WHILE EVELYN’S TIME in Oxford was nothing that he chose to remark upon (‘of very small benefit to me’), it would be his education in Europe that served him better. ‘Travel in the younger sort’, wrote Bacon in his Essays, ‘is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.’ And Evelyn, as a younger brother and as yet unfocused in both education and experience, clearly found the list of foreign customs ‘to be seen and observed’ (in Bacon’s phrase) an apt agenda when he left England in 1641 for a four-month visit to the United Provinces and to the Spanish (and Catholic) Netherlands – ‘these two jealous States’. Even though eleven years later he admonished French culture in The State of France, it was still the fruitfulness of travel that he emphasized in its Preface: ‘from a certain vain emulation which I had, to see the best of education, which everybody so decrying at home, made me conceive was a commodity only to be brought from a far country’ (my italics). Travel, or exile in troubled times, was indeed a useful commodity, for persons who were ‘never out of sight of their own chimneys’ smoke’ would much diminish their contributions to the world they lived in. As he noticed once abroad at Flushing (Vlissingen), things were ‘infinitely changed’ after being absent from England. Invoking one of Evelyn’s, as well as one of the seventeenth century’s, frequent metaphors, God had furnished and adorned ‘(as I may say) . . . this terrestrial cabinet’ with things to be seen that would be to ‘the profit, and emolument of his own country at his return’.1
The motto that Evelyn devised for himself – to explore everything and retain the best: Omnia explorate, meliora retinete (LB, I.3) – was eagerly observed in 1641. Later, in The State of France (MW, p.45) he would take note of ‘things mechanically curious and useful, as altogether in the mysteries of government and polity, which indeed are more appositely termed philosophical’; thus he saw virtue in registering the equal significance of both practical (‘mechanical’) and philosophical matters. From courts and ambassadors to monuments, both ecclesiastical and secular, from antiquities and ruins to gardens and fortifications, from cabinets and rarities to ‘whatsoever is memorable in the places where you go’ – all must be recorded, and these memoranda (again Bacon) put ‘into a little Room’, a sort of mental cabinet of curiosities.
Curiosity was not, in the seventeenth century, what killed the cat, but whatever promoted intellectual knowledge. Evelyn would eventually own two actual cabinets, one made for him in Florence, one in Paris (illus. 6).2 No single cabinet, inevitably, could contain the accumulated experience of Continental tours, nor even the landscape paintings and ‘drolleries’ that he purchased at Rotterdam, nor the books, engravings, maps and anatomical notations that he later shipped from Padua on his way home and that eventually arrived in London in 1649. These acquisitions, and what promoted them in his journey, allow us to understand what directed his thinking in the six years abroad. His Diary, composed in retrospect, may have invented memories and certainly reinforced his original tourism with subsequent reading from guide-books (some references were misplaced when he wrote up his journal). But the Diary was still a compendium of keen observations first stored and then rescued for their importance in England. It was these notations and observations that were his true ‘cabinet’.
6 John Evelyn’s cabinet, commissioned by him.
In 1641 Evelyn travelled with a cousin, John Caryll, in the company of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, a Surrey neighbour from Albury, who was accompanying the Queen Mother, Marie de’ Medici; Evelyn would meet her again in Dort en route to Cologne (‘toss’d to and fro by the various fortunes of her life’), together with members of the French royalty. From Flushing, Evelyn and Caryll travelled widely throughout the Low Countries, mainly by boat on the canals, returning sundry times to the same town and everywhere curious about sights, monuments, rarities, architecture, gardens, urban enhancement and fortifications (for the wars were a constant presence, as the Dutch were still battling Spain). Evelyn even joined a company briefly at Gennep, and ‘trail’d a pike’. But after being ‘pretty well satisfied with the confusion of Armies and sieges’, and perhaps after a heavy bout of drinking in the garrison, he thought to call it quits on a military life.
