Lichfield is still a beautiful city set in a shallow valley, six miles south of the river Trent in south-east Staffordshire. Surrounded by undulating fields and leafy lanes, the city is laid out on a bed of warm sandstone, the centre of which is dominated by England's only three-spired cathedral, a particularly inviting medieval structure whose heavy (but rarely unhappy) restoration in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries testifies to the destructive power of the Civil War in England.
A small plaque above an estate-agents in Breadmarket St. commemorates the birthplace of Elias Ashmole and informs us that Ashmole was made Windsor Herald to King Charles II and that he was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Few would imagine that behind this token record lurks one of the most intriguing and inspiring stories in the whole of English history.
Elias Ashmole was born on 23 May 1617, the son of Simon Ashmole, saddler and bailiff of the city. At Ashmole's baptism in S. Mary's, the name Elias flashed through his godfather's mind and, as a result of this inspiration, he insisted that Elias be the boy's name. Was Ashmole's godfather, Thomas Offey (sacrist of the cathedral church), aware of a prophecy circulating throughout Europe at the time wherein the New Age would be preceded by the return of ‘Elias the Artist’ : the prophet Elijah? We do not know, but from the day of his baptism to the night of his death, Elias Ashmole's life - for all its exceptional range of interests - would be entwined about the world of prophecy and spiritual magic. He always believed, and was probably encouraged to believe, that there was something special about him.
Elias was an unusually gifted boy, attending and excelling at Lichfield Grammar school and singing in the cathedral choir, thereby imbibing the spiritual flavour of the best of the catholic Church of England. On Elias's maturity, material considerations demanded he make his fortune through practising Law and in 1638, at the age of twenty-one, he began soliciting in Chancery, at which time he also met his first wife Eleanor, daughter of Peter Mainwaring, a Cheshire squire of slender means and, perhaps, a friend of the family. Eleanor Ashmole was to die childless only three years later.
In May 1644 Ashmole was appointed with two others as commissioner for the gathering of excise money in Staffordshire. Later in the same year he was at Oxford, trying to get Parliament to pressure the governor of Lichfield into surrendering excise monies. While at Oxford he became a member of Brasenose College, studying geometry, mathematics, astronomy and judicial astrology. These were all subjects favoured by his hero, the Hermetic magus, John Dee. Dee (1527-1608) had been court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I and was widely regarded as the most brilliant man of his time, famed in England and on the continent for his knowledge of mathematics and spiritual alchemy. In 1652 Ashmole would write of Dee as a man deserving of “the commendation of all Learned and Ingenious Schollers, and to be remembered for his remarkable abilities” - not the least of which lay in mathematics, of which Dee was “in all parts… an absolute and perfect master.” This interest in what he saw as the unjustly neglected Dee inheritance would occupy him on occasion for the rest of his life.
It says something of the character of the English Civil War that while Prince Rupert's Royalists1 were being routed by a Parliamentary army at Marston Moor (July 2 1644), Ashmole was embroiled in the study of astrology, only to be brought away from his books by his being put in charge of the eastern defences of Oxford in support of the Royalists from May to December 1645. He was then sent to defend Worcester from Parliament, resulting in another failure for Prince Rupert's forces. Worcester fell ten days after Lichfield Close was surrendered to Parliamentary forces (July 14 1646), during which latter siege (and accompanying plague) Ashmole's pious and much-loved mother died. Ashmole returned to Lichfield to bid his mother the saddest farewell. The picture of Lichfield which presented itself to him must have shaken him to the roots. Parliamentarian forces were in the process of completing the demolition of the many ancient art-works both within and without the cathedral, while using the interior as a stable for their horses; that holy place which had once smelt of sweet incense now reeked of horse-manure. There were plans afoot to reduce the cathedral to rubble. The cathedral records - or what survived of them (the Parliamentarians had held the Cathedral Close before) - were being destroyed wholesale, and in the flames Ashmole could see hundreds of years of English history going up in smoke, never to be recovered. Nevertheless, he did succeed in saving some of the cathedral's library-books from the hands of the Parliamentarian vandals. Having saved what he could, there followed a curious interlude in Elias Ashmole's life.
