EVELYN’S FIRST INCURSION into what today might be called the civil service was his little-appreciated job in 1661 of writing a ‘Narrative of the Encounter Between the French and Spanish Ambassadors’, a task ‘commanded’ by the king, who also then ‘instructed’ him in its writing. A manuscript account of this dispute about precedence is held in the National Archives, but it was probably not issued in print. Yet his eagerness to bear witness to the restored monarchy led him to engage in other activities that were for him more agreeable and profitable to his country; in many of these new activities he was driven in part by what he had learned in Europe about urban design, architecture and, in particular, hospitals, like the one he saw in Amsterdam for ‘lame and decrepit soldiers’. Yet he was increasingly distressed by court intrigues, gambling (‘an horrid vice, & unsuitable to a Christian Court’) and generally the ‘licentious times’, and later still by the increasing dominance of Catholicism in and around the monarchy.
He assumed a variety of posts on different royal commissions that discussed hackney coaches, highways and regulations of the Mint, and in 1664 he was appointed a commissioner for the sick and wounded seamen and prisoners of war during the second and third Dutch wars. Later, in 1671, he was named a member of Charles II’s new Council for Foreign Plantations, renamed a year later as the Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations, with an annual salary of £500; some of that business touched upon the ‘Georgical’ Committee’s work and was referred to in the previous chapter. Evelyn’s Diary also notes an appointment in 1666 to a commission to regulate the farming and making of saltpetre, which may well have reflected the Evelyn family’s former business in gunpowder production. He much wanted to succeed his father-in-law as clerk to the Council, as Charles II had promised, but it was passed to William Williamson. Under James II he would be appointed a Commissioner of the Privy Seal.
This chapter will explore some of these official governmental roles, and we will return to other writings and activities in later chapters. By his own account in the Diary, Evelyn was an exceptionally busy man, listing multiple tasks, both administrative and personal: in 1675 he wrote to Beale that he was ‘engaged in a sea of affairs’ (LB, I.566). He continued to view experiments at the Royal Society (examining poisons sent from India, examining a pelican in St James’s Park, or visiting a Jesuit’s very varied collection of Japanese and Chinese rarities, including garden landscapes); he visited and dined, often in the company of fellow commissioners or colleagues on Royal Society committees; he went to theatres and court masques. At Sayes Court he welcomed and dined many visitors, as well as planting elms in the Home and West fields and establishing a grove ‘next the Pond’. He was a constant and concerned listener to sermons, the texts and arguments of which he noted; he attended with equal care to various commitments in the family – its births, miscarriages, christenings, confirmations, illnesses, marriages and deaths, including that of his brother Richard. He arranged for his twelve-year-old son John to be tutored at New College, where he matriculated in 1668, and in 1674 John was admitted at the Middle Temple and called to the Bar nine years later. Evelyn also began a friendship with one of the maids of honour to the Duchess of York, Margaret Blagge, ‘one for whom for her many & extraordinary virtues, I did infinitely esteem’ (see Chapter Eleven).
All of this, while attending to multiple obligations and journeying through the counties designated for him by the Commission for sick and wounded seamen and prisoners of war, deciding on billeting, organizing supplies and providing medical aid for Dutch prisoners and his own wounded, and above all, endlessly pleading for funds. Simply the time spent travelling, the journeys between Sayes Court and London, between Sayes Court and the southeast seaports, and responding to his obligations, would have been demanding for a modern bureaucrat, and his journeys were taken on boats, naval yachts, and carriages that sometimes overturned. He was often accompanied by armed guards when he was delivering money.
So it was not a complete surprise when in 1667 he responded to a pamphlet by George Mackenzie, a Scottish advocate, entitled A Moral Essay preferring Solitude to Publick Employment, published two years earlier in Edinburgh. Evelyn’s reply, dedicated to his father-in-law, who had himself been active in public employment, was announced as Publick Employment and an Active Life preferred to Solitude and all its Appanages – these included ‘fame, command, riches, conversation, &c’ (MW, pp. 501–52).
