XXII

ENGLISH ACHIEVEMENTS

1629—1664

WILLIAM TURNER, who had written the first plant book ever published in English, had been unlucky in his timing. Throughout his life, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time; his books had scarcely a chance of finding an audience. Thomas Johnson, on the other hand, was brilliantly placed to exploit the spirit of the age. The old beliefs were not sufficient for this new generation of plantsmen, who questioned fables, unmasked superstition, gradually threw nonsense aside. The barnacle tree found no place in Johnson’s edition of the Herball. Increasingly knowledge was based not on tradition but on observation; a study of plants became a necessary part of a gentleman’s education. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury was typical of this new breed of amateur connoisseurs:

I conceive it is a fine study and worthy a gentleman to be a good botanic, that so he may know the nature of all herbs and plants, being our fellow-creatures and made for the use of man; for which purpose it will be fit for him to cull out of some good herbal all the icones together, with the descriptions of them and to lay by themselves all such as grow in England, and afterwards to select again such as usually grow by the highway-side, in meadows, by rivers, or in marshes, or in cornfields, or in dry and mountainous places, or on rocks, walls, or in shady places, such as grow by the seaside; for this being done, and the said icones being ordinarily carried by themselves or by their servants, one may presently find out every herb he meets withal, especially if the said flowers be truly coloured. Afterwards it will not be amiss to distinguish by themselves such herbs as are in gardens, and are exotics, and are transplanted hither.¹

Plate 138: Various forms of daisy (Bellis perennis) from Theodor de Bry’s Florilegium renovatum et auctum of 1641

The newly enlarged Herball found a ready market among men such as Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of Eton. On 2 July 1637, he writes to Johnson, addressing ‘this my servant unto you at the present with two or three requests. First, that you would direct him where he may buy one of your Gerrards, well and strongly bound; next, where I may have for my money all kinds of colored pinks to set in a quarter of my garden, or any such flowers as perfume the air.’²

The same spirit of rational enquiry prompted the summer ‘simpling’ expeditions that Johnson instigated and undertook with fellow members of the Society of Apothecaries. This Pickwickian crew includes William Broad, who had contributed laudatory verses to John Parkinson’s Paradisi, and John Buggs, later thrown into prison for practising medicine without a licence (Buggs then abandoned medicine for the stage and joined the Queen of Bohemia’s players instead). The first journey into Kent (13 July 1629) produces records of about 270 plants. Johnson does not include trees or shrubs, but concentrates on the smaller plants of the pasture, arable and shoreline typical of the landscape around Rochester and Gravesend. His account of the expedition (the lter of 1629) is written in Latin, rather than English. Perhaps he felt it added gravitas. Perhaps he felt it was what would be expected of him by his fellow apothecaries, for whom the account was chiefly made. Perhaps there was a general consensus that Latin was somehow more ‘scientific’ than English and a more appropriate language to use in a work that was intended as a serious contribution to scientific research. There was, as yet, no Royal Society to promote such enquiry and it was the Warden of the Society of Apothecaries, Thomas Hicks, ‘knowing that we had for several years past been in the habit of undertaking a journey of three or four days for the sake of traversing the natural habitats of the plants’, who in 1632 ‘not only encouraged us as usual to spend some days on it, but promised himself to take his fair share of the work and more than his share of the expenses’. Johnson and his companions ‘agreed forthwith, and thanked him for thinking us worthy of such an honour’. So, on the first of August that year, the socii itinerantes - Johnson and his friends William Broad, Leonard Buckner, Robert Larking and James Clarke - gather at Hicks’s house where they have a celebratory breakfast. They then

went to the barge, boarded it, spread our sails to the wind, and left London. In the course of ten hours we covered sixty English miles, so that at the first approach of night we put to shore by the chalk cliffs of the isle of Thanet and the bay of Margate, where piles have been driven in and tied together and rocks thrown into the water so as to make a mole or pier for the more convenient berthing of ships. Here we left our own ship and went to our inn, where we found everything fit and ready, including our most attentive host, whose name is Richard Pollard. While we were in the island, he never left us, nor did he, like most others, plunder us when we departed.³

