Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/133

This page has been validated.
Stukeley
127
Stukeley

or the ‘Hippolytus’ is extant. The ‘Agamemnon’ was published in 1566 with a dedication to Sir William Cecil, and many commendatory verses. The title-page ran: ‘The Eyght Tragedie of Seneca entituled Agamemnon translated out of Latin into English’ (London, 12mo). Studley’s four translations were included in the edition by Thomas Newton [q. v.] of ‘Seneca his tenne tragedies translated into English,’ London, 1581 (cf. reprint by the Spenser Society, 1887).

Studley wrote Latin elegies on the death of Nicholas Carr [q. v.], the Greek professor at Cambridge, which were printed with the professor’s Latin translation of Demosthenes in 1571. In 1574 he published, ‘with sondrye additions,’ a translation of Bale’s ‘Acta Pontificum Romanorum’ under the title of ‘The Pageant of the Popes, conteyning the lyves of all the Bishops of Rome from the beginninge of them to the yeare 1555,’ London, 1574, 4to. It was dedicated to Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex [q. v.] Some Latin verses by Studley addressed to Sir William Cecil about 1564 are among the domestic state papers (cf. Cal. 1547–80, p. 248).

Studley’s religious opinions were stoutly Calvinistic. On 1 Feb. 1572–3 he was summoned before the heads of colleges at Cambridge on a charge of nonconformity. A few months later he vacated his fellowship. He is doubtfully said by Chetwood to have crossed to the Low Countries, to have joined the army of Prince Maurice, and to have met his death at the siege of Breda. That siege took place in 1590, but no contemporary authority seems to mention Studley’s share in it.

[Cooper’s Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 100; Wood’s Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, ii. 10; Tanner’s Bibl. Brit.; Warton’s Hist, of English Poetry; Collier’s Registers of Stationers’ Company (Shakespeare Soc.), i. 127, 140, 147.]

S. L.

STUKELEY. [See also Stucley.]

STUKELEY, WILLIAM (1687–1765), antiquary, born at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, on 7 Nov. 1687, was the son of John Stukeley, an attorney, by his wife Frances, daughter of Robert Bullen of Weston, Lincolnshire. He was sent in 1692 to the free school at Holbeach, and as a boy was fond of retiring into the woods to read and to collect plants. Occasionally he listened behind a screen to the learned conversation of his father with Mr. Belgrave, ‘an ingenious gent,’ in refutation of whose arguments he wrote a small manuscript book. He collected coins, bought microscopes and burning-glasses, and learnt something of wood-carving, dialling, ‘and some astrology withal.’ On 7 Nov. 1703 he was admitted to Bennet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, became a scholar in the following April, and took the degree of M.B. on 21 Jan. 1707–8. In his undergraduate days he ‘went (he says) frequently a simpling, and began to steal dogs and dissect them.’ When at home, he ‘made a handsome sceleton’ of an aged cat. Stephen Hales of the Royal Society and Dr. John Gray of Canterbury were among his botanical associates, and he made large additions to Ray’s ‘Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam.’

On leaving Cambridge he studied anatomy under Rolfe, a surgeon in Chancery Lane, and medicine under Dr. Mead at St. Thomas’s Hospital (1709). In May 1710 he went into medical practice at Boston, Lincolnshire. In May 1717 he removed to Ormond Street, London, where he lived next door to Powis House. On 20 March 1717–1718 he became a fellow of the Royal Society, and in January 1718 took part in establishing the Society of Antiquaries, of which body he acted as secretary for nine years. On 7 July he took the degree of M.D. at Cambridge, and on 30 Sept. 1720 was admitted a fellow of the College of Physicians, and became a freemason, suspecting freemasonry to be ‘the remains of the mysterys of the antients.’ In the same year he published an account of Arthur’s Oon and Graham’s Dyke. In 1722 he was elected a member of the Spalding Society, and at a later time (1745) founded the Brazen Nose Society (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. vi. 4).

In March 1722 he read as the Gulstonian lecture a discourse on the spleen, published in 1723. About this time he suffered from gout, which he cured partly by using Dr. Rogers’s ‘oleum arthriticum,’ and partly by long rides in search of antiquities. The first-fruits of his antiquarian expeditions appeared in 1724 in his ‘Itinerarium Curiosum.’ He was now well known to the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Winchilsea, and ‘all the virtuosos in London’ and had ‘a particular friendship’ with Sir Isaac Newton. His greatest friends were Roger Gale [q. v.] and Samuel Gale [q. v.] With the former he went on long antiquarian tours in various parts of England, and in 1725 traversed the whole length of the Roman Wall, and ‘drew out (for he was a respectable draughtsman) and described innumerable old cities, roads, altars,’ &c. His frequent visits to Stonehenge furnished material for his book on Stonehenge, published in 1740, and accounted at the time his prin-