Ashmole retired from the fray to the house of his father-in-law, Peter Mainwaring, at Smallwood, near Congleton in Cheshire, in order to meditate on the shocking events he had witnessed. Less than three months later, on 16 October 1646, at 4.30pm :
I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire with Colonel Henry Mainwaring [a Parliamentarian] of Karincham in Cheshire; the names of those that were then at the Lodge, Mr Richard Penket Worden, Mr James Collier, Mr Richard Sankey [a Catholic], Henry Littler, John Ellam, Richard Ellam and Hugh Brewer.
This is the earliest account of an apparently ‘non-operative’ or ‘speculative’ Free Masonic Lodge known to English history, and raises a host of questions pertinent to the history of the Craft. We shall look at these questions in due course.
The year 1646 saw the end of Ashmole as armed opponent of Parliament and the return of the magus-to-be to his books. In 1648 he added the investigation of botany and alchemy to his studies. Alchemy, whose abstruse symbolism permeates the atmosphere of Free Masonry, very soon began to consume his interest.
In the November of the year in which his king was beheaded (1649), Ashmole made a rich marriage to a widow2 after astrological consultation, a marriage disapproved of by the members of the lady's family who brought a series of lawsuits against him : responsibilities which he later said profoundly restricted his concentration on alchemy. Nevertheless the following year saw the publication of Fasciculus chemicus, a translated alchemical text by John Dee's son Arthur (1579-1651) for which Ashmole, as ‘James Hasolle’ wrote the Introduction. Ashmole had thought that Arthur Dee was dead and was surprised to discover that Dee junior had in fact only been away in Russia, as the much-respected physician to the Czar, and had since returned to Norwich. Dee replied to a letter of Ashmole sent on 23 January to the effect that he did not object to Ashmole's use of his work. Friends of Ashmole met Dee in London but Elias missed his own opportunity, for Arthur Dee died the next year (1651). Arthur Dee left a son, Rowland, who was a merchant in London and who gave Ashmole a family pedigree in 1674 during a prolonged period of Dee-interest in Ashmole's life.
Ashmole now began to live up to his self-given title of Mercuriophilus Anglicus, the English Mercury-lover. In 1651, Ashmole's diary records his being made ‘son’, that is to say spiritual heir to William Backhouse3 , an alchemist recluse of Swallowfield, Berkshire, being enjoined thereby to call Backhouse ‘father’. The relationship of ‘father’ to ‘son’ may well be in imitation of the traditional relationship between the mythic arch-sage of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, and his pupils : Asclepius, Tat and Ammon. Ashmole was clearly seeking spiritual initiation4 . Ashmole wrote a poem5 which offers ample indication of the depth of spiritual feeling to which his intercourse with Backhouse led him.
From this blest Minute I'le begin to date My Yeares & Happines …& vow I ne're perceiv'd what Being was till now.
See how the power of your Adoption can Transmute imperfect Nature to be Man.
I feele that noble Blood spring in my Heart, Which does intytle me to some small parte Of…Hermes wealth…
The poem goes on, emphasising that it was alchemy's power to transmute the man rather than the metal which led him to offer his fate over to what he calls the “Hermetick Tribe.” Elias clearly followed his own path in his pursuance of alchemical secrets and, considering he had apparently only taken the subject up three years previously, he had made speedy progress. Only five years after meeting Backhouse he was already acknowledged by other independent adepts as the leading British figure in the Art. Ashmole's relationship with Backhouse and indeed Ashmole's career in general was watched with great interest by the Rosicrucian-influenced reformer Samuel Hartlib, who became known to Ashmole personally (some time after Ashmole's initiation). In Hartlib's Ephemerides (1650, sect.4. p.6) we also learn that Hartlib enquired of William Petty concerning Backhouse. William Petty frequented John Wilkins' rooms at Wadham College, Oxford between 1648 and 1651, at which meetings the core idea of the Royal Society was established (according to Sprat's official history of the Society). Petty called Backhouse “an Elixir man”, and it is difficult to tell whether this designation for an alchemist dedicated to finding the “Elixir of Life” had any pejorative meaning attached to it. One intuits here that Ashmole was not a member of the core group whose associations fostered the Royal Society but was of great interest to at least some of them. Most notably there is the case of Ashmole's desire to join the Rosicrucian Brotherhood.
