The Magus of Freemasonry

Following the royalist defeat at Worcester in July 1646, parliamentary officers ordered Elias Ashmole to keep out of London. At about the same time, according to the historian Anthony Wood, Izaak Walton (1594–1684), warden of the Ironmonger’s Company Yeomanry, closed his sempster’s (seamster’s) business on the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street near the Inner Temple and left London, “finding it dangerous for honest men to live there.” Like Ashmole, he returned to the area of Shallowford in Staffordshire, near the bishop of Lichfield’s palace at Eccleshall, about twenty miles northwest of Lichfield.

Ashmole was a friend of Izaak Walton, but at what date they became friends is unknown. Perhaps they had met around Fleet Street, close to where Ashmole began his legal career in 1638. They were certainly friends by the time of the 1676 edition of Walton’s world-famous The Compleat Angler: The Contemplative Man’s Recreation (first published in 1653), in which Walton referred to their friendship in the context of strange and wondrous marine life.

“I know,” wrote Walton, “we islanders are averse to the belief of these wonders; but, there be so many strange creatures to be now seen, many collected by John Tradescant, and others added by my friend Elias Ashmole, Esq. who now keeps them carefully and methodically at his house near to Lambeth.”

To those who are familiar with his references, Walton’s work, apparently devoted to the harmless pastime of angling, reads like a covert message to depressed royalists and dispossessed Anglican clergymen throughout the country.

The philosophical roots of The Compleat Angler lie in the works of Hermetically influenced Catholic Anglicans and Continental magi. The book’s message can be read as “Be calm, contemplate the waters; receive inspiration therefrom: all troubles will pass.” Or, as Walton himself recommended, “Study to be quiet.” The “troubles” referred to by Walton derived from the puritanical, repressive, anti-ecclesiastical, and generally hot-headed manifestations of Cromwell’s government, the Protectorate.

Walton quotes from Albertus Magnus (On the secrets of Nature, a favorite work of alchemists and physicists) and from Hieronymus Cardanus’s De Subtilitate (19th Book: on “raining frogs”). Cardanus was an astrologer (d. 1576) and a favorite author of Johann Valentin Andreae.

Away from the hustle and bustle of city life: stained-glass window from Winchester Cathedral depicting Izaak Walton as the contemplative angler and his excellent advice, “Study to be quiet.”

Walton cites Sir Francis Bacon’s Natural History regarding the mysterious properties of water. When discussing the powers of fish to hear what man cannot, Walton refers to “a mysterious knack, which though it be much easier than the philosopher’s stone, yet is not attainable by common capacities, or else lies locked up in the brain or breast of some chemical man, that, like the Rosicrucians, will not yet reveal it.”

Walton includes his old friend Sir Henry Wotton (formerly ambassador to the Republic of Venice) as a “chemical man.” Walton also uses Du Bartas’s Divine Weekes and Works (1608, translated by Joshua Sylvester), a book full of Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic knowledge. The final section of Du Bartas’s work deals with Solomon’s Temple, with particular reference to those pillars of Jachin and Boaz that appear in masonic lore.

Walton refers with approval to Renaissance Hermetic scholars such as Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) and Franceso Giorgi and his Harmony of the World. Indeed, the humble angler’s companion reads like a condensation of the spiritual Hermetic reforming philosophy, and would have been understood as such by men of Ashmole’s persuasions; it also reads like a book suitable for a Free Mason’s vacation. Walton looked to the unity of all things revealed through the deepest contemplation of nature (cf. Ashmole’s motto, Ex Uno Omnia: both Hermetic-Neoplatonist and monarchist).

Walton was also the biographer of Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) and Dr. John Donne (1573–1631). Donne had been a particularly close friend of Walton, a friendship begun when the poet was vicar of St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street. A friendship between a sempster and a famous man might be considered unusual. However, snobs will always fail to see that being special transcends the bounds of class and income. What could possibly have united the sempster and the man who had been chaplain to James I’s daughter Elizabeth on her marriage to the elector Frederick of the Palatinate in February 1613? The answer is spiritual insight.

Donne was deeply interested in Pico della Mirandola, Kabbalah, and Hermetism in general. Walton was present when Donne consigned his manuscripts to the care of Dr. Henry King (bishop of Chichester in 1641); at Donne’s saintly passing in 1631, Sir Henry Wotton asked Walton to collect material for a life of Donne (published in 1640 with a collection of Donne’s sermons). Walton published the biography of Wotton in 1651.

