The Magus of Freemasonry

By the 1670s, Ashmole had enjoyed a long acquaintance with the key figures of the Royal Society. He would have been familiar with what Joseph Glanville in 1665 declared to be “a Prophetick Scheam” of that Society: namely, the dream of establishing “Saloman’s House.”¹ The potent image of Saloman’s House was derived from Sir Francis Bacon’s allegorical fable New Atlantis, which first appeared as an addendum to his Sylva Sylvarum, or Naturall History, In ten Centuries, published a year after Bacon’s death in 1627. It was a popular work and was republished several times throughout the century.

New Atlantis tells an allegorical tale of a ship that arrives at a mysterious island called Bensalem. The voyagers are greeted cautiously by a people of enviable educational and psychological endowments. The narrator is informed of how they came to be such a peculiar people of advanced attainments. An ancient patriarch had established an order on the island, and the islanders had proved faithful to his inspiration. The patriarch’s name was Solamona.

The author of New Atlantis seems to have been acquainted with Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1618), as well as the Fama Fraternitatis (ms. c. 1610). In Andreae’s utopian classic, Christianopolis, a traveler is washed ashore on an island that likewise demonstrates every aspect of contemporary scientific and mystical idealism in its organization and physical structure.

Furthermore, inhabitants of Bensalem (the “New Atlantis”) somewhere in the Pacific (the Solomon Islands?) seem familiar with Rosicrucian imagery. A scroll first delivered to the travelers before they are permitted to land is “signed with a stamp of cherubin’s wings, not spread, but hanging downwards; and by them a cross.” This image is reminiscent of those under the protective eye of the Rose Cross Brothers: Sub umbra alarum tuarum Jehova (“under the shadow of Jehovah’s wings”) in the so-called Rosicrucian Manifestos.

Bacon seems to have taken Andreae’s ideas and recast them for his own, not dissimilar purposes. Those purposes seem to have involved the realization that there was advantage to be gained not only in arguing a case for a reform of learning, but also in showing an attractive and intriguing image of a place where the reform has already occurred. Hence, Bacon looks forward to a New Atlantis that might stem from the reform of natural philosophy detailed in his earlier works.

This new philosophy is embodied in the concept of Saloman’s House, which suggests, among other things, the Temple of Solomon familiar to the scripture-read people of his own day.

Bacon’s aim was to get people from the known to the unknown: from worshipping God in his “House” (church) to examining God’s creation in his “other” house: the universe, or Temple of Nature. This idea goes back to Hermetic and natural philosophic sources that Bacon shared with Elias Ashmole, though Bacon gives his reform program a slightly more worldly flavor than some other followers of the Hermetic tradition such as, in Bacon’s own time, Dr. Robert Fludd.

To return to Bacon’s story: Having been permitted to land on the island, the travelers to Bensalem are informed of a king, the island’s lawgiver Solamona, who had established the island’s distinctive organization 1,900 years earlier:

Ye shall understand, my dear friends, that amongst the excellent acts of that king, one above all hath the pre-eminence. It was the erection and institution of an order, or society, which we call Saloman’s House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God. Some think it beareth the founder’s name a little corrupted, as if it should be Solamona’s House. But the records write it as it is spoken… . I find in ancient records, this order or society is sometimes called Saloman’s House, and sometimes the College of the Six Days’ Works; whereby I am satisfied that our excellent king had learned from the Hebrews that God had created the world, and all that therein is, within six days: and therefore he instituting that house, for the finding out of the true nature of all things (whereby God mought have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them), did give it also that second name.²

A number of scholars today believe that it was the idea of Sir Francis Bacon’s Saloman’s House that provided the mainspring of inspiration for the Musaeum Ashmoleanum.³

The first Ashmolean Museum was constructed at Ashmole’s behest on Broad Street, Oxford, between 1679 and 1683. As far as we know, he never referred to his brainchild as Saloman’s House, though he might, being an Accepted Free Mason, have been flattered by such an allusion. Flattered or not, he would have doubted whether the design of the building had risen to such an exalted conception.