Keynes notes that the young Mackenzie was known as a ‘bigot’, which probably led Evelyn to make his riposte, involving as it did another opportunity for broad satire; Keynes also says the piece ‘is but a half-hearted affair’, which seems a level way of assessing Evelyn’s involvements in a public realm that lay outside his dedicated work on horticulture and his specific services to the Royal Society. Indeed ‘conversation’, unsurprisingly, seems to have been his main concern, for it meant living and communing with others in society, though these days the word has lost that larger emphasis: ‘Not to read men, converse with living libraries, is to deprive ourselves of the most useful and profitable of studies.’ Evelyn defends Boyle, whom Mackenzie praised for his solitude, for being in fact visible and experienced in public employment, which for Evelyn was essentially work for the Royal Society, a public not a private body. An appeal to classical ethics on the virtues of solitude was both a tribute to ancient practice and a concern, acknowledging that in its translation it acquired, as well as lost, a fresh demeanour. Evelyn’s piece ends with a facetious comparison of two ‘land-skips’: one of a king and a working country, the other of a ‘country gentleman’, sleeping, gluttonous, book-reading while his family starves, sunbathing and poaching.
Mackenzie actually liked Evelyn’s response, though Pepys could not find ‘much excess of good matter though it be pretty for a bye discourse’, something from a man not wholly convinced of what his role could be in the Restoration. Yet later writers have praised the treatise, that it ‘sums up much of the Humanist doctrine concerning the active life, and is perhaps the fullest and best written discussion of it in English’.1 Evelyn himself tells the reader that the treatise was ‘but the effects of a very few hours, a cursory pen, and almost but of a sitting’. He enjoyed ‘this way of velitation’ (that is, quarrelling or disputing with words, as opposed, presumably, to warfare), and it gave him the chance ‘to improve the English style’ of writing and rescue it from the discourse of ‘the pulpits and the theatre’; the court equally was ‘a stage of continual masquerade’. In terms of public service, God himself is the model for humans, being ‘always so full of employment . . . [an] eternal and incomprehensible activity, creating, preserving, and governing’; but Evelyn also calls upon the ancients, like Cicero, to confirm that a philosophic life does indeed relate to knowledge (‘Science’) and not merely to solitude. Ambition is not only manifest in ‘public places, and pompous circumstances, but at home, and in the interior life’.
There were offers of public service that Evelyn declined: to serve as a magistrate, to serve as Latin Secretary to the king, to fulfil Charles’s repeated invitation to write a full history of the Dutch wars. Indeed, in 1659 he had written a lively letter to the second wife of Edmund Waller to expound the virtues for her of being a gardener’s wife (like ‘Eve herself’): his advice balanced a Virgilian retreat, citing the Georgics on a ‘most serene and harmless life’, with a life of ‘labour, and small wealth’; this was followed by an enumeration of many ancient gardeners who had been ‘Captains in war, and . . . arbiters of affairs in peace’ (LB, I.238–9). His own more serious, accomplished tasks were subsequently directed towards the Royal Society, about which he confessed to Lady Sunderland that he inclined towards ‘employment upon a public account’, as with his Sylva, adding that the task there was ‘suitable to my rural genius, born as I was at Wotton, among the woods’ (Correspondence, p. 689, my italics). He also served on a Royal Society committee for ‘the Improvement of our English tongue’. During the Dutch wars he excused himself from re-election to its Council, but was elected again in 1670.
Yet Sylva’s plea for trees jibed with his role for his Navy work (serving those in its ‘wooden walls’) and with his service on foreign trade and commerce: not exactly a captain in war, but something of a maker of peace. Working and caring for the sick and wounded seamen and prisoners throughout the Dutch wars was no sinecure, and not particularly well remunerated either at £300 per year. His commission involved much travel through Kent and Sussex (the districts assigned to him), with powers of appointing surgeons, physicians, provost marshals, commanding and designing hospital space, and the endless need to procure funds to serve prisoners and wounded; these had to be begged or pried from senior colleagues, who were working for a government not yet equipped, as later governments could be, with adequate budgeting. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn also designed the seal for the Commission, showing a Good Samaritan, with the motto fac similiter (do likewise).
