v) is a lengthy rambling exposé of the true nature of human existence – suffering – beginning with a dream vision for which Style employs a pastoral persona: ‘Strephon’ flies around the world, lamenting the extent of cruelty and exploitation of others, all to satisfy human greed. Returning home, and conscious of his own future fate, he rehearses the various kinds of sickness that result in death (‘And sorrow too by slowe aproaches kills’, f. 51v), fiercely castigating the medical profession for useless quackery and high fees. The poem ends, however, with an unexpected rejection of the accumulated evidence derived from ‘reasons light’, in the face of the ‘heauenly beames’ that assure Christians of the life to come (f. 53r).

‘Cromwells ghost’ (f. 55r-v) then consists wholly of a defiant justification of Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorial and murderous actions, put into the mouth of his ghost: ‘No crimes were farther carried on than mine.’ In contrast, ‘Psalme the 15’ (f. 57r-v) is a straightforward rendering of its source text, listing the characteristics of a truly good man, deserving of a place in heaven. ‘To my owne soule’ (f. 56r-v) is more personal, first counselling himself against losing ‘Your vertue freedom & your heauen’ merely ‘To purchase guilded dunghills here below’, before moving on to the futility of spending time flattering kings, who are ‘only moulded of sutch clay as wee’. Subsequent lines reveal that Style, on this evidence, would not have wished for the splendid tomb with which his family marked his resting place:

Some tombe perhaps they orderd ere they dyed

May long remaine a witness of theyr pride.

Oh may some turfe when I am dead apear

The humble proof of my submission here. (f. 56v)

The most unexpected of the six poems in question is that written on f. 43r, which is headed ‘Said by a young lady to her child taking something to destroy it’, the child in question still in its mother’s womb. Whether or not it relates to a tragedy of which Style has personal knowledge, it deserves quoting in full:²⁸

Thou that thy life ere thy birth must loose,

 Twixt nothing and a being, mixture of extremes,

Unfinisht embrio whom both states refuse

 As eatch too perfect or imperfect deemes.

Got when my passion honours lawes orecame,

 Condemned to death by its seuere decree,

Unhappie product of my lawless flame,

 Thou must the victime of my honowr bee.

Dye to preuent thy cruell mothers shame,

 But doing so forget you ere were mine,

And when returnd to chaos whence you came

 Tell not the shades the horrour of my crime.

To loue and honnour all mankind’s a slaue,

 Whose rigid lawes none nobly can decline.

Blame loue then, who th’imperfect being gaue,

 And tyrant honour that doth thy death designe.

This 16-line poem, unusually in abab quatrains, is equally remarkable in being a rendering into English of a sonnet by the French poet Jean Hesnault (1611-1682?), libertine and atheist, published in his Oeuvres diverses of 1670.²⁹ Hesnault’s 14-line poem, rhyming abba cddc eef gfg, is separated into four stanzas by inserted printer’s ornaments, and it can be seen that Style follows its structure closely:

Toy qui meurs avant que de naistre,

Assemblage confus de l’estre & du neant,

Triste Avorton, informe Enfant,

Rebut du Neant & de l’Estre,

Toy que l’amour fit par un crime,

Et que l’honneur défait par un crime à son tour.

Funeste Ouvrage de l’Amour,

De l’honneur funeste victime,

Donne fin aux remors par qui tu t’es vangé;

Et du fond du neant où je t’ay replongé,

N’entretien point l’horreur dont ma faute est suivie.

Deux Tyrans opposez ont decidé ton sort.

L’amour malgré l’honneur t’a fait donner la vie.

L’honneur malgré l’amour te fait donner la mort.

Style, however, elaborates the French poem, making it both much more personal and less severe. Thus in contrast to the first-person emotions given expression in Style’s second stanza, Hesnault uses ‘je’ and ‘ma’ only once, at the end of his third, and there is no equivalent to Style’s l. 9, ‘Dye to prevent thy cruell mothers shame’. Hesnault’s expressed attitude to his subject-matter is much more matter of fact, as exemplified by the studied paradoxes of his final stanza.