Walton employed a curious seal, given to him by Donne. It shows Christ crucified on an anchor. In his right hand is a set of compasses, compasses being a traditional motif of freemasonry.

Two years after the execution of his father, Charles II made a bid to recover the Crown. His Scots army was, however, defeated at the decisive battle of Worcester, following which, after many adventures (such as hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel in Staffordshire), the late king’s heir fled to Europe. After the battle, a peculiar correspondence flowed between Izaak Walton (who had been “observing” a “fanaticall meeting” at St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street) and a Mr. George Barlow of Blore Pipe House, near Eccleshall, Staffordshire:

For Mr Geo. Barlow, att Blowe Pipe House nr. Eccleshalle, in StaffordordeShire, These ffor his owne handes with speede and care.

I praye you Sr to believe this to be a token of my love forr you and a prooffe that I am an honest and loyall man; wh. in these times is a rare character, that it oughte or was wont to be in Englande. Sir ’tis knowne in London that Col. Blague hathe secreted in your house (when you received him after the fatall fighte at Worcester) ye Lesser George of ye Garter, of Gold and Diamonds, belonging to ye King; and there is much talke here of a commission being given to a Troop of horse to searche youre house for it, You may depende on this forr I was tolde it by a Parlimente Captn one Rich: Frankk, whome I mett tonight at a fanaticall meeting called an Evening Lecture held in St Dunstans Churche in Fleete Streete; where a brawling Trooper filled that Pulpit wh. was once occupied by ye learned and heavenly minded Dr Donne. Sr you can devise any meanes of conveying ye Jeuell to me, I praye you to doe so ffor so shall you be discharged, of a dangerous truste and I not suspected, and I will bring it to London where I have some hope of giving it to a gentleman who meanes with all speede to returne unto ye King. I shall follow this letter so closely to Stafforde as almost to prevent mine owne messenger, but give him youre commandes and ffear not ffor their coming safe to ye handes of Sr.

Blore Pipe Farm today—the place where George Barlow hid the Lesser George after the Battle of Worcester.

Elias Ashmole’s 1672 antiquarian masterpiece, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the most Noble Order of the Garter, tells us what a “Lesser George” is. A George is a medal bearing the image of St. George that hung on a gold chain worn by Knights Companions of the Order of the Garter. Ashmole notes that one such medal was worn by Charles I “at the time of his martyrdom.” Ashmole was also clearly aware of the part played by Izaak Walton in the safe transmission of the Lesser George from George Barlow to the exiled Charles II:

Nor will it be unfitly here remembred, by what good fortune the present Soveraign’s lesser George set with fair Diamonds was preserved, after the defeat given to the Scotch forces at Worcester, ann. 4 Car II. Among the rest of his attendants then dispersed, Col. Blague was one; who, taking shelter at Blorepipe house in Staffordshire, where one Mr George Barlow then dwelt, delivered his wife this George, to secure. Within a week after. Mr Barlow himself carried it to Robert Milward, Esq.; he being then a prisoner to the parliament, in the garrison of Stafford; and by his meanes it was happily preserved and restored: for, not long after, he delivered it to Mr Izaac Walton, (a man well known, and as well beloved of all good men; and will be better known to posterity, by his ingenious pen, in the “Lives of Dr Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, and Mr George Herbert”) to be given to Col. Blague, then a prisoner in the Tower, who, considering it had already passed so many dangers, was yet persuaded it could yet secure one hazardous attempt of his own; and thereupon, leaving the Tower without leave-taking, hasted the presentation of it to the present soveraign’s hand.

What an extraordinary business! Here we see Izaak Walton in the role of a trusted agent of the royalist cause, confident that Colonel Blague will be able to escape from the Tower of London and make his way to the rightful monarch, Charles II—and all for the Garter jewel. In his letter to Barlow, Walton notes that he is himself “not suspected,” to the extent that he can even attend a “fanaticall meeting” of Puritanical activists, his operation relying on precise knowledge of those individuals with access to the exiled monarch.