We can chart his work on the Commission both through his Diary and, more usefully, through his frequent letters on his work for the Commission, which filled many pages of his letterbooks and feature considerably in correspondence with Pepys, now collected in Particular Friends.2 Pepys, a clerk of the Acts for the Naval Board, had begun his own work in government administration under Cromwell in 1654; he had also attended meetings at Gresham College, and his early admiration for Evelyn’s learning changed into something like affection. The two corresponded before their first meeting in 1665, though Pepys had visited Sayes Court during the Plague that year when Evelyn was absent in Kent. In a letter of October 1665 Evelyn hoped they would become better acquainted, and Pepys confided to his Diary that the more he got to know Evelyn, ‘the more I love him’.3 In Evelyn’s letters, of which more survive than do those from Pepys, he ‘emerges as a far more rounded human being’ than in the diaries (Particular Friends, p. 13). If their main business was focused initially on naval matters, their relationship grew, as Evelyn advised Pepys in 1669 on a visit to France, giving detailed advice on where to go and what to see and enclosing letters to present to persons there (Particular Friends, pp. 68–75). He commiserated with Pepys on the death of his wife, who had fallen ill while travelling in Europe, and he visited him in the Tower when in 1673 Pepys was committed on suspicion of abetting popery (he was loyal to the Duke of York).
Evelyn clearly enjoyed some of his work for the Commission: a lengthy trip in January 1665, he reported, was ‘not [an] unpleasant journey’. He was efficient, punctilious, curious (he witnessed the launch of a new double-hulled ship called Experiment), while also caring about the tragedies of this ‘terrible war’. He met with the burned sailors who survived an accidental ship explosion, witnessed horrible amputations (‘several their legs & arms off’), and had ‘to consider of the poor orphans and widows made by this bloody beginning’ as well as endlessly providing doctors and medical supplies. Yet his anxious and importunate letters to Pepys, sometimes enclosing copies of letters to other officials, were endless pleas for more assistance – financial, medical, and simply support for his work; he laments that what he was supposed to do in cooperation with other members of the Commission and their appointed officers in Kent and Sussex was thwarted by cheating, misuse of funds and excessive expenditures by apothecaries, by sailors faking their discharge papers from hospital and by the lack of a hospital ship. A letter to Pepys in early October 1665 is typical:
finding divers Chirurgeons and sick-persons at my doors who had come from several places with sad complaints that they could not procure quarters for them. I was forced to dispatch warrants to the constables and other officers to be aiding and assistant to my deputies . . . I have had earnest entreaties from several of the commanders [in the fleet] to dispose of their sick and wounded men on shore, but the clerk . . . obstructs the effect of the warrant I sent to the constable . . . I have peopled all the intermedial villages [between Chatham and Gravesend], what I shall do with these miserable creatures, who are not able to move? . . . without money I could not feed two thousand prisoners . . . I dare not show my face, ’till I can bring them some refreshment [that is, money]. (Particular Friends, pp. 38–40, 56)
Travel, billeting and supplies for food and medicine were costly, and funds were slow to appear; he reported constantly to the king in person or in council, where he told him that the Commission cost £1,000 a week to function. He had to request funds from Lord Albemarle, the Commission’s secretary, for guarding prisoners and himself when carrying cash to various Kent ports; together with Admiral Lord Sandwich he made ‘peremptory’ demands for monies to prevent prisoners from starving.
