The life of Harvey, like that of all his contemporaries, falls naturally into two great divisions. Hitherto it had been passed in peace and learned ease, but for the future much of it was to be spent in camps amongst the alarms of war. War indeed he had seen both in the Mantuan campaign and in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and the war clouds had been gathering rapidly at home. Few, however, could have imagined that the religious excitement in Scotland, coupled with the results of Strafford’s policy in Ireland and the acts of Laud in England, would provoke in a few years an internecine struggle which was not ended even by the execution of him whom in 1640 all looked upon as the Lord’s Anointed.

Harvey, perhaps, saw what was coming less clearly than any of those in a responsible position round the King, and it affected him less. Dr. Bethune, the senior Physician in Ordinary to the King, died in July, 1639, and Harvey was appointed in his place. The post was more valuable than the one he had held, for the College of Physicians contains a memorandum giving an account of the sums of money due to Harvey out of the King’s Exchequer. It is docketed—

“Money due out of the
Exchequer for my pension
21 April 1642
and also since
for my pension
of £400 p. ann.”

The appointment carried with it a lodging at Whitehall and certain perquisites which are mentioned in the following order extracted by Mr. Peter Cunningham from the Letter Book of the Lord Steward’s office:

In Scotland the religious riots of 1637 had culminated in the destruction of episcopacy and the formation of the Covenant, acts of rebellion which were assisted by Richelieu in revenge for Charles’s opposition to his designs upon Flanders. Preparations were at once made for war. Early in the summer of 1639 the King joined the army under the command of Harvey’s friend the Earl of Arundel, and summoned the peers of England to attend him in his progress towards Scotland. His splendid Court, accompanied by nearly 25,000 troops, marched to Berwick. The Scotch forces, with Leslie as their leader, marched South and encamped on Dunse Law, a hill commanding the North Road. The two armies faced each other for a short time, but the King, finding that his troops sided with the Scotch and that defeat was inevitable, concluded a sudden treaty,—signed on the 18th of June, 1639, and known as the “Pacification of Berwick,”—and returned to London. The pacification was not of long duration, but it led to the summoning of that Parliament whose actions soon showed the more sagacious politicians that a civil war was imminent.

The Estates met in Edinburgh on the 2nd of June, 1640, and ordered every one to sign the Covenant under pain of civil penalties. In so doing they acted in direct defiance of the King, and they refused to adjourn at his order. They sent Commissioners to London, but Charles refused to see them, and the Estates then appealed for help to France. A Scotch army was again mustered. It crossed the Tweed and entered England on the 20th of August, 1640. Newcastle, Durham, Tynemouth, and Shields were occupied, whilst the fortresses of Edinburgh and Dumbarton again fell into the hands of the insurgents, who defeated the King’s troops at Newburn-on-Tyne.

The King travelled to York, where he held a great Council of Peers on the 24th of September, 1640. By the advice of the Council negotiations were opened with the Scots. Eight Commissioners from their army came to Ripon, and a treaty—called the Treaty of Ripon—was entered upon, though it was not signed until nearly a year later. All that the Scots asked was conceded, and they were promised £300,000 to defray the expenses they had incurred. The armies were then disbanded, and for a time peace seemed to be restored. The King again visited Scotland, and a meeting of the Estates was held, whilst in London the Long Parliament met on the 3rd of November, 1640, and chose Lenthall their Speaker.

Harvey must have witnessed all these events, for he was in close personal attendance upon the King during the whole time. He received a warrant by Royal Sign Manual whilst the King was at York, addressed to the Comptroller of the Household and dated the 25th of September, 1640, by which the King gives £200 to Dr. William Harvey for his diet.” This was in lieu of the three dishes of meat, which in those troublous times were not easily to be obtained.

