All wise Men, should have two Religions; the one, a publick, for their Conformity with the People, the other, a private, to be kept to their own breasts.
THOMAS SPRAT
A CENTRAL THEME throughout Evelyn’s life was his attention to issues of ‘domesticity’, a topic that will concern and underlie all of the chapters that follow. But it is worth a preliminary explanation of what was involved in domesticity at that time. Today, this means essentially life in the home, or domus, attending to near and extended family members, to visitors, personal faith and domestic tragedies, household and dwelling place, to family finances, and to children who cannot choose their parents. Yet for Evelyn in the seventeenth century, that mode of domesticity would have extended to his close friends and colleagues, like Thomas Henshaw, Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, Sir Thomas Browne, John Beale or John Aubrey, for whom letters often took the place of visitation.
Yet this sense of domesticity was not as simple as, and perhaps more robust than, it can be today. This younger son was deeply attached to the family estate at Wotton in Surrey, which Evelyn assumed he would never inherit (though he did so towards the end of his life); even so, it was still a place that always mattered. Not having such a home – an estate with its roots in the countryside, political connections within the county and obligations to the neighbourhood – Evelyn took over elsewhere a property belonging to his father-in-law, leased first from the Commonwealth and eventually from the Crown. It was nonetheless a house and land where he could install a family and indulge himself in the making of a garden, which was a prime ambition in a nation that he felt lacked good and up-to-date garden design. So at Sayes Court he made a dwelling place, together with what became, and remained historically (after it disappeared), an important garden. To Sayes Court in 1652 he brought his wife, Mary, and there she bore him six children over sixteen years; some died young, some succumbed to smallpox or other disease. It was the location to which his family, friends and notables – including Charles II and his queen – would be welcomed and entertained. But it was a lease that constantly involved him in issues both financial and legal, and even territorial, as it was adjacent to the busy, growing and intrusive Deptford dockyard. Nor was it readily anything like a home: when his young son Richard died at the age of five, he was buried at Wotton rather than in Deptford’s churchyard. It was to Wotton that he took Mary to comfort her when her mother died soon after accompanying her daughter to England. It was the place he took his family to during the London Plague of 1665, and during that retreat one of his daughters was born, in the very room where he himself had seen the light of day. Wotton was also the house and home to which he would return to solace himself, where he went (as he put it) to ‘refresh himself’ or to recuperate from illness, as he did on the eve of the Restoration. And even before he obtained Sayes Court he was proposing and designing garden features for his brother at Wotton, a site that he had hopes of improving even as a younger brother. When chance gave him the ownership of Wotton, he would counsel his grandson on the regime that he envisaged for Wotton and its estate after his death, which for Evelyn came in 1706. It is interesting that while we possess plans of Evelyn’s gardening at Sayes Court, we have very few images of it, while Wotton was sketched on many occasions with a loving concern for how it appeared, its complex of buildings, terraces, waters and surrounding woodland (illus. 2 and 3).
While a modern household will usually have one or two family members working outside the home and sometimes bringing work back with them, in Evelyn’s case there was no such ‘outside’ place of work. Though he was constantly active beyond his dwelling place, he had no formal employment, not wanting to practise the law, not wishing to serve in the military, and not obtaining, despite seeking it, any government post, such as that of the Historiographer Royal. He was, nonetheless, a prominent member of the important Royal Society, founded in 1660, and a virtuoso and ‘amateur’ (in the best sense of that word) in architecture, numismatics, painting and sculpture; but he excelled himself in the art of garden-making. He did engage in what today we call the civil service, but he had no permanent post and therefore no steady financial income; indeed, he sought to obtain employment in government not only for himself, but for his father-in-law, who had served as ambassador to France before the Restoration, and for his two sons and grandson. All that activity did involve him constantly in work for and at the Court, to which he could journey back and forth from Sayes Court, though on occasions and during winter months he sometimes took lodgings in town. But the Court was not, for this principled and pious man, a very congenial place, and its culture increasingly appalled him.