Of the more pleasant chores, he clearly enjoyed meeting with senior admiralty, lords and other commissioners (‘a world . . . of earls & lords’) and the various accommodations he accepted while travelling – he was ‘splendidly treated’ at Dover Castle. He even enjoyed some hilarious moments at a dinner in Greenwich, which Pepys described: Evelyn ad-libbed ‘some verses made up of nothing but the various adaptations of may and can’. He had to visit the major ports along the south coast – Dover, Deal, Sandwich – check on fortifications at Deal and Sandown, establish officers in various towns and occasionally review their work; on one occasion he took his young son John to Dover, where he went to sea but was not sick. A royal party visited the Nore at the mouth of the Medway in July 1665 and saw the Prince, a vessel that Evelyn noted as being in ‘good order, decency and plenty . . . in a vessel full of men’; it was captured and burned by the Dutch a year later. On other occasions he visited the fleet at the mouth of the Medway, and on 1 June 1666, hearing cannon fire while in his garden at Sayes Court, he took horse and rode through the night to Rochester, but saw no battle off the coast and returned to London, where first reassuring and then calamitous messages were received from the four-day battle: his Diary (III.439–41) recounts the loss of ships, 660 dead, 1,100 wounded and 2,000 taken prisoner.
He oversaw the requisition of a portion of St Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark in preparation to receive wounded sailors from the English fleet, and alerted commanders to be ready to receive the wounded and prisoners when the fleet engaged the Dutch; later he asked for the use of the Savoy Hospital near Somerset House in the Strand, and later still hired Leeds Castle, to which he marched five hundred prisoners, and where he later flooded the moat, built a new drawbridge, brought spring water into the courtyard and did some conservation of the fabric. He reviewed prisoners at the old Chelsea College, where the Dutch complained of the insipid English white bread. He also had to request of the king how to proceed with assisting some important Dutch commanders whose ship had been lost at sea and were captured; Charles recalled the kindnesses he had received from the Dutch in the Interregnum and wished to help (such were the civilities in wars at that time). As the Dutch ambassador was still in London, Evelyn took up the matter with him. Yet on some occasions he could take himself to the Royal Society to ‘refresh among the Philosophers’.
Meanwhile, in 1665 the Plague struck in London, borne largely by the black rats who swarmed in the crowded and filthy slums; deaths came in the thousands. Evelyn claimed that over four hundred had died in his Deptford parish alone. The king retreated to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and finally to Oxford, and Evelyn took his wife and family to Wotton, ‘trusting to the providence and goodness of God’ (Diary, III.417). A daughter, Mary, was born there in October 1665 in the very same room where Evelyn himself ‘first took breath’; but after the christening Evelyn himself returned to his charges, finding many thousands dead, and ‘poor pestiferous creatures, begging alms’ in the streets of London. But a year later he still wanted Mary kept safely at Wotton, and after a family celebration at New Year, with ‘much, & indeed extraordinary mirth & cheer, all my brothers, our wives & children being together’ (Diary, III.428), he returned once again to London ‘about his Majesties business’.
In the spring of 1666 Evelyn drafted a plan for a new hospital at Chatham, which he had presented to the king (who greeted it ‘with great approbation’) and was in turn encouraged by the Navy Commissioners to set upon it ‘speedily’. The rudimentary plan was for a four-sided infirmary, built around a courtyard, with towers at each corner and the corridors lined on both sides with rooms for the wounded (illus. 36). Accompanying the plan was a very lengthy letter detailing the estimated costs of everything from bricks and mortar to window frames and furniture of four hundred beds, as well as the salaries of surgeons, matrons and nurses; estimated costs were to be set against savings and reimbursements (Particular Friends, pp. 60–65, with a more simple list of expenditures, pp. 53–4). Once again funds were lacking, yet Evelyn notes how much could have been saved by having had such an ‘Infirmary’ in the last two years and and how much would be saved in the future (since he wrote this retrospectively, he was presumably thinking of the third Dutch war that broke out five years later).
36 Evelyn’s plan for a hospital at Chatham, 1666, from William Bray’s edition of Evelyn’s Diary and Correspondence (1887).