There is no doubt that several core members of the Royal Society (such as John Wilkins) were inspired by Bacon’s call for a revised program of “Natural History.” The Sylva Sylvarum ("The Forest of Materials”) was intended as part 3 of Bacon’s Great Instauration. His Instauration (or reform of learning) was intended to both usher in and form a sound basis for a new era of experimental learning, orderly exploration of nature, and careful classification of evidence—that scheme familiar to science today as the Baconian Method. However, it appears that Ashmole was not personally moved by the Baconian bandwagon, at least under the Baconian name, though he was clever enough to take it into account.

It is understandable why Bacon’s New Atlantis imagery was employed to make Bacon and his method look like the true father of what is now the Museum of the History of Science. The thesis has logic and is doubtless tempting, since Bacon is often credited with being a father of modern science, a John the Baptist to Isaac Newton’s scientific messiah.

The Old Ashmolean Museum, Broad Street, Oxford, now the Museum of the History of Science.

However, it is clear from the quotation in “New Atlantis” above that the “House” referred to as being “Saloman’s” was an order or society. To superficial observation this image might appear to have been most clearly and exoterically expressed in the establishment of the Royal Society, of which Ashmole was of course a founding fellow. However, the “order or society” established on Bensalem was plainly an allegory for a hoped-for assembly or association of talent, not a blueprint for an institution in stone. Indeed, if one were to seek a historical precedent for an allegorical “house” that is also an order or society, the nearest analog in England would be a “lodge,” which, while suggesting place, is part assembly and part concept or symbolic locus. The symbolic “lodge” is an imaginative projection.

The second, Continental, precedent that would undoubtedly spring to Ashmole’s mind when faced with Bacon’s story would be the “virtual fraternity” of the Rose Cross Brothers. The Fama tells us that the Brothers of Christian C.R., the order’s founder, met in the “House of the Holy Spirit.” That is to say, those considering themselves the followers of Christian C.R. met in a holy spirit; they did not need to gather physically, for they were united in spiritual communication “under Jehovah’s wings.” But they needed to communicate their discoveries; in that sense, the “house” traveled. This concept seems to have informed the story told in New Atlantis. Bensalem sends out “Merchants of Light” to gather knowledge for the House as a whole.

However, it is not Bacon’s ideas so much as Ashmole’s own esoteric—and practical—mode of thinking that we need to understand when attempting to grasp his intentions when he established his museum in Oxford. The museum was not simply an Oxford foundation; it was the result of cooperation between the university and a private person, a benefactor who was respected for his learning and his closeness to the king—and of course for what he could give to Oxford.

Oxford absorbs gifts and returns kudos; Ashmole knew that. Furthermore, he had studied at Brasenose College and fought for the royalist cause in royalist Oxford; he was a luminary of the Restoration, on close terms with the stars of that era. The museum, while akin to the Royal Society’s ambitions, was not a project of the Royal Society as an institution, though it may be seen as an expression of the stream of inspiration that led to that fellowship. That stream was as much spiritual as it was practical.

In recent times there has been an uncontested tendency to sweep Ashmole’s achievement into an undifferentiated state as part of a wider and inevitable movement, Oxford born. This view shares characteristics with that discussed earlier wherein Ashmole somehow stole John Tradescant’s credit for the collection. This tendency appears so negative toward Ashmole at times that one wonders if the proponents of these views would prefer to go back to the seventeenth century and rename Ashmole’s achievement the Bacon-Tradescant Museum of Modern Science.

A fascinating recent guide to the discovery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemical instruments, ephemera, and anatomical remains (human and canine) at the rear of the Old Ashmolean expresses the essence of what is practically an obliteration of Ashmole’s significance:

Recent historical accounts of the Ashmolean Museum have recognized that Elias Ashmole’s offer to present the rarities he had acquired from John Tradescant, and the need for a “large Roome” to contain them, came at a time when these could be incorporated into broader ambitions to make provision for experimental natural philosophy in the University. In July 1677 the orientalist Humphrey Prideaux of Christ Church traced the progression of this initiative from the publication in the same year of Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire, whose title continues in a Baconian vein, Being an Essay Towards the Natural History of England. According to Prideaux, “we are now on a design of erecting a Lecture for Philosophical History to be read by the author of that booke,” and the incorporation of the Tradescant-Ashmole collection fell within this wider project:

… as soon as we have agreed on the ground, we shall build a school on purpose for it with a laboratory annext and severall other rooms for other uses, whereof on[e] is to hold John Tredeskins raritys …⁴

The author doubts whether this modern account may be taken wholly at face value. First, Ashmole’s contribution is diminished to the offering of a collection “acquired” from Tradescant; this offering is grammatically separate from the need of a large room to “contain” it. The use of the word offer is also somewhat light.