We may wonder how it came to be that a tradesman and publisher such as Walton could have had access to such exalted, and risky, circles. In his letter to Barlow he refers to himself as “an honest and loyal man,” while in Ashmole’s account we are told that Walton was “well beloved of all good men.” The adjectives good and honest seem to bear some special implication in this context. Certainly they are employed with particular reference to those people sympathetic to a traditionalist and sacred commitment to religious and political unity (that in some way, man’s place in the cosmic order is dependent upon sacred monarchy: Ex Uno Omnia).

It should also be borne in mind that not all those who supported “king & parliament” against Charles I desired either his execution or a cessation of the monarchy. Therefore, Colonel Henry Mainwaring and Ashmole, for example, may have had more in common, politically speaking, than the mere nomenclature of “royalist” and “parliamentarian” might immediately suggest. The issue was essentially one of whether the king could rule without Parliament. Many royalists considered that Parliament had gone too far, infringing more fundamental loyalties. Religious loyalties were also determinative.

A commitment to the principle of unity as both a political and metaphysical principle was not only the hallmark of Walton and his friends, but may well have been an implicit principle and subtending ideal of that “Free Masonry” to which Elias Ashmole was also attached. The hypothesis that Walton was himself a Free Mason—and that this association gave him and others access to a discreet network of operations—cannot be discounted. Such a supposition might well account for Walton’s secret part in the affair of the Lesser George. However, Walton’s status as agent may also be accounted for on the basis of his privileged friendships with such luminaries as Donne, King, and Wotton: men whose thoughts were characterized by a distinctive Christian spirituality in a monarchical setting.

In fact, there is circumstantial evidence of freemasonic lodge work right in the very heart of that part of Staffordshire where the events surrounding the protection of the Lesser George took place. A few miles on from Eccleshall (in the vicinity of which Walton temporarily retired in 1646) on the Eccleshall-to-Newport road, through Sugnall and Croxton and just before one reaches the magnificent late-Elizabethan hall at Broughton, there is a narrow country lane to a place called Fairoak. A mile down this lane, on the left, one finds Blore Pipe Farm, substantially as it was when George Barlow hid the Lesser George in 1651. Nearby is a sandstone cave where the Duke of Buckingham himself hid after the Battle of Worcester—and just before one reaches Blore Pipe is a country inn called The Freemason’s Arms.

While public houses of this name are to be found in towns and cities (notably in London), it is somewhat surprising to find such a place in an isolated country spot like Fairoak. The building dates from the sixteenth century, but no one knows how long it has borne the square and compasses on the outside. There are sandstone quarries at the bottom of the lane, and the area (Bishopswood at the head of the Langot Valley) has revealed evidence of much medieval industry going on in the clearings of the surrounding woods.

The “faery hill” at Fairoak, topped by a grove of oak trees.

George Barlow of Blore Pipe hid the Duke of Buckingham in this cave (overgrown) after the Battle of Worcester (1651).

Masons and freemasons were certainly active in the area in the fourteenth century. A few miles to the east stand the medieval ruins of Ranton Abbey (on lands now owned by Lord Lichfield), while even closer to Fairoak stood Eccleshall Castle, of which Dr. Robert Plot wrote in his Natural History of Staffordshire: “And in the reigne of his [Henry III’s] Son King Edw.I. Walter de Longton Bishop of Lichfield, and Lord high Treasurer of England, some say built, others repaired, Eccleshall Castle; and the Manor of Shoubrough or Schuckborough, which before says Leland belong’d to one Shuckborough with the long beard, by whom it was given to the Miter [Bishop] of Lichfield.”¹

If associations of like-minded men are simply inevitable, then one does not need to posit the existence of discreet sodalities to explain both Ashmole’s and Walton’s remarkable connections and activities. Magnetism of mind and inner purpose may be sufficient to account for the great web that bound men like Ashmole and Walton during the 1650s. Royalists, after all, had much in common during this period! Their common cause had been defeated, at least externally. Many suffered and were bound by dependencies.

Nevertheless, it is as natural for like-minded men to form sodalities as it is to be attracted to one another’s minds. Something like Free Masonry may have served to ritualize common purposes, like the mathematicians and astrologers feasts to which Ashmole also refers. We cannot say there is no evidence for such a conjecture; what we can say is that the evidence does not point inevitably to that conclusion, and for that reason, the question remains open—and the mystery (if there is one) remains.