It is to be noted further that the religious unorthodoxy of Style’s l. 11, ‘And when returnd to chaos whence you came’, referring to the body’s fate after death, finds an echo in his poem ‘On the sight of the tombs of my dear mother and brothers’ (discussed earlier), which contains the couplet ‘Unborn I still in those dark beds had slept | Where things unmade and things destroy’d are kept’ (f. 17r). Whereas ‘And when returnd to chaos whence you came’ translates Hesnault’s l. 10, these two lines are closely modelled on a line from the Earl of Rochester’s short poem beginning ‘After death, nothing is, and nothing death’, namely ‘Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept’ (l. 10). Rochester’s poem is headed ‘From Seneca, Troades, Act II, Chorus’,³⁰ and it is striking that Hesnault included a version of the same passage from Seneca in his Oeuvres diverses (pp. 100-13). Given the closeness of the wording, there is little doubt that Style modelled the couplet in ‘On the sight of the tombs’ directly on Rochester’s line, but this does not rule out an acquaintance with Hesnault’s rendering of Seneca. It seems clear, at the least, that Style was attracted by Rochester and Hesnault’s Lucretian materialism.

Oliver Style’s Poems (2)

The strength of feeling and expression in some of the above-mentioned poems, together with the boundary-breaking subject-matter of this last one, suggests that Style was primarily writing for himself. The same is likely to hold good for the main sequence of eighteen poems, copied on to ff. 1-42 probably in 1698. No more than a few are in any way datable, but it is possible that their order loosely reflects their date of composition. The poem placed second, ‘Reflections on the approaching age’ (ff. 4r-5r), finds Style mainly concerned about his advancing years, but the striking metaphor with which it begins (using ‘Indian’ in the commonly extended sense of ‘East Asian’) suggests strongly that he was indeed seriously injured in the Smyrna earthquake:

A gay new vessel sailing out of port

Makes winds its pastime and rough storms its sport.

But when that ship has seen the Indian shore,

Hath had its main mast and its rigging tore,

Returning home under those winds she fails

That setting out did but just fill her sails. (f. 4r)

But despite a handful of more extravagant lines, such as ‘Thousand diseases then fill every vein’, Style is here less concerned about the inevitability of death than in ‘A serious meditation’ and ‘Twas night and weary nature seem’d to sleep’, copied later in the manuscript. Instead he chooses to invoke the assistance of ‘heav’nly powers’, who advise him that to enjoy happiness in old age he must cultivate reason, virtue, friendship, and charity. The poem may therefore date from relatively early in the 1690s.

Style’s first-hand account of the earthquake itself, placed fourth in the sequence, does not refer to any injury, but (as will be seen) is concerned overwhelmingly with the fate of the town, its inhabitants, and his friends. It was presumably written relatively soon after the disaster. The one poem that may possibly have been written earlier, on grounds of subject-matter, is the one next following, ‘On the death of a parrott’ (f. 12r-v). Put into the bird’s mouth, its departed but now free spirit laments what had been a life of caged captivity, ironically thanking its captor for his ‘mistaken care | Which doubtlesse you intended for my good’.

Certain other poems in the main sequence can be more or less precisely dated. As was said earlier, ‘On the sight of the tombs of my dear mother and brothers in Watringbury church, who dy’d while I was in Asia’ (ff. 17r-18v) is likely to have been written soon after Style’s return from the Levant. Also important autobiographically is ‘Reflections on Mr Dolls drawing my picture’ (ff. 31r-32v), which appears to refer to his disfigurement, as in ‘Doll hath dealt kindly by my batter’d face’ and ‘Too just, so paid to make a man deform’d’, as quoted above. Some lines later Style alludes to his age (‘The face you see, as young as it appears, | Speaking in bounds, has weather’d forty years’), suggesting a date of composition in the mid-1690s. He returns to the twin themes of deformity and public scorn towards the end of the poem, where he refers with bitter irony to the virtues of flattering and dissembling needed to rise in society, and even makes out, no doubt with exaggeration, that he is dependent on charity (‘a strong support’ possibly refers to the need for physical assistance):³¹

Such virtues never want a strong support

Nor walke bedab’led to the knees in dirt …

… But when recoiling natures going down,

Then to be aw’d still with a sullen frown,

Still walke with pointed daggers o’re ones head,

The slipp’ry ropes of strictest conduct tread,

And forc’d to flatter meanly for ones bread. (f. 32r)

Such bitterness of expression is stronger still in two poems relating to women. ‘A satyr against marriage’ (ff. 14r-16r), also noticed earlier, is particularly outspoken, expressing views that were hardly for polite circulation, though they could again have been exaggerated for effect. Thus Style continues, shortly after the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay:

But two good dayes make up the marriage dose,

The day you’r bound and the blest day you’r loose.

