The Magus of Freemasonry

May 29, 1660: “For now the nights dire tragedies are done …” King Charles II enters London and Ashmole published a poem, Sol in Ascendente … to celebrate the glorious Restoration.¹

Just over a fortnight later (June 16), precisely at 4 p.m., he “first kissed the King’s hand,” having been introduced by the king’s page, Thomas Chiffinch (1600–66).² Two days later, the king appointed Elias Ashmole as Windsor herald. His duties involved keeping accurate records of the nobility and heraldry of England and establishing rights to coats of arms, as well as organizing ceremonial occasions and participating in them as one close to His Majesty. On the same day, Ashmole’s good friend William Dugdale was appointed Norroy King of Arms. Together they would endeavor to restore nobility to England.

It hardly needs saying, but Ashmole did not ingratiate himself into the king’s favor, having been recommended by those closest to His Majesty. After nine years in exile, Charles II barely had time to see his bags unpacked before giving an audience to the squire of Bradfield (retd.) and member of the Inner Temple (since 1657): an astrologer and antiquarian whose last publication was an obscure text on alchemy. But Ashmole had a reputation for loyalty.

Engraving of King Charles II from Elias Ashmole’s Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672).

On what basis, other than having been penalized by Parliament for taking up arms for the king, that loyalty was now being rewarded is still something of a mystery. Ashmole had carried out intelligence work for King Charles I’s army during the first Civil War. Furthermore, he was approved of by Samuel Hartlib and other scientific advisers to the king’s aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her son Charles Louis (based in the Hague).

In this period, as in our own, science and state intelligence frequently went hand in hand. The first president of the Royal Society was Sir Robert Moray. Moray served on diplomatic missions for King Charles II during the latter’s difficult exile. He was an admitted Free Mason (1641, into a Scottish lodge, Mary’s Chapel No. 1), astrologer, scientist, accounted a “great patron of the Rosie Crucians” in his chemical enthusiasms, and, at least by the time of his death in 1673, a friend of Ashmole, who remembered him as “learned and ingenious.”

On December 1, 1660, Ashmole recorded how the king “gave me [another] gracious audience and among other things told me, he believed I was an Honest man, He lookt upon me as an Honest man, and would take care for me as an Honest man.”³ For a man such as the king, enveloped in intrigue and skulduggery for most of his life, the presence of Elias Ashmole must have made a refreshing change.

On February 9, 1661, the king signed a warrant making Ashmole secretary of Suriname, in the West Indies. Had the story of England’s relations with Suriname developed along the lines of some of her other possessions in the region, Ashmole might have found himself extravagantly wealthy after such an appointment. But he always had to make his luck; little material wealth ever simply rolled into his lap.

Disease-ridden and populated with nomadic Arawak Indians, Suriname saw the arrival of Europeans starting in the 1650s. Suriname’s first English settlers were dispatched by Lord Willoughby, the governor of Barbados, but after a brief settlement the Zealander Andreas Crijnsen invaded in 1667. The struggle was concluded when the peace of Breda ceded Suriname to the Dutch. England gained New Amsterdam. Now, had Ashmole become secretary to what would later become New York, his life might have been very different.

On February 21 it was decided that Ashmole would be paid forty marks annually for his services as Windsor herald. A mark was worth about two thirds of a pound; he was unlikely to build a palace through such royal favors—but he did get to attend the “big events.”

On April 23, 1661—St. George’s Day—Charles II was crowned at Westminster. C. H. Josten concluded that as Windsor herald, “[Ashmole] may have been consulted as an authority on doubtful questions of ceremonial and precedence,” as well as the practical preparation of the festivities.⁴ Josten also emphasizes, “Every detail of the ceremonies was to Ashmole a matter of interest.”⁵ Ashmole’s account of the coronation was authoritative but he was not credited in later accounts of the sumptuous ceremony. In fact, his definitive account received no credit until 1761.

In 1661, Ashmole published A Catalogue of the Peers of the kingdoms of England, according to their birth and Creation, and became deputy for Sir Edward Bysshe, Clerenceux king of arms. On May 16 of that year, Ashmole recorded “the Grant of Arms to me from Sir Edward Bysh Clarenceux.”⁶

Now holding an important position in the determination of nobility, Ashmole considered that the time had come for some recognition of his tireless work—undergone at his own expense—in preserving, recording, and editing records concerning the Order of the Garter. He hoped the order would grant him the title of historiographer and remembrancer of the Order, not being himself a knight, and grant some recompense for expenses incurred.