The destruction wrought by parliamentarian forces did not end with the last shot of the Civil War. A diary note of October 1651 reveals Ashmole’s concern for the shelled-out Lichfield Cathedral after two years of the Cromwellian Protectorate: “the stately Cathedrall at Lichfield : set upon to be totally ruined, by Colonel Danvers Governor of Stafford who by authority from the parliament employed workmen to strip off the lead from the roof.”²

Ashmole kept himself informed of events in Lichfield. A note of July 26, 1653, recorded: “The faire Bell called Jesus Bell at Lichfield knockt in pieces by one Nickins a Pewterer, who was the chief officer for demolishing that Cathedrall.”³

View of cathedral from the point of view of the artillery at Prince Rupert’s Mount.

The violence of the Protectorate extended beyond stones, lead roofs, and church bells. On August 2, 1652, Ashmole “went to Maidston Assizes to heare the Witches tryed, and tooke Mr Tradescant with me.”⁴ This was John Tradescant the younger, whose private collections at Lambeth so excited Ashmole. In the event, six witches were hanged, accused of bewitching nine children, a man, and a woman, and £500 worth of cattle and corn lost at sea by witchcraft.

Johann Valentin Andreae, the author of the Fama Fraternitatis, now an old man in Wolfenbüttel, believed the treatment of witches a stain on mankind. Ashmole did not record his opinion of the sentence. His mind was preoccupied with other things.

Around this time, he and his friend Dr. Thomas Wharton prepared a catalog, published by John Tradescant in 1656: Amusaeum Tradescantianum: or, A Collection of rarities. Preserved at South Lambeth near London by John Tradescant. That word preserved was very important to Ashmole and he was doubtless worried about what would happen to a collection such as Tradescant’s in the future. The making of the catalog was a first step to preserving at least the memory of it. John Evelyn, who visited the Tradescant collection on September 17, 1657, named Ashmole as the sole author of this, “the first English catalogue of a natural history museum.”

Soon after the Maidstone trip with Tradescant, Ashmole made an extended journey to Lichfield and Staffordshire. On August 19, 1652, Ashmole “entered Lichfield about sunset.”⁵ Against the reddish skyline he would have seen the silhouettes of two spires, the third truncated at its base, having crashed through the roof. According to local historian Howard Clayton’s Loyal and Ancient City, after the parliamentarian destruction of 1646, “Centuries of religious custom disappeared and the Cathedral Close became for 14 years a place of ruin, inhabited by squatters and haunted by owls at night.”⁶

Heading north, Ashmole arrived on August 28 at Gawsworth Hall, on the Congleton-to-Macclesfield road, “where my Father in Law Mr Mainwaring then lived.”⁷ Gawsworth was also the home of Lady Fitton, whom Ashmole had admired six long years before.

“Study to be quiet,” advised Izaak Walton, then possibly fishing on the Dove not far away. On September 23, Ashmole himself “took a Journey into the Peake, in search of Plants and other Curiosities.”⁸ (The river Dove divides the Staffordshire from the Derbyshire Peak District.)

Ashmole’s “Noates” of his journey contain short entries of peculiar words, sayings, rhymes, miners’ language and customs, cookery recipes, people, inscriptions, and sights. For example, a Staffordshire oatcake was called a “Bannock” consisting of oatmeal and barley, baked on a griddle. “A Spider is called an Aldercrop.”⁹

Four miles northwest from Buxton, Ashmole encountered a Mr. Owlerinshaw of Owlerinshaw, who had given “King James [I] greate Satisfaction about the blazing Star. This Owrneshaw [sic] was at Cambridge.”¹⁰

The reference to the “blazing Star” should be of great interest to those concerned with the history of Freemasonry. Ashmole’s note is the first reference I have found to this key “ornament” of lodge work.

The “blazing Star” represents the Shekinah, or presence of God. John Browne’s Master Key, a book written in cipher in the 1790s, tells us how: “The Blazing Star, the Glory in the Centre, reminds us of that awful period, when the Almighty delivered the two tables of stone containing the ten commandments, to his faithful servant, Moses, on Mount Sinai, when the Rays of His Divine Glory shone so bright, with such refulgent splendour and unparalleled lustre, that none could behold it without fear or trembling.”

That King James gained “Satisfaction” on the subject from Mr. Owlerinshaw suggests that His Majesty may himself have been an admitted Free Mason (the word admitted refers to Scottish masonic practice where “acceptions” were unknown).