A month or two later Harvey was in London, for on the 24th of November, 1640, he obtained permission from the College of Physicians to sue the heirs of Baron Lumley in the name of the College to recover the salary of the Lumleian lecturer on surgery and anatomy. Leave was given him, but the political disturbances and Harvey’s attendance upon the King appear to have prevented him from carrying out his object. Dr. Munk says that no further mention of this suit occurs in the Annals of the College until the 31st of May, 1647, when “a letter was read from Dr. Harvey desiring the College to grant him a letter of attorney to one Thompson to sue for the anatomical stipend. It was presently generally granted, and shortly afterwards sent him under the general seal.” From a manuscript of Dr. Goodall’s, in the possession of the College, it appears that Harvey expended at least five hundred pounds in various lawsuits on this subject, which was not settled until some time after his death, and then at the expense of Sir Charles Scarborough, his successor in the chair of the Lumleian Lecturer.

The only notice of Harvey during the year 1641 is the following entry on page 38 of the Album of Philip de Glarges, preserved amongst the manuscripts at the British Museum:

Nothing appears to be known of De Glarges except that he was a wandering student of medicine, theology, and philosophy, and an ardent collector of autographs. He seems to have graduated at the Hague in 1640 when he defended a thesis upon palpitation of the heart. His collection of autographs show that he was provided with first-rate introductions, and that he was apparently a promising student. It would be difficult, says Dr. Aveling, to find a more suitable motto than the one Harvey has chosen to impress upon the mind of a young man. It is one which Harvey had always acted upon and found to be true.

Matters were soon brought to a crisis in England; only four days after Harvey wrote this motto Strafford was beheaded. On January 3, 1641-1642, the King’s desperate attempt to seize the five members precipitated his fate. It led Parliament to make preparations for the war which had now become inevitable, and Isaac Pennington, a vigorous and determined Puritan, was chosen Lord Mayor of London. Soldiers were enrolled to form an army. On the 16th of August, 1642, the King left London, and six days later his standard was raised at Nottingham. Harvey accompanied him. The newly raised troops belonging to the Parliament, as yet ignorant of the trammels of discipline, broke into the houses of suspected persons, rifled them of their contents and often sold their booty for the merest trifle. Harvey had been living in his official lodgings at Whitehall, and though he attended the King, not only with the consent, but at the desire of the Parliament, he was very rightly suspected of being a vehement Royalist. Perhaps, too, the mention of his name in Parliament had brought him prominently into notice, for though the proceedings of the Parliament were nominally private, every act was rigorously scrutinised and actively canvassed by the agitators and local politicians. The chief outbreak of lawlessness occurred in August, 1642, immediately after it was known that the King had unfurled his standard, and it was probably on this occasion that the mob of citizen-soldiers entered Harvey’s lodgings, stole his goods, and scattered his papers. The papers consisted of the records of a large number of dissections, or as they would now be called post-mortem examinations, of diseased bodies, with his observations on the development of insects, and a series of notes on comparative anatomy. Aubrey says: “He had made dissections of frogs, toads, and a number of animals, and had curious observations upon them.” Harvey bitterly regretted the loss of his papers which he thus laments: “Let gentle minds forgive me, if recalling the irreparable injuries I have suffered, I here give vent to a sigh. This is the cause of my sorrow:—Whilst in attendance on His Majesty the King during our late troubles, and more than civil wars, not only with the permission but by the command of the Parliament, certain rapacious hands not only stripped my house of all its furniture, but, what is a subject of far greater regret to me, my enemies abstracted from my museum the fruits of many years of toil. Whence it has come to pass that many observations, particularly on the generation of insects, have perished with detriment, I venture to say, to the republic of letters.”

Charles left Nottingham on the 13th of September, so that it was probably early in this month that Harvey took the opportunity of riding over to Derby to see Percival Willoughby, who had been admitted an extra-licentiate at the College of Physicians on the 20th of February, 1640-1641. Willoughby says: “There came to my house at Derby, my honoured good friend Dr. Harvey. We were talking of several infirmities incident to the womb. He added to my knowledge an infirmity which he had seen in women, and he gave it the name of a honey-comb [epithelioma] which he said would cause flooding in women.”