The pleasant’st joy I can in marriage see

Is the sweet hope of being one day free. (f. 14r)

Subsequent lines make clear that if married he would be forever hoping for his wife’s death.³² But Style is not entirely misogynistic, seeing that (‘contracts I hate’) he goes on to extol the benefits of free love:

Lover and mistresse is a warmer name,

More apt to kindle and mantain a flame.

While wee make love, still a new fondnesse grows,

Love’s a wild boy and he no fetters knows.

When e’re you offer to bound his flight

He takes his wings and leaves you out of sight. (f. 14v)

If ‘A satyr against marriage’ is to be read autobiographically, it is possible that the views expressed were hardened by earlier experience. Another poem, ‘On a perjur’d lover’ (f. 34r-v), reveals that Style had apparently been engaged to be married (‘Happy for me, else I had been your spouse’) until his lover broke her promises to him, possibly through infidelity: ‘Nay know I’me happy thinking that I’me led | By better stars from such a faithlesse bed.’ The preceding couplet, asserting that he has not been emotionally affected, may even (in the light of ‘Said by a young lady to her child’) allude to an unwanted pregnancy (‘Mine the content, while you have the concern; | To see your falsehood can do me no harm’), but it is perhaps more likely that the woman’s concern is for her reputation.

A poem of a quite different kind, perhaps from the mid-1690s, is the discursive ‘A poem presented to the Honourable the Lady B.’ (ff. 26r-29r), the dedicatee being Style’s maternal cousin Susan Armine (d. 1713), who in 1662 had married Sir Henry Belasyse. Style begins by alluding again to his foreign travels, adopting the same persona as he used in ‘Twas night and weary nature seem’d to sleep’ in order to create a pretended distance between himself and his subject-matter:

Strephon that had so many climates seen,

And of such hazards had the witnesse been,

With travel tir’d, att length was gently laid

Beneath an oak and to himselfe thus said. (f. 26r)

Following this preamble, he begins by contrasting ‘the just order’ of most of creation with the universality of human disorder, asking controversially ‘What was it made this great machine the world?’. Was it ‘from eternity the same’ or was it in fact made by ‘some God’ (f. 26r)? And he returns to this problem at the end of the poem, with an appeal to Lady Belasyse for an answer:

’Tis therefore to the judgment of your mind,

From errors dross so perfectly refin’d,

That with submission I desire to know

Whether a deity made the world or no? (f. 29r)

Style’s agnosticism is here very apparent. Although he writes positively of heaven in certain later poems, the nearest he comes to praising God is at the start of the manuscript’s first item, ‘A poem against knowledge’, where it soon becomes apparent that this praise is limited to God’s initial creation of the world and the paradisal nature of life in Eden before the Fall. ‘Adam’s crime’, in contrast – his desire for knowledge, which brought death and suffering to mankind – leads to the scathing reflection:

If such the blessings of great parents be

Give me the curses of an enemy.

Th’Almighty better had for man design’d

If to his laws he had his will resign’d. (f. 2r)

Style then ends the poem with a back-handed compliment praising God for at least threatening Adam and Eve with what would happen if they disobeyed him.

Much of the central part of the poem to Lady Belasyse is a lengthy exposé of the miseries inflicted on humanity by those wielding power, Style’s preoccupations including the endless cycle of children suffering for the sins of their fathers (‘So an eternal whipping still goes round’, f. 27r); rulers wasting their riches and their subjects’ lives by waging war (again, many soldiers, in joining up, ‘th’oppression of their parents shun’, f. 27v); and the misery endured by servants, beggars, prisoners, and (unexpectedly) children unjustly disinherited as a result of their mothers making late second marriages.

But the final thirty lines, changing direction, begin by castigating ‘heav’ns blackguard’, namely those ‘who in their wondrous zeal of church defence’ (f. 28v) wish to return the country to popery. In this connection Style next turns to address Lady Belasyse, first praising her mind and character, then asserting how much happier England would have been had James, Duke of York, while not yet king, kept his promise (to his by then widowed mistress) and married her:

Nay if kind heav’n had granted you that throne

Which, had vows had weight, would have been your own,

It much more Englands happynesse had been

To have had you, then yours, to be theire queen.

Then we’d ne’re fear’d being to Rome enslav’d;

What blood, what treasure Albion might have sav’d.