2 John Evelyn’s drawing of the house and surrounding woodlands at Wotton, in Surrey.
Ironically, it was to a person in this court that he was drawn, when he became friends with a young maid of honour, Margaret Blagge. The basis of this relationship, about which he later wrote in The Life of Mrs Godolphin,1 appears to have been his need for, and indeed skill in, pedagogy, joined to a pious wish to advise a young woman who sought his friendship in the first place. His early education had been, by his own confession, not particularly useful, and he found the years travelling and studying in Europe were worth more than what he had learned at Oxford. So an instinct to instruct others emerged from his own self-instruction and found expression in and outside the family.
One of his first compositions on family matters was the private admonishments, or Instructions Oeconomiques, addressed to his young wife, ‘to be kept under lock and key’ (not the wife, the instructions).2 It was inscribed in gold to ‘the present mistress of my youth, the hopeful companion of my riper years and the future nurse of my age . . . M[istress] Mary Evelyn, my dear wife’. He advised his bride of thirteen years on the duties of wives and the requirements of a happy union, on ‘Society Paternal’, and on county life, all the while sustaining his remarks with a cluster of sententiae and cultural allusions to Hesiod, Plato and Cyrus, among others. It must have been a touch intimidating for even this accomplished young woman, but she clearly rose to the occasion, and later in Evelyn’s life he would salute her as ‘the best wife in the world, sweet, and (though not charming) agreeable and as she grew up, pious, loyal & of so just a temper’. Later in life Evelyn also composed ‘Directions for the Employment of your Time’ for his daughter,3 which begins with advising some devotions, listening to her mother’s commands, walking in the garden for exercise, practising writing, playing on the harpsichord, ‘more solemn intercourse between God and your soul’, family prayer time and special instructions for Sundays. Mary seemed to have honoured those instructions in making her own little book of ‘several designs and thoughts of mine for the regulating my life upon many occasions’.4 Late, he penned a small volume for his son, John, on John’s departure in 1692 for a post in Ireland, with advice on religion, ‘profitable Entertainment’ and what would have to be done to ‘re-edify’ Wotton, which by then Evelyn knew he would inherit from his brother and pass to his son (though the latter never occurred). And in 1704, after John’s death and thinking of how his work and values, and Wotton itself, must be maintained after his own death, which occurred two years later, Evelyn wrote Memories for my Grand-son.
3 Evelyn’s rough sketch-cum-plan of Wotton House and its surroundings.
So he had always been an engaged and careful family member, teaching his sons, acquiring tutors for his nephew and recommending others for his friends’ families. A brief acquaintance with any of his lengthy letters will signal how easily he took to the task of instructing and guiding the young. It was a habit that emerged in his deep, pious and sometimes misunderstood friendship with Margaret Blagge.
But for Evelyn the truer home, if not the household, was his country. ‘Home and continent’ was how he rendered the words of Claudian on contentment. It was, at the very least, an interchange between, on the one hand, Europe and its intellectual heritage and, on the other, whatever can be considered ‘home’, which comprised Wotton, Sayes Court and the potential of a new England after the Restoration. A pious household was a private religion, to be carefully nurtured, but the public religion was the nation, and conformity to it by its people required at once a commitment to the English religion, to its arts and culture and to its intellectual role in the larger world. In 1671 he wrote to James Hamilton that the religion of the Church of England is a ‘sublime, and noble service, comely, and adequate to its glorious object, and would be envied and admired, if the great ones did it honour, and would bring piety into reputation’ (LB, I.513–14). And Evelyn chose to serve his country and his faith by what he could do well – through translation, by writing about architecture and horticultural matters, and ensuring that his exile in Europe during the unhappy years of the Interregnum was harvested and conveyed to his countrymen.