Ashmole’s legitimate hope was cut cruelly short by Henry de Vic, first baronet of the Isle of Guernsey and chancellor of the order since March 29, 1661. De Vic made a shocking speech to order members, accusing Ashmole of social climbing, big-headedness, and megalomania. Ashmole should be dismissed from consideration as he was, according to de Vic, “unknowne and I am afraid Illiterate” and had “never served the Publick.”⁷ He was a tiresome money grubber who wanted to run everything and who needed stopping in his tracks.

What, apart from rank snobbery and meanness, drove de Vic to attempt to denigrate Ashmole is unknown. Ashmole had enemies, of course—not least among whom had been his brother-in-law, Sir Humphrey Forster. The king raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders; Ashmole withdrew, not wanting to be the cause of controversy or dissension in the order. Deeply hurt, as one might expect, Ashmole very nearly dropped his long-standing Garter project for good.

On May 29, 1674, Henry de Vic’s shameful speech was quietly excised from the Order’s written record by Seth Ward, the bishop of Salisbury and chancellor of the Order, lest it stain either the Order’s or Ashmole’s historic reputation. Had there been any doubt in the king’s mind concerning Ashmole’s decency where money was concerned, the monarch would certainly not have appointed his herald to the Royal Commission on June 30, 1662, for the recovery of Charles I’s belongings, stolen, sold, and scattered under Cromwell’s rule.

Ashmole’s reputation as an invaluable Englishman of learning was reinforced following a meeting held at Gresham College on November 28, 1660. On that date, a preparatory meeting of twelve members of the future Royal Society took place. Four days later, Ashmole’s signature appears in the Royal Society’s first journal book, among those of 114 specially invited to join the nation’s first organization for the furtherance of scientific experiment.

Ashmole, officially proposed on December 12, was duly elected a Fellow on January 2, 1661. “This afternoon [January 9, 1661] I went to take my place among the royall Society [blank left to fill in the final agreed name] at Gresham Colledge.”⁸ Its declared “designe of Founding a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning” proved too cumbersome to provide its title. The once “Invisible College” of Robert Boyle’s dreams became known simply as the Royal Society; its patron, King Charles II.

In 1664, the Royal Society appointed Ashmole to a committee charged with “collecting all the phenomena of nature hitherto observed, and all experiments made and recorded.” This somewhat ambitious program (never completed) was very much in tune with the work of the fictional Fraternity of the Rose Cross and certainly consistent with the labors of Sir Francis Bacon’s “Merchants of Light” in the latter’s influential New Atlantis (1627). Sir Francis appeared on the cover of Sprat’s official history of the order as a posthumous patron. Ashmole would doubtless have preferred to see John Dee in his place.

Detail from frontispiece of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. To the left (seated) is Robert Boyle and to the right, Sir Francis Bacon.

Ashmole still hoped for a great flowering of alchemical knowledge and cosmic insight (beginning, he predicted, in 1663), led by coming philosophers who would “Illustrate, Enlarge and Refine the Arts like tried Gold.” We do not know if the society’s confining itself largely to matters of mechanical demonstration would have disappointed him. As a mathematician, he would certainly have been pleased at the society’s giving the once suspected discipline of mathematics greater respectability and impetus.

Like many thoughtful mathematicians of the time, Ashmole held Dee’s 1570 Mathematical Preface (to Euclid) dear. For Dee as well as Ashmole, mathematics was a dimension of the spiritual mind that could be discerned in Nature, but whose source was absolutely immaterial. Dee got bored with mathematics—having been, as Ashmole asserted of him, “a perfect master”—and attempted to communicate with the universe’s governing angels directly. I suspect that Ashmole felt similarly; he took scientific method for granted.

Unlike the English population at large—and that of most of the rest of the known and unknown world—he needed no persuasion of the potential of science. He would have found today’s continual stream of scientific evangelism tiresome. He knew that experimental methodology was only a means to an end, not a cosmic principle. His feel for evidence and his incredulous common sense are apparent on every page of his antiquarian works. He could relax his guard where medicine was concerned, but many today take their pills in a state bordering on faith.