This, Johnson’s second plant-hunting expedition into Kent, takes him and his crew into a more easterly part of the county than before, moving on from Margate to Sandwich by way of Quex Park, whose garden Gerard had known well. Johnson goes off to look at Sandown Castle, which Henry VIII had built in 1539. Guided by a local schoolmaster, the others explore the walls and bastions ‘now partly ruinous with age’. They visit Caspar Niren, a Fleming settled in the town, in whose garden they admire sweet cicely, liquorice, bistort and a pink-flowered guelder rose. They pay their respects to the local apothecary, Charles Duck, who shows them ‘a thing worth remembering’:

the ‘spoils’ (if I may so call them) of a serpent fifteen feet long and thicker than an arm. As far as I can hazard a guess, it was a sea serpent; for it was caught by two men among the sandhills near the seashore, after its head had been shattered by small shot discharged from a fowling piece. It was hunting the rabbits, of which there is a vast abundance there, for food; for one or two were extracted from its stomach. These men, as I have said, brought the dead beast to our good friend Charles Duck, were duly rewarded and handed it over; its skin stripped from the flesh and stuffed with hay he still keeps with him as a memento of the event.

From Sandwich, the party moves on to Canterbury, and explores the cathedral, ‘once world-famous for the shrine of Thomas Becket, of which the least costly part was of gold.’⁴ Turning back homewards, they make their way on more familiar territory to Faversham where they pay their respects to the local apothecary, Nicholas Swayton. Swayton’s garden is planted for pleasure as well as profit: Michaelmas daisies from America, Brompton stocks, columbines, cotton lavender, opium poppies, cyclamen, feverfew and tall melilot, much in demand for plasters and poultices. After ‘waiting for an opportune moment at Gravesend, at the first of the tide on the river we entered a splendid boat driven by eight oars that happened to be left there and so returned to London, giving heartfelt thanks to God for His many benefits conferred on us: and we pray that on the works undertaken by us and all men for the public good He will bestow the desired fulfilment. Amen.’

The public good - that was what motivated this energetic and ambitious young apothecary. He was proud of his profession, but conscious that, while they knew so little about the plants they used to prepare their medicines, they could easily be duped by unscrupulous suppliers. The immediate point of the journeys ‘undertaken for the discovery of plants’ was to understand what these things really looked like, since native plants still made up the greatest part of an apothecary’s pharmacopoeia. But it is evident from the Introduction to his published account of this second Kentish journey (the Descriptio itineris plantarum of 1632), that not everyone in the Society agreed with him. Perhaps it was the older generation, more moulded by custom and practice, whom he had in mind when he complained that ‘some folk not only ridiculed our labour as vain and superfluous but derided all more precise knowledge of plants as useless, supposing that it is enough to know them merely by name and from reading. It is very certain’, he continued, ‘that the men of old who founded medicine were not so indolent and ignorant.’ Johnson never loses an opportunity, either in the four accounts of his journeys, or in the amended Herball, to point out how easily apothecaries can be held to ransom by their own lack of knowledge. Speaking in the Herball of the hemlock water dropwort, he notes that it ‘groweth amongst oysiers against Yorke House a little above the Horse ferrey against Lambeth … Pernitious and not excusable is the ignorance of some of our time that have bought and (as one may probably conjecture) used the roots of this plant instead of those of Peionie; and I know they are dayly by the ignorant women in Cheape-side sold to people more ignorant than themselves by the name of Water Lovage’. The water dropwort, widespread in ditches and damp places in the south and west of the country, was much easier for the herb-women to find than the lovage or the paeony But all parts of it - roots, stem, flower - are highly poisonous. There was, as Johnson recognised, a pressing reason for apothecaries to be better informed.

Johnson’s references show him to be a well read man: he refers to classical authors such as Dioscorides, Italian sources such as Giovanni Pona’s catalogue of plants on Monte Baldo and Prospero Alpino’s 1592 book on Egyptian plants, the works of the French nurseryman and explorer, Pierre Belon, and Jean Robin’s Catalogus stirpium lutetiae of 1597, English authors such as William Turner and John Parkinson as well as the great trio of Clusius, Dodoens and Lobelius. But the consensus that plantsmen in England were slowly achieving in the first half of the seventeenth century depended as much on extensive networks of sympathetic friends as it did on book learning. Johnson’s new edition of the Herball, which he began to work on immediately after his second journey into Kent, pays tribute to a mass of these contacts. The Gentleman Usher, Sir John Tunstall, drew his attention to a strange colchicum growing in his garden ‘at Edgcome by Croydon’. Thomas Glynn of Glynllifon sent a red-flowered mountain avens from his garden in Caernarvonshire. William Coote, chaplain to Lord Herbert, reported a hawkweed growing ‘in the Lady Briget Kingsmill’s ground at Sidmonton not far from Newberry in an old Roman camp close by the Decuman port’. Leonard Buckner, who had been with Johnson on both the journeys into Kent, supplied details of a marestail which he had found ‘three miles beyond Oxford, a little on this side Euensham ferry, in a bog upon a common by the Beacon hill neere Cumner wood in the end of August 1632’. Without maps to reference, establishing the exact locations of plants was a cumbersome business. In Essex with Nathaniel Wright, Johnson found a new kind of pimpernel, ‘among the come at Wrightsbridge being the seat of Mr John Wright his brother’.