So beyond that immediate circle of family and friends was a need to domesticate himself in the larger European world of politics and culture. In his private and domestic life Evelyn was attentive and generous, while also firm and principled. In the larger and public search for domestication, he found the opportunity to travel, which as a younger son without the obligation to oversee the family home at Wotton he could do by absenting himself from England during the more troubled upheavals that preceded the Commonwealth. That brought him into contact – in person and through books – with a circle of both European thinkers and those who had also fled from England in those years. This first-hand knowledge of European experience decisively impacted his thinking, his publications and translations as well as his enthusiasm for garden-making – itself both a personal inclination and one he deemed crucial to share with his English contemporaries. Thus he translated and broadcast, ‘for the benefit or divertissement of our country’, treatises on French gardening – The French Gardiner (1658) and The Compleat Gard’ner (1693) – and given that no Italian treatise presented itself to be rendered into English he added his own observations on Italian design in various comments on garden-making. It was due to those projects, wrote Stephen Switzer in 1718, ‘that Gardening can speak proper English’. On the basis of both that French expertise and his first-hand visits in Italy, Evelyn built his own English corpus of gardening, horticultural and arboricultural writings as well as practising the making of gardens.
For this ‘chameleon’,5 speaking proper English was crucial, whether about gardening, architecture, politics, engravings, fruit trees, arboriculture, navigation and commerce, medals and coins, painting, national characteristics, earth or vegetation. Englishmen without sufficient language skills needed to read important foreign works in their own language, and see how ideas could be accommodated in England and be presented clearly in English. The title of John Ogilby’s The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro in 1654 acknowledged a famous Roman authority, politician and poet, but 43 years later, the very title of John Dryden’s The Works of Virgil made them seem already more English; while Ogilby’s edition glossed the text with elaborate marginal annotations, Dryden’s translation stands alone on the plain page.
Translation was itself a constant effort at domestication. John Oldham in the ‘Advertisement’ to his Ars Poetica of 1681 argued that his job was to put ‘Horace into a more modern dress, than hitherto he has appear’d in, that is, by making him speak, as if here living and writing now. I therefore resolv’d to alter the Scene from Rome to London.’ Altering the scene, literally and metaphorically, was a constant theme of writers: in the early eighteenth century Alexander Pope’s translations were urged on by Sir William Trumbull, who knew they would make ‘Homer speak good English’. Evelyn himself engaged largely in such translations, and he encouraged his son John to do the same: John junior would publish in 1673 a version of the Latin of René Rapin’s Hortorum Libri IV (1665), itself modelled on Virgil’s Georgics, which was hailed on its title page as ‘And now made English’; the son’s Grotius His Arguments was also ‘rendered into plain English verse’ in 1686.
Thus the nation saw that ‘domestication’ (on the somewhat invidious analogy of domesticating wild beasts!) was not only making foreign ideas available and hospitable to the nation, but was to be done in good and clear English: what Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society, with which body Evelyn was much involved, termed ‘a domestic plainness’. This concern for plainness, at once domesticated in England and readable in the study of one’s own dwelling, sustained much of the Society’s business, and Evelyn himself contributed to it by finding good English for Lucretius, Chrysostom and a cluster of other foreign writers. Yet it was not a Presbyterian plainness, for Evelyn at least applauded the Laudian character of English Church services; rather, he chose to do everything that seemed useful and proper to enrich the English character with a domesticated Europeanism.
The presiding genius and inspiration for members of the Royal Society was Francis Bacon, and he specifically emphasized the need for domestication in his New Atlantis, published in 1627, the year after his death, when Evelyn was yet seven years old.6 In the fable of Solomon’s House in New Atlantis, as well as in Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (a title that Evelyn would partly echo in his own Sylva, as well as echoing Statius’ Silvae), he would find much encouragement for his own various activities. The lengthy discourse given by the ‘Father’ of Solomon’s House that ends Bacon’s New Atlantis covers every possible field of study that the Royal Society and its members collectively would strive to emulate, and to which Evelyn himself contributed: such matters as weather, care of the sick, experiments, ‘mechanical arts’, furnaces and heat-producing mechanisms, engines of all sorts, the manufacture of gunpowder, flying machines and ‘curious clocks’, representations of things near and far – from worms and small flies to rainbows and the heavens – and ‘perspective-houses, where we make demonstration of all lights and radiations’, including the production of ‘feigned distances’.