The question-and-answer catechism quoted earlier (Sloane Ms. 3329—the earliest-known English catechism) asks the question: “How many Jewels belong to your Lodge?” To which the answer is given: “There are three. The Square pavement, the blazing Star and the Danty tassley.”

There was, at least in the 1720s, a tradition in Free Masonry that King James had “revived the English lodges” and was a “Mason King” (Anderson’s Constitutions, 1723). It is known that he stayed in Staffordshire; hunting expeditions in the vicinity of Hoar Cross in the Needwood (royal) forest occurred in 1619, 1621, and 1624.¹¹

James I as painted by Rubens on the Banqueting Hall ceiling, Whitehall (architects: Inigo Jones and Nicholas Stone). Note the pillars of Solomon’s Temple and the figure of Hermes in the foreground. (Photo: Matthew Scanlan)

The record of Ashmole’s meeting characters from the area might also account for his later employee Robert Plot’s assertion in his Natural History of Staffordshire (1686) that “Free-masons” were “more numerous” in the Staffordshire moorlands than elsewhere. Was Ashmole paying call on brethren?

He mentions a man called “Wagge” from the moorland village of Wetton who “is Staffordshire Astrologus,” a fellow astrologer.¹² At Dove Bridge (near Uttoxeter), Ashmole actually participated in a magical “Call,” or invocation of spirits. “I came to Mr: Jo: Tompson, who dwells neare Dove Bridge. He used a Call, and had responses in a soft voyce.”¹³ Ashmole inquired of the spirit concerning the health of his friend Dr. Thomas Wharton, who was poorly. “He told me Dr : Wharton was recovering from his sickness, and so it proved.”

On October 2 “I came to Lichfeild.”¹⁴ Ashmole’s return to his birthplace was to attend to more mundane business than that which occupied him in the moorlands to the north. At 11 a.m. “Mr Anthony Diott offered an agreement between me and my uncle.”¹⁵ Anthony Dyott (d. 1662), son of Sir Richard and Dorothy Dyott, was a barrister of the Inner Temple and had been major of a regiment of foot in Charles I’s army.

Thomas Ashmole, Elias’s uncle, had taken effective possession of the family home in Women’s Cheaping (now Breadmarket Street). After negotiations, Ashmole’s “Uncle quited his Title to me, which pretended to my home in Lichfeild, and sealed to me a deede of Bargaine and Sale.” On the fourteenth, Thomas Ashmole sealed his nephew “a Release and gave me possession.”

In 1654, Ashmole was doubtless gratified by the publication of the Oxonian John Webster’s Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies, wherein Webster advocated that astrology be taught in the universities, which he said, “have not only slighted and neglected it, but also scoffed at it.”¹⁶ Webster first eulogizes the exemplary “Mr Ashmole,” followed by Mr. William Lilly, Mr. Booker, Mr. Sanders, and Mr. Culpeper. Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54) was an astrologer and physician.

Dr. Seth Ward, one of the core group who would proceed to found the Royal Society, condemned astrology as unsound in his response, Vindiciae Academiarum (1654), while admitting that he nonetheless had “a very good respect” for Elias Ashmole. Ashmole himself did not enter the debate and would doubtless have shrugged his shoulders and opined that everyone was entitled to his own opinion. Perhaps he might have added, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” Ashmole never bore grudges and his later relations with Ward were friendly. As usual, he had more interesting things on his mind.

Ashmole had obviously “put it about” that he wanted to know of anything his correspondents could find on the subject of John Dee. In March 1654, Dr. Thomas Browne of Norwich wrote to Ashmole, detailing his meetings and conversation with John Dee’s son, Arthur, author of Fasciculus Chemicus. Arthur Dee informed Dr. Browne that his father had “small Powder” for projection, which he witnessed.¹⁷

Dee also informed Dr. Browne that “Kelly dealt not justly with his Father [Dr. John Dee], and that he went away with the greatest part of the powder; and was afterward imprisoned by the Emperor in a Castle from whence attempting an Escape downe the Wall, he fell and broke his Leg, and was imprisoned againe.”

This “Kelly” was Sir Edward Kelley, Dee’s assistant and subsequently partner in alchemy. Kelley is generally supposed to have led Dee astray, fabricating a number of angelic messages to suit his own purposes or fantasies.