On May 27, 1663, Royal Society Council Minutes record how it “Ordered that Dr Goddard deliver the Charter of the Society to Mr Elias Ashmole, to enrole the Armes of the Society, and the Claims Concerning the same in the Heralds Office.”⁹ This person was Dr. Jonathan Goddard (1617?–75). His visit to Ashmole’s office might have occasioned a degree of disappointment for Ashmole, who had proposed a beautiful design for the arms.

In Josten’s words, “The drawing [of the arms] is of particular interest because of its possibly masonic symbolism, deriving from Amos VII, 7–8.”¹⁰ Ashmole’s design shows the royal standard to the top left while from above condescends a hand, holding a plumb line that is held in suspension in the darker, lower portion of the coat of arms. The motto below is taken from Virgil’s Georgica, ii, 490: rerum cognoscere causas (“to know the causes of things”).

Like all human organizations, the Royal Society was always more ready to receive gifts than grant favors. According to Royal Society Classified Papers, on March 29, 1682, it received as a gift from Ashmole a book for its library, Three Relations concerning ye nature, Effects and Theory of Comets, written “in High Dutch” (German).

In the spring of 1675, the secreted bones of the poor “Princes in the Tower” were discovered during renovation work at the Tower of London. On May 9, a letter winged itself from the pen of John Aubrey (1626–97), antiquarian and historian of Wiltshire, to Oxford historian Anthony Wood.

“The bones of Edward V and Brother are found, and the King is making a noble Monument and ISS [inscriptions] for them at Westminster: and Mr Ashmoll (who remembers him to you) assists in the Designe.”¹¹

We find Ashmole, at the age of fifty-seven, at the center of things: assisting the king in a sensitive memorial project, observed by one of the great antiquarians of the day, writing to the up-and-coming historian Anthony Wood. Ashmole was a news item.

Thirteen years earlier, Ashmole had his busy pen in hand, taking notes in the church and manor house at Blore, near Ilam in the Staffordshire moorlands (August 10, 1662). A priest hole was discovered in the 1990s in one of the bedrooms at Blore. Many of the old genteel families stayed true to the old “Romish” religion. One can only guess as to whether Catholic rites took place in Ashmole’s presence. He never seems to have gotten involved with debates about “which religion was better.” He was probably loyal to the Anglican Church as the reformed Catholic Church of England but, one suspects, more than tolerant of individual Catholics.

An interesting exchange in this regard was recorded in the autobiography of nonconformist minister (and relative of Ashmole) Henry Newcome, MA. On December 7, 1664, Newcome was reminded of a meeting: “I was thinking of a passage of my brother Ashmole’s when we met him at Knutsford, how he discoursed with my wife about my conformity—that nonconformity could be nothing but in expectation of a change. Alas, a thing I never thought of.”¹²

This fascinating remark is very telling as to Ashmole’s subtlety and originality. If I interpret it correctly, Ashmole seems to have been implying to Newcome that nonconformity, being defined by its reaction to something disapproved of, should never be regarded as a stable state by itself. Sects are built on disputes, and are therefore never stable, unless ossified by aggressive oppressiveness. Then brave sparks simply quit. True religion must be rooted in something more than doctrinal disagreement, however sincerely held. Ashmole was always looking for the roots of things. Really, his religion was cosmic, Gnostic, and personal. This was, I believe, his ideal Church for England.

A year after taking notes at Blore, Ashmole was back on the antiquarian peace path, this time in the good company of William Dugdale. Perhaps his mind was more settled than it had been for many years. Ashmole’s brother-in-law and enemy, Sir Humphrey Forster, baronet of Aldermaston, Berkshire, had just died. Forster had plagued Ashmole’s life with lawsuits and insults for over a decade, destabilizing his marriage and his work. Were it not for Forster, by Ashmole’s own account, we should probably have seen a second volume of the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum and who knows what else; Ashmole always had a number of fascinating projects “on the go.”

Portrait of Sir William Dugdale, Blyth Hall, Warwickshire. (Photograph taken by kind permission of Sir William Dugdale, Bt.)

Between March 30 and April 10, 1663, Dugdale accompanied Ashmole on a heraldic visitation of Staffordshire. This involved, in part, recording knightly armorial inscriptions and gathering information on ancient families.