Ashmole’s active donation of what was his own property included his own collections, which he had acquired. Indeed, he had the decency to maintain the integrity of the Tradescant collection, rather than, as other collectors have done, simply absorbing it as part of his own collections.

Ashmole was magisterially involved in the establishment, detailed regulation, and underlying philosophy of the museum. According to the quotation above, the rarities could be “incorporated into broader ambitions.” Broader ambitions? It has not been established that Ashmole’s ambitions were not as broad as the university’s own.

Humphrey Prideaux is cited as an authority to support the paragraph’s rather sweeping judgment. Prideaux, an orientalist “of Christ Church” in July 1677, traces the progression of “this initiative” from Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire—whose subtitle in the “Baconian vein” makes it very acceptable to the thesis.

By 1677, Prideaux had held his master’s degree for only two years, and was not to receive his doctorate of divinity until nine years later. His literary reputation as an orientalist (such as it is) rests on a “Life of Mahomet,” published in 1697, “written,” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of National Biography, “as a polemical tract against the deists, and worthless as a biography.” The title “the orientalist … of Christ Church” hardly applies to the young man of July 1677; what is the value of what he writes concerning Dr. Plot? It is merely his opinion. Furthermore, it has been placed in a context where such an opinion might lead one to suppose an encounter with an authority.

At any rate, the first reference to the founding of a “publique musaeum” comes not in 1677, but in a letter written by Ashmole to His Excellence Count Griffinfeld, Lord High Chancellor of Denmark, dated September 18, 1674, three years before Dr. Plot’s book on Oxfordshire.

On July 3, 1675, Ashmole wrote a letter to Mr. Thomas Hyde, library keeper of the Publique Library in Oxford. In it Ashmole describes his wish to “propose the building of some large Room, which may have Chimnies, to keepe those things [his collections] aired that will stand in neede of it.”⁵

It is reasonable, then, to assert that Prideaux is speaking from hearsay about activities already in motion. His use of “we” simply means “Oxford is planning.” The reference has little to no bearing on the true part played by Elias Ashmole in the foundation of his museum.

On December 16, 1659, John and Hester Tradescant sealed and delivered to Ashmole the Deed of Gift of all John Tradescant’s rarities, including books, coins, pictures, medals, stones, “mechanicks,” “pieces of antiquity,” and strange and wondrous things brought back from sea voyages—such as a mermaid’s hand.

Ashmole noted on April 4, 1661, how Tradescant left “my closett of rarities” to his wife Hester in his will.⁶ Hester claimed that her husband never wanted his collection to go into private hands, but should instead go to the University of Oxford or Cambridge. John Tradescant the younger was buried on April 25, 1662.

On May 18, 1664, Ashmole’s “Case came to hearing in the Chancery against Mrs : Tredescant [sic].”⁷ The validity of the Deed of Gift was upheld; Ashmole’s possession of the Tradescant rarities was established.

In the year that Ashmole obtained a fragment “of the True Cross” and obtained a term of 500 years in a moiety (portion) of a house, garden, and orchard at South Lambeth (by assignment of Rebecca Blackamore, a widow of Lambeth), he wrote a letter to His Excellence Count Griffinfeld. Based in Copenhagen, the count was Lord High Chancellor of Denmark.

The tomb of John Tradescant the younger, who was buried at St. Mary’s, Lambeth, on April 25, 1662.

The year was 1674. The fragment of the True Cross disappeared from the museum after 1697. The house at South Lambeth was situated next to Hester Tradescant’s house, and Ashmole’s letter to Count Griffinfeld marks his first mention of his plan for a “publique musaeum.” The museum would be the first open to the public in the nation’s history; very few people in Britain had ever heard the word museum, let alone had the remotest idea of what one was for. The public museum was a remarkable and historic innovation; it was the first purpose-built museum in the world.