In 1667 the Dutch navy invaded the Medway, burning English vessels in port (the fleet had not been quick enough to leave) and provoking a panic that the Dutch would sail up the Thames. Evelyn moved ‘my best goods, plate &c from my house to another place’ (surely Wotton?), and his family were alarmed when an accidental fire erupted in the Deptford shipyard that was assumed (wrongly) to have been started by Dutch invaders. Land forces were moved to defend fortifications in Kent. ‘These were sad, & troublesome times’, and he was indignant at the overall negligence and the decision to hold the fleet in harbour rather than venture out to sea. He was commanded to search for fuel around London (peat, notably, which he had mentioned in Sylva), which he did, but reported that ‘nothing was now further done in it’. He visited Chatham to inspect the damaged and still-burning hulks of ships and observed the Dutch fleet blocking the mouth of the Thames. Peace was eventually proclaimed by August and in the next year he finalized his figures and accounts for the sick and wounded.
37 Edmund Prideaux, the avenue at Arlington’s Euston Hall, Suffolk, c. 1735, drawing showing how Evelyn’s proposal had matured.
In the relative calm between the second and third wars he travelled into East Anglia and stayed a while, somewhat unhappily, while the court hunted, hawked, raced their horses, diced and gambled, taking refuge when he could in his ‘pretty apartment’. At Arlington’s handsome garden at Euston Hall he advised on ‘plantations of firs, elms, limes &c up his park, & in all other places and avenues’ (which must have been accomplished by the time Edmund Prideaux drew it in the 1730s, illus. 37), and advised him to bring the parkland up to the house; he also remarked on the ‘pretty engine’ that raised the water for fountains and a machine to grind the corn. Thence he was taken by Henry Howard to Norwich, where at last he had the chance to meet with Sir Thomas Browne, with whom he had corresponded: his ‘whole house & garden being a paradise & cabinet of rarities, of that the best collection, especially medals, books, plants, natural things’; this ‘did exceedingly refresh me’, especially in the wake, the night before, of an unseemly dispute between Howard and a carpenter over the measurements of a room.
In June 1669 he returned to Oxford and saw Wren’s new-built Sheldonian Theatre, was annoyed by some malicious and hostile remarks against the Royal Society by the Public Orator who conceived of some slight towards the University, but received an honorary degree and was afterwards entertained handsomely at St John’s College. And back in Essex a fortuitous encounter with a young Grinling Gibbons in 1671 found him admiring the carving of a crucifix, ‘for the curiosity of handling, drawing and studious exactness, I never in my life had seen before in all my travels’ (Diary, III.567). Evelyn, impressed, acquainted Charles II, who was delighted by the work, and this chance meeting lifted that craftsman into prominence: Gibbons was eventually given work by Christopher Wren at the new St Paul’s and at the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and – as he lived until 1720 – his carving came to decorate country houses: Blenheim, Chatsworth and Petworth. Evelyn may well have admired Gibbons’s art also because of the latter’s fastidiousness in the woods he chose for his work – lime for fruits and garlands, oak for panelling, boxwood for medallions.
But sea and land battles resumed when another (the third) Dutch war erupted in 1672, provoked by an English attack on the Dutch Smyrna fleet in the Channel and as a result of Charles II’s secret alliance with France against the Dutch. Evelyn himself thought that the conflict ‘was slenderly grounded and not becoming Christian neighbours’, but he nevertheless had to visit Gravesend to deal with those wounded in that abortive English attack on the Dutch convoy. He sailed to Sheerness to inspect fortifications at Tilbury, and from an Admiralty yacht surveyed ‘redouts & batteries’ on both sides of the estuary. He was handsomely entertained at Margate, where he took time to remark on the local trade of brewing, with husbandry in the surrounding countryside far exceeding any part of England. He lamented the loss of his friend the Earl of Sandwich, at the sea battle of Southwold Bay, and attended his funeral at Westminster. He organized the funeral of a French rear-admiral commander who died of his wounds and witnessed a double amputation of a gangrened leg, without, in the end, being able to save the sailor: ‘what confusion & mischief do the avarice, anger, and ambition of princes cause in the world, who might be happier with half they possess: This stout man, was but a common sailor.’
His correspondence with Pepys resumed as before, as did his journeys to and fro, overseeing prisoners and providing, when he could, funds for both them and the wounded. Pepys himself was moving to higher things, with a seat in Parliament, the Mastership of Trinity House, becoming a governor of Christ’s Hospital and in mid-1673 the Secretary of the Admiralty. The war dragged on until February 1674, when the Treaty of Westminster ended the conflict: ‘losing so many good men, for no provocation in the world but because the Hollander exceeded us in industry, & all things else but envy’.