A long section in New Atlantis on ‘large and various orchards, and gardens’, and parks or ‘enclosures of all sorts, of beasts and birds, which we use not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissections’ must have struck Evelyn in particular:
Wherein we do not so much respect beauty, as variety of ground and soil, proper for diverse trees, and herbs: and some very spacious, where trees, and berries are set, whereof we make diverse kinds of drinks . . . In these we practice likewise all conclusions of grafting, and inoculating. As well of wild trees, as fruit trees, which produceth many effects. And we make (by art) in the same orchards, and gardens, trees and flowers, to come earlier, or later than their seasons; and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater, and sweeter, and of differing taste, smell, colour and figure, from their nature. And many of them we so order as they become of medicinal use . . . We have also means to make plants rise by mixtures of earth, without seeds; and likewise to make diverse new plants, differing from the vulgar; and to make one tree or plant turn into another . . . (p. 38)
The customs and politics of the New Atlantis that in their turn clearly sustained the agenda enunciated at Solomon’s House were evidence of two kinds of domesticity: love and care of the family, described in an elaborate description of a quasi-ritualistic family gathering (pp. 26ff.), and the rewards of careful and focused travel. If the society is ‘wholly bent to make [this] kingdom and people happy’ (p. 21), then travel, though strictly limited, brings news of foreign places, ‘knowledge of the affairs and state of those countries . . . and especially of the sciences, arts, manufacture, and intentions’ (p. 24). Travelling ‘doth commonly know more by eye’ (p. 16); but those less able to travel and see, those that ‘stayeth at home’, can learn by perusing published accounts of those who do travel, as they bring home ‘books, abstracts, and patterns of experiments’ from other countries, and are called ‘merchants of light’ (p. 45). In short, the ‘end of our Foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (p. 35).
As early as 1592 Bacon had told a correspondent that ‘I have taken all knowledge to be my province’; from which he wished to purge both ‘frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities’ and ‘blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures’, to which end were required ‘industrious observations, grounded conclusions and profitable inventions and discoveries’.7 Evelyn would have appreciated that determination, and in the published works of Bacon he found constant encouragement, even if he himself lapses into ‘auricular’ conclusions from classical writers. Yet he was also, far less than Bacon would prove to be, possessed of only ‘moderate civil ends’, less willing to participate in political affairs. But the scrutiny of natural and artistic phenomena and an interest in asking questions and seeking empirical understandings were as fundamental to him as his family, religion and nationality.
Evelyn’s sense of family was strong, and during his European travels he was constantly in touch with his brothers and sister. It was to the former that, later in 1659, he prefaced his translation from the Greek of St John Chrysostom’s Golden Book concerning the Education of Children, when seeking consolation for the death of his five-year-old son in 1658. Geoffrey Keynes rightly says it was the most attractive and personal of his publications. Evelyn’s understanding of his pedagogic role in the family was modelled on his concern for the state, which he served loyally as a royalist and an Englishman and where his private conscience in matters of religion (or what moderns would term consciousness) was cultivated. Michael McKeon, in his book on The Secret History of Domesticity, quotes John Dryden to the effect that ‘Conscience is the Royalty and Prerogative of every Private man’ – thereby neatly allowing a connection of royalty with the individual.8
Domesticity in the seventeenth century had a far richer significance, as McKeon demonstrates, for the link between private conscience and public deportment was intricate. These involved a more and more complicated negotiation between private and public worlds, between the household (the Greek oikos) and the state or polis. As McKeon sees it, the ‘relation between polis and oikos was understood both metaphorically and metonymically: the polis was conceived and arranged on the model of the family’; while he cites Aristotle’s Politics (‘the state is by nature clearly prior to the family’), he misses Aristotle’s historical point that oikos did proceed polis. McKeon also quotes John Locke’s understanding that ‘the power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his wife, and a Lord over his Slave.’9 That is an understanding of what home and family mean strikingly different from today’s.