On June 17 of that year, Ashmole had received his gold medal and chain (worth eighty pounds) from the king of Denmark in grateful recognition of the magnitude of scholarship evinced in Ashmole’s History of the Order of the Garter. Ashmole informed His Excellency that “when I dye, [I will] bequeath it to a publique Musaeum, that Posterity may take notice of the largeness of his [the king of Denmark’s] Bounty to an English Gentleman.”⁸

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in its current magnificent home on Beaumont Street, Oxford.

The motive here for the bequest is absolutely true to Ashmolean form. It is in order that posterity may take notice. This is in tune with his whole life’s feeling and conviction for the need for preservation, “lest we forget.” This is the antiquarian motive, not the Baconian, scientific one. The history of science shows a perpetual discarding of yesterday’s theories and practices, even, in some important cases, the attempted obliteration of memory. Isaac Newton’s destruction of Robert Hooke’s reputation while president of the Royal Society, for example, is something Ashmole could never have countenanced.

Ashmole desired to bring the best of the past to the attention of the present for the betterment of the future. Ever poised between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, the past is his heaven that must be joined to the earth of the future, and his future is his heaven that must be joined to the earth of the past. The present is incidental, mercurial, mysterious: the past in the making. The future is made in the past; it has its owner’s stamp upon it. What is Time? According to Ashmole, time is that which reveals meaning in the universe.

As stated before, Ashmole took the importance of knowledge of nature for granted; it was an obvious aspect of “natural magick” (physics) and of common practical sense (the how-to-do of the born Midlander). Ashmole would be the very last person on earth to denigrate the importance of learning, or of the benefits of a reform of learning, as long as that reform was properly and comprehensively rooted.

It is to be doubted whether Ashmole would have regarded Bacon’s “Great Instauration” as all that great; he would have regarded Bacon’s program as rather weak on the spiritual side: a little too clever by half, sometimes simplistic and frequently rhetorical.

A true “revolution” was, for Ashmole, the culmination of an astronomical cycle with astrological meaning, based on the past and tested by experience. To ordinary eyes, such a revolution could appear wholly novel, as a revelation. To Ashmole, the Book of Nature had many more tricks up her sleeve. He should have known; he was the Mercuriophilus Anglicus, not entirely confined (in his own mind) to history.

On October 2, 1674, Mr. and Mrs. Ashmole (Ashmole having been married to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Dugdale, since 1668) moved into their house at South Lambeth. On November 26, their neighbor “Mrs Tredescant[,] being willing to deliver up the Rarities to me,” enabled Ashmole to carry “several of them to my House.”⁹

It would be hard to imagine that Ashmole moved into his house to spare himself removal costs. Whatever his reasons, he appears to have done so in innocence, perhaps to provide some comfort for Mrs. Tradescant; the rarities, after all, were not going to go very far. This innocence may later have given him cause for regret.

On August 6, 1676, Ashmole was robbed during the night of thirtytwo cocks and hens. It is likely that the thieves climbed into Ashmole’s garden over a great heap of earth and refuse laid against his garden wall by Hester Tradescant.¹⁰ Widow Tradescant seems to have entered a state of mind we should now call, with no great accuracy, “paranoid.”

Something of this affliction seems to have gripped Ashmole himself. Until the heap was removed, he lay in abject fear night after night lest his house be broken into. His fears were justified, however. His neighbor does indeed seem to have “lost her marbles” over Ashmole.

On September 1, Hester Tradescant was forced to make a legal Submission, confessing that she had made defamatory statements about Ashmole’s rights, intentions, acts, and character.¹¹ Pitifully, the widow Tradescant had even falsely accused Ashmole of making a hole in her wall so that he might pass through it to steal her goods once she was dead. Freudians could doubtless make something of that.

An engraving by Michael Burghers on the east front of the museum in about 1685 bears an inscription reading “T. Wood Arch.t.” Thomas Wood, architect, was the master mason in charge of the building operations from 1679. He received a weekly wage of ten shillings and occasional payments of ten pounds for stone carving. This is revealed in the university archives, Computus Vice-Cancellarii, 1666–97. However, there is reason to consider that the design on which Wood based his elegant work derived from a plan Christopher Wren had made for a new home for the Royal Society a decade earlier.

