The subjects of this essay came into my mind by way of a train of thought that began with the beautiful villages of the Cotswold hills of southwestern England, and that topic was stimulated by a couple of videos that I chanced upon. The circumstances also forced upon my mind the “uncertainty principle” associated with the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. It holds that the smaller the particle the investigator sets out to study, the more likely it is that the investigation itself will frustrate the search for exactitude. The Cotswolds are noted for their numerous beautifully preserved and picturesque villages. Like so many other beautiful things in our world, whether made by God or by us, their delicacy is threatened by mass tourism. This presents a dilemma for modernity and the democratic dogma, but fortunately not for me. I am writing, at a long distance away, concerning two members of the Dover family, prominent in parts of Warwickshire in earlier centuries: the Dover family.
For Captain Robert Dover, a lawyer born in Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, we have a certain death date (1641) and an approximate birth date, proposed by the Dictionary of National Biography. England has a good historical claim to being the Land of Eccentrics, and the Seventeenth Century has a claim to be at least one of the also-rans for the Age of Eccentricity. Captain Dover, whose military rank, like those of so many of his contemporaries, was mainly ceremonial, had a legal career that was likewise somewhat of the same sort. “He was bred an attorney who never tried but two causes…” That is because he had a good deal of inherited money and had better things to do.
What better things, exactly? England in the early seventeenth century was already showing the religio-political divisions that by mid-century led to civil war. Two great historians (W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman) characterized the two sides as follows: the Anglican Cavaliers were “wrong but romantic” while the Puritan Roundheads were “right but repulsive”. The Puritans were, well, puritanical killjoys. They frowned on cakes and ale, dancing, and good old family fun sports like bear-baiting. Remember Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night? Or the community self-righteousness in The Scarlet Letter? In 1605 Dover, politically conservative, religiously conventional, and classically educated, decided that what the country needed was a revival of the ancient Olympic Games. They would be set for the Thursday and Friday in Whitsun week (seven weeks after Easter), and the venue would be a particularly handsome spot in the Cotswolds. The competitors would come from the local countryside. In addition to various foot races, there was much leaping, walking on hands, rabbit hunting, throwing of heavy objects, etc., and of course “a country dance of virgins.” All this was to be punctuated by bibulous al fresco feasting. In short, something for the whole family, and something guaranteed to scandalize Puritans, and all of it presided over by Captain Dover in fancy dress on a big white horse. The Cotswold Olympics had a surprisingly long run, followed by frequent mini-revivals down into living memory.
But Robert’s peculiarities may be thought to pale in comparison with those of a later eminence of the Dover clan, namely Thomas Dover, M.D. (1660-1742), alias “Doctor Quicksilver.” This Dover has earned a place both in medical and in maritime history. Quicksilver is of course the chemical element mercury (Hg, atomic number 80), and Dr. Dover became famous for his successful use of it as a specific medicine in treating what in the England of his day was euphemistically called “the French disease” (and less euphemistically the pox or the clap.) This malady was rife among the dissolute aristocracy of Europe. It is a recurring motif in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the racier stage plays of the era.
One of Hogarth’s famous series “Marriage à la mode” depicts a visitation to the clinic of a syphilis quack. The dread disease was considered the appropriate stuff of mirth. Two young agricultural workers on the estates of Stanton Harcourt near Oxford, a young man and young woman engaged to be married, were working in the fields when a violent rainstorm suddenly burst out. They took refuge beneath the branches of a large tree which, unfortunately, was struck by a lightning bolt that killed them both. The poet Pope memorialized this tragedy in an X-rated obituary couplet:
Here lie two poor lovers, who had
the mishap
Tho’ very chaste people, to die of a clap.
Today the oral ingestion of heavy metal is generally frowned upon, some of us indeed objecting also to its aural form. But Dr. Dover discovered that if he had very good luck and a precisely minute dosage, quicksilver might kill the syphilis before it killed the one afflicted with syphilis. But it was a close call. But he did not invent the treatment, but rather refined it. One struggles to imagine the process by which this medical discovery had first been made. It was presumably by some such process as that described in Charles Lamb’s “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” in his Essays of Elia.
In popular literature of earlier
times a besetting sin of the medical professional is avarice. The money-grubbing medico was already a stock
literary character by the time Chaucer wrote his trenchant portrait of the
“Doctor of Physic” in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. But Thomas Dover took the concept of the
piratical physician to an altogether new level.
Since 1684 he had been practicing in Bristol, a major port city south of
the Cotswolds. When he decided he needed
to improve his income, he went to sea, though not as a physician. He lived in the golden age of
privateering. A privateer was a
government-sanctioned pirate, that is, someone legally sanctioned to plunder
England’s enemies on the high seas on a system of sharing the spoils. He and some associates undertook a joint
enterprise along these lines, putting up the venture capital necessary. In 1708 their ships, the “Duke” and “Duchess”
set out on a world-wide quest in search of floating wealth. Dover, a major investor, was captain of the
“Duke”. A real captain.
For the English, the enemy of choice was Spain, its once powerful empire in decay and decline. The continent of South America, half of which was made up of Spanish imperial principalities, provided the privateers with a fine hunting ground. In the course of their hunting expedition the entrepreneurs of the “Duke” and “Duchess” experienced an event of indirect importance to the history of English literature. A few blobs of earth arising from the Pacific Ocean about two hundred and fifty miles west of Santiago de Chile are dignified by the name of the Juan Fernandez Islands. On one of these a British mariner named Alexander Selkirk found himself stranded, under circumstances that are not entirely clear, in total solitude. He was an ingenious and resourceful fellow, and he had survived without seeing another human being for four years when he was discovered and rescued by the privateers, who had been amazed to see a light shining over the seascape in the night. In daylight hours they poked about and and discovered the literally isolated Scotsman. It is plausibly believed that his remarkable tale, when it became known upon his return to the British Isles, provided Daniel Defoe with the idea of writing Robinson Crusoe, a book that has been being read with pleasure by a large number of readers for the last three centuries. Later Dover was involved in a plunder raid on Guayaquil, Ecuador, a town that was an important depot for the silver mines.
Before returning home Doctor Quicksilver further displayed his maritime chops by capturing a Spanish war ship (twenty-one guns!) which he brought back to Bristol on the homeward journey of 1711. The expedition had set out in the summer of 1709. Sailing around the tip if South America was no mean feat, but Quicksilver took it in stride.