Yet you may joy, defrauded of your due,

To see how heav’n does your wrongs pursue

And plagues the guilty breaker of his vow. (ff.28v-29r)

The implication is that Lady Belasyse, like Style a staunch Protestant, would have at least damped down James’s Catholicism, thus preventing the crisis of 1688, the accession of William and Mary, and subsequently the Nine Years’ War (these references very likely dating the poem to the mid-1690s). Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), in his History of his Own Time, records with reference to 1673 that Charles II talked his brother out of making such a match and that Lady Belasyse also had pressure put upon her.³³ She was compensated the following year by being made a life peeress in her own right, taking the title Baroness Belasyse of Osgoodby.

Style’s preoccupation with the cruelty and suffering in the world, expressed so strongly in the above poem, is modified elsewhere in the direction of social satire. Thus ‘Vice triumphant’ (ff. 6r-7v) takes the form of character sketches of virtuous and vicious social types, beginning with an example of the latter:

The brisk young wench that don’t herselfe confine

To honours laws but digs her native mine,

To her gay coaches and rich manteaus come,

Pearls from the Indies and perfumes from Rome.

All natures stores seem made for her delight,

Courted all day and still caress’d at night. (f. 6r)

Her contrast is a chaste servant girl. Later on we find a virtuous wife, suffering at the hands of a brutish husband, paired with an unfaithful wife who successfully sues her husband for financial gain. Other featured types include a corrupt and an honest steward, a pandar and a parasite, and, as an example of those who cheat the state, Edward Pauncefort (‘Pansfourd’, f. 7r), a moneylender with an official appointment who in 1695 was investigated by the Commons for financial irregularity.³⁴ In turn, ‘Reflections on mankind’ (ff. 39r-42v) is devoted to exposing the ubiquity of human folly in the face of reason. It too begins with character sketches, including of a pedant and a young gallant, both types providing scope for striking turns of phrase:

A pedant scorning vulgar words to speak,

Swell’d with conceit and bristled up with Greek,

Who of the numerous volumes he has read

Has only heap’d a Babel in his head … .

… . While the young gallant with no other trade

But dressing, danceing, park, and serenade,

His head adorn’d with wig exactly curl’d,

The scorn and terrour of the polish’d world,

Laughs att all learning, scorning all thats writt,

And vainly takes his ignorance for witt. (f. 39r)

After more general reflection (‘All men are fools tho’ not with like excesse | Only distinguish’d by the more or lesse’, f. 40r) Style turns his attention at greater length, and with much circumstantial detail, to the serious foolishness of misers, wastrels, gamblers, and (rather differently) authors. The poem ends with an anecdote that begins ‘So in my travels once a Turk I knew’ (f. 42r), the fool in question described as furious with a doctor who had cured him of the delightful delusion that he was already enjoying the happiness of heaven.

Far less personal – except for making clear Style’s political and religious preferences – are lavish tributes to the twin Protestant monarchs of the 1690s. Following Mary II’s death in December 1694, Style’s ‘On the death of the late Queen Mary’ (ff. 22r-25r) is an extravagant pastoral lament in which personifications of the spirits of England and Belgium (i.e. Holland) comfort Style’s habitual persona Strephon in his distress. Equally laudatory is a poem ‘On the late peace’ (ff. 36r-38r), applauding her husband William III for his part in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick and so very likely written that year.

Interspersed amongst Style’s original compositions are five translations of well-known poems by Horace: four odes (I: 22, II: 14, III: 9, and IV: 7) and the Carmen saeculare.³⁵ Style may perhaps have been attracted to the first of these because of its references to what he renders as ‘Moorish bows’ and ‘Lybias burning sands’ (f. 13r). Odes II: 14 and III: 9 are both about the inevitability of human death.

‘Advice to a Painter How to Draw the Earthquake’

The only English poet named by Style (during his lament for Mary II) is Abraham Cowley: ‘Not Cowleys selfe could all this meeting tell | What mighty sorrows did their bosomes swell’ (f. 24r). But Style had almost certainly read Dryden, the opening of whose ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ is very likely echoed in the first couplet of ‘On a perjur’d lover’:

In pious times, e’r Priest-craft did begin,

Before Polygamy was made a sin;³⁶

While th’infant world allow’d us happy times,

Perjuries then were counted mighty crimes. (f. 34r)

He had clearly read enough contemporary English poetry to allow him to write with confidence, if not always metrical elegance. Throughout his very personal body of work he succeeds in using pentameter verse effectively to give voice to the various troubling preoccupations resulting from the catastrophe that defined his life.