Plate 139: A seventeenth-century garden scene from Daniel Rabel’s Theatrum florae (1633)

Johnson was more of a plantsman than his calling as an apothecary strictly required. Adding the ambitious Welsh journey to his travels, he had visited twenty-five English and Welsh counties by 1641, when he described that last epic journey (it included an assault on Snowdon, where the party picnicked among thymes and sedums, saxifrages and violets) in his Mercurii botanici pars altera.⁵ Collecting and cataloguing was Johnson’s forte and it was work that had to be done if the study of plants was to go forward - a study that had been later starting in Britain than on mainland Europe. But the constraints imposed by editing an existing work did not give him the opportunity to impose a major rearrangement. Perhaps at the time he was working on Gerard’s Herball he was not anyway sufficiently interested to push on the great Lobelius’s work in sorting and arranging plants in particular groups and families. He must, though, have appreciated and admired the work that Lobelius had done, for he quoted him more often than any other author, both in the Herball and in his own accounts of the apothecaries’ journeys. And yet, in his chapter ‘Of Rushes’, he is able to write briskly: ‘I do not here intend to trouble you with an accurate distinction and enumeration of Rushes; for if I should, it would be tedious to you, laborious to me, and beneficial to neither.’

Johnson’s edition of the Herball was reprinted in 1636 but Johnson himself felt obliged to place an advertisement on the last page, apologising for the fact that so little new work appeared in it. This, he said, was because of his plan ‘to travell over the most parts of this Kingdome … for I judge it requisite that we should labour to know those plants which are and are ever like to be inhabitants of this isle; for I verily believe that the divine Providence had a care in bestowing plants in each part of the earth fitting and convenient to the foreknowne necessities of the future inhabitants; and if we thoroughly knew the vertues of these we needed no Indian nor American drugges’. Helped by his friends he now had it in mind to produce a complete flora of Britain. The lists of plants published in the accounts of his various journeys broadcast a kind of status quo. Correspondents could then add new information about areas of the country Johnson had not yet visited himself. Unfortunately, in 1642, the Civil War brought his travels abruptly to an end. Johnson left his apothecary’s shop on Snow Hill and entered the company of London Royalists at Oxford. From there, he joined Colonel Rawdon at Basing House, the seat of the Marquis of Winchester, where, as the fellow Royalist Thomas Fuller relates in his Worthies (1662), he was ‘no lesse eminent in the Garrison for his valour and conduct as a Souldier, than famous through the Kingdom for his excellency as a Herbarist, and Physician’. In a sortie during September 1644, he was wounded in the shoulder, ‘whereby contracting a Feaver he dyed a fortnight after’.

There was one man in England who could have carried on the great work that Johnson had in mind, the publication of a complete flora of Britain, and that was John Goodyer. Goodyer, eight years older than Johnson, had already collaborated with him, sending much of the information used in the revised edition of Gerard’s Herball. In the Preface Johnson freely acknowledged the great contribution made by Goodyer ‘the onely Assistant I had in this Worke’ and arranged for each of Goodyer’s paragraphs to be signed with his own name (there were more than a hundred of them). But Goodyer was an amateur, a country gent, who never lived more than a few miles from his Hampshire birthplace. He was thorough, methodical, an obsessive taker of notes, a demon indexer, a maker of concordances, an autodidact, observant, interested, steady, pedantic even, but he lacked Johnson’s drive. Together, he and the more extrovert, energetic Johnson would have made a perfect editorial pair. Alone, wrapped in the calm of his Hampshire study, he collected, corresponded, listed, kept meticulous accounts (thirteen shillings and eightpence for lodgings in Guildford on his way to London in 1631, together with outlay on oats and hay for the horses, grease for the coach - sixpence, a shilling tip for the ostler, and ferry charges at Lambeth) but, on his own account, published nothing.⁶