Ashmole almost certainly believed that the Fraternity of the Rose-Cross actually existed in some form or other. In the Bodleian Library's Ashmole manuscript collection6 there exists, appended to a hand-written copy of the first ‘Rosicrucian Manifesto’, the Fama Fraternitatis (first published in Cassel, Germany in 1614), a fervent petition to “the most illuminated Brothers of the Rose Cross” that he, Elias Ashmole might be admitted to their fraternity. Professor Frances Yates believed this to have been “an entirely private pious exercise” based on Ashmole's knowledge that the convention for approaching the Fraternity was to understand that the Brothers of the Rose-Cross could detect the true will of the aspirant without themselves seeing any written petition. Unfortunately, we do not know the date of this petition. Ashmole himself, along with the entire British Rosicrucian movement, was entirely ignorant of the true social and political context in which the so-called Rosicrucian manifestos were formed.
In 1652 there appeared Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, the product of a brilliant research enquiry into the English alchemical tradition. In the following year, Ashmole recorded in his diary the astonishing report that his spiritual master William Backhouse (who thought he was dying) had passed on to Ashmole the secret of “the true Matter of the Philosopher's Stone.” What this may have been, Ashmole did not say.
1660 was the year of the Restoration of Charles II, and one might have thought that the monarch had more pressing business to deal with than to give his assent to the foundation of the Royal Society and to entertain the pleas of Elias Ashmole. But that would be to forget the work of the men who helped ease the way for Charles II : men such as Samuel Hartlib and Sir Robert Moray, liasing with Charles through the court of Elizabeth, ex-Queen of Bohemia in the Hague. The Restoration had meanings other than the return of the Crown. There was the restoration of the dignity of the Church of England, and there was the restoration - one might even say renaissance - of the Ancient Wisdom founded upon the Square, that is to say, the Temple : a luminous idea which in its simplicity avoided the more contentious language of magic and the real threat of persecution and social unrest. The puritannical Right was active, but many had been exhausted by it.
Ashmole was in close touch with events in Lichfield. A letter of 19 January 1660 from the churchwardens of S. Michael's Lichfield to Ashmole's chambers in the Middle Temple thanked him for “freely giving £5 towards the building of S. Michael's church in Lichfield” -happily still thriving. Shortly after Charles II's generally welcome return to these islands, Ashmole was granted his first meeting with the new king (16 June 1660). The issue he chose to bring to Charles' attention was the condition of Lichfield Cathedral - that but for the vestry and the chapter-house it was roofless. Nevertheless, the clerks were still keeping the canonical hours amid the ruined interior. Charles II “much lamented” the state of Lichfield Cathedral and made it possible for Ashmole to set about organising its reconstruction. On 18 July, Ashmole wrote of how his friend
Mr Dugdale moved Dr Sheldon [bishop of London] to become an Instrument for the repaire of Lichfield Cathedral, and proposed that the prebends &c. that were to be admitted should parte with one half of the profits of their living towards the repaire of the Fabricke, which would be no great burden to them, considering their livings are all improved to a treble value at least, and by this example the Gentry might be invited to join with them in some considerable contribution.