The 139-line poem printed below, ‘Advice to a painter how to draw the earthquake that hapned in Smyrna June 30^th 1688’, reveals knowledge of one particular genre of contemporary English verse. Advice to a painter poems had been popularised by Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell, and were in vogue in the 1670s and 1680s, usually for satirical purposes.³⁷ Style, differently, uses the form to help structure a mournful narrative. Following a short invocation –

Painter, that by a guiltlesse magick art

From gloomy shades canst raise up shapes like men,

Let thy bold pencil living forms impart

To the rough draughts I trace out with my pen

– he asks the artist to begin by painting Smyrna as it was before tragedy struck, a prosperous and attractive coastal city (ll. 5-14). The next passage, in a different mode, anticipates what is about to happen; questions people’s habitual hopes for the future given that such solid-seeming buildings ‘so uncertain stand | As if but only pictur’d on the sand’ (ll. 17-18); and briefly describes the moment of the earthquake, questioning its possible causes (ll. 33-37).³⁸

Style’s concern is then initially for the survivors – those who were not among the ‘Sixteen thousand souls […] damn’d to deaths dark night’ (ll. 25-26) – and it is for a depiction of the crowds of living victims that he next turns to the painter, requesting him to ‘deface’ his earlier work to show the resulting ‘confusion’ (ll. 38-39). Again, after six lines of instruction he turns to describing the terrible scene himself (ll. 44-53), following this with a general injunction to ‘perceive’ a ‘slower crowd’ (l. 54) of those unlikely to survive.

The painter is then explicitly asked to pause (‘But painter, now thy work a while must stay’, l. 60), as Style’s attention shifts to four of his own friends who perished in the disaster. His lament for their deaths fills more than ninety lines, during which it emerges even more personally that two of them were dining with him that day – that they died whilst he survived. The lament as a whole begins with the loss of his dear friend ‘Barnardiston’, characterised as ‘Thou kind companion of my blooming years, | Thou grave advisor of my great affairs’ (ll. 63-64). The reference is to his cousin Samuel Barnardiston (‘Nearly thy birth was unto mine alli’d’, l. 66), for whom see above in connection with his family’s possible influence on Style’s choice of career. Following next is ‘Stephens’, praised as a youth with a bright future ahead of him, but ‘doom’d to dye […] just at my table’ (ll. 78-79). This is Henry Stephens, born c. 1667, who had come out to Smyrna as recently as 1687. He too had a family relationship with Oliver Style, being the son of a cousin (née Anne Cholmley) of Sir Thomas Style’s second wife, Margaret Twisden.³⁹

The third friend commemorated is ‘Laura’, whom he remembers as having prayed for him on an occasion when he was ‘languishing and weak’, and, remarkably, for having been the first to teach him ‘the language of the East’ (ll. 86, 88). Last of these four victims, identified only as the father of ‘Fair Isabella’, is another who had been invited to dine at Style’s table that fatal day and who was ‘slain | At my left hand’ (ll. 91-92). Only at this point does Style give praise (rather than thanks) to heaven for having protected his life.

Advice to the painter resumes when Style moves on to the final phase of the day’s horrors: the devastating fire that succeeded the earthquake itself. ‘Let greedy flames march o’re the town apace’, he begins (l. 103), before instructing the painter to ‘Draw crowds of those whose fate ’twas to survive’ (l. 106). But art, he acknowledges, cannot depict the movement of the flames or the cries of those trapped within fallen buildings who realise they cannot escape. One of these is another female friend, Zarma, who, in a particularly affecting passage, unsuccessfully asks him to kill her before the flames arrive (ll. 114-21).

Style’s final address to the painter follows immediately: ‘But now the flames give a sufficient light | Thou may’st even draw the curtain of the night | And me all pensive sitting on the shore’ (ll. 122-24). The poem then ends quickly. Continuing with the present-tense description used throughout, Style laments his financial ruin but takes heart from the ‘brisk and lively hope’ that ‘springs up’ after he has invoked ‘heav’ns aid’ (ll. 130-31). We last see him, with others, setting sail for Italy ‘in search of a more faithfull land’ (l. 139). This relative optimism, scarcely reflected in his other poems, may suggest that this one was written before he returned home to Wateringbury.