Curious about everything he saw, even indiscriminately as when pillaging the guide-books he would read later, some things nonetheless stuck in his mind, whether at the time or subsequently. One was a curiosity for, indeed a tolerance of and interest in, rival faiths. He eagerly explored the practices and places of worship, visiting a synagogue in Amsterdam and a variety of Protestant sects, kissing the hand of the deposed and widowed Protestant ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia (the elder sister of Charles I), meeting with the English who had fled from Parliamentary censures as well as English nuns in Brussels, visiting convents and a friary, meeting Carmelites, and Jesuits, whose school and educational building he much admired in Antwerp; all without wavering in his own English Protestant faith (in Bacon’s New Atlantis Christianity was insisted upon, even while its inhabitants accepted the existence of other religions). So, too, was his openness to meeting interesting foreigners (‘two Polish noblemen, who were travelling out of Germany, and had been in Italy, very accomplished persons’).
He compared what he saw constantly with things back home in England, not always to the latter’s advantage; he admired the state houses in European cities, ‘all magnificently built’, and any modern, classicizing buildings. He noticed lepers on the riverbanks as his boat went by, saw his first elephant in Rotterdam, visited a hospice for lame and decrepit soldiers in Amsterdam, admired the ‘wenches [in a seminary or charterhouse] so well brought up to house-wifery’ that suitors sought them in marriage, and a kind of Dutch bride-well where ‘lewd women are kept in discipline and labour; but in truth all is so sweet and neat’. In Brussels he admired paintings of the recently deceased Rubens, peered through a keyhole to observe the latticework of book presses in a closed library there, and marvelled again at gardens, with statues and artificial music from manifold waterworks.
Given Evelyn’s later regard for garden-making and garden-writing, his visits to these sites were noted, at least retrospectively, and sometimes glossed briefly – ‘a fair garden and park, curiously planted’ in The Hague, or a lime tree in the Convent of St Clares at ’s-Hertogenbosch (‘the like where-of for evenness & height I had not observed’). And while always eager to inspect military installations – he found those at ’s-Hertogenbosch the ‘most matchless piece of fortification in the world’ (to the extent that, as a ‘stranger’, he was allowed to inspect them) – nothing pleased him more than the ‘delicious shades and walks of stately trees’ throughout the city of Antwerp. Earlier, he had visited the botanical garden at Leiden, having matriculated at the University (a device for avoiding taxes and excise), where he acquired a catalogue of its exotic plants. He also marvelled at the theatre of the Anatomy School and the University’s cabinet or Repository of natural curiosities, the many contents of which he enumerates (illus. 7). He visited the Elsevier printing house in Leiden, bought books from Plantin’s press in Antwerp and visited the premises of the great mapmakers Blaeu and Hondius, in Amsterdam.
In October at Ghent he met up again with Arundel, now returned from taking the ailing Queen Mother to Cologne, and together they finished their journey through the Spanish Netherlands and took ship to Dover. Once in London, Evelyn took leave of his lordship at Arundel Stairs, whence he returned first to the Middle Temple and then to Wotton, where he resolved to ‘possess myself in some quiet if it might be, in a time of great jealousy’.
His return to England was brief, and within two years he was once again on the Continent. The months in England were restless and perturbed, the kingdom troubled, and the king at war ideologically, and soon militarily, with Parliament, whose members determined to address their longstanding grievances and to curtail the king’s authority over those who advised him. Evelyn was in ‘perpetual motion’ between London and Wotton, visiting family members on several occasions in Lewes, in Godstone and Long Ditton in Surrey and Hertingfordbury in Hertfordshire; Evelyn’s paternal grandfather, George, had spawned a large family of 24 children from two marriages, so there were many contacts to maintain. Early on, he witnessed the king’s state entry into London on his return from Scotland, ‘to great acclamations and joy of the giddy people’, but declined some of his duties as one of the organizers of Christmas festivities at the royalist Middle Temple (setting up only a series of bronze busts of the Caesars) and thence retreated to Wotton. He noted his regular taking of the blessed sacrament, mainly at Wotton but also at the Middle Temple.