The year 1654 ended sadly. At 6 p.m. on November 24, Ashmole’s “good Father in Law Mr Peter Mainwaring died at Gawsworth.”¹⁸ One may imagine that the death of his old friend hit him very hard, sending his thoughts back to more innocent times spent joyfully in the bosom of his first Mainwaring home. Peter Mainwaring was buried in the chancel of Gawsworth church.

A fortnight later, “Doctor Pordage [was] put out of Bradfield Living.”¹⁹ As the holder of the advowson for Bradfield, Ashmole was to present a successor to the parish. Pordage’s ejection had taken some years’ effort by the “expurgators” or Commission of Berkshire “for the ejecting of Scandalous, Ignorant and Insufficient Ministers and School-Masters.”²⁰

The Protectorate had no time for the ancient episcopal order and attempted to rationalize or modernize or reform (whatever the chosen word may be)—or just plain interfere with—religion, as it saw fit.

The Compleat Angler could have been written for John Pordage. However, the mystical doctor did not join Izaak Walton on the Dove or the Ware. Instead, he kept a substantial foot in Bradfield and continued as a fisher of men at a Behemenist “conventicle” in Reading, members of which would go on to form the Philadelphians. Pordage’s learned works would inspire the great Non-Juror and mystic William Law (see my book The Gnostic Philosophy for an account of Law and Jacob Böhme).

The expurgators, unversed in the profundities of the Silesian shoe manufacturer Jacob Böhme, condemned Dr. John Pordage as “ignorant and very insufficient for the work of the ministry” on sixty-five charges, including blasphemy, heresy, and intercourse with spirits—none of which seems to have caused Elias Ashmole any sleepless nights.

The next year saw the beginnings of Ashmole’s consuming interest in the Order of the Garter, perhaps inspired by the story of the fabulous “escape” of the Garter Jewel—the Lesser George—back to Charles II. His manuscript collections for his book The Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the most Noble Order of the Garter (1672) fill thirty-nine folio volumes. He assembled and reduced most of his material before the Restoration “with ready assistance” from Dr. Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor and register of the Order of the Garter, along with his consulting “other authentick Manuscripts and Autographs.” He also made “a painful and chargeable search of our public Records” to produce what would eventually become the greatest work of antiquarian research ever published, a landmark to this day.

Ashmole’s instincts for preservation were very marked in the painstaking process that at times must have seemed endless. Furthermore, he chose not to restrict the narrative to the Order of the Garter alone, but to give an account of many other knightly orders (including a watershed account of the Knights Templar—on account of its fairness) and, indeed, a timely exposition of the meaning of nobility and knighthood.

Through all this period, it would appear that not all was well in Ashmole’s relationship with his wife. Exacerbated partly by the lawsuits of her own children against her husband, and partly by temperamental conflicts, their mutual affection cooled. One writer has referred to the “slow crucifixion of an unhappy marriage” and something of the kind seems to have been in Ashmole’s mind when he secreted the following couplet in his papers on April 27, 1655:

It was probably a deep love that made them hate one another; a love unspoken grows twisted and alien from its root. At the end, a cold heart and a skinny bag of untold memories.

In the following year, Ashmole’s wife sued her husband for alimony, having been badgered for years by members of her family. In a chorus led by Sir Humphrey Forster, they had accused her of allowing Ashmole to pressure her into a stance of carelessness toward her own children. This gibe hit home and undermined the couple’s relationship. The case came to a final hearing on October 8, 1657.

John Maynard (Ashmole’s counsel) asserted that while Mrs. Ashmole’s deposition had amounted to 800 sheets of paper, “not one word” had been proved against Mr. Ashmole “of using her ill nor ever giving her a bad or provoking word.” The Lords Commissioners denied alimony and delivered Mrs. Ashmole back into her husband’s care (they had been living apart). The Ashmoles went to live with William Lilly and his wife.

Lilly recorded that Ashmole never blamed his lady, only her illness and her “Councillors and Abettors.” It seems that the couple underwent a genuine reconciliation following the case and that after the storms, fate “pleased to sweeten” Ashmole’s “long-Sufferings with a fair and peaceful Issue.”²¹

Nevertheless, it would appear that the couple were living apart at the time of Mary’s death eleven years later, at which time Ashmole lost all title to the lordship of Bradfield, along with the substantial sum of £602, sixteen shillings per annum.