Wren wrote a letter to fellow Royal Society member Henry Oldenburg on June 7, 1668, describing a plan for new premises at Arundel Gardens, London. Though never executed, it, like the first Ashmolean, had a laboratory in the basement. It also had a large room on the ground floor linked by a principal staircase to another large room on the first floor for a collection of rarities. It may be that Wren provided Wood—or Ashmole—with the design, or at least some ideas.

It would have been natural for Ashmole, seeing Gilbert Sheldon’s “Theatre” next door to his museum, to think Wren was the man for the job. On the other hand, Wren may have found the project less than challenging in the 1670s; he disliked architecture, considering himself first and foremost a physicist. The Sheldonian had involved unique architectural challenges answered with brilliance—the single roof over the main chamber was a masterpiece. Wren was older now, and the most challenging aspect of the Ashmolean was resolved by his ingenious method for getting smoke from the basement laboratory out into the main chimneys.

The Ashmolean is not disharmonious to the overall effect of the Sheldonian and the towering Bodelian Library close by. However, it is not as striking as the Sheldonian, and one might think that Wren would have come up with something more remarkable to stand next to his youthful masterpiece. Furthermore, this author cannot help but observe a great similarity between the magnificent east door of the Old Ashmolean and the frontispiece to Ashmole’s great inspiration, the Monas Hieroglyphica by John Dee (1564). Perhaps Ashmole suggested something of the kind to freemason Thomas Wood. In the light of the evidence, Wood properly deserves all the credit for his stately, lasting work.

Michael Burghers’s engraving of the east front of the museum (c. 1685).

Morphological relationship between the east door of the museum and the title page of Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). Was Ashmole involved in the design?

Wren’s magnificent Sheldonian Theatre, adjacent to the Musaeum Ashmoleanum on Broad Street, Oxford.

The requirements of the Ashmolean were simple enough and would have appeared so to Ashmole. But to a British university, the museum was epoch-making by virtue of its basement laboratory, stocked with “state-of-the-art” chemical instruments. One might object that the state of the art of chemistry in 1683, when the museum opened its doors to the public, was pretty low. But it had to start somewhere, and the Ashmolean provided impetus.

In fact, it provided a great deal. For more than 150 years after its foundation, the museum remained the center for scientific studies (which included anatomy) in Oxford—a great tribute to the powerful spiritual impulse that drove Ashmole’s great energies into such a life-enhancing and generous direction. The inclusion of the laboratory was farsighted and clear-sighted.

The remainder of the building required a large hall to accommodate the displays of rarities and a lecture hall so that natural science might gain the image of being a school. It was competing with Oxford’s established tradition, those great schools celebrated with their names above the doors of the Bodleian quadrangle: logic, metaphysics, divinity.

Ashmole no doubt harbored hopes that some day the laboratory would produce great advances in alchemical achievement. However, in his prolegomena to the regulations that he devised for the strict running of the establishment, he was content to use the utilitarian, even prosaic, language favored by the Royal Society in its commitment to public experiments of a useful nature.

Because the knowledge of Nature is very necessarie to humaine life, health, & the conveniences thereof, & because that knowledge cannot be soe well & usefully attain’d, except the history of Nature be knowne and considered; and to this, is requisite the inspection of Particulars, especially those as are extraordinary in their Fabrick, or useful in Medicine, or applied to manufacture or Trade …¹²

Today it is very hard for us to fully understand what was extraordinary about the activities of leading members of the Royal Society. As we have seen, the effort of natural philosophers such as Bacon was to get people to consider the leap between worshipping the Creator and respecting (or “worshipping”) the wisdom inherent in His Creation.

There existed an ancient ecclesiastical and religious prejudice against finding this life too interesting in its details; you might become a pagan (by worshipping the creation) or sorcerer (by knowing too much for everyone’s own good). Either way, you could end up dead, even damned for eternity; an herbalist could be suspected of witchcraft.