7 J. W. Swanenburgh’s engraving (after J. C. Woudanus), 1610, of a view of the Botanical Garden and Ambulacrum, Leiden.
At Wotton, with his brother’s permission, he built a ‘little study over a cascade’, which he sketched (illus. 8), and created a pond and island, along with ‘some solitudes & retirements’, a needed respite in the gathering storm. He and his brothers purchased saddle horses in Northampton, when the First Civil War made such provisions urgent, and then he followed some of the king’s battles – arriving at Portsmouth when it fell to the besieging Parliamentary forces in September, but still going to take his leave of the vanquished governor on his departure to France. In 1642 Queen Henrietta Maria was escorted to safety in the United Provinces in search of funds for the king’s party, accompanied again by Arundel, who then settled in Padua to avoid the conflict at home; Evelyn would meet up with him there later. In November 1642 Evelyn decided to aid the king at the battle of Brentford, but arrived too late ‘with my horse and Armes’, during the withdrawal of the victorious royalists; the next year he sent only his horse ‘and furniture’ with a friend to support the king, who had rashly retreated to royalist Oxford rather than moving upon London.
8 Detail from a sketch of Evelyn’s study and the cascade at Wotton.
Evelyn still managed some ‘journeys of pleasure’ to relatives and friends, with other visits to cultivate his ‘curiosity’, fuelled doubtless by his recent experiences abroad and perhaps concerned at how much damage the Parliamentary forces would wreak in the land – he had witnessed the destruction of the ‘stately Cross in Cheapside’ by a ‘furious and zealot mob’ – and he returned thence to Wotton ‘with no little regret for the confusion that threatened us’. He had visited Albury soon after his return from the Low Countries and learned there from Arundel of the Irish massacre of thousands of Protestants, which had fuelled Puritans’ anti-Catholicism. He went with his brothers to view the monument to Sir Francis Bacon at St Albans, admired Winchester Cathedral, twice visited the gardens and vineyard at Elizabeth I’s Hatfield and another royal palace at Theobalds Park (largely demolished in 1651 by the Parliamentarians), and got to visit the new house at Balls Park, which must have reminded him of the Dutch classicist buildings he had seen abroad. He also viewed Parliament’s new fortifications now surrounding London (incognito – not declaring his ‘having been in his Majesties Army’).
By late summer of 1643 he realized that what he had witnessed in his constant toing and froing around southern England made it ‘impossible to evade the doing of very unhandsome things’. He refused to sign the Solemn League and Covenant, thereby implying his opposition to Presbyterianism. Parliament was granted power to gather funds, to be repaid with interest, from properties assessed within twenty miles of London; Wotton was spared at that point, yet eventually would seem threatened and was where troops would later be billeted. So Evelyn obtained the signature of the king, still at Oxford, to license his departure from England. Though his brother George urged him to remain and ‘think on your own country’, he decided to leave once again, realizing perhaps that his own country could benefit in the long run from time he spent abroad. In October 1643 his brothers accompanied him as far as Tower Wharf, where he took sail downriver to Gravesend and thence by post arrived at Dover. He was accompanied now by the ‘very dear friend’ from Balliol, James Thicknesse.
The Diary of these travels (reworked in 1660) actually addresses the mid-1640s from the vantage point of the Restoration. By then a king was once again on the throne, Evelyn had returned a married man, with a house (courtesy of his father-in-law) that he was able to lease and where he would make a garden, and he had acquired new and learned friends and was above all eager to find ways of using what he had learned on his Continental travels. So we may read between the lines of his Diary to find some of the interests that began to absorb him when he was back finally in England.
Besides his increasingly strong garden interest, on which more later (since he seemed largely to have relied upon his own observations when writing up that part of the Diary), he clearly took cognizance (as who could not at that time) of the political wars in Europe, in particular the role that religion played in them, the various political identities and structures of different foreign states, along with an assessment of their value to a visiting Englishmen, and – above all – his search for new scientific ideas, not simply in matters of what today we would term the physical sciences, but in matters of agriculture, urban planning, arboriculture, chemistry and local history, as revealed by cultural materials and informed by questioning local observers (shepherds, for example, reporting on an attack by wolves near Rouen) and by readings in foreign texts. He purchased books, pictures and engravings and was acquiring a decent command of French and, later, Italian. In Rome, though his frugal family were concerned, he bought books on mathematics, music and languages and amassed ‘no inconsiderable collection too of pictures, medals, and other trifles’ (LB, I.330).
