Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 20

constitutional lawyer, a parliamentarian and a legal scholar whose writings would
laythegroundrulesformodernEnglishlaw.Aheadofhimalsolayhisprivatemar-
riage to the brilliant Elizabeth Talbot, the countess of Kent and the widow of his
erstwhile patron. No church record of a marriage exists, but that would be charac-
teristic of Selden, who regarded marriage as a civil contract and not a sacrament,
and therefore no business of God or of the Church. Or of anyone else, for that mat-
ter. 'Of all actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people,'
Selden once wryly observed, 'yet of all actions of our life it is most meddled with
byotherpeople.'Elizabeth'shouseatWhitefriars,convenientlylocatedtwoblocks
east of his law office in the Inner Temple, became his after they moved in together.
NoneofthiscouldhavebeenpredictedfromSelden'smodestoriginsandscholarly
bent - and none of it would have happened had James I not called him on the car-
pet.
London was the place to be if what Selden wanted was to taste the remarkable
cultural ferment of the Tudor age. Elizabethan London brimmed with brilliant
men from modest backgrounds - theologians, lawyers, poets, playwrights - and
John Selden soon found his place among them. His friends included the poet John
Donne, the satirist Ben Jonson and the playwright Francis Beaumont. There is no
record that he met Shakespeare, but given the circles in which Selden moved -
Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night were first performed at the adjacent Inn of
Court, for example - it would have been difficult to avoid the meeting. Selden's
accomplishments later in life would be many, but he was never to make his mark
as a poet. Poetry was something every young man of social ambition in Elizabeth-
an London had to write, and so a twenty-something Selden dutifully turned out
verses,butversessoladenwithobscurereferencesthatreadinganyofthemismore
like solving a crossword puzzle than reading a poem. The best a fellow poet could
say about him with regard to his literary accomplishments was to call him 'solid
Selden': praise, if a little faint. Late in life he would declare that verse was 'a fine
thing for children to learn to make'. A poet of ordinary talent might write poems
'to please himself, but to make them public, is foolish'. He was probably thinking
back ruefully to his younger self.
Selden's closest friend in the literary world was one of the two or three greatest
poets of the age, Ben Jonson (Fig. 4). Selden recalled that when James I demanded
that Selden present himself for questioning, it was Jonson who accompanied him
to the meeting. Here was another who had risen from obscurity on the power of
his talent and intellect. The son of a bankrupt preacher who died before he was