On April 1, Ashmole spent the night in the home of Sir Edward Bagot, baronet, at Blithfield. Bagot’s descendants abide there to this day; families are the marrow of history. A broken family is as terrible as an ancient tree felled wantonly. Though the mustard seed be smaller than a fingernail, from it comes a home for all the birds of the air. Every home is a nest; every egg has a story.

The entrance to Blithfield Hall, home of the Bagot family.

Blyth Hall (on the river Blyth) as depicted in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire.

From Staffordshire, Ashmole and Dugdale rode on to Shropshire. August 3, 1663: “9 H.A.M. I began my Journey to accompany Mr : Dugdale [Norroy King of Arms] in his Visitation of Shropshire and Cheshire.”¹³ Visitations were held at inns, where attestations by former Norroy and Clerenceux Kings of Arms were copied. Heads of families were summoned to attest claims of arms and descent. There had been vast despoiling of records during the Reformation and civil wars. Ashmole and Dugdale were endeavoring to play their part in darning the split fabric of English life and history.

For example, Ashmole took notes in the church at Malpas, Cheshire, recording inscriptions to “Judith, wife of Thomas Dod of Shoklach” (d. January 21, 1651); Dr. Thomas Dod (d. March 10, 1647)—the Dods had been at Edge since Saxon times; “Thomas Bulkley of Bikerton” (d. October 24, 1624); “Owen Clutton of Chorlton” (d. November 18, 1648); “… a coat of arms … of Mr Dod of Edge.”¹⁴

Ashmole made notes on the church at Gawsworth, where his late father-in-law Peter Mainwaring lay beneath the chancel. Ashmole described a portrait in the east window of the chancel and an inscription beneath, commemorating Sir Richard Sutton, co-founder of “Brazen-nose Colledge in Oxford : and benefactor to this Church. Anno Domini 1505.”¹⁵ Brasenose was, of course, Ashmole’s college. The other founder of that excellent college (and founder of Lichfield’s Grammar School) was Bishop Smyth of Lincoln.

Blithfield church.

Malpas church, Cheshire, visited by Ashmole and Dugdale in the summer of 1663.

On June 3, 1668, William Dugdale addressed a letter “from Mr Ashmoles Chamber in ye Middle Temple Lane” to Thomas Yate, Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.¹⁶ According to C. H. Josten (another Brasenose man): “This letter, which deals with the restoration of the tomb of Bishop William Smyth in Lincoln Cathedral, is preserved among the muniments of Brasenose College; it has been printed in R. Churton, The Lives of William Smyth Bishop of Lincoln and Sir Richard Sutton Knight, Founders of Brasen Nose College, Oxford, 1800, pp. 532–3.”¹⁷ The author, Archdeacon Ralph Churton (1754–1831), was himself a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, an institution that owed much of its founding impetus to the pioneering works of Ashmole, Dugdale, and Aubrey.

Two months after Dugdale visited Ashmole in Middle Temple Lane, Ashmole himself visited Dugdale at Blyth Hall, Warwickshire. The purpose was probably to propose marriage to Dugdale’s third and second surviving daughter, Elizabeth. Shortly before they were married at the chapel of Lincoln’s Inn on November 3, 1668 (Ashmole’s second wife having died on April 1), William Lilly “predicted” the nature of Ashmole’s third wife; he had probably met her already.

The chapel at Lincoln’s Inn, London, where Ashmole married Elizabeth Dugdale.

Blyth Hall today. (Photographs taken by kind permission of Sir William Dugdale, Bt.)

Note the date on this chimney on the side of Blyth Hall.

“… (O)f a middle stature, round visage, having a mole on her cheek … of a lovely feature indifferent fleshy or Corpulent, or inclining thereunto, loving hospitality or to live handsomely.

“… (I)t is very probable, a third wife shall bury him, yet will shee bee very flegmatiq, and accidentally inclined to the spleen and griefe.” Ashmole would find her “instabliem in venerijs et amoribus.”¹⁸ Josten summed up the picture of a woman “amorous, unstable, charming and probably rather foolish.”

It is impossible to know what Elizabeth brought to the marriage, apart from a father-in-law who had first been Ashmole’s true friend. Elizabeth admired her husband and, according to Anthony Wood, was wont to embrace him in public—something the author suspects would have induced pleasantly raised eyebrows—and perhaps a twinkle from Elias Ashmole. Now fifty-one, the Windsor herald had known matrimonial and social coldness for over a decade.