Most people had not been raised in such a way that they would or should find Nature interesting. The human body was largely a closed book. Most theological teaching was concerned exclusively with morals and salvation; the earth was as God made it and that was that. Farming was farming; milk was milk; war was war; and we should all strive to be good and to be saved. From hell and—yes—from this world that was corrupted by the Devil. Fallen man was in no state to come to grips with its secret construction. Similar anxieties prevail in today’s era of genetic and nuclear research.

Therefore, to ask people to be open to the idea that Nature had something to teach required a hook: that what they looked at in a museum (the place of the Muse) would be striking, intriguing, rare. Ashmole expressed this requirement when he demanded that “the Particulars” to be inspected be “extraordinary in their Fabrick.” Things seen should be “useful in Medicine” (curing disease) or applicable to “Trade” (making money).

The “rarities” therefore had to look as surprising as the performances seen at a fair. There was joy in knowledge. The museum was open. This was something that, if not entirely new (the theater could be an educational force), then certainly gave a fresh focus and a new, magical twist. Learning could be—and had to be—entertaining. It would have been no good exhibiting coal or grass or a stuffed cow. A museum must amuse.

One needed extraordinary rarities. The Tradescant collection contained these in abundance. Ashmole wanted to provide contrast and balance between the stranger things of nature with the stimulating survivals of the past and the finds of antiquarian research, preserved for the enlightenment of those who would otherwise either forget or not know at all. These, Ashmole also possessed in abundance. He had acquired them through years of dedicated and precise, systematic collecting.

On January 26, 1679, at 10 p.m., a careless fire began in Pump Court, the Middle Temple, in a room next to Ashmole’s chambers. It destroyed Ashmole’s library—thirty-three years of collected books. Nearly 9,000 coins and medals ancient and modern—the product of thirty-two years of collecting—melted in the flames. Carbonized beyond recognition and scattered about the embers that Ashmole trudged through on the following morning, was a large collection of ancient manuscripts and seals pertaining to the English nobility and gentry.

Pump Court, Middle Temple, London.

Ashmole had collected examples of all the Great Seals of England from the time of the Norman Conquest, as well as many from the religious houses of England and Scotland. His observations on history, coins, medals, heraldry—the studies of three decades—all went up in smoke. Valuable pieces of antiquity, sundry curiosities of art and nature: “All these, and many other things of worth, perished in those fatall Flames.”¹³

For Ashmole the preserver, the event came as a hammer blow, a wasting of the soul. As if feeling his pain, friends and well-wishers sent letter after letter of commiseration. It was, in fact, a national cultural disaster. There was no British Museum or British Library then: only people, and only a few like Ashmole.

It must have been with particularly mixed feelings, then, that Ashmole noted on May 15 that year that the first stone of the Ashmolean Museum was laid, on the west side of the Sheldonian Theatre.¹⁴ Inexplicably, half of his eventual gift had already gone forever.

Possibly as a result of the anxieties engendered by the destruction of so much of his collections, Ashmole’s health became impaired. Attacks of gout increased. In 1681, the vain application of poultices to his right foot weakened the tendons. The result was pain so acute that attempts to walk became a nightmare. It must have been a great disappointment to Ashmole that the growth of his most public enterprise was accompanied by pains that only fellow gout sufferers could understand for their debilitating, frustrating intensity.

August 17, 1682, saw the completion of “the building prepared to receive my Rarities… . Between 8 and 9, I first saw the said Building. I was invited by the Vicechancellor & dyned with him at Queenes Colledge.”¹⁵ The arms of Vice Chancellor Timothy Halton, DD (1632?–1704), provost of Queen’s, still hang over the east entrance of the Old Ashmolean. The vice chancellor had served as comptroller of works.

Following Ashmole’s approval, the antiquarian Dr. Robert Plot was appointed first keeper of the Ashmolean and professor of chemistry. It may be argued that Ashmole’s ambition was somewhat greater than that of the university’s powers that be, for an attempt to establish an Ashmolean Professorship in chemical and natural history was prevented by ecclesiastical influence. The proposed chair was regarded as too alarming an innovation to be countenanced by its opponents. Times have changed.