A few weeks later Harvey was actually under fire at Edgehill. The battle took place on the 23rd of October, 1642. All the morning was spent in collecting the King’s troops from their scattered quarters, and it was not until one o’clock that the royal army descended the steep hill leading to the wide plain in which stand the village of Radway and the little town of Kineton. Harvey took charge of the two Princes, boys of 12 and 10 years old, who afterwards became Charles II. and James II., and in the course of the morning he probably walked along the brow of the hill from the inn at Sunrising to the Royalist headquarters which were placed about a mile further east. Weary with waiting he and the boys betook themselves to the wide ditch at the very edge of the hill, and to while away the time Harvey took a book out of his pocket and read. “But,” says Aubrey, “he had not read very long before the bullet from a great gun grazed the ground near him, which made him remove his station.” As soon as the battle had really begun, Harvey, we may be sure, was alive and interested, his book was pocketed and he devoted himself at once to assist the wounded. The very nature of the wounds would give additional zest to the work for, unless he was present at the battle of Newburn-on-Tyne, this must have been his first opportunity of treating gunshot wounds. Anthony Wood in his account of Adrian Scrope shows that Harvey was no impassive spectator of the fight, for he says: “This most valiant person, who was son of Sir Jervais Scrope, did most loyally attend his Majesty at the fight of Edgehill, where receiving several wounds he was stripped and left among the dead, as a dead person there, but brought off by his son and recovered by the immortal Dr. Will. Harvey, who was there but withdrawn under a hedge with the Prince and Duke while the battle was at its height. ’Tis reported that this Adrian Scrope received 19 wounds in one battle in defence of his Majesty’s cause, but whether in that fight at Edgehill I cannot justly say. Sure I am that he was made Knight of the Bath at the Coronation of King Charles II., An. 1661.”

The battle was undecided, and Harvey, like the other personal attendants upon the King, must for a while have felt the keenest anxiety for the safety of his master. The King remained for a time at the top of the hill, but when the battle began in earnest he could not be restrained from mixing with the troops, sharing their danger and adjuring them to show mercy to such of the enemy as fell into their hands. Perhaps too Harvey saw one of the most picturesque acts of the battle. The Royal Standard, carried by Sir Edmund Verney at the beginning of the fight, had waved over the King’s Red Regiment—the Royal Foot Guards. Verney slain, and the Guards broken, it passed to the Parliamentary army, and was committed to the charge of the secretary of the Earl of Essex, the Commander-in-chief. Captain Smith, a Catholic officer in the King’s Life Guards, hearing of the loss, picked up from the field the orange scarf which marked a Parliamentarian and threw it over his shoulders. Accompanied by some of his troop, similarly attired, he slipped through the ranks of the enemy, found the secretary holding the standard, and telling him that so great a prize was not fitly bestowed in the hands of a penman, snatched it from him. Then, protected by the scarf, he made his way once more through the hostile force and laid his trophy at the feet of the King, who knighted him upon the spot.

The battle over, Charles pushed on towards London. Banbury surrendered on the 27th of October, and on the 29th he entered Oxford in triumph. Harvey attended the King to Oxford where he was at once received as a persona grata. His position in London, his attachment to the King, and his fame as a scientific man, must have combined to render his entrance to the most exclusive Common Rooms a matter of ease. In Oxford he very soon settled down to his accustomed pursuits, unmindful of the clatter of arms and of the constant marching and countermarching around him, for the city remained the base of operations until its surrender in July, 1646. Aubrey says that he first saw Harvey at Oxford “in 1642, after the Edgehill fight, but [I] was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our College [Trinity] to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation.” Two years later Bathurst was killed in defending Faringdon, but he was a distinguished Fellow of his College, and it was doubtless, with the aid and by the advice of such a friend, that Harvey was incorporated Doctor of Physic at Oxford on the 7th of December, 1642.

For the next year or two Harvey lived quietly at Oxford, making dissections and carrying on his professional work amongst the courtiers who thronged the town. It appears too from the following report that Dr. Edmund Smith was living with him in Oxford. The memorial consists of a letter from Richard Cave to Prince Rupert, concerning the health of his brother, Prince Maurice. It is preserved among the Rupert Correspondence in the British Museum, and it runs—

Dr. Aveling, from whose “Memorials of Harvey” this letter is copied, says “the treatment by ‘very little phisick’ and ‘only a regular diet’ seems to have been successful, for Cave, writing soon afterwards to Prince Rupert, says: “Maurice is not able yet to write letters, but hath this day taken physic and so intends to bid his physicians farewell.”