Three years later, having urged the appointment of Bishop Hacket7 to oversee the reconstruction, Ashmole contributed £20 and again £10 towards the restoration of the cathedral. (He was praised for this act in a Latin poem by Thomas Smith, cathedral sacrist). The restoration of the cathedral was understood to be an unmistakable analogy for both the alchemical renewal of the spirit which underpinned Ashmole's life and, possibly, for the practical application of Temple symbolism. In 1662, Ashmole wrote to the cathedral subchanter, outlining a gift of rare sets of church anthems and service-books dedicated “to the service of your Temple”. Ashmole was certainly interested in the Temple of Jerusalem. There are among his papers extracts in his own hand taken from John Lightfoot's The Temple : Especially as it stood in the dayes of our Saviour. With measurements of the second Temple of Jerusalem. (London. 1650)8 . It is impossible to say, however, whether this was a personal interest or whether it was connected with his being a Free Mason. A year later Ashmole gave a further £30 to the Cathedral and on 17 March 1666 : “I bestowed on the Bailiffs of Lichfield a large chased silver bowl and cover, cost me £28 8/6d” The letter of thanks from the Bailiffs of Lichfield, John Burnes and Henry Baker, is highly revealing of both the way they saw Ashmole and the way they thought he saw the cathedral. It is very hard to imagine a similar letter being sent today. We have the marvellous picture of Ashmole, a servant and intimate of the King, an astrologer and profound scholar being hailed by a group of bailiffs as nothing less than a magus.
as if some propitious stars arising in the East had, (at this time) gone before our Magus [Ashmole], steering its course to this our city of Lichfield, and stood over the new-erected pyramids of our cathedral, (where as yet a star appears) darting its benign influence on this poor and loyal city, inviting the Magi from afar, to offer some tribute to it…like one of those true Magi that offered to Christ in his poorest condition, you have largely offered to the repaire of his Church our ruined Cathedral. But you have likewise Annually and liberally offered, relieved, and refreshed Christ in his members, the poor of our City.
(Ashmole gave at least £5 a year to the poor of Lichfield). The references to Ashmole as a magus and the description of the restored spires as “pyramids” suggest strong Hermetic implications and in-references. His reputation in such matters was now public knowledge - and was approved of. Ashmole may well have thought the New Age of the Brotherhood was well under way - but which Brotherhood?
Charles II bestowed the office of Windsor Herald upon Ashmole in 1660. Significant people were speaking up on Ashmole's behalf. Such men must have included Samuel Hartlib and Sir Robert Moray. As one with the Royal Eye upon him, Ashmole's work began to acquire a new, magisterial and established character.
On 2 January 1661, Ashmole was elected to be one of the 114 founders of the Royal Society, to “meete together weekly”. Ashmole was judged “willing and fit” to participate in “a designe of Founding a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.” Ashmole probably did not realise that the eventual confining of Royal Society study to purely material phenomena on Baconian experimental lines (Bacon would have been surprised if Magic was to be excluded from Science) would eventually budge Ashmole's beloved Neoplatonic cosmos out of public science and into the private world of the gentleman-scholar or secret Hermetic enquirer. But this long process, thought of in the last century as the ‘triumph of science over superstition’, was hardly yet underway. Isaac Newton also would have been dismayed at the arrogance of materialism. He was as concerned with the lineaments of the Temple as he was with the gravity which held them in place.
1663 was the date Ashmole had predicted in 1652 by astrological means as the time when the Rosicrucian-style dream of the coming of the “more pregnant and famous philosophers” would be fulfilled. Ashmole may have thought that the Royal Society would be an invaluable aid in realizing this dream. Sir Robert Moray, a man described in his own time as “a great patron of the Rosie-Crucians” would doubtless have shared Ashmole's view. Furthermore, 1663 saw the appearance of a “Fiery Trigon” of Saturn and Jupiter : an unmistakable sign for Ashmole of the ‘coming philosophers’ who would “Illustrate, Enlarge and Refine the Arts like tryed Gold.”
In 1663 Isaac Newton was at Cambridge and after graduating (1664) he spent the two plague years (1665-1666) largely at home in Woolsthorpe in the Fens investigating the properties of light. Why light? Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man that it is natural for the physicist to think of the universe in terms of light and matter in energetic inter-action. “We see matter by light; we are aware of the presence of light by the interruption of matter.” Suffice to say, Newton became aware of universal gravitation in the period 1665-1666. Newton, alchemist and mathematician, would of course fit the bill as “a more pregnant and famous philosopher”.9
In the year of Newton's graduation, Ashmole was appointed as a member of the Royal Society's committee charged with “collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded.”- an activity very much in tune with that of the fictional Fraternity of the Rose-Cross and certainly with the work of Bacon's “Merchants of Light” in the latter's New Atlantis. (1627).