Happily, there were compensations for the trail of misery walked by the Ashmoles. Ever adept at “locating the talent,” Ashmole had become friendly with fellow antiquarian William Dugdale of Blyth Hall, Warwickshire (where a magnificent portrait of Ashmole as Windsor herald still hangs).

William Dugdale was Ashmole’s senior by twelve years. Perhaps there was a subconscious need for another surrogate father figure after the death of Peter Mainwaring. Happily, the affection Ashmole held for his future father-in-law was reciprocated. They enjoyed the same things: journeying about the byways of England, visiting churches, recording inscriptions, holding up at good taverns, searching through ancient manuscripts, picking up stories and artifacts, and delving deeply into the past. They were the living embodiments of “the Contemplative Man’s Recreation.” Together, they went a-fishing for England’s history.

In Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire there is an engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar of “The prospect of Guyes Cliffe from the meadows on the north-east thereof.”²² The engraving bears Ashmole’s coat of arms and the inscription Posteritati Sacrum Per Eliam Ashmole Arm. Mercuriophilum Anglicum. Perhaps the pair would be pleased to know that a lodge of Free and Accepted Masons now meets at the chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, Guy’s Cliff, the lodge dominated by the ancient carving of Guy of Warwick depicted in Dugdale’s work. Guy’s Cliff’s spiritual associations go back to the time of the ancient British saints who emerged from Wales after the Romans departed.

Incidentally, it was Ashmole and Dugdale who initiated the scholarly use of flint instruments for purposes of archaeological dating.

The duo spent May and June 1657 traveling and making extensive observations in Staffordshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Devonshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire. They recorded the presence of tumuli, ancient stones, ruined remains of the Roman occupation, churches, and monuments. They measured churches, drew coats of arms, and made copious botanical notes. They were antiquarians, doing what antiquarians are supposed to do. They were easy riders of the wealds, valleys, and plains of England; nothing passed them by.

Guy’s Cliff, near Warwick, as depicted in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).

On January 25, 1658, Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich again put quill to paper on the subject of his conversations with Arthur Dee. According to Dr. Browne, Arthur Dee “was a persevering Student in Hermeticall Philosophy, and had no small encouragement having seene projection made, And with the highest asseverations [sic] he confirmed unto his death, that he had occularly undeceavably and frequently beheld it in Bohemia, and to my knowledge, had not accident prevented, he had not many yeares before his death, retired beyond Sea, and fallen upon the solemne process of the great worke.”²³

This letter can only have encouraged Ashmole in completing his preface to The Way to Bliss three months later, “to prove the Possibility of such a thing as the PHILOSOPHER’S STONE,” as the title has it.

On July 27, 1658, Ashmole was off on his travels again—this time alone. “I went toward Worcestershire and Staffordshire, 4H.P.M. In this Journey I visited Sir Tho : Leigh [August 6]; Sir Harvey Bagot [Bt. 1591–1660; Ashmole visited Blithfield Hall, near Abbots Bromley on August 14], Sir Rich Lewson, the Earle of Denbigh.”²⁴

Sir Thomas Leigh (c. 1616–62) lived at Hamstall Ridware; his once fine Jacobean mansion is now a set of striking ruins at the back of the fine church, some seven miles north of Lichfield. To stand in the cemetery there and gaze at those ruins, and to imagine Ashmole arriving during a long-lost summer long ago, is to experience what it is to be an antiquarian—to leap across time as the past leaps toward one.

On August 4, Ashmole was in Lichfield, presumably enjoying a not dissimilar experience. He copied lists of streets, places, and tenements mentioned in three registers of Lichfield Cathedral. He also took notes and made drawings of monuments, coats of arms, and inscriptions in the church of St. Michael, Greenhill.

The ruins of the Jacobean mansion at Hamstall Ridware, visited by Ashmole in 1658. The spire of Hamstall Ridware church rises behind them.

On December 16, 1659, while England appeared to be slipping out of control after the death of Oliver Cromwell, John Tradescant the younger chose to make an extraordinary gift. He apparently decided that posterity would have a greater chance of viewing his collections intact if he passed them on to Elias Ashmole’s charge in the event of his death.