In this year, 1643, Harvey received his last payment as physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The Journals contain no record of his retirement from office in the hospital, but the ledgers, which have been kept with great accuracy and minuteness ever since the granting of the Charter in 1547, show the entry standing in its usual place, but for the last time. “Item to Doctor Harvey, Physician, xxxiii li. vi s. viii d.” Harvey was resident in Oxford at the time of his retirement, and the absence of any allusion to so important an event in the history of the hospital must be ascribed in part to the confusion of the times. The Journals of the House of Commons, however, contain a significant note: “Feb. 12, an. 1643-1644. A motion this day made for Dr. Micklethwayte to be recommended to the Wardens and Masters of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, to be physician in the place of Dr. Harvey, who hath withdrawn himself from his charge and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament.” (Sir) John Micklethwaite was as a matter of fact appointed Physician in reversion to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, May 26, 1648, and he succeeded to the post of full physician May 13, 1653. He was one of the physicians in ordinary to Charles II., and died in 1682.

Harvey’s presence in Oxford, and his method of working by experiment and by logical deduction from observation, must have been singularly agreeable to that band of experimental philosophers who in a few years were destined to found the Royal Society. Harvey’s leaven worked successfully in the brains of such men as Scarborough, Highmore, Willis, and Wren, and in due season the pupils brought forth fruit worthy of their master.

Harvey’s connection with the University of Oxford was destined soon to become both intimate and honourable, though it was unfortunately only of short duration. In 1645 he was elected Warden of Merton College, in succession to Sir Nathaniel Brent. The present Warden of Merton, the Hon. G. C. Brodrick, says that on the 27th of Jan., 1645, letters were received from the King, then lodged at Christ Church, reciting that Sir Nathaniel Brent had absented himself for nearly three years, had adhered to the rebels, and had accepted the office of Judge Marshal in their ranks, to which might have been added that he had actually signed the Covenant, for he gradually became more and more Presbyterian in his views though he was originally a friend of Laud. We learn from the articles afterwards exhibited against [Sir] John Greaves, then a Fellow of the College, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and the senior Linacre lecturer upon anatomy, that he was the person who drew up the petition against the Warden, and “inveigled some unwary young men to subscribe to it.” The King’s letters accordingly pronounce the deposition of Brent, and direct the seven senior Fellows to present three persons as eligible to be his successor, out of whom the King would choose one. The Royal mandate was obeyed, but there were some irregularities in the consequent election, against which Peter Turner protested and resigned his Fellowship on his protest being overruled by Lord Hertford, who had succeeded the Earl of Pembroke as Chancellor of the University in October, 1645. However, five out of the seven seniors, including the Sub-Warden, placed Harvey first on their lists, and the King lost no time in nominating him. He was solemnly admitted Warden according to ancient custom, on the 9th of April, and two days later, on April 11th, he addressed the Fellows in a short speech which is still preserved. The extract from the College register runs:—“Dominus Custos, Convocatis in Alt Gaul Sociis, haec verba ad illos fecit. Forsitan decessores Custodiam Collegii ambiisse, ut exinde sese locupletarent, se vere longe alio animo nimirum ut College lucro et emolumento potius foret: simulque socios, ut concordiam amicitiamque inter se colerent sedule solliciteque hortatus est.” [The Warden spoke thus to the Fellows assembled in the Great Hall. He said that it was likely enough that some of his forerunners had sought the Wardenship to enrich themselves, but that for his own part he undertook its duties with far other motives, wishing as he did to increase the wealth and prosperity of the College. At the same time he appealed earnestly and anxiously to the Fellows to cherish amongst themselves an harmonious friendship.] The speech was thought at the time to be somewhat “Pharisaical,” but there seems to be no doubt that Harvey was really expressing his feelings. There had always been a close bond between Merton and the medical profession from the days when John of Gaddesden, one of the earliest Englishmen to write a complete treatise on medicine, was a Fellow, and it was peculiarly fitting that Harvey should have been elected head of the College. He was a rich man, childless, without expensive habits, and so devoted to the pursuit of science that there is but little doubt that if he had retained his position he would have become one of the greatest benefactors of the College. As it was, the College during Harvey’s year of office presented more the appearance of a Court than of a seat of learning. From 1643 to 1646, when the Queen was in Oxford, she lodged in Merton College, occupying the Warden’s House, and living in the room still known as “the Queen’s room,” with the drawing-room adjoining it. Anthony Wood says that during her occupation “there were divers marriages, christenings, and burials carefully registered in a private register by Mr. John Gurgany, one of the chaplains of Merton College; but about the time of the surrender of Oxford the said register, among other books, was stolen by the soldiers out of his window in his chamber joining to the church door.” Many officers too were quartered in Merton, and the College was so full on the 1st of August, 1645, that the annual meeting had to be held in the library, as neither the Hall nor the Warden’s lodgings were available for the purpose.