France, in particular Paris, gave him the opportunity to explore all ‘mechanically curious and useful’ interests as well as those that would be vital in less practical ways (MW, p. 45). Doubtless much drawn, given the situation in England, to considering the history and fortunes of the French monarchy, he observed the memorial sculptures of their monarchs at St Denis, noted the mourning for the death of Louis XIII and the regency of the young Louis XIV, and the chequered history of the Protestant faith after Henri IV had converted to Catholicism in 1593. One of his first duties was to pay a formal visit to Charles I’s resident ambassador in Paris, Sir Richard Browne, a meeting that would prove particularly momentous, as Browne would eventually become his father-in-law.3 He visited hospitals. He enjoyed listening to Jesuit disputations at the Sorbonne, and was greatly pleased with the singing at a French Protestant service, though dismayed by the lack of pews to sit on, unlike in England. Urban developments he found particularly interesting – flagstones rather than the cobbles of London, new stone bridges and ‘streets, suburbs and common buildings’, and the elegance of public buildings both Gothic and Baroque. Likewise, later, at the Vatican Library he found its decoration with ‘Emblems, Figures, Diagrams and the like learned inventions found out by the wit & industry of famous men’ was more impressive than the ‘Antiques & Grotescs’ at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In Paris, he visited Pierre Morin’s garden (‘tulips, anemonies, ranunculus’s, crocuses &c being of the most exquisite’) and its adjoining cabinet with collections of shells, flowers and drawers of carefully preserved butterflies (‘the like I had never seen’); this would be a garden that he would later copy back home at Sayes Court. At the Palais-Royal he also observed skills of riding, fencing, dancing, music-making ‘& some skill in fortification & the mathematics’, and the garden in its midst. He travelled westward to Dieppe with Sir John Cotton from Cambridgeshire, and in Le Havre, where he was allowed to visit the fortifications, he observed the inscription on one cannon – ultimata ratio regum (the final argument of kings). Travelling southwards, he paid his respects to Queen Henrietta Maria, who had escaped from Exeter, and after some adventures of his own he arrived at Tours; here he spent almost five months to improve his knowledge of the French language.
The amount of attention given to gardens in his Diary is considerable, and much of it (as its modern editor notes frequently) original and not dependent on sources he may have consulted after his return. The list of garden visits included the botanical Jardin du Roi (illus. 9), which he visited early on during his time in Paris, noting its ‘enclosure wall’d in, consisting of all sorts of varieties of grounds, for the planting & culture of medical simples. It is certainly for all advantages very well chosen, having within both hills, meadows, grown wood & upland, both artificial and natural’ (Diary, II.102). He recognized the necessity in a garden of providing a variety of microclimates and topographical opportunities, similar to what was noted in Bacon’s New Atlantis – ‘variety of ground and soil, proper for diverse trees, and herbs’. In ‘Elysium Britannicum’ when he sketched plans for a new botanical garden he presumably copied the similar layout at Paris, notably the mount with its variety of microclimates (illus. 10). In the same manuscript he also drew a plan for an ‘artificial echo’ that he had observed in the Tuileries, laid out in the Italian mode by Catherine de’ Medici (illus. 11). If this seems an odd observation, and even odder that he would wish to construct one in an ideal garden, it confirms his interest in physical properties; for he also noted a similar acoustical effect on a bridge over the River Marne, ‘where the renowned echo returns the voice 9 or 10 times being provoked by a good singer’.4