“5H.30’ P.M. Mr Tradescant and his wife sealed and delivered to me the deed of Guift of all his Rarities.” The Gift included books, coins, pictures, medals, stones, “mechanicks,” “Pieces of Antiquity” and “other things and Rarities.”²⁵

This event has generated some controversy. Since the Tradescant collection became the basis for the first Ashmolean Museum’s contents, it has served some writers’ evident distaste for Elias Ashmole to regard his achievement as the mere “gifting” to Oxford of Tradescant’s achievement, with Ashmole’s name cunningly absorbing all the credit.

A recent biography of Sir Christopher Wren by Lisa Jardine sees Ashmole as a somewhat shady character, one who appropriated for himself the credit of another’s labor. Taking the (at the time) discredited words of Ashmole’s enemy Henry de Vic (c. 1599–1671), chancellor of the Order of the Garter, as ammunition, Ashmole is presented as an overly ambitious fraud who got where he was by grafting himself on to the work of others.

Ms. Jardine writes: “Elias Ashmole is a particularly striking case of someone who did well out of the Restoration through his flair at ‘remembering’ a largely apocryphal golden Stuart past before the Civil War. His lasting fame and ’name’ rest (in the title of the Ashmolean Museum) upon his dubious acquisition of another man’s lifetime collection of rarities, and his subsequent gifting of them to the University of Oxford.”²⁶

This is a serious charge. It is as serious as a supposition that since Ashmole was a Hermetic Philosopher, he stands at the end of a superstitious era (with his back to us), unworthy of little more than quaint footnote status in the era of modern science that succeeded it.

As has been observed, modern science disowned the mother (“natural magick”) that bore it. Does it then suffer from an Oedipus complex? Truth will out. Newton practiced alchemy; Ashmole was accounted a fine mathematician. William Dugdale, acknowledged as one of the greatest antiquarians in Britain’s history, chose to work in close concert with Ashmole for years. Was he duped?

It is difficult to know on what evidential basis the charge is made that Ashmole had a flair for “remembering” (the use of quotation marks seem to suggest that fabricating would be a more appropriate word) an apocryphal Stuart golden age. Nor can the author assess the value of calling Ashmole a “striking case,” a phrase redolent of the Bar. However, it is at least possible to disentangle the circumstances that led to Ashmole’s temporary possession of the Tradescant rarities. Members of the historical jury will find that there was nothing “dubious” in the transaction.

It is important to recall that Ashmole’s personal fame and reputation did not depend upon the restoration of the monarchy. Ashmole was regarded as a leading light in his field—or fields—even while Cromwell ruled. Ashmole’s carefulness and powerful preservation drives made him an obvious candidate—in fact, as history shows, a most justified choice—for the care and trust of the Tradescant collections.

The Deed of Gift was first disputed in 1661. John Tradescant’s widow, Hester, with motives of her own, said that her husband came home “distempered” and got her to sign the document inadvisedly, as a witness.²⁷ She maintained that her husband later canceled the deed as he did not want the collections in private hands. Mrs. Tradescant did not know that the deed had legal standing and could not be canceled by one party.

In fact, Ashmole returned the deed to her and said that if she did not like it, he would not “have it for a world” honesty compelled him to surrender the legal evidence of the advantage he had gained.²⁸ But the Tradescants must have thought that the return of the deed relinquished its power; it did not. They kept the deed. Tradescant changed his will to leave his collections after his widow’s death to the university of either Oxford or Cambridge.

Ashmole did not claim to be the founder of the Tradescant collections, only of the museum that preserved them, among other things. To that museum he entrusted those collections, adding into the bargain his own remarkable collections. The beneficiary of a “dubious transaction” would surely have sold the material for personal profit or attempted to conceal its provenance.

Elias Ashmole, Windsor herald, by Cornelis de Neve, painted sometime in the 1660s. (Photographed by kind permission of Sir William Dugdale, Bt., Blyth Hall, Warwickshire)

On June 16, 1660, Ashmole “first kissed the King’s hand.”²⁹ The madness was over (thought the royalist)—and many an old fool returned to prominence (thought John Milton). The Restoration ended the hard years of Cromwellian rule and the sun kissed the fortunes of Elias Ashmole.

As we shall see in chapter 9, King Charles II regarded Ashmole as a striking case of an honest man; the king was very shrewd.