Charles II had petitioned Evelyn to write a history of the Dutch conflict; his involvement with the Commission and his obvious literary skill made the request perfectly apt. Charles ‘began to tempt me’ to write about the Dutch wars after Evelyn presented him in 1669 with The History of the Three Late Famous Impostors – namely, two pretenders in the Turkish imperial family (Padre Ottomano and Mahomed Bei) and a Jewish pseudo-Messiah (Shabbethai Zebi) – a book dedicated to Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington and Secretary of State from 1662 to 1674. His dedicatory epistle asserts that his stories were of ‘undoubted verity’ and were based upon eyewitnesses, though their names are repressed so they not be ‘inconvenienced’. Doubtless this was a sure affirmation of his own historical skills and probity and ensured that he would be continually pressed to narrate the wars with the Dutch. Arlington, on behalf of the king, continued to request such a history, not least because Evelyn’s previous request, having been declined, ‘was ill taken’.
So, provided with much research assistance from the Secretary’s office, Evelyn began work, reported what he had done so far to the king in August 1670 and was ‘enjoined’ to make his writing ‘a little keen [that is, critical], for that the Hollanders had very unhandsomely abused him, in their pictures, books, & libels, &c’. At the start of the next year and again eight months later, Evelyn had his arm twisted once more and was given further materials, but had still not produced the required work. But at some point as early as June 1660 he had annotated his Diary (hopefully or retrospectively) with ‘See the whole history of this conflict in my Hist: of the Dutch War’, and in 1681 he was still sending Pepys large sea charts and the text of what he had written: ‘I transmit the sheets I have long since blotted [that is, completed] about the late Dutch War’ (Particular Friends, p. 123). He also included a map of the Dutch action at Chatham in 1667, noting the locations of the English ships and the massed armada of the Dutch at the mouth of the Thames.4
But the book, though estimated by its author in 1671 as being 800 to 1,000 folio pages, was never completed. What was published in 1674 was his Navigation and Commerce, their Original and Progress, a notice of which also appeared in the Philosophical Transactions (vol. IX) of the Royal Society, praising its author as one who ‘excites England, and adviseth the most advantageous preparations for our future defense, and for aggrandizing our Trade and Commerce’. But what Evelyn had presented to the king was ‘no other than the Preface prepar’d to be prefix’d to my History of the whole war, which I now [1674] pursued no further’ (Diary, IV.41). As propaganda, it should have been issued before peace was concluded, during which the king had not only urged him forward but had the piece read to him. But when even that portion of the history emerged, the Dutch were deeply offended and demanded its withdrawal, which was acceded to and copies returned to the printer.
Yet Evelyn, not surprisingly given his knowledge of the Netherlands, found their inhabitants skilled in the management of land and in furnishing, through ‘commerce alone’, the materials they did not possess – ‘grain, wine, oil, timber, metal, stone, wool, hemp, pitch, nor almost any other commodity of use’ – and he went on to note that the Dutch built ‘goodly cities, where nothing but rushes grew; cultivated an heavy genius with all the politer arts; enlarged and secured their boundaries . . .’. As he positions Holland within a survey of nations, ancient and modern – from Carthage to Venice and Genoa – his argument, while it does not diminish his claims for England and its trade, once again reveals his concern for balance and attempt at evenhandedness (MW, pp. 625–86).
Again, one suspects that Evelyn was too scrupulous to proceed rapidly with the work, however much he was interested in that historical moment and his own wish to record his involvements in it. But balancing, on the one hand, commands from Charles II, support from the Secretary of State and demands that he not ‘moderate my style’ when writing against the Dutch (Diary, III.559), and, on the other, his dissatisfaction with both government bureaucracy and the Navy’s ineptitude, might have confirmed his own growing sense that the war was both a mistake and not what a Christian nation like England should tolerate.