Some signal recognition of Ashmole’s skills did come in his lifetime: “I received the honor of being made Doctor of Phisick at Oxford” (August 19, 1669).¹⁹ While Ashmole was mentioned by Anthony Wood as one of Oxford’s famous authors who were members of Brasenose College, Wood failed to mention some of Ashmole’s most important antiquarian work.²⁰

This omission was brought to Wood’s attention in a letter from John Aubrey on the publication of Wood’s work: “(H)e [Ashmole] is a mighty good man : and very obliging : … Mr Ashmoll is troubled that you have omitted in his Life what he most valued, viz. His Catalogue of the Collection of Rarities of the University which he did with his owne hand, and was a very laborious worke …”²¹ There are references to Ashmole’s manuscript catalog in the three-volume register of consular and imperial Roman coins in the Bodleian Library. Great achievements of antiquarians rarely rise farther than the footnotes of unloved works; posterity has little time for gratitude.

There was, however, one antiquarian work accomplished in his lifetime that did garner the recognition Ashmole justly deserved. On May 8, 1672, he recorded how at “2H 40’ I presented my Book of the Garter to the King.”²² The mighty work was “very graciously” received. He also dispatched a copy to the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield, where it still resides in the Cathedral Library. Nathaniel Greenwood, Custos Jocalium of Brasenose College in 1675, inscribed the flyleaf of that college’s presentation copy of the book as follows: Liber Aulae Regiae et Collegii de Brasenose ex Dono Authoris, huius Collgij olim Alumni. John Wilkins formally presented a copy of the masterpiece to the Royal Society.

According to Dame Frances Yates, “The book is a landmark in antiquarian scholarship and still unsurpassed as the main authority on its subject. In the preface Ashmole tells of his distress at seeing the honour of the Garter trampled on in ’the late unhappy times‘ of the civil wars. His purpose was to restore the image of the Order as a step toward the Restoration. When his great book was published, copies were sent abroad, almost like embassies to foreign potentates.”²³

Title page of Elias Ashmole’s antiquarian masterpiece.

On October 25, 1673, Ashmole received a letter from the court of Charles Louis, elector of the Palatinate and Samuel Hartlib’s patron. Even while the French army was marching through the Palatinate to further Louis XIV’s imperial ambitions, R. Rockwood, “Counsellor to his Electorall Highness and Governor of Oppenheim and Heidelberg,” found time to write to Ashmole to thank him for the Garter book.²⁴ Charles Louis’ heir, Prince Charles, a great admirer of Ashmole, would seek conversation with the old man on a visit to London in 1690.

The German Palatinate was not the only court to express its gratitude for Ashmole’s work. The antiquarian recorded how on June 17, 1674, “The King of Denmarke has sent me a gold Chaine and Medal worth 80l. [pounds].”²⁵ Ashmole was justifiably proud of the gold medal and chain.

At Epiphany 1675, for example, a procession to St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to honor the Magi’s adoration of the infant Christ occasioned this gleeful diary entry: “I wore the Chaine of Gold (sent me from the King of Denmarke) before the King in his proceeding to the Chapell to Offer, Gold Frankencense and Mirh.”²⁶ One would like to know whether Ashmole played the part of a late magus at this royal magian offering; Ashmole was well suited for the part. One can at least imagine his attendance inducing some appropriate quip from the king!

Ashmole’s famous portrait (now in the new Ashmolean) of himself as a thoroughly established figure, slim in crimson dress, bewigged with hand on hip, reveals his affection for the medal. It is draped by his great Garter book, on which rests his right hand. The befittingly elaborate frame for this portrait, incidentally, was the work of the “Excellent Carver” Grinling Gibbons (1648–1720), who wrote to Ashmole on October 12, 1682, to ascertain whether the stars would favor the enterprise outlined in a previous letter.²⁷

This astrological inquiry was not unique in Ashmole’s later life. Whereas once his astrological skills had served the lovelorn wishes of suitors and ladies—as well as himself, of course—his astral abilities were now in demand for serious matters of state from officials of government, and from the king himself.