The year 1645-1646, during which Harvey held the office of Warden of Merton, was long a memorable one in the annals of Oxford. The City was invested by Fairfax for fifteen days from May 22nd, whilst the King was at Droitwich. On June 14th the Royal cause was ruined at Naseby, and on November 27th the College was called upon to lay in a supply of provisions against another siege. On December 28th the King ordered a special form of prayer to be used in the chapel on Wednesdays and Fridays “during these bad times.” On March 24th the College gave a bond for £94 on account of provisions which it had no money to buy. At three in the morning of April 27th the King, disguised as a servant, with his beard and hair closely trimmed, passed over Magdalen bridge in apparent attendance upon Ashburnham and Hudson, and we cannot but believe that Harvey was one of the little band who closed the gates of the city with heavy hearts as his Majesty rode off to begin his wearisome captivity. On May 11, 1646, Oxford was summoned by Fairfax, and on June 24th it was surrendered on very honourable terms, the garrison marching out over Shotover 3,000 strong. The Duke of York fell into the hands of the Parliament; but Rupert, Maurice, and the greater part of the noblemen and gentlemen attendant upon the Court had left Oxford the day before its surrender. Mr. Brodrick says that “Harvey must now have retired from the Wardenship and Brent must have resumed office, though no minute of either event is preserved in the College Register.” We find, however, that in September, 1648, Brent rendered accounts, as Warden, for the four years from 1642 to 1646.

Anthony Wood describes in language which has often been quoted, the utter confusion in which the past three years had left the University—the colleges impoverished, lectures almost abandoned, many of the students dispersed and others quite demoralised—“in a word, scarce the face of an University left, all things being out of order and disturbed.” This account is confirmed by a striking entry in the College Register, under the date October 19, 1646, where it is stated that by the Divine goodness the Civil War had at last been stayed, and the Warden [Brent] with most of the Fellows had returned, but that as there were no Bachelors, hardly any scholars and few Masters, it was decided to elect but one Bursar and one Dean. It is also added that as the Hall still lay “situ et ruinis squalida” the College meeting was held in the Warden’s lodgings.

Of the few students whom we know that the influence of Harvey’s name attracted to Oxford that of Charles Scarborough, the first English editor of Euclid, is the most noted. Ejected from his fellowship at Caius College, Cambridge, on account of his Royalist tendencies, he immediately withdrew to Oxford, entered himself at Merton College, obtained the friendship of Harvey and rendered him considerable assistance in the preparation of his work on the development of animals. He was created a Doctor of Physic on June 23, 1646, by virtue of letters from the Chancellor of the University, and in these letters he is described as a Master of Arts of Cambridge of seven years’ standing and upwards, who was spoiled of his library in the beginning of the Civil War, and afterwards for his conscience deprived of his fellowship. His letters testimonial are under the hand of Dr. William Harvey, who says that he is well learned in Physic, Philosophy, and Mathematics.