Like Johnson, he makes regular summer journeys in search of new plants (horse hire, one shilling; expenses at Weymouth, three shillings). While Johnson’s expeditions were sponsored by his fellow apothecaries, Goodyer’s are less focused. But he does realise how unsatisfactory it is to try to cram British plants into a straitjacket cut for a different time and a different place. William Turner, the pioneer, had been chiefly concerned with matching English names to the plants that Dioscorides and other classical authors had already described. His book, though an important landmark, did little to increase knowledge about British plants that the ancients did not know of. Gerard’s Herball grew out of a Continental book, Dodoens’s Pemptades of 1583, and had been illustrated with pictures that also originated on the Continent. Johnson’s edition of 1633 added British locations and more British plants, but was still constrained by its source. In his early twenties, Goodyer seems to want to do something about this lacuna and for five years produces a storm of notes, diligently collecting information about British plants: herb Paris at Chawton, sea holly at Tichfield, white and purple colchicums at Warminster, a narrow-leaved lungwort in the New Forest, sea heath on Hayling Island. He records information about oak, walnut and chestnut trees that Johnson later uses in his edition of the Herball. After this flurry, he retreats to his study and in 1622 begins his laborious interlinear translation (Greek into English, for no English edition yet existed) of Theophrastus’s Enquiry into Plants. One of the first books he had ever bought had been Theophrastus in the Aldine folio edition of 1497.⁷

Plate 140: A single chequered colchicum (possibly Colchicum agrippinumj in a painted florilegium produced by a Dutch artist in the first half of the seventeenth century

In 1631 he goes to London (’wyne wth. Johnson 6d’), possibly to discuss the new edition of the Herball. He stays at the Angel, near Denmark Street off the Strand and visits his bookseller, Dr Dale in Long Acre. He drafts letters to various foreign plantsmen with a view to exchanging seed of English plants for foreign ones he has never grown: ‘Sir, I have made a short Catalogue of some plants which growe for the most p[ar]te wild in Fraunce; you may acquaint anie herborists there that you please yf they will helpe me to seeds of them, or any other.’ The plants are cross-referenced with the page numbers of the plants as shown in Lobelius’s Stirpium adversaria nova of 1570 ‘that there may be no mistakinge’. Aged forty, Goodyer marries Miss Patience Crumpe, spinster of St Giles in the Fields, Middlesex, and buys a present of edging lace for his new wife (tenpence). A Royalist, of course, he does not fight in the Civil War but defends himself as best he can with a Protection Order granted on 9 December 1643 by Lord Hopton of the King’s garrison at Petersfield. His Majesty’s soldiers are to ‘defend and protect John Goodyer of Petersfield in the County of Southton Gent: his house horses servants family goods chattels and estates of all sortes from all damages, disturbances & oppressions what-soevere’. When the war is over he settles to an interlinear translation of Dioscorides’s Materia medica which fills 4,540 pages; later he arranges for it to be bound in six quarto volumes (three shillings). On 26 September 1661, he sends to the binders the Theophrastus translation he had made nearly forty years earlier (The bindinge - the cleane paper - the claspes, four shillings’). At his death in 1664, twenty years after Johnson’s, he leaves ‘all my books de plantis which I do give and bequeath to Magdalen College in Oxon to be kept entirely in the library of the said College’. Those books, carefully inscribed by Goodyer with the date he bought them and the price he paid, encapsulate the entire history of the study of plants from Theophrastus to John Ray. Gathered on the shelves of that quiet Hampshire study are Aristotle and Dioscorides (bought on 10 November 1631 for Is 6d), Brunfels, Fuchs, six different editions of Mattioli’s Commentarii, Lancelot Browne’s copy of Cesalpino’s De plantis (bought on 17 November 1627 for four shillings), Turner, Gesner’s Historia plantarum, Bauhin’s Phytopinax of 1596, six books by Clusius, seven by Dodoens, six by Lobelius, copies of all Johnson’s accounts of his plant-hunting expeditions. There’s a ten-year moratorium on book buying around the period of the Civil War, but then he begins again: ‘22 March 1651 £3 2s 6d sent Dr Dale for Bauhin 3 vols, one shilling for the portage to & from Dr Dales, a shilling to John Symonds to carry up the money, one shilling and fourpence to William Mychell for bringing the bookes down.⁸ Almost as soon as it is printed, he buys Hernandez’s account of Mexican plants and John Ray’s iconic catalogue of the plants of Cambridgeshire, published in 1657. John Goodyer’s library contains everything of importance that has ever been written about plants. But like a logjam that has built up in a river, the time has come for that great, congested accumulation of facts to sweep on and be reassembled in a more coherent way.

Plate 141: Samuel de Champlain’s sketch of the settlement at La Croix, Maine, as it appeared in the first edition of his Voyages (1619)