Ashmole was approached on January 15, 1672, by Lord Treasurer Clifford, of the governing “Cabal.” The question to which he sought a horary solution was as follows: “Whether his Majesty’s Declaration of Indulgence [to religious dissenters] of the 15 of March 1671/2 will not occasion such a contest in the House of Commons at their next meeting as to hinder the King’s supplies of moneys, unless it be set aside.”²⁸

According to Josten, this is “a typical example of the far reaching conclusions which were derived, by those who believed in astrology, from such horary figures, the text also affords evidence of Ashmole’s grasp of the possibilities of a complex political situation. Ashmole’s notes convey the impression that he favoured developments towards a greater measure of toleration, but we do not know whether he shared the King’s and Lord Clifford’s opinion that full toleration should be granted to the Roman Catholics.”²⁹

Likewise, Sir Robert Howard sought astral guidance from Ashmole on October 13, 1673: “Whether the house of Commons shall have good Success in these proceedings to settle the protestant Religion and the Interest and prosperity of the nation; and whether they and theyre King shall unite in a good correspondency.”³⁰

Ashmole gave a full answer to the question, concluding that “About Christmas [now happily restored] the Eyes of many of the House of Commons wilbe opend, and seeing further into the present designes then now they doe, will withdraw themselves and cleave to the King.”³¹

Between January 7 and 15, 1674, Ashmole recorded parliamentary proceedings, along with the current disposition of the constellations. Josten considered, “It is not unlikely that Ashmole had been asked by Charles II to interpret the course of the planets during this period.”³²

Ashmole was probably aware of the happy circumstance by which he was now fulfilling the role that his hero John Dee, following the thirteenth-century genius Roger Bacon, had outlined as suitable for a magus: acting as privileged adviser to the monarch, for the greatest good of the country. Unlike Dee, he had not sought the role; it had been thrust upon him. Loyalty and discretion were rewarded.

However, the responsibilities that went with earlier rewards were becoming onerous to him. A month after making the aforementioned parliamentary reports, while residing at the upper end of Sheere-lane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Ashmole wrote a letter to the Earl Marshall’s secretary, Mr. Hayes. “I desired Mr : Hayes to move his Lord, to give me leave to resign my Heralds place.”³³ Ashmole was planning a retirement.

On January 29, 1675, nearly a year after making his request, Ashmole recorded that “This afternoone I obteyned the Earle Marshall’s leave to resigne my Heralds place.”³⁴ On April 17, Ashmole’s brother-in-law John Dugdale took his place, while on that same morning Ashmole agreed with his carpenters on building a home at South Lambeth. He and his wife Elizabeth (daughter of William Dugdale) moved into their new home at South Lambeth on October 2, 1674.

Those involved were loath to lose his expertise and there were several attempts in later years to get him to reverse his original decision; Ashmole had set a high standard and none could match it, not even his wife’s brother.

Portrait of Sir John Dugdale (1628–1700), Blyth Hall, Warwickshire. (Photograph by kind permission of Sir William Dugdale, Bt.)

Ashmole had also set an exemplary standard in his other main appointment, that of comptroller of excise in London. This service was a latter-day development of his first royal appointment, as Commissioner for Excise for Staffordshire during the Civil War. Here his mathematical skills found pecuniary outlet. The comptroller’s task was not to raise taxes, but rather to oversee the accounts of monies raised to see that there was proper accounting with no embezzlement.

Officially, Ashmole had been comptroller of excise for England and Wales since 1661, but in fact his share of the task had been confined to London, whose range was bounded by “the Bill of Mortalitie” to be about ten miles radius of the City.

On December 17, 1674, the Lord High Treasurer resolved, “At Midsummer next Mr Ashmole [was] to enlarge his comptrol throughout England and Wales and send his Deputies into ye Respective Countyes.”³⁵ Four days later, the Lord High Treasurer warranted £500 per annum from the Excise to be paid to Ashmole—an increase of £100 to cover additional labors in going beyond the bounds of the capital. This compensated Ashmole for the loss of his Windsor herald income.

On February 14, 1685, Ashmole’s duties to Charles II ceased; the king was buried. Just a little less than a year later (January 20, 1686), Ashmole undertook a task for the new monarch, James II. It was not quite the kind of thing he was used to: “The Commissioners of Sewers met, and I (with some of the other Commissioners) tooke my Oath.”³⁶ It is hard to say whether this would have been an entirely positive oath.