On 23 October 1667 Ashmole made a horoscope to determine a propitious time for King Charles to lay the first stone of the Royal Exchange. The masonic researcher E. Conder suggested that Charles II laid this foundation stone “in true masonic form” and that for this reason, Ashmole the Free Mason, was asked to compile the horoscope10 . In the following year, Ashmole married for the third and last time : Elizabeth, the daughter of his friend William Dugdale. He had no children from any of his three marriages.
In 1672 Elias Ashmole released his opus magnum of antiquarian study and research discipline, The Institution, laws and ceremonies of the most noble Order of the Garter. This work brought Ashmole even more fame at home and abroad.
Ashmole's magical interests certainly did not come to an end on his becoming friendly with Charles II. On the flyleaf to Ashmole's copy of John Dee's Liber Mysteriorum 1-V11 there is recorded in his own hand the story of how he was brought a valuable cache of John Dee's “spiritual diaries”, in particular that magical system called the Heptarchia Mystica : a guide to the seven orders of angels and their operations in the governance of the universe :
Be it remembered, that the 20th August 1672, I received by the hands of my servant Samuell Story, a part of Dr. Dee's manuscripts all written with his own hand; viz : his conference with Angello, which first began the 22nd December Ano 1581, and continued to the end of May Ano 1583, where the printed Booke of the remaining conferences (published by Dr Casaubon) begins, and are bound up in this volume.
The story of how Ashmole obtained these manuscripts is itself extraordinary and is told by Ashmole on the fly-leaf. They were brought to him (in exchange for a gilt-copy of the Garter book) by one of the wardens of the Tower, Mr Thomas Wale. Wale's wife had formerly been married to a Mr Jones, a confectioner of Lombard Street, London. Shortly after the latter marriage the couple had gone to look at some stuff put up for sale by a joiner. Among the household items was a chest of fine workmanship, formerly belonging to a Mr John Woodall who had bought the chest “very probably” after Dee's goods were exposed to sale after his death in 1608. About four years before the great Fire of London (1666) the couple had moved the chest, heard rustlings inside and on inspection and with the help of a piece of iron, they discovered a secret drawer full of books together with a rosary. A maid burnt about half of the collection but the then Mrs Jones put the rest safely away. They even survived the Great Fire when the chest itself was destroyed. The manuscripts were taken out with the rest of the saveable goods to Moon Fields and then, after the Fire, finally returned home. On marrying Mr Wale, Mrs Wale informed her husband about the books and he, on hearing that Ashmole had lately passed through London, brought them to him. Ashmole's reputation was pervasive. Whether or not Ashmole ever tried to ‘re-activate’ the angelic calling-system of Edward Kelley and John Dee is unknown, but it is certain that he did take the work very seriously and in no wise found it reprehensible that Dee should have attempted to crown and complete his scientific knowledge by making contact with the spiritual powers believed to be ‘behind’ those physical manifestations which he had spent his life in observing.
A year later (4 July 1673) Ashmole recorded in his diary that “The learned and ingenious Sir Rob: Murrey died.” ‘Learned and ingenious’ is a phrase reserved by Ashmole for those versed in the Hermetic Art, and that is certainly true of Robert Moray, patron of Thomas Vaughan and friend of Elias Ashmole. Within six months of obtaining the Heptarchia Mystica, Ashmole had asked the antiquary John Aubrey (in whose Lives Ashmole features) to enquire after contemporary accounts of Dee in Mortlake (Dee's principle place of residence) and received a report from Aubrey on 27 January 1673 with which he was dissatisfied. Aubrey had, however, made contact with an 82 year old widow, Widow Faldo, and Ashmole went to interview her on August 11 1673, a month after hearing of the death of Moray. One wonders what his thoughts were as he approached Mortlake, last home of his Hermetic hero. Widow Faldo told Ashmole that she had known Dee well and had been inside his house, four or five rooms of which had been “filled with bookes.” He kept a “plentifull Table and a good Howse” and once permitted Faldo and her mother the vision of “the Ecclips of the Sun in one of his Roomes, which he had made darke.”