‘Advice to a Painter’, it should be said, is not the only English-language description of the Smyrna earthquake, but Style’s is very different in kind. Soon after the event the London Gazette printed ‘An Account of a dreadful Earthquake and Fire at Smyrna, in a Letter from an English Gentleman at Constantinople, dated July 8. 1688’, which was reprinted in Nathaniel Crouch’s The General History of Earthquakes, Being an Account of the Most Remarkable and Tremendous Earthquakes that Have Happened in Divers Parts of the World (London, 1694), pp. 138-39. To quote from the latter:

On June thirty between 11. and 12. at Noon there happened at Smyrna a violent Earthquake, which in a Minute threw down many, and shattered all the Houses in that City. […]. About four hours after the Earthquake, a Fire broke out in the Frank-Street from an House called the Genovese-House, which by the strength of the Wind, and in that Consternation, having no opposition soon consumed the Frank-Street and all the Town, except the Skirts and the Houses on the side of the Hill, which stand scattering and not contiguous. The most moderate computation of People destroyed is 5000. Some make it double the number. […] [M]any poor People were buried in the ruins before they could get help.

After drawing attention to the death of some 400 Jews, including a famous rabbi, Aaron Aben Haim, and to that of both the Metropolitan of Symrna and the Patriarch of Alexandria, the writer explains that the European residents suffered far fewer casualties because, it being a Saturday, many had gone out into the surrounding countryside.

The same point is made in an eye-witness account of the earthquake dated 19 July, sent in a letter from W. Farrington (another English factor) to the Rev. William Haly.⁴⁰ He does not mention Oliver Style, but names the English residents who were killed, including Samuel Barnardiston and Henry Stephens. ‘Mr Peirce’, also killed, may possibly be Isabella’s father, slain at Style’s left hand:⁴¹

This sudden judgment of God Almighty happened about a quarter of an hour before 12 at noon on the 30^th ult.; which day being a Saturday the Consul and near two-thirds of Station were gone on their Spasso in the country; myself and about 18 of the Factory, Mr Adams and Mr Husther’s scrivan were in town, of whom were killed Mr Samuel Barnardiston, Mr Stephens and Mr Peirce, and Mr Adam’s scrivan his thigh broke, Mr Husther’s both his legs, but are in a fair way of recovery, one of Capt Cork’s sailors and Doctor Guppi’s boy also killed; the great escape all the rest of us had is admirable.

Farrington goes on to describe the running to the sea, the aftershocks, the cries for help, and the many injured people, ‘amongst whom was brought Mr Stephens dead, whose limbs and ribs were all broken (cf. ll. 80-81 of Style’s poem, ‘Yet thy cold corps I took with pious care, | And to thy freinds the mournfull burden bear’). Of the consequences of the fire, which he estimates began about two hours after the earthquake struck, he writes:

[I]t increased so furiously that there was little time to save any of the effects but what were most remote; numbers of people were burnt that could not be relieved, for the earthquakes continued so frequently that it was presumption in anyone to venture himself amongst the broken walls which often fell and killed some that went to help others.

In this case it is ll. 102-21 of Style’s poem that provides the detail, including of his moving encounter with the trapped Zarma.

Another, more official account of what happened survives in the form of a dispatch from William Raye, the English consul in Smyrna, to the ambassador in Constantinople, Sir William Trumbull.⁴² Raye, writing on 25 July, is most concerned to report the estimated financial loss of the British, French, and Dutch nations in the city, made worse by the extent of the looting, attributed to ‘mariners’. Rather than listing the British casualties he records losses to property: ‘Mr Barnardiston’s house, Mr Nicoll, Mr Onslow, and Mr Cater have suffered most, and for my own part […] I lost everything I had in the house, save a very small part of my plate.’ Of the fire, he writes that ‘It burnt violently about 48 hours and consumed about half the city and in the first 12 most of our houses’.

Raye dwells, however, on the number of people likely to have perished in the disaster. The ‘English gentleman’ quoted earlier, writing on 8 July (eight days after the earthquake), estimates at least 5,000 people dead, perhaps double that number, while Farrington, on 19 July, reports that ‘It is thought in this great calamity are perished circa one-third of the inhabitants of the town’. Raye, more than three weeks after the event, when he was presumably in possession of more up-to-date information, tells Trumbull:

It was discoursed at first as if by compute 10,000 souls perished; now the Turks say 15,000, but admitting there were 120,000 in Smyrna, which is the most usual compute, to reckon one-sixth perished is a very moderate computation; nay, I find a great part inclining to believe that a fourth-part were destroyed.