When writing to Pepys in August 1689, in response to his asking for a portrait to adorn ‘your choice library with the pictures of men illustrious’, and even when having sat the previous month to have his portrait drawn by Godfrey Kneller at Pepys’s request, he demanded, ‘what in God’s name, should [I] a planter of cole-worts [cabbages] do amongst such worthies?’ In this long and extravagant letter (Particular Friends pp. 188–204; its editor calling it ‘epic’) Evelyn seems to be surveying his own role, fame and perhaps uncertain comportment in the world. While ‘faces . . . signified nothing to the possessors’, he did admire the late Clarendon’s decision to collect pictures of ‘his own countrymen’ instead of ‘foreigners’. Evelyn then celebrates the suitable ‘faces’ of ancient and modern worthies, from Machiavelli and Petrarch to Tycho Brahe and Copernicus, from Vittoria Colonna to Petrarch’s Laura (but not beautiful strumpets); he despises how the court has been corrupted by pimps, concubines and buffoons who devalue English culture, and he promises that truth will out when names are eventually named!
But in the end, lest painted images get banished to ‘brokers in every dusty corner’, he singles out and praises medals, which should adorn libraries: for their images and descriptions or titles on one side have, on their reverse, notice of what heroic exploits the personages performed, and ‘famous temples, thermae, amphitheatres, triumphal arches, bridges, aqueducts, circuses, naumachiae’ – all of which have greatly assisted ‘the recovery of the ancient and magnificent architecture, whose real monuments have been so barbarously defaced by the Goths’. Medals can elucidate history and chronology, but he forbears discussing their finish or counterfeiting. As with his concern for building collections at the University of Oxford, Evelyn was anticipating the need to found and sustain public museums, as he would later do in forwarding the creation of the first public library in London.
In the remainder of the letter to Pepys, what he calls his ‘ramble . . . a deal of ground for so little game’, he takes a tour d’horizon both of important virtuosi of all ranks and of his own work already published, like Sculptura, or perhaps the book he was already envisaging (Numismata), his work on preserving the English language and his larger vision or ambition for learning and philosophical collections in England. What is interesting, however, is that he seems to avoid any discussion of his or others’ plans for more work on horticulture or gardening. He meanders further through collections of medals and portraits, listing names like Clarendon and dozens of others that ‘I do not at present call to mind’, before he focuses on the establishment of libraries, great collectors, his concern for the selling or even exporting of book collections, the need to establish writing academies, which will ensure ‘a nervous, natural strength and beauty, genuine and of our own growth, without always borrowing, or stealing from our neighbours’; such an assembly would bring into England what Richelieu had achieved in France to improve ‘useful (less mechanical) conversation, of learned persons’.
Though the printing of his translation of Naudé’s book on libraries (dedicated to Clarendon) had appalled him, he was still urging that excellent libraries for nobles be created and maintained; he also urged keeping abreast of ‘auctions [of books that] become so frequent among us’ and tended to scatter in days important holdings that took years to build.5 Besides the establishment of noble libraries, he asked that gentlemen too should have ‘competent libraries’ to use in town, for London especially was defective in good libraries, unlike Paris; yet even if a person did possess a decent library, he would not have prepared and been willing to circulate a catalogue, for ‘fear of being disturbed’. Oxford and Cambridge fared better, but he still hoped that some Maecenas would donate collections of manuscripts especially to colleges, instancing a great collection of manuscripts of Isaac Vossius that was in ‘danger of being devoured by Mr [Robert] Scott and other[s] of our auction-men’. Still, he singled out the magnificent library building that Wren designed for Trinity College, Cambridge, and listed a handful of other good libraries in Oxford. But to Pepys, at least in 1689, there is no mention of ‘Elysium Britannicum’ or other horticulture work.
At the end of his letter he encourages Pepys to assemble collections of engravings that are cheap, useful and instructive: title pages, heads and effigies of authors, and those who profess arms and arts. These would ‘stand in competition with the best paintings’. Pepys’s immediate reply noted that in less than five pages, Evelyn had provided him with what, from any other writer, would occupy five volumes.