A great deal of Evelyn’s efforts and achievements in ‘domestication’ came both in the form of letter-writing and writing for publication and (not always the same thing) the publication itself. This was true especially in the area with which Evelyn was most concerned – the promotion of horticulture and arboriculture. As Elizabeth Yale has shown, naturalists collected their information on the basis of a Baconian observation, then wrote up notes, sketched items, shared their information in correspondence and eventually, perhaps, fixed their ideas in printed form, though with a frequent interest in undertaking revisions, as Evelyn did with his Sylva.10 Correspondence and shared notes were certainly how Evelyn communicated with Samuel Hartlib, John Beale and John Aubrey, among others; equally, the masses of their notes, documents, drafts, sketches and manuscripts did not always result in publication. Yet, as Yale also shows, in this huge and elaborate effort to observe and understand the natural world, the wild, cabinets, herbaria and florilegia were used to gather this somewhat fragmented knowledge into a portrait and representation of the natural riches of Britain itself.
But for many virtuosi it was – long before they turned to publication – the writing and communication in correspondence that established a network of intellectual exchange. Evelyn’s correspondence was considerable, and it was through his letters that he sustained and advanced many of his ideas. It was typical that he engaged in correspondence with Samuel Hartlib, a key broker of intellectual ideas across a universal range of disciplines throughout Europe, but this was an epistolary exchange of the kind that he conducted with many others besides Hartlib. This larger correspondence (and his own determination to keep copies of important parts of it in his letterbooks) show that staying in contact with a wide range of contemporary thinkers was essential to him personally and to his hopes for advancing ideas in England. If his much-relied-on Diary reflects the contacts he made and maintained throughout his life (though it is sometimes brief, elliptical and not always accurate), his letters are more eloquent of his sharing of ideas at once scientific and artistic, religious and political, public and personal. Indeed, his letters also reveal that his dedication to domestication was bifocal: to deal with a wide circle of friends and correspondents reflected on his family, and his family implicitly and explicitly was but a metaphor, a metonymy, for the public state.11
But Evelyn, as were so many of his contemporaries, was hugely conscious of living through a revolution in print culture, not just of books that were distributed through bookshops and by itinerant booksellers, but of pamphlets and journalism that were widely circulated. Ideas could now be more quickly consumed, communicated and denounced; political animadversions could be quickly promoted or discounted; and science, as Bacon envisaged, would no longer be floated on traditions of folklore, word of mouth and old wives’ tales. John Aubrey, also a great compiler of materials, was grateful for this new medium:
since printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil wars, the ordinary sort of people were not taught to read: nowadays books are common, and most of the poor people understand letters: and many good books and variety of turns of affairs, have put all the old fables out of doors; and the divine art of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin-Good-fellow and the fairies (illus. 53).12
4 William Faithorne (d. 1691), undated drawing of John Aubrey.
And the home is where language is transmitted, taught and nurtured so that books may be read.
If the gunpowder industry of the Evelyn family had much declined by the Civil Wars, a point Evelyn himself noted in responding to Aubrey’s remarks on the county of Surrey and Wotton’s woods and streams in particular, then bookmaking indeed was or could be more powerful than the cannon. So Evelyn continued to produce pamphlets, reports to the Royal Society, books and translations – an essential way of communicating foreign ideas to English readers now that books could be widely available. He also found, like Aubrey, that to accumulate facts and observations meant constant revision was needed; yet it led nevertheless to a frustrating failure to complete his magnum opus, ‘Elysium Britannicum’. In that, he had hoped to bring together everything that the British gardener needed to know – mechanically, horticulturally, philosophically – in a book worthy of inclusion in a Baconian library of a newer Atlantis.