Style, on whatever basis, put the number of dead at ‘sixteen thousand’ (l. 25).⁴³

I now print his poem from its sole known witness, Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 10.⁴⁴ I have retained the scribe’s orthography, but capitalisation, on-the-line punctuation (other than exclamation marks), and paragraphing are editorial.⁴⁵ In l. 74 a second scribal hand, possibly Style’s own, has corrected the wording, as recorded in the notes, below. While the verse form is predominantly Style’s habitual pentameter couplets (with a triplet at ll. 35-37), it may be noted that ll. 1-12 are composed of quatrains.

[f. 8r] Advice to a painter how to draw the earthquake that hapned in Smyrna

June 30th 1688

  Painter, that by a guiltlesse magick art

  From gloomy shades canst raise up shapes like men,

  Let thy bold pencil living forms impart

  To the rough draughts I trace out with my pen.

    Let Smyrna first beneath an hill be plac’d, 5

  Whose towring head old ruines may adorn,

  Yet with those trophyes seems as proudly grac’d

  As ensigns do whom frequent fights have torn.

  Then let a bay give to the town a shore,

  The curling billows may with ships be crown’d, 10

  Whose various colours may those nations score

  By whom her freindship or her power is own’d.

  Let th’adjacent gardens summers liv’ry wear,

  And all things gay and flourishing appear.

    Yet these fair tow’rs which allmost kiss the sky 15

  Must in a moment all in rubbish lye.

[f. 8v] If things so solid, so uncertain stand

  As if but only pictur’d on the sand,

  Why should mankind spread his hope so wide,

  Whose life to death so nearly is ally’d? 20

  In vain you merchants toil for envy’d wealth,

  In vain you sick men look for wellcome health,

  Vainly young virgins destine future love,

  For all your dooms, alas, are sign’d above.

  Sixteen thousand souls that saw the chearfull light 25

  Last moment, next are damn’d to deaths dark night,

  And that fair town, where all things seem’d to smile,

  Is now become its dwellers funeral pile,

  Those spires where heav’n by erring zeal was prais’d

  Sunk low as quarries whence they first were rais’d. 30

  Pallace nor cottage can withstand the shock

  When heav’ns strong arm doth foundations rock.

    Whether these tumults naturally arise

  From pent up winds that seek the larger skyes,

  Or from the heat of subterranean fire, 35

  Is what in vain wee curiously inquire,

  While our bold sins heav’ns lasting patience tire.

[f. 9r]    But painter, now thou mayst thy work deface,

  And spread confusion o’re the fatal place.

  Draw the mix’d crowd among the ruines crush’d 40

  And all heav’ns face obscur’d in clouds of dust,

  With scatter’d troops that from the ruines come

  As if but newly risen from the tomb.

  Greife and amazement in each face appears,

  And hoary beards are cover’d o’re with tears, 45

  Grave matrons beating their distracted breasts,

  Wishing in vain they’d perish’d with the rest,

  Mix’d with young virgins who their parents mourn,

  Fearing to hear their fates for whom they burn,

  And lovers too whom vainly fate did spare 50

  Unlesse their loves have been as much her care,

  With little children who by nature led

  Run seeking mothers who alas! are dead.

    But far behind a slower crowd perceive,

  Hasting as wounds and weaknesse give them leave. 55

  To shatterd limbs their fright doth vigour give,

  And deaths approaches makes them long to live,

[f. 9v] Whose ghastly wounds for pity doe intreat,

  Pity, which few in this confusion meet.

    But painter, now thy work a while must stay, 60

  While were ’tis due I just resentments pay.

  You, Barnardiston, first shall have my tears,

  Thou kind companion of my blooming years,

  Thou grave advisor of my great affairs,

  Still partner of my pleasures and my cares. 65

  Nearly thy birth was unto mine alli’d

  But nearer far by sacred freindship ty’d.

  Just in the height of manly beautyes prime,

  Or doom’d by fate or snatch’d by chances crime,

  Take my just greif and this unpolish’d verse 70

  As mean attendants to thy noble herse.

  These greens and flow’rs, O may they ever live,

  And like thy fame still gratefull odours give.

    Nor, Stephens, thou in youths first blooming pride

  Shall be forgott that perish’d by my side. 75

  Fair was thy morning and a glorious day

  Might follow, had feirce destiny giv’n way.