9 The Jardin du Roi ‘pour la culture des Plantes’, Paris, drawn and engraved by Frédéric Scalberge, 1636.
10 Sketch of a botanical garden, from Evelyn’s manuscript compilation ‘Elysium Britannicum’.
11 A sketch of an artificial echo, from Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’.
Other excursions took him to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he enjoyed the ‘incomparable prospect’ beyond the river; to Saint-Cloud, ‘so rarely watered, & furnished with fountains, statues, & groves, as I had never seen anything exceeding it’, to which he then adds an original and fairly detailed description; to the former garden of Cardinal Richelieu at Rueil, where the garden was far grander than the house and struck him most with its grove of evergreens; and to the Bois de Vincennes, also with its ‘grove of goodly pine trees’. At the Palais du Luxembourg he admired the library, its shelves lined with green velvet, its cabinet, paintings, and the good-quality air in the gardens, noting in particular the well-trimmed box in the parterre, the hornbeam hedge, the array of vases and statues, a star-shaped wood with a fountain at the centre and, above all, the garden’s visitation by ‘infinite numbers of persons of quality, & citizens, & strangers’. At Fontainebleau, where the palace ‘is nothing so stately & uniform as Hampton Court’, he contrasted the accomplished design of its landscape of pools, canals and fountains with the ‘white & horrid rocks at some distance in the Forest [that] yield one of the most august & stupendous prospects imaginable’. He may have sketched some of his sights there,5 for he was notably alert to how garden design was both dependent on reformulating the natural world and yet how it was best appreciated by being juxtaposed to those original materials. This dialogue seems to have pleased him particularly in city gardens, even though such a contrast had actually to be invented: in the rue de Seine he admired ‘an excellently painted perspective, strangely enlarged to appearance’ that intimated by its depiction a larger and less designed prospect beyond that contrasted with the ‘little garden’ (illus. 12). Such perspectives could also represent distant, if famous, places, and at Rueil he was struck by the utterly realistic painting of the Arch of Constantine in Rome:
[Even] a man well skilled in painting may mistake it for stone, & sculpture: and indeed it is so rarely performed that it is almost impossible to believe it painting, but to be work of solid stone. The sky and the hills which seem to be between the Arches, are so natural that swallows and other birds, thinking to fly through, have dashed themselves to pieces . . . (Diary, II.109)
12 A painted perspective in a French garden.
Thoughts of Rome must have spurred Evelyn and Thicknesse onwards and down into southern France. They had reached Marseilles in October, and then from Cannes took a boat to Genoa.
Italy would make an even greater impact on Evelyn, as it carried him into the heart of the latest works of architecture, painting, sculpture and garden-making as well as into a mosaic of authorities and governments: there were republics (Venice, Genoa), independent states like Lucca, the Duchy of Tuscany, the Spanish Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and the Spanish rulers of Milan, and the papal states of Rome (though he had already seen one of them at Avignon); Bologna, through which he returned in 1645, was also under papal control. On his return, after a troublesome passage through the Alps, he passed through the Duchy of Savoy and into the federal cantons of Switzerland. Through these different regimes and cultures he moved with an intelligent and taciturn observation, and along the way acquired a new friend and travel companion, Thomas Henshaw (later to be a friend and colleague in the Royal Society) (illus. 13).
13 Evelyn’s etched print from a suite of Views between Rome and Naples dedicated to Thomas Henshaw of 1649.
Italy was, he wrote in a rather dreadful poem upon leaving Rome to travel north, ‘the World’s sole Cabinet’ (Diary, II.402–5). Its verses surveyed the sights he had seen, but he began – via an allusion to Virgil – by noting that thoughts when ‘kept house at home . . . knew no more / Than what might be survey’d from my own door’. What was at home ‘circumscribed in self-Content’ was in Italy a volume opened to architecture, gardens, paintings, sculptures, glorious ruins and ‘speaking stones’ that enlarged his understanding of the world. He was indeed a busy tourist, so much so that three times his Diary notes ‘being pretty weary of my continual walkings’ around Rome. There he viewed religious festivals, processions, and midnight services on Christmas Eve, only once noting outright annoyance, at a Good Friday flagellation in St Peter’s (‘very horrible, & indeed heathenish pomp’). He was drawn while in Rome (he wrote later to Thomas Keightly) by his wish to explore the ‘verity of things’, confessing to an ‘admiration of the Discipline of the Roman Church’, but less so of its ‘Doctrine’.6 And visiting many churches he was struck by their ‘busy devotion, great silence, and unimaginable Superstition’ (my italics).
