Thomas Rudd
Thomas Rudd (1583?–1656) was an English military engineer, mathematician, and occultist.
Biography
The eldest son of Thomas Rudd of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, he was born in 1583 or 1584. He served during his earlier years as a military engineer in the Low Countries.
On 10 July 1627, King Charles I appointed him ‘chief engineer of all castles, forts, and fortifications within Wales,’ at a salary of £240 per annum. Subsequently, he was appointed the King's principal engineer for fortifications, and in 1635 he visited Portsmouth in this capacity to settle a question between the governor and the admiralty as to the removal of some naval buildings which interfered with proposed fortifications. In 1638, he visited Guernsey and Jersey at the request of the governors, Charles Danvers, Earl of Danby and Sir Thomas Jermyn, to survey the castles on those islands and report upon them to the board of ordnance.
Rudd served as chief engineer on the Royalist side throughout the First English Civil War, and in 1655, his estate at Higham Ferrers was decimated on an assessment for the payment of the militia, as a punishment for his adherence to the Royalist cause.
He died in 1656, aged 72, and was buried in Higham Ferrers church, where several epitaphs composed by himself were inscribed on his tomb.
Author
Rudd wrote two texts on geometry, Practical Geometry, in two parts (1650), and an edition of Euclid's Elements under the title Euclides Elements of Geometry, the first six Books in a compendious form contrasted and demonstrated, whereunto is added the Mathematical Preface of Mr. John Dee (1651), but both works show extensive appropriation (without attribution) from Dutch sources of the early 1600s.
He wrote the supplement to The Compleat Body of the Art Military, by Lieutenant-colonel Richard Elton (1659). This supplement consists of six chapters, dealing with the duties of officers, the marching of troops and the art of gunnery. Sir James Turner, in his Pallas Armata (1683), refers to another work by Rudd on sieges; but this cannot now be traced.
Occult works
After Rudd's death, his vast trove of personal papers were collected and arranged by Peter Smart in 1714. Among his writings, a large number of manuscripts on ritual magic and the Kabbalah were discovered. During his lifetime, Rudd's involvement with the occult was not public knowledge and none of his writings on the topic were ever published. Based on the sheer volume and level of detail in his manuscripts, he must have had a close association with other prominent magicians of his era.
His collection of manuscripts was edited by Aleister Crowley and published as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King in 1904, although the earliest publication may have been uncredited sections of Francis Barrett's 1801 book The Magus.
His collection of manuscripts was revised and transcribed by Adam McLean and released under the title A Treatise on Angel Magic in 1989. The same collection of texts was later turned into a book called The Goetia of Dr Rudd in 2007 by authors Stephen Skinner and David Rankine.