[f. 10r] If doom’d to dye by its severe decree,

  Why must the place just at my table be?

  Yet thy cold corps I took with pious care, 80

  And to thy freinds the mournfull burden bear.

    Nor Laura, thou, tho’ buried with the crowd

  Shall be forgott whose virtue speaks so loud.

  Let some say freindship can’t ’twixt sexes be

  From vice refin’d, yet thine I’le swear was free. 85

  Thou, that when I was languishing and weak

  With pious vows didst heavens mercyes seek,

  That taught’st me first the language of the East,

  May thy fame travel while thy ashes rest.

    Fair Isabella justly might complain 90

  Did I not mention her poor father slain

  At my left hand, whom fatally that day

  My invitation did to fate betray.

    But now ’tis time that I just praises give

  To heav’n, by whose mercy ’tis I live. 95

  Oh! may that life protected by thy care

  Be ever spent in piety and prayer.

[f. 10v] May thy great praise in nobler verse be sung,

  And when I speak still dwell upon my tongue,

  And may each virtue growing in my breast 100

  Lead me att length to thy eternal rest.

    But painter, now to finish our disgrace,

  Let greedy flames march o’re the town apace,

  And in proud triumph thro’ the ruines goe

  To make this place a perfect scene of woe. 105

  Draw crowds of those whose fate ’twas to survive,

  Whose only hope in buried wealth did live,

  Whose desp’rate looks survey the growing flame,

  Which art can’t master nor resistance tame.

  But on thy art it cannot be impos’d 110

  T’expresse their crys in hallow’d vaults inclos’d,

  And with what horrour these poor wretches waitt

  The sad approaches of their certain fate.

    Poor Zarma, thine with ease may be express’d,

  Whose tender limbs a mighty beam oppress’d, 115

  So as no art can her wish’d freedom get,

  And only doth a sudden death entreat;

[f. 11r] And from my hand she begs the fatal blow

  Which coward I had not the heart to doe

  But saw the fair unhappy nymph expire 120

  Wrap’d in th’embraces of th’unwilling fire.

    But now the flames give a sufficient light

  Thou may’st even draw the curtain of the night

  And me all pensive sitting on the shore

  Whilst greedy flames my buried wealth devour. 125

  My hope’s defeated, expectation cross’d,

  And ten years labour in a moment lost,

  Enough, were’t not for heav’ns immediate care

  T’have driven a stronger courage to despair.

    Drown’d in these thoughts I heav’ns aid invoke 130

  Whence strait springs up a brisk and lively hope.

  Thou hope, that still do’st on th’unhappy waitt,

  Thou cheap redresser of a wayward fate,

  Thou captives freedom and thou ease from pain,

  Thou beggars plenty and thou loosers gain. 135

    With this poor cargo and auspicious gales

  T’wards Italy wee bend our swelling sails,

[f. 11v] While crowds of people darken all the strand,

  Like me in search of a more faithfull land.

Notes

1  guiltlesse: harmless, as opposed to (presumably) wicked magical arts.

3  pencil: ‘a paintbrush made with fine hair tapered to a point’ (OED, n., I.1).

8  ensigns: military or naval flags.

11 score: point out, indicate, in a transferred use of the sense ‘mark’.

23 destine: make plans for.

24 sign’d: assigned, appointed (by heaven).

29 erring zeal: presumably with reference to non-Christian churches in Smyrna.

49 for whom they burn: i.e. for whom they feel as yet unrequited love.

61 were: i.e. where. resentments pay: express feelings of sorrow.

66 Cf. Dryden’s ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’, l. 3, ‘For sure our Souls were near ally’d’.

72 greens: ‘Freshly-cut branches, leaves, or other greenery’ (OED, green, n., 2d.)

74 youths: interlined by a different hand above ‘earths’, which is crossed through,

85 refin’d: separated out.

95 mercy: preceded by ‘just’, which the scribe has crossed through.

109 art: technical skill, i.e. ability to deal with the fire.

110 art: in contrast, the painter’s art, quite unable to ‘expresse’ (111) the cries of those who are trapped, a task that therefore ‘cannot be impos’d’.

111 hallow’d vaults: probably a reference to the places of worship in which the survivors naturally sought safety.

114 In contrast, Zarma’s physical situation can ‘with ease’ be expressed by the painter.

139 a more faithfull land: possibly anticipating a return to a Christian country.

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..