On his first day in Rome he made a point of getting acquainted with various English Jesuits, including the poet Lucius Cary (who, he noted, ‘afterwards came over to our church’); he watched a Jewish rite of circumcision, visited hospitals including that of S. Spirito, which he much admired, and visited an innumerable number of cabinets and collections, like the antiquities of Cassiano dal Pozzo. He was shown the dispensary and gardens of the German Father Athanasius Kircher, whose experiments in optics, reflection and ‘perpetual motions’ were admired by both Evelyn and Henshaw.
Throughout, he took in and sometimes sketched what he saw; his wide-ranging curiosity as well as his scepticism would match what would characterize Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, first published in 1646 (with later editions in 1650, 1659 and 1672):7 Browne would later become a valued correspondent. Thus Evelyn climbed and drew the chasm of Vesuvius (illus. 14), studied the Leaning Tower of Pisa, visited the ducal zoo in Florence, heard a eunuch sing in a church choir and enjoyed carnivals in both Rome and Venice, but doubted the veracity of two thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns, St Thomas’s ‘doubting finger’, and a seven-foot unicorn’s horn or the ‘only talon or claw of a Griffon that I ever saw’. A deformed cat (two tails and six ears) seen in Orléans he was more disposed to accept, and his regard for the rarest of jewels and other precious stones and shells was enthusiastic.
Southwards from Rome, he encountered a succession of resonant places – Virgil’s birthplace, Cicero’s tomb, rich and fertile landscapes, the supposed arm of the historian Livy in a Neapolitan church, the ‘exotic rarities’ of Ferrante Imperato, and (after the ascent of Vesuvius) a visit to the Phlegraean Fields and the bay of Baiae. His later account of this area is more full than he could have seen on that one visit, so must have been later reinforced with other readings.8 But in retrospect it provided an intriguing mix of historical and mythical landscapes, Roman ruins and biblical associations, ‘delicious’ fruits and vines, sulphurous fumes, from all of which he derived a cluster of memories, at once sceptical yet fascinated and duly empirical. Some, on the effects of sulphur upon humans and dogs, were explored in an experiment with two dogs, which expired in a grotto but revived (or just one of them) when dunked in an adjacent lake; other experiences, like his view of Virgil’s supposed tomb, he would utilize when redesigning the terraces for Arundel’s grandson at Albury in 1667 (see illus. 33–5).
14 Etching after a drawing of Vesuvius by John Evelyn, signed with the monogram ‘J E f[ecit]’, from the 1649 suite of etchings.
After Naples, they had four more months in and around Rome, with further visits to see antiquities and hospitals, to purchase books and engravings, and further excursions to more gardens, some in unexpected places (Circus Maximus, the Mausoleum of Augustus), others at Villas Giustiniani, Farnesina, Borghesi, Ludovisi and, beyond the city, at Frascati and Tivoli. But then, a shortage of funds and a desire to return homewards meant Evelyn moved swiftly north, now accompanied by the poet Edmund Waller. In Venice he heard Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea and witnessed the Doge’s ‘marriage’ to the sea with a golden ring. He travelled several times to Padua, in which medical school he obtained a certificate of matriculation, and studied medicine, visited hospitals and purchased charts of the veins and nerves (‘the first of that kind [that] had been ever seen in our country’). In Padua he visited the sick Arundel, who presented him upon leaving with a list of things to see (some of which, like Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, his hurried northwards progress forced him to miss). In February 1646 he finally left Venice, and after the passage of the Alps arrived in the federal cantons of Switzerland (‘half be Roman Catholics, the rest reformed, yet all mutually agree’). He fell extremely ill with smallpox in Brig during May and June, but recovering, this granted him immunity against the subsequent incursion of the disease into the life of Sayes Court. By July, after many ‘disasters and tedious peregrinations’, he was in Paris, thankful to have ‘gotten so near home’.
But home, which he had critiqued in the verses composed at Rome, was surely England, not even perhaps Wotton, which was then the only ‘home’ he knew. One who simply surveyed everything from the comfort of his own door was but ‘circumscribed in self-content’. After his travels, he would not be so circumscribed, but what he could do back in England was uncertain, both in the conditions there and in the application of his new skills and knowledge.
