Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/292

 place. This he also refused to do. One of his peculiarities was a distaste for black, and his habit of wearing a blue gown caused him to be known throughout the district as Blue or Blue-skin Dick of Thanet. For many years any gross fabrication was known in Minster as ‘Culmer's news.’ After the Restoration, in 1660, he was ejected from the living, when he went to live at Monkton, also in Thanet, and was soon afterwards suspected to have been engaged in Venner's conspiracy. On this suspicion he was arrested and committed to prison in London. During one of the several examinations he underwent he was asked why, when he broke a stained-glass window which represented the Temptation in à Becket's chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, he had destroyed the figure of Christ and not that of the Devil, and he replied that his orders from the parliament had been to take down Christ, but they had said nothing about the Devil—an answer which gave a valuable hold to his enemies. As nothing could be proved against him he was speedily liberated, and returned to Monkton, where he is believed to have died about the commencement of 1662. Archbishop Laud described Culmer as ‘an ignorant person, and with his ignorance one of the most daring schismatics in all that country’ (Kent), and Wharton says he was a man ‘odious for his zeal and fury.’ Besides ‘Cathedral News,’ he wrote ‘Lawless Tythe Robbers discovered, who make Tythe-Revenue a Mock-maintenance,’ 1655, and ‘The Ministers' Hue and Cry, or a True Discovery of the Insufferable Injuries, Robberies, &c., enacted against Ministers,’ &c., 1661.

 CULPEPER. [See also .]

CULPEPER, NICHOLAS (1616–1654), writer on astrology and medicine, was son of Nicholas Culpeper, a clergyman beneficed in Surrey and a kinsman of the Culpeper family settled at Wakehurst, Sussex. He was born in London 18 Oct. 1616; went to Cambridge in 1634 for a short time; obtained a good knowledge of Latin and Greek; studied the old medical writers; was apprenticed to an apothecary of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate; and about 1640 set up for himself as an astrologer and physician in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields. He supported the parliamentarians and the religious sectaries, and is reported to have engaged in at least one battle in the civil war on the parliamentary side, where he was seriously wounded in the chest. He does not appear to have relinquished his medical practice for any length of time during the war, and acquired a high reputation among patients in the east of London. In 1649 Culpeper brought himself into wider note by publishing an English translation of the College of Physicians' ‘Pharmacopœia’ under the title of ‘A Physical Directory, or a Translation of the London Dispensatory. By Nich. Culpeper, gent. (London: Printed for Peter Cole).’ A portrait of the translator is subscribed ‘In Effigiem Nicholai Culpeper, Equitis.’ This unauthorised translation excited the indignation of the College of Physicians, which was fully reflected in the royalist periodical, ‘Mercurius Pragmaticus,’ pt. ii. No. 21 (4–9 Sept. 1649). The book is there described as ‘done (very filthily) into English by one Nicholas Culpeper,’ who ‘commenced the several degrees of Independency, Brownisme, Anabaptisme; admitted himself of John Goodwin's schoole (of all ungodlinesse) in Coleman Street; after that he turned Seeker, Manifestarian, and now he is arrived at the battlement of an absolute Atheist, and by two yeeres drunken labour hath Gallimawfred the apothecaries book into nonsense, mixing every receipt therein with some scruples, at least, of rebellion or atheisme, besides the danger of poysoning men's bodies. And (to supply his drunkenness and leachery with a thirty shilling reward) endeavoured to bring into obloquy the famous societies of apothecaries and chyrurgeons.’ The translation has none of the defects here attributed to it, and the abuse was obviously inspired by political opponents and the societies whose monopolies Culpeper was charged with having infringed. In 1652 a broadside was issued entitled ‘A Farm in Spittlefields where all the knick-knacks of Astrology are exposed to open sale. Where Nicholas Culpeper brings under his velvet jacket: 1. His Chalinges against the Doctors of Physick; 2. A Pocket Medicine; 3. An Abnormal Circle,’ &c. Second and third editions of the ‘Directory’ appeared in 1650 and 1651 respectively. In 1654 Culpeper renamed the book ‘Pharmacopœia Londinensis, or the London Dispensatory. Further adorned by the Studies and Collections of the Fellows now living of the said Colledge, by Nich. Culpeper, gent., student in physick and astrology, living in Spittlefields, near London. Printed by a well-wisher to the Commonwealth of England,’ 1654. In September 1653 Culpeper again trespassed on the monopoly claimed by the recognised medical writers by publishing (with Peter Cole) a book entitled ‘The English Physician