In 1675 Ashmole executed work on the history of Windsor Castle, notes for a projected biography of John Dee and according to Dr Campbell's biographical article on Ashmole (Biographia Britannica 1747), he collected material for a History of Freemasonry, the notes for which existed among Ashmole's papers in 1687. Campbell's account reads as follows :
As to the ancient history of Freemasons, about whom you are desirous of knowing what may be known with certainty, I shall only tell you, that if our worthy brother E. Ashmole Esq; had executed his intended design, our fraternity had been as much obliged to him as the brethren of the most noble Order of the Garter. I would not have you surprised at this expression, or think it at all too assuming. …What from Mr E. A's collection I could gather, was, that the report of our Society's taking rise from a Bull granted by the Pope in the reign of Henry III, to some Italian architects, to travel all over Europe to erect chapels was ill-founded. [the ‘Comacene theory’ of Masonic origins - the architects were supposed to have come from round Lake Como, survivors of the fall into barbarism.] Such a Bull there was, and those architects were Masons; but this Bull, in the opinion of the learned Mr A was confirmative only, and did not by any means create our fraternity, or even establish them in this kingdom.
Dr Campbell then went on to suggest that enquirers look into the stories of S. Alban and King Edwin, in whose time masons were supposed to have been active. Campbell asserted that Mr Ashmole was more understanding of, and better acquainted with these stories of masonic origins than those who would ascribe a late date to Free Masonry.
Between 1679 and 1683 Ashmole was busy with another great project. This project was to succeed and bring him the fame on which his name now definitively rests. He was in the process of establishing the first-ever public museum in Britain, a museum of natural science built up from his own purchases and from material inherited through his association with the Tradescant family through his second marriage. The Ashmolean now stands as a great neo-classical structure on Beaumont Street and S. Giles, Oxford. The original building included a unique chemical laboratory in the basement, the first of its kind in a British university. Ashmole was ahead of his time in this work, for after his death the laboratory was reported as being in a disgraceful state of damage and neglect. Ecclesiastical influence prevented the foundation of an Ashmolean Professorship in chemical and natural history but the University did appoint the first Keeper of the Museum, Dr Robert Plot, as Professor of Chemistry. (Plot also wrote the exquisite Natural History of Staffordshire, which refers to the very large number of Free Masons in that county12). 1,758 of Ashmole's books are today housed at the Ashmolean, and for more than 150 years after its foundation the Museum remained the centre for scientific studies in Oxford - a great tribute to the powerful spiritual impulse which drove Ashmole's great energies into such a life-enhancing and generous direction. If there ever was an invisible spiritual Fraternity, Ashmole certainly paid his membership-dues.
In 1685 Charles II died and his Catholic son James II succeeded him. The bailiffs of Lichfield begged Ashmole to be their MP. Ashmole was delighted to accept. James II opposed Ashmole's candidature, having promised the seat to a favourite and asked Ashmole to stand down, claiming he had known nothing of Ashmole's acceptance. In spite of this, many citizens of Lichfield still voted for Ashmole, deeply regretting that their wishes were so high-handedly overturned. Ashmole wrote the bailiffs a letter, giving money for a coronation party and telling them :
You cannot but imagine I looke upon my selfe as a very unfortunate man, that finde the love of my country men (almost without parallel) so great, and yet cannot accept their votes.
Three years later, in the year that James II fled the country in the bloodless Revolution which ousted him in favour of William and Mary, Dean Addison begged Ashmole to pay for the completion of the Cathedral's ten-bell peal :
Whatever interest this City and Church have in your Birth and Education, hath already redounded, insomuch honour thereby, and in your continual bounty, to both…nor in truth have we any other Argument, but your Charity and our necessity.
Sometime between the 18 and 19 May 1692, Elias Ashmole died. His tombstone in the Howard Chapel of S. Mary's Lambeth reads : While the Ashmolean endures, he will never die. John Aubrey, who knew Elias Ashmole, declared, simply, that “he was a mighty good man.”