Dr. Plot was with Ashmole at South Lambeth when on March 24, 1683, as Ashmole records it, “I began to put my Rarities into Cases, to send to Oxford.”¹⁶ A contemporary letter from the Rev. Thomas Dixon to Sir Daniel Fleming follows up the story: “… John Tredeskins Rarities are come down from London by water. The Elaboratory (which some call the Knick-knackatory) is almost finish’d and ready to receive them. Doctor Plot who is to be Superviser of ye Elaboratory brought them downe.”¹⁷ If they had TV news in those days, the event would doubtless make the six o’clock bulletin.

Two months later, on May 21, the Duke and Duchess of York, the Princess Anne (the Duke’s second daughter—and future Queen—by his first wife, Anne Hyde), and a throng of earls and lords arrived at the Ashmolean Museum looking for entertainment and perhaps a little magick. A set speech by Dr. Plot served to welcome them to the museum. He then presented the rarities, accompanied by the bishop of Oxford, the vice chancellor, and the doctors of all the faculties. According to Anthony Wood, “Then they went donne to the Elaboratory, where the[y] saw some experiments to their great satisfaction.”¹⁸

This was of course the gala opening. The whiff of regal patronage was in the air and everyone was on best behavior. There had been dreams of such an event but it had taken someone special to turn them into reality. Sadly, the man without whom it would never have happened was unable to attend.

Elias was now sixty-six years old. The dreadful affliction of gout prevented him both from directly overseeing the movement of his collections into the museum itself and from attending the grand opening—a sad double blow. Throughout the spring and early summer, the gout to his feet was so agonizing that he was unable to leave his house; he could not walk without an intense, depressing, psychologically aging pain. Magicians are not immune to the worst that Mother Nature has to offer.

Sir Francis Bacon’s “cure” for the ailment, given in his Sylva Sylvarum, gave no relief. Not for many years would the world of science, which had offered the universal law of gravitation, discover—perhaps belatedly—that gout could not be cured by external poultices.

On May 24, the university gained entry to its new house on Broad Street, as recorded by Ashmole’s man-in-Oxford, Anthony Wood: “Those Doctors and masters that pleased retired to ye Musaeum which is ye upper room, where they viewed from one till 5 of ye clock what they pleased… . Many that are delighted with new phil[osophy] are taken with them; but some for ye old—look upon them as ba[u]bles—Ch.Ch. [Christchurch] men not there.”¹⁹ One can imagine the Common Room banter on that particular day.

Ashmole kept a careful eye on events at the museum, but from a distance. He rarely made the journey to damp old Oxford, having to rely on the mail. Oxford doubtless lost something in not having the genius on the doorstep, so to speak. His emphatic speech and humorous manner would certainly have inspired those involved with the museum and set its work in a fuller perspective than bookish dons would have been able to do. Ashmole would have been popular with undergraduates, who, when suitably impressed, have been known to warm to their elders.

The Oxford historian Anthony Wood, or Anthony a Wood, as he styled himself. Wood was a keen observer of Ashmole’s

Not all of his days were darkened by ill health, however. On July 17, 1690, the warm air brought Elias to the doors of his creation at the grand old age of seventy-three. The event was again recorded by Anthony Wood: “Thursday [the] Vi[ce]ch[ancellor]—Heads of Houses and others to the numb[er] of 30 or thereabouts dined in the upp[er] house of the Musaeum where the rarities lay—Mr Ashmole was carried in a chaire or sedan[;] was placed at ye end of that place and the Doctor standinge about him, Mr Ed Hanner of Ch. Ch. [Christchurch] chymical professor spoke a speech to him—afterwards they went to dinner—Mrs Ashmole Jack Cross and Mr Sheldon [not the archbishop] dined together in Doctor Plots Study.”²⁰

Mr. Ashmole’s body was, sadly, not as sharp as his mind, “being then much out of order and brought very low by divers indispositions” (Wood).

Still in Oxford, two days later, Ashmole spent Saturday evening dining with his wife “at the provi[ce] ch[ancellor’s] Doctor Meer at Brasn. Coll.”²¹ John Meare, DD (c. 1659–1710), principal of Brasenose College, had the privilege of being the last man to entertain Elias Ashmole at Oxford, forty-five years after the young captain Ashmole had commanded the grim artillery post of Dover Pier in the defense of that great city from her enemies.